Fred Francis

New developments in comics studies have begun to consider the superhero comic as a transnational, rather than American, phenomenon. This approach offers a new way of thinking about the typical story that Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen jointly upended the comics world in 1986. While there is robust criticism to challenge the idea that 1986 was a miraculous year for comics, the continuing attention drawn by the two works requires us to think further about their apparent similarity. This article proposes the importance of a narrative of American exceptionalism within comics culture as a defining feature of the contemporary context for the production of the works. It then examines their responses to this context, arguing that they undermine the American monomyth of the superhero in different ways that originate in the different national positions of the two writers.

Published in Comparative American Studies 14:3-4, 15 Dec 2016

In the 1980s, a small group of comics creators broke from the conventions of the costumed hero by writing superhero comics marked by complexity of narrative, an abandonment of moral absolutism, and a markedly sombre tone and aesthetic. In doing so they inaugurated what became known as the Modern or ‘Dark’ age of mainstream superhero comics. This history has become standard in comics scholarship today, yet there are several elements of the narrative that are not readily obvious and which require development. One of the most prominent of these is the fact that Miller and Moore’s most highly praised works of the period – The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen – situate themselves in an alternate future of advanced technological development, yet also aesthetically recall a gothic past. The combination of scientific futurism and literary history which can be found in both works offers a way of understanding the construction of the texts, and can also be used as a tool for the periodization of the Dark Age.

The utilisation of a literary history to assemble a scientific future can be shown to offer particular advantages for Dark Age comics creators. Most importantly, moments where a similar desire to explore scientific potential is expressed in art and literature act as model for the work to be performed in comics. Moore’s description of the world of Watchmen as one where ‘science, traditional enemy of mysticism and religion, has taken on a growing understanding that the model of the universe suggested by quantum physics differs very little from the universe that … mystics have existed in for centuries’ suggests that in order to understand the futurism of Watchmen, one must look to the past for a negotiated territory between the two poles of science and mysticism. A close examination of the intertextuality of the works suggests it is the point of Anglo-American Romantic and gothic writing that is the clearest point of reference as a negotiated space, and it is from this source that the Dark Age builds its future worlds.

My paper will present several instances from key Dark Age superhero works, including Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and Kraven’s Last Hunt, where themes, elements of plot, or direct quotations from Romantic and gothic literature are incorporated into futuristic settings. These will be used to argue that it is the dual-vision of these works, the ability to simultaneously look back into literary history and forwards to a potential future, that is the key development of the Dark Age of superhero comics.

Although Frank Miller is a highly controversial figure within comics today, his importance for the superhero comic during the 1980s is critically near-unanimous. Current opinion holds that Miller’s innovation was to re-read and re-write the superhero narrative, using the long history of superhero comics to his own end by offering a personal revision of previous stories. However, it is also possible to see a revision of the American literary heritage in Miller’s work which provides a basis for the Gothic, violent Batman which would become the standard for the superhero in the 1980s. One of the major elements in this on is the direct allusion to Poe and the history of the detective story which Miller makes during the end of The Dark Knight Returns. By situating his work in this lineage, Miller makes a claim for his work to be read in a context of literary history. Doing so, and tracing the many less obvious allusive gestures to American literature, and particularly the formative American gothic trio of Poe, Melville and Hawthorne, offers a new way to understand Miller’s work. In particular, critically complex aspects of the books, such as Miller’s political conservatism, his celebration of anti-state violence, and his fascination with decaying cities, can be read as the reuse of themes prevalent in 19th Century texts, as he attempts to remake the superhero comic as American literature. My paper will present several aspects of correspondence between Miller’s Batman and 19th Century texts, alongside their historical contexts, to suggest a similarity that emerges from a shared project – making American literature – between the two moments.

It is not surprising, given the predominantly supernatural themes of superhero comics writing, that magic is not only a strong theme within the texts but also the lives of those who create comics. Both Alan Moore and Grant Morrison - two of the most prominent writers of the superhero comic form - are practising magicians, and believe their writing of comics to be the praxis of occult magic. Alan Moore states: 'Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness', and from this it can be inferred that the depth of the relationship between the practices of magic and the art of comics runs deeper than the occasional use of magical heroes and powers within a narrative. Although they tend to slightly different occult traditions, in both cases Moore and Morrison’s praxis of magic takes place through the use of symbols – or, as Morrison terms them, sigils – which are created to affect the reader, entrancing them and altering the world. This magic then operates in a remarkably similar way to Nigel Thrift's recent conception of affective glamour in the world of capitalism – ‘a secular magic, conjured up by the commercial sphere’ where the aesthetic impression of an object is used to bewitch a viewer into a course of action (i.e. to purchase). With this conjoining of occult and critical thought made, my paper will investigate the relationship between the magical image (sigil/symbol) and the production of art as it is described by Moore and Morrison, from primitive cave painting to comic books, and use this to propound a methodology for interpreting symbolic detail in literature, using examples taken from the two authors in question, in an effort to elucidate their work and their relationships with comics narrative and occult imagery.

In 1902, Marcel Mauss’s study of magic in tribal cultures in Africa – A General Theory of Magic - drew the conclusion that magicians were necessarily ‘liminal’, existing at boundaries of natural ability, at boundaries of identity, and living at the physical boundaries of society. This analysis offers several parallels to the superhero, and shared concepts in the critical work of theorising the superhero already exist. Although Kavaney does not mention Mauss in her study, her assessment that Batman must be a superhero is based on him possessing the ‘liminal status’ of existing at the threshold between states, in particular across boundaries of ability and social status which she uses to define the superhero. With this parallel suggested, the incorporation of the anthropology and critical theory of magic into a study of the role of the superhero can be shown to provide several useful tools. For example, the ability to group superheroes into the same categories Mauss and his followers offer for differing cultural practices of magic, such as sorcerer or witch, can provide a frame of reference with which to read characters, suggesting an innate motivation for Tony Stark’s alcoholism as a manifestation of the tradition of being driven by negative urges which plagues sorcerers, or for the collective demonization of mutants in the Marvel universe as an recurring expression of the previous social contexts for witchcraft. My paper will cover interpretations of the historic and tribal role of practitioners of magic, and offer these, with specific examples, as the basis for a method of illuminating popular superhero narratives, particularly in Marvel and DC Comics, in relation to their cultural precursors.

The history of the whale in Western culture, as the 'Extracts' that open Moby-Dick make clear, is in the adaptation of previous works, rather than first-hand experience. Philip Hoare, in 2009, begins his study of whales and whaling by documenting his own experience of reading Moby-Dick, and the ways in which it has saturated the cultural consciousness: the book has become the 'default evocation of anything whalish – from newspaper cartoons and children's books to fish and chip shops and porn stars'. Moby Dick’s cultural translations and appropriations by heavy metal – a particularly weighty, loud and 'whalish' form of music – are of particular note here, and evidence an undercurrent of shared practices between modern heavy metal and the 19th Century novel which crosses boundaries of time and medium. The novel's tendencies toward Gothicism, mysticism, religious iconography and the supernatural can be seen to be in confluence with the thematic practices of heavy metal, as can the shared desire for the ornate aesthetic surface which celebrates technical skill. My paper will use Hoare's reading of Moby-Dick, alongside studies of Melville's own practices of ekphrasis and adaptation, to analyse the key uses of the novel in heavy metal, including Led Zeppelin's "Moby Dick", Mastodon's 'Leviathan' and Ahab's 'The Call of the Wretched Sea', and argue for the necessity of reading these as confluential with Melville's art and therefore also as responses to the image of the whale, in the long tradition which Moby-Dick itself follows.