Spider-man seems to be a vessel into which critics can project ideologies, like existentialism, or American-style 'liberalism' (which in that particular case, means neo-liberalism, globalisation, in essence, capitalism). Batman, on the other hand, seems to be the focus of oedipal readings.
Oedipus? Really? Have we regressed to Freudian readings, already? Okay…
Philip Orr’s “The Anoedipal Mythos of Batman and Catwoman” (Journal of Popular Culture. 27.4, 1994) never actually explains how it uses the word ‘anoedipal,’ but it’s presumably from Deleuze and Guattari, with whose work I’m not familiar. The bulk of his paper seems to have little to do with the Father (in the Freudian or Freudian-derivative psychoanalytical sense), with killing father figures, or with having sex with mother figures. Clearly, without understanding Deleuze and Guattari, I can’t legitimately criticise this paper (perhaps the ‘anoedipal’ has nothing whatever to do with the ‘oedipal’?), but the paper itself doesn’t seem focused on anything in particular, anyway.
Its choice of source texts is random at best. Tim Burton’s Batman Returns and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns are certainly linked by a noirish aesthetic and by the ideological implications thereof (even more so than the appearance of the word ‘returns’ in both titles), but Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke and Batman: The Cult seem randomly chosen, cherry-picked even, in order to make a particular point about Batman/Bruce Wayne’s psychology as it pertains to fascist implications of identity, a particular point that is, sadly, extremely unclear. If Orr is aware of the long history of the character, he’s chosen not to reflect that knowledge in this paper.
Then we have Mark Fisher’s “Gothic Oedipus: Subjectivity and Capitalism in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins” (ImageText. 2.2, 2002), which splits its vision between, on the one hand, oedipal readings of Batman and his Rogue’s Gallery of father figures: the memory of Thomas Wayne; the servant-come-father figure, Alfred Pennyworth; the corporate power of Mr. Earl, Bruce’s own private Claudius; the protective but manipulative Henri Ducard/Ra’s al Ghul; the reluctantly helpful Lt. James Gordon; and Morgan Freeman, reprising his role as everybody’s favourite mystical negro, this time named ‘Lucious Fox .’ On the other hand, the paper addresses the capitalist implications of Bruce Wayne’s fight for, and use of, his vast, vast, mind-bogglingly huge, fill-a-money-bin-and-swim-in-it pile of cash.
It’s absolutely true that the Batman mythos concerns itself with fatherhood and family. Despite Batman’s pretentious brooding and tendency towards acting like a general more than a parent, there’s no denying that he has always surrounded himself with children, building a family (if a dysfunctional one) out of a collection of orphans, himself included. Even the oh-so-dark Miller version of Batman adopts the former members of the Joker gang, as well as his new girl wonder, Robin, in the process raising a family and an army, simultaneously (there’s something about the convergence of domestic and military hierarchies in there, but it’ll have to wait for another time).
This arrangement stands in ironic juxtaposition with the ever-smiling, and godly-paternal aspect of Superman, who had pets (a dog, a horse, and a monkey) and a kid sister of sorts (Kara, his cousin), but whose junior version, Superboy, was a younger version of himself, not a protégé. That aspect of pre-Crisis Superman has changed, of course, and the current Superboy is a protégé, but one created by an enemy of Superman’s, the Cadmus Project, as an easily-controlled replacement for him after his brief period of being dead, in the early 90s. After the fall of Cadmus, that Superboy was foisted upon Superman by fate. Now there is an oedipal narrative!
The psychology makes sense. Superman doesn’t deliberately build a family around himself because he had one for his entire youth, despite being the ‘Last Son of Krypton,’ and having a dead father (pre-Crisis). Batman, however, was orphaned at age 11, and as a result, takes on a replacement father, Alfred, and compulsively rescues orphaned children. Dick Grayson and Jason Todd’s parents died. Tim Drake’s father was initially comatose but recently killed in the Infinite Crisis mini-series. The Huntress/Helena Bertinelli’s father, a mafia crime boss, was executed. Batgirl II/Cassandra Cain was raised by an abusive assassin who, predictably, also died. Even Batgirl I/Barbara Gordon’s strained relationship with her father, Commissioner Gordon, lead her to the ‘bat family.’
But back to Fisher. I can see why fatherhood/parenthood would seem to figure largely in the Batman mythos, but as I’ve just tried to demonstrate, the application is bass-ackwards. Bruce Wayne doesn’t kill his father to become Batman, even in an anachronistic or symbolic sense. He becomes Batman to make up for the loss of his father, which is totally different. With that, I’m going to simply ignore his oedipal reading, and move on to the part of his paper that is far more interesting.
Fisher’s argument regarding class and wealth in Batman Begins is fascinating, but suffers from a failure of pessimistic imagination, to quote Sarah Vowell. Essentially, he argues that the film sets up a narrative of capitalism gone wrong, with the seemingly city-wide depression caused by Ra’s al Ghul, and the symbolic theft of Wayne Enterprises by Mr. Earl, who intends to sell the company’s stock on the open market. To correct this situation, we have Batman literally battling Ra’s al Ghul, and Bruce Wayne waging corporate war on Earl. In both narrative threads, Fisher argues, ‘good’ capitalism returns to Gotham in order to correct ‘bad’ capitalism. It’s essentially an extremely shallow morality play that, surprise surprise, happens to champion capitalism either way.
I think Fisher’s being a little too optimistic, though. The film’s antagonists are ‘good’ capitalists. Ra’s al Ghul’s meddling with Gotham’s economy should merely correct itself, if we follow the ‘invisible hand’ philosophy of capitalism (which is fallacious, but so wide-spread that’s effectively part of the ideology), in which any change or fluctuation is just the nature of the beast (and that biological metaphor is, of course, part of the fallacy). Earl’s assumption of ultimate power over Wayne Enterprises, his desire to sell it on the open market, and his eagerness to produce military hardware for profit is the ultimate expression of mercenary capitalism. He’s making money, therefore he just is in the right, according to that point of view.
Bruce Wayne’s return to Gotham and his conscious correction of its economy, exemplified by battling Ra’s al Ghul and taking back his family’s corporation, is not a capitalist move, but an imperial move. Carmine Falcone, who would be a walking cliché of a ‘goodfella’ if he weren’t played with so much glee, even calls Bruce “the Prince of Gotham.” Bruce appoints Lucious Fox as the CEO of Wayne Enterprises. If he were assuming a position of capitalist power, he would take that position for himself. Instead, he assumes a position of noble power, of right by birth to decide the fate of his father’s company and the people in it, and of the people of Gotham City. He might intervene for the better (though even that is up for debate), but the very concept of the vigilante is that he or she decides what constitutes ‘justice’ and actively corrects situations he or she has determined to be ‘unjust.’ The film does not champion capitalism. It champions the power of an élite noble class in the guise of free-market capitalism, which is even more manipulative and frightening.
I put my last post on a website and got some very sharp responses from another guy who happens to be an academic and knows comics very well. He pointed out a few things that have made me reformulate somewhat.
He said two things that struck a chord with me. First, he said that the distinction between ‘clones’ and ‘analogues’ is immaterial since every copy is going to reflect on the original in some way, and I have to admit, he’s right. The difference, in theory, is pretty simple, but in practise, I have a lot of trouble even thinking of an example of a genuine clone, a character that was a mere rip-off and stayed that way. That may be because genuine clones don’t tend to stick around (why bother reading the copy if you have access to the original?), or that their stories are folded into those of the original, by some process of memory akin to how we fold all the disparate stories of one character together (the long, long history of Batman, for example, is demonstrably not one story!). I’d have to do some hard research to sort out the answer to that question, but on the face of it, the objection is very convincing. Copies always reflect the originals, somehow.
Captain Marvel, the original Superman clone, had a very different origin (magic rather than sci-fi), a different level of powers (they wanted him to be more powerful in the hope that he’d outsell Superman), and a whole different kind of secret identity (instead standing for a child who wants to be a powerful adult, Billy Batson actually is a child). Then there’s the ‘original’ Marvelman, a British knock-off of Captain Marvel who was created specifically because DC sued Fawcett Comics in ’56 for copyright infringement and won. The result was that a British magazine that had been carrying the Captain and now couldn’t, created a copy to fill in the gap. But even then, the Marvelman Family was different than Marvel Family, although clearly derivative. There was no female member of the Marvelman family, for example, and their original was, again, pseudo-scientific, having been created by the RAF, not an old wizard living in the subways.
To me, though, that logic, copies always reflect originals, still carries over to all characters who have multiple creative teams. Mark Waid’s version of the JLA is distinctly different than Grant Morrison’s version, and since the former followed directly after the latter, comparison is almost inevitable. Which means, basically, that I’m still stuck on how we define ‘the original.’ Perhaps a better word would be ‘definitive.’ Not the first iteration of a character, but the most famous, the one that the greatest number of people go to in their minds when you mention Spider-man or Wonder Woman. I’ll let that thought go for now, though, because I’m not sure where to take it. It’ll come back. They always come back.
The other thing that guy on the internet said is that he doesn’t see how the distinction has any use, and I have to admit, that comment stopped me cold. I don’t know what the use is until I use it, but I still have to wonder about, as he said, what the distinction I invented indicates about my assumptions. He said that it’s a system that lends itself to dismissing ‘all those childish clones’ in favour of the ‘good stuff,’ like Ellis or Moore’s analogues. That wasn’t my intention, but he has a very good point. My intention was to create a category for rip-offs and knock-offs that allows us to look at them as valuable characters in their own rights because they provide some kind of commentary, either on the originals or on the genre from which they come. Again, though, he was able to argue that all of the examples I gave of clones could be, in my system, analogues, because there was some level of commentary in every reflection, therefore all I was really creating was a convenient way to push a lot of characters and comics further into the gutter, which I am obviously not in favour of.
I think I have to abandon that distinction, then, as one that merely perpetuates exactly the kind of false high/low split that I don’t believe in (or didn’t think I did, anyway). I’ll just stick with the idea of ‘analogues’ as copies that carry an inherent comment on the originals, and just drop the idea of a copy that has no content. I’m not that post-modern.
There's one problem, though. If we look at what Ellis says carefully, I think we have to admit that all superheroes are clones or analogues of some kind. "[T]he truth of any current superhero 'hit' is that they're about the audience's relationship with old characters."
Every new artist team or generational shift, or even editorial fiat, makes a character anew. For example, in the first dozen issues of Superman comics, Superman himself was an anarchic force. He smacked around cops and subverted the political order, demolishing a block of tenement houses, for example, to force the government to rebuild them.
After the first year, however, the editors instructed Seigal and Shuster (who continued writing and drawing the character for many years after selling it to DC) to make Superman more status quo, at which point he started literally going on missions for the then president. The post editorial-fiat version would seem to be a clone of the 'original,' even though it was written/drawn by the same two guys, who also created the character.
If we extend that same kind of shift to all superheroes who've passed through the hands of more than one set of artists or editors, then almost all of them are clones, and a good deal are analogues. Like all folklore and legend, their stories are told and retold, over and over again. Repetition of the theme and tropes of the narrative are part of their nature. By this reasoning, superheroes just are clones and analogues.
This leaves us with one, further problem, though: in a genre that almost exclusively uses a rotating roster of artists and editors, how do we even define 'original' to begin with? Are we not actually working with Baudrillard's 'simulacra,' copies without originals?
There's an important distinction that we have to make between two different kinds of characters, 'clones' and 'analogues.' The key is that the former, clones, merely employ the reader's pre-existing emotional relationship with a character, while the latter, analogues, actively comment on the original character.
Now, bear with me a second, because my terminology gets a little funny. In a Bad Signal post from 17 October 2005, Warren Ellis mentioned these kinds of characters, but he uses the word 'analogue' the way I argue we ought to use the word 'clone':
“the truth of any current superhero "hit" is that they're about the audience's relationship with old characters. So how do you replicate that without resorting to a bunch of analogue characters (again)?”
The important part, according to Ellis (and I agree) is the "audience's relationship with old characters." This is true of what I call clones as much as it is with long-running characters. On this list, you can put characters like the original Captain Marvel or Supreme who, in their day, were so much like Superman that readers might buy their books to get the same satisfaction as when they read actual Superman comics.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer who, in a paper called "The World Ozymandias Made" (from The Journal of Popular Culture), uses the word 'clone' but describes exactly what I call an 'analogue' character:
“'Clones' are characters that[sic] resemble other established superheroes, both in costuming and abilities, [...] The Clones have their own lives, their own continuity, and their own costumes [...], but in their presence they make reference to the original [...]. This process of cloning allows the authors to partake of a particular aspect of the discourse of superhero comics, providing their readers with familiar iconography…” (504)
(Wolf-Meyer, Matthew. “The World that Ozymandias Made: Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference.” Journal of Popular Culture. Winter 2003, 36:3, 497-517. Italics are mine, for emphasis)
The key, here, is that the new version doesn't just capitalise on the popularity of the original, but actively comments on the original in some way. That extra layer of commentary is the important distinction between the two.
Examples of analogues include just about everything Alan Moore's ever written with superheroes in it. Miracleman is a commentary on the British clone character Marvelman, who himself was a clone of Captain Marvel, who was a clone of Superman. The Watchmen heroes are almost exclusively analogues of the old Charlton heroes. Tom Strong bares a strong resemblance to Doc Savage. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comments both on Victorian adventure/horror fiction and the 'super-team' concept itself. Moore's take on Supreme, starting with issue #41, quite playfully exposes the fact that Supreme was always a rip-off of Superman.
Ellis constantly uses both clones and analogues. At least twice in Stormwatch, he uses villains who are clones of the classic JLA. In Planetary, however, he switches to analogues of both superheroes (Superman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman), and pulp heroes (The Shadow, Tarzan, Doc Savage).
Much like Miracleman, JMS' Supreme Power is an analogue reboot of the original Squadron Supreme, which was merely a clone title.
I use the terms backwards to my sources because 'clone' carries the connotation of complete sameness, of a mere copy, which more appropriately describes a character built just to play on the reader's sympathies for an original. The word 'analogue' however, denotes comparison. If two things are 'analogous,' they're not identical; they're just different enough for us to compare the two and learn new things about both.
Kind of a trite title, I know, but it's actually what I want to discuss.
Last year, during a discussion of Akira, I got it into my head that it was nonsensical to speak of the position of the viewer in comics panels. The prof was talking about how the angle of depiction implicitly placed the viewer at a certain position in space within the hypothetical three dimensions of the illustration. He was understandably baffled by the a suggestion that there was no implied position because it’s an illustration, and I backed off because, given a moment to think about it, I realised I was arguing a gut feeling with no actual reasoning behind it.
But it occurs to me now, with eighteen months of hindsight, that I might have been on to something, though certainly not what I thought I was on to. I suspect that we, today, talk of the position of the viewer in no small part because in photography and cinema, the viewing eye is physically locatable in the camera lens. That lens, and the machinery attached to it, had to be physically located in space in order to capture the image, therefore it's quite logical, very important in fact, to speak of the position of the viewer. The same can, by some extension, be said about the painter or other illustrator who uses a model. A painter had to have been located in front of a model and looking at it from a particular angle, from which the illustration was created.
But what about an image created wholly from the illustrator's mind? There is, of course, a point of view (literal, in this case) that logically implies a position in space. An over-head panel of Superman's Fortress of Solitude doesn't require the pencillor to fly to the North Pole, but it does implicitly place the viewer some number of meters above the Earth in that geographical region. I'm still stuck, though, with the gut feeling that viewers don't necessarily see things that way, at least not all the time.
When we see a character at an upward angle we tend to think that character is taller, as we can see in Citizen Kane, in which they actually hacked up the floorboards in order to put the camera operator at about ankle level, thus making Kane look like a giant. By the same token, a downward angle makes a character look smaller. This means that, as viewers, we tend not to assume that those angles make us different sizes. Instead, we assume that the subject is of a particular size. We can also observe this phenomenon when someone looks down from a tall building and says, "the people look like ants." We assume our own viewing angle to be objective, or at least standard, as if by instinct.
Demonstrating how this through process works would require empirical testing, but I'm going to take it as a working hypothesis for a moment, just to see how far I get. What occurs to me is that if we don't alter ourselves when our point of view is forcibly altered by film, why would we alter our position in space?
At the very least, why would we do so with a small square of illustration? An IMAX theatre can give us a sense of vertigo, but only because it fills our field of vision. A single panel, a TV, even a movie screen, aren't big enough to create that same effect. I'm totally contradicting myself now, but I wonder if the ubiquity of the television means that we are in fact less apt to wonder about the implied position of the viewer because we're so accustomed to seeing a disembodied image that, among other things, rapidly cuts from one angle to the next, and can cut from physically disparate locations, downtown LA one moment and Madagascar the next?
Even in documentary-style filming, in something like The Office, seeing the subjects interact with the camera is always a bit off-putting. I recall when Jean Cretien visited my high school just after he was elected. I was in a TV production class, which basically meant we played with cameras. One of us actually got into the ENG news scrum as Cretien left the building. Midway down the steps of our high school, he looked straight down into the lens and said, "Hallo, young man." We thought it was great. I wonder if part of the reason we thought it was great is because he, a constant subject of the camera's gaze, was actually acknowledging that gaze?
None of these thoughts are rationally, let along empirically, substantive. I'm not willing to go out on a limb and claim any of its truth value, but given the ways in which we interact with the disembodied images of television, computer, and cinema, I wonder if the average reader of comics is actually totally oblivious the implied physical position a panel puts her? And if most people don't think of it, if it's not part of their experience, what's the good in us critics worrying about it?
This feels like a dark road.