Christian L. Pyle

Department of English
University of Kentucky
uk00028@ukpr.uky.edu

 

Reynolds, Richard. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. Studies in Popular Culture. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994.

 

Although the “superhero” has been a staple of American mass media since the emergence of Superman in 1938, a definitive study of the genre has not appeared. Therefore, I greeted the American edition of Reynolds’s book (first published in London by B. T. Batsford in 1992) with enthusiasm. Its potential seemed substantial, as suggested by the back cover copy:

 

The popular figure known as the superhero has exerted such a strong and mushrooming influence upon society, morality, and politics that a mythology now pervades our culture. . . . Here is a study of this superhuman creation, revealed as a proliferating symbol whose dimensions over sixty years of comic book history have been rendered to satisfy the demands and expectations of the popular audience. This fascinating book shows how the superhero has become a vivid figure in the mainstream of modern culture.

 

This is a description of the book that popular culture scholars and postmodernists have needed: a wide-ranging yet detailed study of the proliferation of the superhero myth. Regrettably, Reynolds’s Super Heroes, while it has several merits, is not that book.

 

Reynolds begins with “a first-stage working definition of the superhero genre” expressed in seven criteria:

 

1. The hero is marked out from society. He often reaches maturity without having a relationship with his parents. 2. At least some of the superheroes will be like earthbound gods in their level of powers. Other superheroes of lesser powers will consort easily with these earthbound dieties. 3. The hero's devotion to justice overrides even his devotion to the law. 4. The extraordinary nature of the superhero will be contrasted with the ordinariness of his surroundings. 5. Likewise, the extraordinary nature of the hero will be contrasted with the mundane nature of his alter-ego. Certain taboos will govern the actions of these alter-egos. [By taboos, Reynolds will explain further on, he refers to myths in which the hero gains strength through abstinence.] 6. Although ultimately above the law, superheroes can be capable of considerable patriotism and moral loyalty to the state, though not necessarily to the letter of its laws. 7. The stories are mythical and use science and magic indiscriminately to create a sense of wonder. (16)

 

Rules 1 and 3 are accepted facets of the American hero, as true of Natty Bumppo and Huck Finn as they are of Superman and Batman. Rules 4 and 5 are also familiar and straight-forward (although rule 4 could use a footnote regarding heroes who alternate between mundane surroundings and fantastic realms, such as outer space, Asgard, or astral planes). Rule 2, however, is flawed in a way that points to a major weakness of Reynolds’s book: its forshortened historical perspective.

 

Parallel to the “earthbound god” tradition of costumed heroes stemming from Superman is the “masked man” tradition of heroes with no real “superpowers.” The best-known comic book example is Batman, but he was preceded by other comic book heroes (the Crimson Avenger), pulp fiction heroes (the Spider, the Black Bat), and radio heroes (the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet). Batman, the subject of three sections within Super Heroes, is obviously in Reynolds’s mind when he refers to “superheroes of lesser powers.” One could argue that Batman’s above-average intelligence, athletic ability, weaponry, or fear-instilling costume are “powers,” but Reynolds does not go into that. Instead he defines the super-ness of such heroes in terms of their interaction with the Superman crowd. This idea, as well as Reynolds’s lengthy discussion of continuity later in the book, depends upon the existence of a “universe” in which all the characters owned by a particular company inhabit the same fictional world. However, the idea of a fictional universe is more recent than Reynolds seems to realize. He links it to superhero teams (37-38), but, prior to the emergence of Marvel in the 1960s, the adventures of superteams were isolated from the solo adventures of the teams’ heroes. (I don’t mean to be overly pedantic, but one could ask if the Green Lantern appearing in All-American Comics is the same character as the Justice Society member appearing in All-Star Comics, just as we ask if the Quentin of The Sound and the Fury is the same character as the Quentin of Absalom, Absalom!). The formation of a universe in which casual allusions are made between titles really only began with Marvel and was integrated into DC only recently.

 

The failure to consider how the genre has changed over time is the central flaw of Reynolds’s study. A perusal of the dates of texts he selects for close readings (1938, 1940, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1986, 1986-87, 1987) shows that his real interest/background is in the comics of the 1980s. However, Reynolds does not qualify his generalizations as to which parts of comics history they apply. Also, he makes no attempt at delineating critical periods of the genre except for references to the “Golden Age”/ “Silver Age” distinction used by fans, a distinction which is useful for separating, say, the “Golden Age Flash” from the “Silver Age Flash,” but which lacks a scholarly foundation.

 

Reynolds’s best points tease us because, though fascinating, they remain always underdeveloped. For example, in his chapter on costumes, Reynolds discusses how costumes function differently depending on the hero’s gender:

 

The costumed heroine may be frankly the object of sexual attraction, and therefore (for many male readers) will constitute the object of their gaze, as well as the subject or protagonist through which they engage with the action of the text. So, whilst for the superhero the transformation into costume can best be achieved with something as instantaneous as Billy Batson's "Shazam," which calls forth the invincible Captain Marvel, for the superheroine the process can (at least potentially) be viewed as the performance of an uncompleted striptease. And thus the (male) reader is called upon to 'read' both heroines and villainesses as objects of desire--'good girls' and 'bad girls' maybe, but objects of the same rhetorical logic. (37)

 

Before we can accept this point as valid, we need a detailed comparison of typical transformation scenes of heroes and heroines. The issue is further complicated by the use of an atypical strip tease (from The Sensational She-Hulk) as an illustration for the section. If the gender discussion were expanded, Reynolds would also have to deal with the homoeroticism question, especially since superwomen in skintight outfits are considerably less popular with the primarily male readership than supermen in skintight outfits. Anyone familiar with the critical literature will know that the question has been a major issue since Frederic Wertham asked it in Seduction of the Innocentin 1954. By asserting that the gaze is exclusively heterosexual, Reynolds evades the homoeroticism issue altogether.

 

Another major issue of the Wertham era was the implied fascism of the superhero, who (coincidence?) was born just as the Nazi “supermen” were marching across Europe. In his sixth criterion for the genre, Reynolds refers to the potential “patriotism” of the hero. Here he may be thinking of all the early 1940s covers with heroes toting flags, fighting alongside troops, or selling war bonds. While he doesn’t really deal with the fascism question, he discusses the conservativism of the genre:

 

A key ideological myth of the superhero comic is that the normal and everyday enshrines positive values that must be defended through heroic action --and defended over and over again almost without respite against an endless battery of menaces determined to remake the world for the benefit of aliens, mutants, criminals, or sub-aqua beings from Atlantis. The normal is valuable and is constantly under attack, which means that almost by definition the superhero is battling on behalf of the status quo. Into this heroic matrix one can insert representatives of any race or creed imaginable, but in order to be functioning superheroes they will need to conform to the ideological rules of the game. The superhero has a mission to preserve society, not to re-invent it. (77)

 

Having made this relatively straightforward point, Reynolds then teases us once again with a more provocative argument that he never fully elaborates. In a somewhat tentative fashion, and using what seem to be nonrepresentative (and mostly quite recent) texts, he suggests that “nuances and subtleties which function as irony and satire” can undercut the superhero’s tendency toward political conservatism (79). One would have liked Reynolds to go further here, but he chooses rather to evade what perhaps seems to him too complex and highly-charged a topic.

 

A third evasion in Super Heroes is that of the role of corporate mass production and commodity culture in the genre. Superheroes are not just fictional characters, they are registered trademarks. Reynolds considers how continuity constrains the creativity of writers and artists in the superhero industry, but he does not deal with the role of the editor whose concerns include sustaining sales and maintaining a corporate image.

 

A final flaw of Reynolds’s book is that it does not reference or discuss previous works which make similar points. Reynolds’s discussion of continuity, for example, would be enriched by a consideration of Umberto Eco’s well-known 1972 essay “The Myth of Superman.” Reynolds argues that “intertextual and metatextual continuity create a subsidiary world in which the process of time can be kept under control. While this process does not exactly abolish history from superhero comics, it does divorce the superheroes [sic] lives from their historical context” (44). But Eco had already announced this divorce twenty years ago. He explained that if Superman stories were true narratives, placing their events in real time, Superman would be, like the rest of us, “consumed” by events until he would eventually grow old and die, a fate which cannot befall a mythic figure (333-334). To avoid this, observed Eco, Superman stories “develop in a kind of oneiric climate–of which the reader is not aware at all–where what has happened before and what has happened after appears extremely hazy” (336). This is by no means the only instance where Reynolds fails to make the obvious reference. Another example is his discussion of the superhero costume as a fetish, which runs along lines very similar to those of Gillian Freeman’s argument in her study of pornography (the last chapter of which is devoted to superhero comics).

 

The strength of Reynolds’s study is its emphasis on close readings of specific texts–often, indeed, of specific pages and panels. Most of the previous studies of superheroes have prefered to analyze the basic premise of a series rather than a specific story. Reynolds’s “key texts” chapter is especially strong in this regard. Its detailed readings of The Uncanny X-Men, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Watchmen draw attention to the distinctive skills of particular writers and artists. In reference to reprinted X-Men pages, for example, Reynolds describes how penciller John Byrne “employed a style of sequential art that was ‘cinematic’ in the sense that it constantly interpreted each panel and each segment of the narrative from an implied and subjective point of view” (86). The detail of Reynolds’s analyses makes up in depth for what they lack in breadth.

 

In the last few years, the University Press of Mississippi’s Studies in Popular Culture series, under the general editorship of M. Thomas Inge, has placed several worthy volumes on the bookshelves of comics scholars, including Joseph Witek’s Comic Books and History, Inge’s own Comics and Culture, and a reprint of Coulton Waugh’s The Comics. Reynolds’s contribution does not measure up to the tradition those predecessors established, but it does offer a promising starting point for the scholar who wants to write a more thorough and definitive study.

 

Works Cited

 

• Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” Diacritics 2 (1972): 14-22. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism: Modernism Through Poststructuralism. Ed. Robert Con Davis. New York: Longman, 1986. 330-344.
• Freeman, Gillian. The Undergrowth of Literature. The Natural History of Society series. London: Nelson, 1967.