Banality in Comics Studies?

Review of Nickie D. Phillips and Staci Strobl, Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice and the American Way. New York: New York UP, 2013.

Comic books represent a royal road to the cultural unconscious. That is the operative assumption of Nickie D. Phillips and Staci Strobl’s Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice and the American Way. The authors situate the book as a contribution to the interdisciplinary field of cultural criminology, which focuses less on legal and institutional practices and more on the cultural representation of crime and punishment. Here cultural criminology overlaps cultural studies as it has emerged over the last forty years. As the authors put it, “In analyzing contemporary comic books, we employ a cultural criminological framework, suggesting that the cultural meaning and symbolic importance of comic books represents a viable area of exploration for criminologists” (5).  As in many cultural studies projects on the meaning and reception of popular forms, Phillips and Strobl employ methods both analytical and ethnographic, surveying story arcs in two hundred comic titles and conducting focus group interviews with self-selecting comic book fans, who, as the authors note, were overwhelmingly male: “In recruiting participants for focus groups, we managed to include only one woman” (225).
 
Much of the strength of Comic Book Crime stems from this mix of synoptic and ethnographic approaches. Unlike the forms of close analysis associated with cultural studies—which can give a cultural form a more radical resonance than it may actually have by focusing on outlier texts or by deconstructing dominant meanings—the synoptic and reception-based approaches employed by Phillips and Strobl effectively calibrate the overall ideological import and social resonance of a dominant form. Thus, the authors argue:
 
Our sample suggests that comic books, although diverse, most often reflect an ideological orientation that reinforces the dominant notions of retributive justice in American culture and celebrates nostalgic ideas about community through apocalyptic plots. Ironically, our sample also shows that retribution plays out as an incomplete project, leaving readers teased as to how violent a hero will be in pursuing justice during the battle between good and evil. This tease, though ideologically short of the promise of retribution underlying many of the storylines, nonetheless provides emotional satisfaction in the spectacularly violent and graphic ways in which restraint is ultimately accomplished. (17-18)
 
This is the book’s strongest point: that the ideological work done by comic books reinforces notions of retributive and incapacitation-based forms of justice, as opposed to rehabilitative, restorative, and deterrence-based forms. Without suggesting a simple equivalence between representation and reception or material practice, they demonstrate how comic books tend to mirror and potentially reinforce dominant assumptions in the United States about crime and punishment. While the authors present this ideology as the hegemonic criminological perspective advanced in super-hero comic books, they also trace the ways in which certain story arcs and characters deviate from this message, as well as the ways in which readers challenge, rework, or conform to it. Thus, they attend to the different versions of justice embodied by figures such as the Punisher, who, as his name suggests, follows through on the promise of retribution; Batman and Superman, who cause death and destruction despite their “no kill” policy; and Wonder Woman, whose basic tenets (although she often doesn’t fully adhere to them) seem closer to what Phillips and Strobl describe as “restorative or participatory justice,” which advocates community-based mediation and peaceful correction (202).
 
The book addresses a range of contemporary issues that affect or relate to comic books, from the representation of Arab-Americans and patriotism after 9/11—where the authors find comics and their readers split between a retrenchment of chauvinism and racism and a more searching reflection on the dangers of the same—to the representation of race, gender, and sexuality (a discussion of class is markedly absent) in superhero comics. In these areas, too, the book mixes an account of comics as generally reflecting a dominant ideology, what they call the “white male heteronormativity of the comic book landscape,” with individual story arcs and characters that challenge and push against this dominant ideology (168).
 
Comic Book Crime’s engagement with these different issues (cultural criminology, questions of race, gender, and sexuality, the ideological landscape of the post-9/11 United States) is both insightful and scattered. I can imagine a book that weaves these threads together into a compelling historicized narrative about how notions of punishment shape conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality in superhero comics and their readers in the ideologically charged context of post-9/11 America; unfortunately, Comic Book Crime doesn’t achieve this synthesis. Instead, each inquiry feels disconnected from the others, as if the book were a collection of essays rather than a monograph. Taken as a series of discrete interventions, the book could potentially work as a textbook for a course on superhero comics. Phillips and Strobl address complicated issues with sensitivity and insight and provide an impressive overview of the superhero genre as a whole. They also do a nice job of steering away from the Scylla of celebration and the Charybdis of condemnation that inflect too much writing on popular culture. But the book does not present a sustained argument from introduction to conclusion.
 
Part of the problem may lie with the methodology that makes the book’s approach valuable. If the strength of the synoptic and ethnographic approach is to situate individual narratives and meanings within the context of the genre and its reception, such an approach also runs the risk of relying too much on the “data” to provide the book’s insights, while foregoing the historicizing, synthesizing, and theorizing that such work also demands. While the authors do provide an historical chapter, tracing the emergence of superhero comic books in the golden age of comics (the 1930s through the early 1950s) and their development in the silver age (the late 1950s and the 1960s) and beyond, this history feels disconnected from the accounts of race, gender, and sexuality they provide in other chapters. Phillips and Strobl make occasional references to, for example, the civil rights movement or black power, but in general, categories such as race, gender, and sexuality are treated like static entities rather than historically dynamic and changing, as well as stubbornly recursive, lived identities. The chapter on the representation of Arab-Americans in the post-9/11 United States is the exception, providing a more nuanced account of the shift in racial rhetorics in the aftermath of the bombing of the World Trade Center, although here too more could be done with the charged context of the post-9/11 years.
 
The text’s limitation in providing a compelling account of the representation of difference in comics is marked by an overuse of the concept of stereotype and the need to combat stereotypes through more positive forms of representation. Central to such a conception is the unexamined assumption that positive representations are somehow less ideological than either negative representations or more balanced and complex forms of representation. In this regard, it might have been interesting for the authors to examine the ways in which comic book villains often function as counter-hegemonic sites of identification for readers — something they mention in passing, but do not take up.
 
Comic Book Crime could be more effectively theorized in other ways as well. Its rare theoretical references tend to be from the 1990s or earlier. There are, for example, references to Jean Baudrillard and to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which is misread as “rejecting the notion that gender should be viewed as a simple binary connected to one’s biological sex” (as opposed to challenging binary constructions of both sex and gender) (147).  Phillips and Strobl’s book does not engage recent cultural studies work that emphasizes the relationship between culture and political economy, as well as culture and globalization. For example, an account of the way neoliberalism has transformed cultural rhetorics of both punishment and competitive individualism would provide a powerful lens through which to view changing comic book conceptions of justice and vigilantism, including the way in which the ambiguous figure of the kick-butt woman has become a staple of contemporary popular culture. Greater attention to how comic book heroes travel and are transformed within a popular culture that is increasingly global might also disrupt the exceptionalist (albeit negative exceptionalist) rhetoric found in the book’s subtitle (with its invocation, however ironic, of “the American way”) and in much of its analysis, which is often cast in terms of “specific, American notions of justice” or described as “quintessentially American” (222, 217). This is not to deny national specificity, but it would be interesting to consider how these concepts might themselves travel and be transformed alongside the super heroes as they become global icons.
 
The conclusion also needs more careful theorization. The authors present three contrasting theories of the relationships among popular culture, reader reception, cultural ideology, and social policy. In the space of a page, the authors assert that readers’ beliefs, as informed by comics, “shed light on policies that may be supported or rejected by readers as a solution to crime in the real world” (which claims a relatively direct relationship between popular culture-shaped belief and policy); that comic books “provide readers an opportunity to move beyond knee-jerk reactions and explore the consequences of power and authority” (which suggests a more interactive and reflective relationship between text, reader, and policy); and that “we believe these books reflect a general and enduring American social conservatism” (which suggests a one-to-one relationship between text and cultural ideology) (221). While these claims could perhaps be reconciled, that would take theoretical work that Comic Book Crime does not do.
 
In sum, Comic Book Crime accomplishes a good deal, but it is not quite the book that its subject matter so richly deserves. It is at its best when engaging crime and punishment, and does a serviceable job of addressing race, gender, and sexuality. It is easy to read, and will probably make a good introduction to the serious study of comics.