May 1, 2008
Show and Tell
I originally presented a shortened version of this paper at the International Comics Arts Forum in Washington DC in October of 2007. It has since been reprinted, with additions, in the International Journal of Comic Art (Vol. 10, No.1, Spring 2008). I reprint it here because the IJoCA is not available on-line.
Citations of comics appear as issue.page.panel. So, (24.12.6-9) is the 24th issue, page 12, and panels 6 to 9. Single slash marks indicate a transition across word balloons, double slashes indicate a transition across panels, and triple-slashes indicate a transition across pages.
Notes Towards a Theory of Metacomics
There have been only a few critical engagements with comics as metafiction or metapictures, which is to say, as metacomics. M. Thomas Inge's "Form and Function in Metacomics" is insightful but, unfortunately, brief. Donald Palumbo's "Metafiction in the Comics" is a non-theoretical close reading of The Sensational She-Hulk, a highly metacomic series from Marvel Comics. Finally, Michael Dunne's Metapop treats comic strips as part of a larger discussion of meta-level expression in popular culture. Thus far, there has been no explicitly articulated method for analysing metacomics as metacomics, as products of a medium that employs pictures, narratives, and text. This paper presents such a methodology, a theory of metacomics that is a synthesis of Patricia Waugh's theory of metafiction, from her book Metafiction, and W.J.T. Mitchell's theory of metapictures, from his book Picture Theory. To demonstrate this theory, the paper applies it to a selection of American metacomics. This in turn reveals a slow shift from the Silver-Age style of American comics to the Revisionist style, which insinuates itself into the Silver-Age style and alters it from within, a process that begins in the early 80s and continues to the present day. Finally, using Brian McHale's rubric in Constructing Postmodernism, this paper treats the Silver-Age style of metacomics as roughly modernist (i.e., preoccupied with epistemology [8], or what Waugh calls structural [53]). Conversely, it treats the Revisionist style as clearly postmodernist (i.e., preoccupied with ontology [8], or what Waugh calls radical [53]). These three different theorists--Waugh, Mitchell, McHale--present surprisingly similar and often overlapping models of both meta-level expression and the modern/ postmodern shift. Thus, this paper demonstrates a move from Silver-Age/ modernist/ structural metacomics to Revisionist/ postmodernist/ radical metacomics.
There are three points that must be clarified before this argument can proceed. First, the Silver Age of American comics was so-named by fans and the term has since been perpetuated by publishers. It is not a critical term, but it is the term that is in use within the comics community, and as such it does indicate a historical shift that critics should not ignore, although they should also not assume it to be entirely unproblematic. Like any other term that describes both a generic style and an historic era, it is inconsistent and there are cases that do not fit the periodisation, much like other such terms (e.g., Romantic poetry or the Victorian novel). "The Silver Age" denotes a loosely-defined generic style that arises from a particular historical circumstance. The combination of historical and generic factors is why this paper refers to it as the "Silver-Age style," which thus retains a sense of historicity ("age") and formal features ("style"). The historical circumstance of the Silver-Age style is the creation of the self-censorship system called the Comics Code, which was instituted in 1954, revised in 1971, and then finally abandoned by mainstream publishers over the course of the 1990s. It made American comics explicitly authoritarian; it removed the consequences of violence and specifically omitted gun-play, which essentially killed the genres that relied on gore or the real threat of death (horror, war, crime, etc.); and it all but removed overt sexuality. In Barthes' terms, the Code constitutes the underlying mythic structure of American mainstream comics, and despite the absence of the Code in post-millennium comics, many of its stylistic conventions and authoritarian presuppositions remain. Thus, much like postmodernism by definition incorporates many features of modernism, Revisionist comics include elements of the Silver-Age style, but they treat them differently, most often employing postmodern irony or knowing hindsight. This paper addresses those aspects of the Silver-Age and Revisionist styles that specifically pertain to metacomic effects.
Second, studying American superhero comics is extremely valuable in this context for a couple of reasons. Most obvious is the simple fact of their popularity. Although their circulation has waned over the course of the late-20th century, they remain the most recognisable genre of comics in the Anglo-American tradition; their potential for socio-political influence is thus not to be dismissed. Put simply, critics of culture and art ignore the popular at their own peril, and superhero comics are extremely popular. Past simple popularity, the genre itself is especially useful precisely because it is both high-fantasy and so-called "low" culture. It is an indicator of a common-sense view of reality because it retains almost all of the dominant logics of its cultural moment and prominently juxtaposes them with its extremely high-fantasy narrative conceits. The fantastic element of the genre extend to narrative elements like technology or magic, but not to social constructions pertaining to, for example, class, race, gender, etc.. This results in a remarkably clear display of those dominant logics because they stand out when set next to the genre's high-fantasy narrative conceits. A culture's bedrock assumptions are thus uniquely visible in its most fanciful stories. As a concrete example, this genre can easily contain a man who can fly, but very rarely can it contain a woman who can have an identity outside of a heteronormative relationship. We ought to pay attention, then, when these dominant logics change from stable identities and a rational external world, to fluid or multistable identities in a world that is literally made of perception.
Finally, although Revisionist comics are largely postmodernist, this paper does not argue that all Silver Age comics are modernist, per se. The metacomics, specifically, that appear in the late-50s and 1960s in the American mainstream are largely modernist in that they either shy away from actually breaking the frame or, much more often, they seek to repair it at some point after the fact. This indicates McHale's shifting dominant from epistemology (trying to know the external world and either succeeding or failing at it) to ontology (trying to know if there is an external world, often discovering there is not, and being either happy or sad about it). The remainder of this paper will move through Mitchell and Waugh's theories--formal metapictures, structural metafiction, multistable images, radical metafiction--using American metacomics as running examples. The goal of this paper is, then, to demonstrate how to apply this theory to metacomics of any kind.
Formal Metapictures (Mitchell)
Mitchell's concept of the metapicture is deceptively simple. In a "strict, formal sense," a metapicture is "a picture about itself, a picture that refers to its own making, yet one that dissolves the boundary between inside and outside, first- and second-order representation, on which the metapictorial structure depends" (42). This basic form of the metapicture creates "a referential circle or mise en abîme" (57), reflections of reflections. He continues, "[t]he principle use of the metapicture is, obviously, to explain what pictures are--to stage, as it were, the 'self-knowledge' of pictures" (57). Mitchell quickly complicates this relatively simple, formal definition of metapictures, but it will suffice to illuminate a series of self-reflexive images from Showcase #4, the first appearance of the second DC Comics character to go by the name "Flash."
The cover of the book [Figure 1] is a metapicture that borrows from the iconography of the cinema (Flash Archives v1, 20.1). The image was created by Carmine Infantino and according to Julie Schwartz, the series' editor, it was intended to depict the Flash "speeding through frames of film" ("Forward" 6). The most striking element of the composition is, however, the figure bursting out of the film frame and running directly at the viewer. There is an implicit comparison, here, between cinema and comics. This character is defined by dynamic movement, something that comics cannot literally depict, so the film frame is imported to imply movement and speed. However, that frame is then dramatically destroyed by that very same dynamic movement, which implies that even though the cinema does move, it cannot contain the Flash's powerful speed. The cover is immediately followed by a splash page (21.1) [Figure 2] in which the Flash, again, bursts out of the page, but this time the iconography is of the comicbook and the visual implication of destruction is all but missing. On the cover, the ragged edges of torn celluloid are clearly visible (even though celluloid does not, of course, behave that way), but on the splash page, the Flash emerges from a single panel, the comics equivalent of a film frame, with a burst of white explosion lines that nevertheless leave the actual comics page intact. The network of panels are seemingly stronger than the linear progression of the film. This is a remarkably nimble manipulation of icons for the purposes of channelling the perceived power of film to bolster the power of the comics page.
These images are also, of course, unmistakably metapictorial. They literally break the frames of two different media. One the cover, the Flash runs directly at the viewer, which violates the boundary between the cinematic image and the viewer's reality, and the splash page does the same, although in this image, he runs not directly out of the page but towards page-right, which places a stronger emphasis on speed, because he appears to traverse real distance, and physically leads the viewer's eye to follow him (i.e., to keep reading the book). In the upper left-hand corner of the comicbook within the comicbook, there is a third comicbook that depicts a simple line-drawing of the first Flash, Jay Garrick (21.3). The second and third pages of the issue depict Barry Allen, not yet the Flash, reading this same comicbook, recognisable by its cover. Within four pages, Barry Allen is then struck by lightning (23.3), gains the power to run at super speed (24.3), and finally goes back to the comicbook to decide what to do with this power (27.3). The metapictorial depiction of the comicbook inside the comicbook, which displays the two Flashes in extremely similar running poses, simply will not let the viewer forget that this character is just another iteration of a fiction, a type as much as he is a character. In Mitchell's terms, this stages the self-knowledge, not of the picture, but of the American comicbook, which often boils down to a seemingly endless reiteration of the same stories, reflections of reflections. As Sean Howe puts it, "For the legions of aging readers, what else are serial superhero stories but perpetually running narrative machines--an endless supply of nostalgia?" (Howe viii). Barry Allen is so dependant on his narrative antecedent that he returns to his comics in order to find out what he should do next. He almost literally treats it like the script of his life; thus, his identity as a stable, believable fiction is in question. He is a character in his own right but he is also depicted as consciously aware that he is a recent iteration of another character. He even says,"THE FLASH WAS JUST A CHARACTER SOME WRITER DREAMED UP!" (23.1). Within only six pages of his introduction, Barry Allen lives in a limbo between his own world, which is real to him, and a world that is inside his comicbooks and that he knows to be fictional. Although this is a tantalizing glimmer of a postmodernist implication, Silver-Age metacomics almost always suppress such glimmers.
Structural Metafiction (Waugh)
Turning to Waugh now, her book describes "two poles of metafiction: one that finally accepts a substantial real world whose significance is not entirely composed of relationships within language; and one that suggests there can never be an escape from the prisonhouse of language and either delights or despairs in this" (53). One end of the pole she calls structural and the other she places "at the level of the sign" (53). She later calls this later end of the pole "radical" (136) because it results in the total dissolution of literary boundaries and/or of the structure of language itself. I will expand on radical metafiction at the end of the paper, but in short, it narrativizes "the exposure of 'reality' in terms of 'textuality'" (53). It argues for "the centrality of language in constructing everyday reality" (53) and that "language constructs rather than merely reflects everyday life [...] meaning resides in the relations between signs within a literary fictional text, rather than in their reference to objects outside that text" (53). She casts structural and radical metafictions not as categories, separate and inviolate, but as poles, things that incrementally shift from one to the other, which matches the incremental shift from the Silver-Age style to the Revisionist style of metacomics, and McHale's concept of a "shifting dominant" between modernism and postmodernism. However, despite this model of metafiction, as movement from one version to a more extreme or radical version, we should not assume a teleology. The former does not automatically progress into the latter. They are merely two different kinds of metafiction. Furthermore, neither is ethically superior. Both can be put to a variety of rhetorical uses.
Waugh's structural metafiction usually does not break the frame of its fictional world (i.e., it stays within its structure), but it does call attention to that frame, to how it functions. It stages the self-knowledge of fiction, to borrow Mitchell's terms, but ultimately it depicts a knowable world, either fictional or real, that is merely mediated through representation. McHale calls this a modernist preoccupation with epistemology, with finding ways to understand the world that we presume exists and is intelligible. Superhero comics are a very high-fantasy genre, so actual frame breaks of one kind or another are relatively common, especially in parallel universe stories, and Waugh's model of structural metafiction includes this strategy. She speaks of novels in which the frame is broken but repaired, or in which it is crossed but strengthened as a result.
In Silver Age comics, when the frame is broken it is almost always repaired. The Flash #123 was published in 1961, five years after the previous example. In this issue, the famous "Flash of Two Worlds!", the new and old Flashes meet in the four-coloured flesh. The new Flash (Barry Allen) has every reason to believe that the old Flash (Jay Garrick) is a fictional character. Staging this meeting could have revived the ontological uncertainties of Barry Allen's first appearance, and that could have created something that is closer to one of Waugh's radical metafictions. It could have destabilized the whole network of fictional worlds in which these characters live. However, those potential implications barely appear in this issue before they are dismissed. The new Flash decides, within four pages, that the world in which the old Flash lives must be a parallel dimension and not in fact a fiction (123.8.5). He asserts this even though within his high-fantasy universe, the possibility exists that he could have been literally sent into one of his old comicbooks. Instead, he reasons: "A WRITER NAMED GARDENER FOX WROTE ABOUT [the first Flash's]ADVENTURES--WHICH HE CLAIMED CAME TO HIM IN DREAMS // OBVIOUSLY WHEN FOX WAS ASLEEP, HIS MIND WAS 'TUNED IN' ON [the first Flash's] EARTH" (123.10.4). Gardner Fox is the writer of the old Flash Comics and also the writer of the issue in which this dialogue appears. He thus contrives a high-fantastic explanation for his own conception of the original character. This logic is of course strained to say the least. It is totally without a basis in evidence but it is vocalized through the heroic protagonist and dressed up in pseudo-scientific terms, the "VIBRATORY SHIELDS SEPARATING OUR WORLDS!" (123.8.5), which means that it is coded as the right answer. It is also the answer that neatly avoids ontological uncertainty.
Thus, as Waugh says, the book eventually "accepts a substantial real world," even if it is an extremely high-fantasy, escapist world. This is the pattern in Silver-Age comics: a frame break happens and then that break is repaired. Uncertainty, especially ontological uncertainty, is dispelled. These comics go out of their way to assert the strength of the frame, between fictions in this case but, by implication, also between the fictional world and the reader's world. This strategy works in isolation but once it becomes an identifiable pattern, that very pattern calls attention to itself. If the frame is broken over and over again only to be fixed over and over again, the effect is no longer a strengthening of that frame but instead an emphasis on the frame as a narrative conceit. It becomes undeniable that that frame is a barrier only because we decide it is, and therefore we can break it whenever it is convenient to do so. This increasingly obvious implication eventually leads to the Revisionist style, literally a revision of the Silver-Age style. Whereas the Silver-Age would characterise crossing the narrative boundary as breakage or destruction, the Revisionist style might call it opening the fiction, or building a bridge between it and ostensibly real space, an act of construction. The shift in dominant logics, from Silver Age/ structural to Revisionist/ radical, results in a shift of the operative metaphors themselves. Thus the frame transforms from a barrier into a door, a point of entry.
Multistable Images (Mitchell)
Revisionist metacomics often employ Mitchell's concept of multistability to represent that shifting metaphorical construction/ description. Once we are in a world defined by perception, description just is an act of creation. It makes a new thing that is not the direct experience of the thing described, but instead the direct experience of the description itself. Mitchell borrows the concept of the multistable image from "anthropological studies of so-called 'primitive' art" (45).
Most multistable images are not metapictures in the formally explicit way[...] They display the phenomenon of 'nesting,' presenting one image concealed inside another image [...] They do not refer to themselves, or to a class of pictures, but [instead] employ a single gestalt to shift from one reference to another. The ambiguity of their referentiality produces a kind of secondary effect of auto-reference to the drawing as drawing, an invitation to the spectator to return with fascination to the mysterious object whose identity seems so mutable and yet so absolutely singular and definite. (48)
Optical illusions are probably the clearest example of multistability. They often trick the eye by playing the two-dimensional form of the picture against the viewer's sense of three-dimensional reality. One of the most famous examples of this effect is "The Devil's Fork" [Figure 3], which has both two and three prongs, simultaneously. The contradiction between two- and three-dimensionality produces a shock, which is usually expressed in the form of laughter. The physical shape of "The Devil's Fork" is impossible in three-dimensions. The effect here is to shock the viewer into acknowledging the obvious: pictures are two-dimensional. The images cannot exist in three-dimensional reality but it can exist as a picture, and therefore pictures simply do not have to follow the perceived rules of the viewer's reality. Mitchell demonstrates that we treat pictures as if they were real, despite the logical knowledge that they are not, and the same is true of fiction. M. Thomas Inge suggests that metafictions "suspend our belief in the reality of the fiction" (1), as opposed to suspending our disbelief. The supposedly willing suspension of disbelief is actually a habitual or possibly even unconscious act. We have to be shocked into reminding ourselves that ceci n'est pas une pipe. The paradox of this lesson, as Todorov demonstrates in The Poetics of Prose, is that we do not in fact expect fiction and pictures to conform to reality. Instead, we expect all forms of representation to conform to their own verisimilitude. "We speak of a work's verisimilitude insofar as the work tries to convince us it conforms to reality and not to its own laws. In other words, verisimilitude is the mask which is assumed by the laws of the text and which we are meant to take for a relation to reality" (83). This includes the representations through which we gather our sense of the real. Realism is just another kind of verisimilitude, not the actual replication of recognisable aspects of reality. It is, in effect, a genre. Meta-level representation thus forces us to acknowledge not just that words and pictures are not "real", but that that which we take to be real is made up of words and pictures.
Mainstream American comics, even Revisionist comics, are not nearly as formally experimental as, for example, underground or alternative comics, so multistable images are unfortunately quite rare. However, there is a powerful conceit in Revisionist comics that duplicates the multistable effect: the analogue superhero. In Warren Ellis' words, analogues are "about the audience's relationship with old characters" (Ellis, Bad Signal 17 October 2005). Matthew Wolf-Meyer explains that they "resemble other established superheroes, both in costuming and abilities, [but] have their own lives, their own continuity, and their own costumes" (Wolf-Meyer 504). Thus, "in their presence they make reference to the original[s]" (Wolf-Meyer 504). Like the multistable image, they are not metafictional in a "formally explicit way" (Mitchell 48), but they do force the audience to acknowledge that fiction can break the alleged rules of reality. Analogues are multistable because they occupy two states simultaneously. They are both fictional characters in their own right, who live in a fictional world that constitutes their own reality, and they are referents to pre-existing characters. This dynamic is very similar to the ontological conundrum of the Flash, but that character's potential analogue multistability is definitively cut off in his meeting with the old Flash (Flash #123). Revisionist metacomics use the analogue to expose precisely that kind of ontological uncertainty where previous metacomics attempted to efface it.
Alan Moore's reinterpretation of the Superman knock-off character "Supreme" is one of the most self-consciously analytical examples of the analogue. Moore takes over writing Supreme with issue #41 and instead of attempting to efface the shift of tone that usually happens when a new writer steps into a pre-existing comicbook, Moore's Supreme consciously acknowledges the shift. Supreme himself suddenly has amnesia, which previous iterations of himself tell him is because his back-story has not been written yet. His memories will return when the writer creates them (41.15.1). This is a result of what they call a "revision" of their universe (41.14.2), which refers to the literary process of revising, but also to the by-then common practise of referring to Moore and his contemporaries as "Revisionist" writers. Supreme physically travels to "the Supremacy," a dimension occupied only by previous versions of himself that have been "revised" (41.8.1). The series even identifies him as a literary figure called a Wylie, "AFTER THIS GUY, PHIL WYLIE. WROTE A BOOK CALLED 'GLADIATOR' SORTA INTRODUCED THE WHOLE SUPERMAN ARCHETYPE" (Return 6.21.4). The Wylie is presented as the master-narrative of this character, embedded as he is within the accepted, though often inaccurate, history of the American comicbook itself. To be clear, the Wylie is not a master-narrative per se. Instead, Supreme presents it as the master-narrative of the world inside the comic book.
Making revision an acknowledged part of the narrative universe constitutes a commentary on American comics as an artistic practise that is dominated by industrial policies. Open-ended narratives, eternally-young protagonists, and rotating artistic teams mean that characters can never be consistent. Paradoxically, superhero creators and their fan base cling to continuity in a form that is akin to Todorov's verisimilitude, as defined above. Continuity is understood in fan and industry discourse as simple consistency, but it is actually a convincing feeling of consistency that is achieved through constant change, continuous micro-updates to the setting and characters, which thus creates the appearance of no change at all. Umberto Eco comes very close to describing this phenomenon in "The Myth of Superman." He calls it a "Plot Which Does Not 'Consume' Itself," and thus never moves through time or towards its own death (17). The Superman comics to which Eco had access repeated single-issue adventures over and over again and showed no changes to the characters or their context, which was the style of the time. However, had he had access to a larger sampling of comics, he would surely have noticed the small, incremental changes made to the setting and reflected in the attitudes of the characters which take on the false appearance of fixity. This is the heart of so-called continuity, what I have in other places called the neverwhen of American comics. Only by juxtaposing disparate examples do we see just how much a given character or setting has changed. The violent, vigilante Superman in Siegel and Shuster's first twelve issues of Action Comics is nothing like the propagandistic icon of Americana that he became after WWII, or the soap-opera scenario that he turned into by the 1990s.
Moore's version of Supreme presents this comparison of disparate versions of the character within single issues. In #41, Supreme literally meets previous incarnations of himself, all of whom represent particular moments in American comics (41.4.1). In subsequent issues, he starts to remember his newly-created backstory and the art changes to reflect the period in which that backstory occurs, from the simple panel progressions and melodramatic body language of the 1940s (e.g., 42.10.1-2) [Figure 4], to the saturated colours and distorted bodies of EC's horror and satire comics of the 1950s (e.g., 44.20.5-6) [Figure 5], and then back to the grim-faced, muscle-bound bodies of Rob Lefield's quintessentially mediocre 1990s style (47.cover) [Figure 6].
The series replicates and acknowledges the shifting backstory that comes with characters like Superman. It could have, on the one hand, presented a fixed, complete, or closed narrative that proceeds from one definite point and ends at another definite point. It could have, on the other hand, opted for the illusion of fixity that is the neverwhen. Instead, Supreme performs a typically postmodern move; it embraces the paradoxes of which it is made. It offers an abundance of new versions of its own story, but remains focused on one particular version of that story. Moore himself describes the progression of the American superhero: "Characters pass from one creator to another and it just depends which phase of the character you happen to be familiar with" (Jack Kirby Collector #30). His Supreme is one of many, and he is also stable within his narrative, but his stability relies on being embedded in a larger cycle of stories, all of which are more or less equally stable. He cannot be a unique, stable, literary presence without the help of the sprawling, fluid, master-narrative context of the Wylie figure in 20th-century American science fiction. To engage with him as a character, the audience must be aware of the literary referent (i.e., Superman). To make sense out of Supreme's story, to keep all of these concepts in mind while reading the series, both requires and results in the audience perceiving the arbitrary nature of that master-narrative.
Thus we arrive at Lyotard's conception of the postmodern. McHale provides a very useful interpretation of The Postmodern Condition and the general postmodernist resistance to master-narratives. "Lyotard's description has been turned into a prescription: avoid at all costs the appearance of endorsing [master-narratives] (since nobody believes in them any more); or, more briefly: avoid story; don't narrate" (5). Instead of abandoning narrative altogether as a way to avoid master-narratives, McHale argues that they "do useful work for us--so long as we 'turn them down' from [master-narratives] to 'little narratives,' lowering the stakes" (24). Thus we can still use master-narrative as a tool, we just have to "divest it of its authority as" master-narrative (24). This is as much an act of transforming the master-narrative as it is of simply recognising that it never was one, that no one story, no one explanation, could possibly address all circumstances or contain all other stories. Supreme does almost exactly this. It depicts a self-consciously little narrative: the story of one particular iteration of the character called "Supreme." In doing so, it depicts the master-narrative, the Wylie, as just a collection of multistable, self-conscious little narratives. It demonstrates the process of "turning down" and reveals that the alleged master-narrative is much smaller than it originally claimed to be.
Radical Metafiction (Waugh)
Waugh's radical metafictions open the frame of the narrative until there is no frame any more. Narrative and/or language is represented as akin to a machine that has been put to a use that it is simply incapable of performing. Not only does it not do what we want it to, but it cannot. These extreme forms of metafiction:
have embraced a Wittgensteinian concept of 'language games'. They function through forms of radical deconstextualization. they deny the reader access to a centre of orientation such as a narrator or point of view, or a stable tension between 'fiction', 'dream', 'reality', 'vision', 'hallucination', 'truth', 'lies', etc. Naturalized or totalizing interpretation becomes impossible. The logic of the everyday world is replaced by forms of contradiction and discontinuity, radical shifts of context which suggest that 'reality' as well as 'fiction' is merely one more game with words. (136)
Waugh initially claims that it is possible to "delight" in radical metafiction but her language is consistently negative when she describes it. Radical metafiction denies things that the reader wants. It is merely a word game, which, in Waugh's description, constructs a prisonhouse of language. Revisionist comics rarely, if ever, imply this negative view of metafictionality. We can see the general sense of radical metafiction start to form in Supreme, but the "logic of the everyday world" is not replaced. Instead, the logic of the American comicbook is revealed. This is a logic that can accept "contradiction and discontinuity" to a great degree via the ever-shifting nature of the neverwhen. Instead of a prisonhouse, Supreme offers a playhouse. It reinterprets the child-like silliness of Silver-Age Superman comics so that the nostalgic adult can enjoy them. In that reinterpretation, Supreme admits just how silly, self-contradictory, and illogical those old comics were, but that admittance grants symbolic permission to superhero comics to be silly and illogical without recourse to making them "realistic" or "gritty," which were of course code words in the 1990s for "violent" and "angst-filled." It also places the audience at just enough cordially ironic distance to reveal the basic ideologies that much popular fantasy does not explicitly admit that it replicates, namely ontological assumptions of stable identity, knowable reality, and linear causality.
The most radical moment in Supreme occurs in Supreme: The Return #6, which is effectively the end of the series because it was cancelled before #7 was published. In this last issue, Moore and Veitch present a series of pastiches of Jack Kirby's various comicbook creations, including the New Gods (6.2-3.1), the Newsboy Legion (6.4.1), the Guardian (6.4.3), Dr. Doom (6.6.1), Seargent Fury and his Howling Commandos, Captain America, (6.8.1), Project Cadmus (6.10.1-2), and the dozens of characters who emerge directly from Kirby's skull while his god-like, disembodied head floats over a city of his own imagination (6.18.1). This issue is as close as the series will come to admitting outright that it is a fiction. The other Supremes casually refer to "revisions" in their universe and are aware that individual versions of the character exist for units of one month at a time (41.10.2), but they specifically say that they ultimately do not know why their universe works this way (41.19.2). Parallels to comicbooks are extremely common in the series. Supreme's alter ego is Ethan Crane, a penciller for Dazzle Comics who draws a character called "Omniman," who is of course yet another Wylie, a Superman knock-off. Despite all of these parallels, the characters never quite realize that they are fictions. The Kirby avatar, however, quite casually refers to Supreme and the world in which he lives as a fiction: "I ALWAYS LIKED THAT HIDDEN VALLEY/SECRET KINGDOM KIND OF CONCEPT. / WORKS GREAT WITH CHARACTERS LIKE YOU! LEMME SEE, YOU'RE A WYLIE, AM I RIGHT? // I NEVER CREATED A WYLIE PERSONAL LIKE. HANDLED A FEW, THOUGH" (Return 6.21.3-4). He places Supreme within an orderly system, a fiction that follows the rules of the Wylie figure and the superhero genre, which means that the series does not quite achieve radical metafiction. However, it does reveal the nature of the rules of that system, which is the first step towards deconstruction.
There is a metafictional moment, however, in Neil Gaiman's Sandman that comes far closer to the radical mode. It bridges the fictional world and the world of the reader such that they are not just linked spaces, but become the same space. In The Wake, millions of dreamers--people, gods, and everything in between--stream into the Dreaming, the quasi-stable space in which dreams happen, to attend the funeral of the Sandman, the title character of the series. The sparse narration that depicts these characters, most of them recognisable from previous books in the series, explains: "THEY WAIT AWKWARDLY, SHUFFLING AND MAKING SMALL-TALK, IN THE WASTELAND THAT WAS ONCE THE HEART OF THE DREAMING. / EVERYBODY'S HERE. // YOU'RE HERE" (The Wake 45.2-3) [Figure 7].
Direct addresses to the reader are a relatively common practise, more so in the 18th-century and Victorian novels which Gaiman's writing style often echoes, and such addresses are only occasionally metafictional; they usually just replicate a commonplace of live storytelling without breaking the frame or flattening fiction and reality. However, this moment in Sandman displays the characteristic blunt truth statements of meta-level art, like Magritte's absolutely literal insistence that "ceci n'est pas une pipe." While reading Gaiman's narration and viewing Michael Zulli's page, the "you" to whom the text refers is at the Sandman's funeral, quite literally. The use of the deictic language, "here" instead of "there," and the present tense, "are" instead of "were," is equally literal. Zulli's art emphasizes this effect with depictions of characters looking out of the page, directly at the viewer, which implies not just a relationship between audience and storyteller, but between the viewer and the characters in the fiction. This is the only funeral that the character will ever have and it exists only in the act of reading and viewing those comics, therefore the audience is as "here" as there is a "here" to be in. This basic metafictional implication, that the reality and the fiction are not separate spaces, is of course supported by the running metaphor of the series: dreaming as both an act of storytelling and like unto hearing or witnessing a story. Sandman is a story about the nature of stories and how powerfully they affect us. The Dreaming itself is presented as an environment that literally responds to and is formed by the minds of its residents, including the billions of people who are sleeping at any given time. By this point in the series, it is a space with fictional and narrative implications. In losing a sense of separation between the fictional world and the audience's world and in stating that lack of separation in undeniably literal terms, the series embraces at least one aspect of radical metafiction; as Waugh puts it, "for metafictional writers the most fundamental assumption is that composing a novel is basically no different from composing or constructing one's 'reality'" (24). There is nothing outside of the fictionalised space because reality is constructed on fictional terms just as much as fiction is.
It is, however, remarkable that Revisionist comicbooks rarely depict the total breakdown of representation that occurs in radical metafictional novels and of which Waugh speaks in the last pages of her book. Instead, Revisionist comics usually attempt to intelligibly depict that breakdown within the comics themselves. In effect, they retain a core, representational coherence and use it to attempt to depict incoherence. This might currently be the limit of the Revisionist metacomic in the American mainstream. Total radical incoherence may be possible, or at least commercially acceptable, only in more experimental work, like alternative comics. We should not, though, consider this a failure to achieve radical metafiction. To make that statement, we would first need to establish an attempt to achieve that effect, in particular. What this paper suggests instead is that Revisionist comics simply do not happen to display that extreme form of metafiction. They also do not characterise symbolic representation as a prisonhouse, something from which one would implicitly want to escape. Aside from the fact that there is nothing to escape to, nothing outside the so-called "prison," they tend to come to the conclusion that if all we have is many shared systems of representation then this thing we call "reality" is not nearly as rigid or as self-evident as most popular conceptions would imply, including Waugh's model of language as prisonhouse. Instead of wholly abandoning its source material (the Silver-Age style), Revisionist comics extend the fanciful nature of Silver-Age storytelling into an at least equally fanciful ontology in which any attempt to separate reality from representation would be simply nonsensical. In one sense, this is an attempt to restore an element of the Silver Age style, but it does so with exactly the self-consciousness that Silver-Age comics tend to lack. Self-consciousness, an awareness of what has come before and of the historical and social factors that formed American comics in the 50s through the early 70s, is one of the defining features of Revisionist comics, which, once again, are literally a revising of the Silver-Age style. Revisionist metacomics celebrate fictionality rather than despairing in it, to use Waugh's description. Alan Moore sums up this attitude in his poetic introduction to Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? "This is an IMAGINARY STORY... aren't they all?"
Conclusion
This approach to metacomics, or indeed this system of approaches, is designed to be in the vernacular of the form, to paraphrase Mitchell. It takes text, pictures, and narrative into account. It freely applies metaphors from any one of those elements to any other, seeking the language of pictures as willingly as it seeks to picture language, or as Mitchell's book suggests, to picture theory. Working with a medium that is inherently visual, narrative, and textual makes separating visual theory from textual theory extremely difficult and not particularly useful, which is why my examples apply Waugh's textual theories to imagery (the Flash as structural metafiction) and Mitchell's pictorial theories to fiction (Supreme as multistable narrative). This paper pushes Waugh's conception of language past its breaking point and transforms the metaphor of breakage into creation. The theory is constructed not to presume its own results. It is not intended to be an argument about what metacomics do, but instead to be a tool with which we can determine what a particular metacomic or set of metacomics might be doing. This extremely brief survey of American mainstream metacomics reveals a transition from the structural and modernist to the radical and postmodernist, which itself is of course linked, in McHale's terms, to a shifting cultural dominant that takes place over the course of the 20th century, from a popular sphere in which truths are natural or objective, to one in which concepts are relative and constructed. The practical application of this theoretical structure is deliberately open, deliberately flexible. It is not linked to any one genre, style, or national tradition. Other scholars working in other comics fields should alter it as their needs dictate. They should translate it into their vernacular. The point, ultimately, is to apply it to other kinds of metacomics--BD, manga, the underground, the comic strip, political cartoon, etc.--to determine if similar, different, or totally other shifts take place there.
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Posted by orion at May 1, 2008 4:24 PM