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The Patron Saint of Superheroes

“Enlisted by a team of honor students for a seminar on superheroes, a mild-mannered professor discovers his inner obsession. Assuming the powers of a novelist, teacher, playwright, and scholar, Professor Chris Gavaler embarks on a mission to unlock the secrets of the multiverse.”

Tag Archives: Austin Grossman

June 3, 2013 The Hollywood Superhero’s Never-Ending War on 9/11

Iron Patriot from IM3

The culminating twist of Iron Man 3, declared Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, “signals both the making of Iron Man 3 and, with any luck, the possible unmaking of the genre.” It was an early review, so Lane had to be coy about specifics, but a few weeks and a few hundred million box office dollars later, we can take the spoiler gloves off and just say it:

“This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war – justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism – that is the single greatest cause of that threat.”

Oh, wait, sorry, that’s not Iron Man 3. That’s Glenn Greenwald on Assistant Defense Secretary Michael Sheehan’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the twelve-year-old foreign policy franchise formerly known as the War on Terror has another two decades of sequels left in it.

What I meant to write is completely different. That Iron Man 3’s supervillianous corporate  technology genius invented his own Osama Bin Laden to mask his R&D and drive up government demand for his ever-expanding arsenal of military products, locking American and the rest of the planet in a self-perpetuating cycle of unwinnable war. But that’s just a movie. The kind that now pretty much defines the Hollywood blockbuster. Director Shane Black even goes the extra metafictional mile and includes the villain’s blue screen movie studio, the same corporate tech keeping Tony and his pals alive.

Iron Man and War Machine without the CGI

“From here on,” writes Lane, “the dumb-ass grandeur around which superheroic plots revolve can no longer be taken on trust.” Greenwald thinks the same about Obama. The war on terror, like the Hollywood superhero, will never end on its own because so many “factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation.” Black lifts the edge of the curtain, but that glimpse will hardly unmake or even marginally slow the onslaught of forthcoming productions. Captain America 2 is shooting in D.C. as I type. That’s D.C., our nation’s capital, and so not technically a Warner Bros or Marvel Entertainment branch office.

The modern superhero movie first took flight in 1978 with Superman: The Movie (the subtitle says it all), with the total number of productions tipping just over forty in 2001. How many since 9/11?  Fifty. In less than half as many years. So, no, 9/11 is not the box office superhero’s origin story. It’s merely the transformative accident that doubled his powers. Like the Golden Age’s Blue Beetle. When his comic book incarnation debuted in pre-war 1939, the Beetle was just another mystery man in a domino mask and fedora. Listen to his first radio broadcast a worn-torn year later and the guy’s ingesting the power-inducing 2-X formula from his pharmacist mentor.

Novelist Austin Grossman recently told my Superheroes class that when he started writing his supervillain-narrated Soon I Will Be Invincible in 2001, he had to ask himself, “Am I just writing about a terrorist?” Austin’s brother, The Magicians author Lev Grossman, penned his own superheroic response, “Pitching 9/11.” The short story is a sequence of failed pitches for adapting 9/11 to screen. Here’s my favorite:

“Lonely, misunderstood Dominican elevator repairman (John Leguizamo?) finds himself trapped by fire after the second plane hits. In agony from the heat and smoke, near death from asphyxiation he jumps from the 83rd Floor. Instead of falling he hover in midair, then rockets upward. The trauma of the attack, and of his impending certain death, has awakened latent superpowers he never knew he had. A handful of others have undergone similar transformations—they hover in a cluster over the collapsing buildings, like so many swimmer treading water. As the roof sinks away below them into nothingness, they choose colorful pseudonyms and soar away together in formation to take vengeance on evil everywhere.”

Lev’s other pitches include scifi thriller, Discovery Channel documentary, and a filmed performance piece, but superheroes are the ready-made absurdity 9/11 was meant for. Diverting the path of an airliner? That’s a job for Superman. The pre-emptive prequel would star Batman. According to The 9/11 Commission Report, President Clinton was so annoyed with the lack of options for taking out Bin Laden he said to one his generals: ‘You know, it would scare the shit out of al-Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp.’”

Substitute “ninjas” with the superhero team of your choice and you’ve got your very own dumb-ass grandeur plot.  But according to Blake Snyder (a friend leant me a copy of his Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need), the Superhero genre isn’t just about “guys in capes and tights.” It’s what happens when an extraordinary person is stuck in an ordinary world. In addition to Bruce Wayne and the X-Men, Russell Crow’s Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind are his go-to examples of misunderstood Gullivers shackled by Lilluputians.

I’m more than a little skeptical about Snyder (he argues Miss Congeniality is a better film than Memento), but he has a point. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. Superheroes soared after 9/11 because Hollywood cast America as the planet’s mightiest super being and the rest of the word population as those moron Lilluputians willfully misunderstanding him. Weren’t they listening when Bush Sr. explained New World Order?

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was the lone superpower, to be loved and respected by a planet of grateful mortals. When some of those ingrates go and topple the Fortress of Solitude, what choice does America have but to declare a War on Lilluputianism? “It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war,” laments Greenwald, “has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation.”

But then in his own superheroic plot twist, Obama, days after his Assistant Defense Secretary was arguing for an unlimited renewal of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, declared: “This war, like all wars, must end.” The Associated Press boiled the President’s 7,000- word speech down to a sentence: “Barack Obama has all but declared an end to the global war on terror.”

Congress is balking of course. And so is our Democracy’s fourth branch of government, Hollywood. While Obama declares war on perpetual war, Marvel has two superhero franchises in post-production (Wolverine, Thor), three filming for 2014 release dates (Captain America, Spider-Man, X-Men), and another four announced for 2015 (Guardians of the Galaxy, Fantastic Four, Avengers, Ant-Man). Throw in the S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show that premieres next fall, and the superhero war isn’t dialing back—it’s surging.

But all those capes and tights flying across our screen have been an inverse shadow of real troops on the ground. So what happens when we finally leave Afghanistan? What happens if the drone war on al Qaeda really does die down? I’m no pre-cog, but the pop culture tea leaves are telling me 2015 will be the last big year for dumb-ass superhero grandeur. Though I wouldn’t underestimate Hollywood’s shapeshifting powers either. Both Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness were already in theaters, literally blowing up their representations of the U.S. drone armada, when Obama dropped his own policy bomb of a speech.

Box office superheroes will endure. Just scaled back to their pre-9/11 levels, where they belong.

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April 29, 2013 Soon YOU Will Be Invincible

About five years ago, a group of honors students were trolling campus for a professor willing to create and teach a course on superheroes. They found me. The syllabus I submitted to C&D for approval included a predictable roster of comic books, interspersed with a few influential pulp novels and even a smattering of Nietzsche and Shaw. But then a friend handed me a novel I’d never heard of, a then recent hardback about an evil genius and the team of superheroes he fights. Standard comic book fodder, but the blurbs on the back assured me this was a literary novel.

And I thought: Really?

SIWBI cover

This is of course well before my superhero obsession had achieved its current proportions, but I had serious doubts. Sure, in rare cases, a comic book, say Alan Moore’s The Watchmen, could scale the pop culture ladder to achieve recognition as a work of serious literature. But this Austin Grossman guy, he was going the other direction. Soon I Will Be Invincible was a novel descending into comic book clichés. Yes, Michael Chabon had won the Pulitzer for The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but that wasn’t a novel about superheroes—that was a novel about superhero creators. Totally different.

And then I started reading. I didn’t make it through the first chapter before going online and ordering my own copy so I wouldn’t mark up my friend’s with underlines and scribbles. Always a sure sign I’m in love. This evil genius, Dr. Impossible, he was hilariously witty and improbably poignant. Where Alan Moore applies psychological realism to darken comic book stereotypes, Grossman achieved a realism that didn’t destroy the beloved formulas. His supervillain still MWAHAHA-ed, doomed to lose every plan for world domination, but under that absurd surface was a frighteningly familiar human being. Where Moore devastates superheroes, Grossman heightens the character types by constructing vast inner psychologies.

So I revised my syllabus and made those honors students read it. And then I made my book club read it. And then, since my kids weren’t reading entirely on their own yet, I read it to them. (My son’s twelve now, and when he heard Austin Grossman was coming to my campus, he found my scribbled-up copy and read it to himself again.) My daughter had already read most of Harry Potter on her own a few times, but she liked the ritual of a parent droning from a book over the breakfast table and after dinner on a couch. Soon I Will Be Invincible may be the last novel I read to them both. When I tried to start another, she very politely asked: “Dad, can we do something not about superheroes?”

But she loved Grossman too. How could the children of two professors not fall in love with a geeky genius in an endless battle against the stuck-up superhero bullies who persecuted him in middle school? But it was Grossman’s second narrator, an amnesic cyborg, who bulled me over. Despite (or perhaps because of) her fantastical absurdities—she shoots rubber bullets and a grappling hook from her forearms—her character took on emotional resonances I didn’t notice at first, meanings smuggled in under all the fun.

So when I got to the paragraph where she mourns the loss of her old self, the kid she can’t even remember ever being, I couldn’t read it. Literally. I choked up. Repeatedly. My kids thought I was having some kind of seizure. I was looking at my almost-pubescent daughter, a girl who had maybe ten minutes left in her childhood, and suddenly the metaphor of an amnesic cyborg was the most profound truth I’d ever read. Or not read. I eventually had to give up and hand the book to her to read aloud to her brother.

And now Austin Grossman has a new novel. How will I cope?

Grossman_You

He’s again returned to my childhood, not to comic books this time, but video games. I can recall reading a green computer screen over a high school friend’s shoulder as he typed responses to text-only prompts. The game Zork began with the words: “You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.”

That nameless main character, “You,” is also the title of Grossman’s new novel. Instead of plumbing the secret depths of superheroes, YOU offers a subterranean view of the computer gaming industry, a multiverse Grossman knows particularly well. He started writing games twenty years ago—because what else would you do with a B.A. from Harvard?—stopping to study Victorian literature at Berkley before launching his literary career while still continuing to expand his work in video.

My family has more Austin Grossman on our shelves than I had realized. He co-wrote Epic Mickey, a game I’ve watched my son slash through with our Wii remote. His credits are long, and even a non-gamer like me recognizes titles like Tomb Raider and Jurassic Park. Though I admit when I saw the headline “Dishonored Writer’s New Novel Shows a Video Game Generation Being Born,” I thought Grossman must have done something really, you know, dishonorable. (Dishonored actually won a range of awards last year and is considered the best action-adventure of 2012. )

I predict equally honorable accolades for YOU. The novel just launched, and Washington and Lee University will be hosting a reading on May 14th. Should you happen to be in attendance and feel a sudden, inexplicable wave of déjà vu, it might because Austin’s identical twin, Lev, stood on the same stage last fall to read from his own upcoming novel, a sequel to The Magician King. There’s clearly an annoying surplus of talent in the Grossman gene pool.

In my family, all the computer DNA went to my two brothers, stepbrothers, so no nature-nurture mystery there. Grossman’s characters enrolled in their high school’s first offering of computer math. So did I—before fleeing the next day. My brothers basically taught the class. I’d still rather watch Space Invaders over someone’s shoulder than play it myself. So all the more amazing to me that Grossman can render the spectacle of 80s and 90s games so thrillingly. Graphically you might just be a plus sign battling hordes of ampersands in a forest of Vs, but his prose imbues your plight with improbable depth, both three-dimensional and psychological.

My brothers went on to careers as programmers, and one is, in fact, a game designer in a universe that bears an uncanny resemblance to YOU. But saying the novel is about video games is like saying The Old Man and the Sea is about fishing. It tells you a great deal and nothing at all.

I will say that YOU is a fantastic novel, but not fantastical. Sure, the game’s archetypal adventurers chat with the narrator on a regular basis, but you can write those off as dreams and daydreams. And, yes, that ur-bug infecting the game code has an almost supernatural vibe, but Grossman never quite exits realism. Or rather, fantasy and reality become flip sides of a single coin. While Invincible explores the disturbing borders where real and unreal meet (the seams in cyborg skin graphs, for example), YOU overlaps the two worlds–literally, the game maps are overlays of Central Park, Disneyland, Scotland.

Ultimately, the difference between here and there, you and your role-playing self, tumble into a shared real/unreal universe, the coin Grossman keeps spinning for almost four hundred dizzying pages. When I set the book down, I had to recalibrate my senses, shake-off the metafictional jet-lag, before handing YOU to my son. He’s a video game junky. He’d dive through the screen of his laptop if he could. I’m glad he can’t, but Grossman provides the next best thrill.

Austin Grossman author photo

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January 30, 2012 My Life as a Cyborg

I read Max Barry’s Machine Man on my flight home from California. I read it without a pencil in my hand. I’m an English professor, so that’s harder than it sounds. The pencil, according to some definitions, also makes me a cyborg.

Comic book artist Geoff Johns offers a better example: “If we have a cellphone and we’re texting on it, we are a cyborg — that’s what a cyborg is, using technology as an extension of ourselves.” Johns is drawing the character Cyborg into the recently rebooted DC universe, making the part-human part-machine superhero a founding member of the Justice League.

I don’t own a cellphone — I know, it defies the imagination — but I would be legally blind without my contact lenses. And in a great amount of pain without the metal capping my childhood cavities. The three earrings sticking out of my head I could survive without, but I wouldn’t be happy about it.

I was born the same year as the Doctor Who Cybermen, the first cyborgs to invade pop culture. I was also there when American TV found the technology to rebuild Colonel Steve Austin for the now shockingly low sticker price of $6M. Actually, my bedtime was 8:30 in 1974, so I was only allowed to watch the first half of each episode.

Marvel Comics’ first cyborg, Deathlok, booted up the same year. I bought the original Astonishing Tales issue from a rotating display rack in my 7-Eleven. I was in high school before DC cranked out their Cyborg, the least original superhero name since Superman. Robocop was way catchier, and the last of the cybernetic goody guys off the assembly line.

Apparently there’s something sinister about human-machine hybrids. Think of James Earl Jones breathing life into Darth Vader’s asthmatic voice box, or Arnold Schwarzenegger thumping around as a homicidal android disguised in a layer of artificially grown flesh. By the time I graduated college, Doctor Who’s Cybermen had upgraded themselves into Star Trek’s “resistance is futile” Borg.

DC revising their timeline to include Cyborg in the “original” Justice League — I wasn’t alive when the team formed in 1960 — is a welcome if obvious act of affirmative action, apparently necessary because the black Green Lantern got the boot. Cyborg was also the first African American cyborg. It’s a good metaphor, one that Dwayne McDuffie soldered to his retooled and newly black Deathlok for the 90’s reboot.

The Cybermen and the zombie-shuffling Borg are multiculturalism’s secret nightmare. The ultimate melting pot where even the pot gets melted in. A cyborg — an abbreviation of “cybernetic organism” — is all about mechanical miscegenation. It’s no coincidence that the term emerged during the Civil Rights Movement.

Isaac Asimov wrote about cyborgs for the first time in 1967. He imagined a future where robots and humans are indistinguishable. After replacing a human patient’s heart with a mechanical one, the surgeon (we don’t know he’s a robot till the end) wishes humans and robots would stop mixing. Asimov titled his short story “The Segregationist.”

The first time I saw Deathlok, I thought the human half of his head sported a tightly trimmed afro. The remains of my childhood comic book collection are piled into an ancient liquor store box in my attic. My favorite cyborg did not survive. So I can’t fact check my memory that his wife is black. They had a son too. This is back when the President of the United States thought abortion should be illegal except for cases of rape, incest, and interracial pregnancies. Barry Obama had just entered his teens.

It’s also not a coincidence that cyborgs entered the collective consciousness during the Vietnam War. Prosthetics technology always spikes with an increase of maimed soldiers. Technically there’s no difference between a cyborg and a prosthetics wearer. It’s an aesthetic divide. Cyborgs are sexy. Prosthetics are pathetic.

Max Barry illustrates the difference in Machine Man. After his narrator loses a leg in a work accident, he’s a victim, on object of pity. The best prosthetic available only heightens his social and self estrangement. But when he intentionally removes another limb so that he can sit comfortably in a matching pair of robot legs engineered to outperform their human equivalents, he’s an instant celebrity.

Cyborg stories always begin with mutilations. The first, Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 “The Man That Was Used Up,” is a supposedly comic tale of a Brigadier-General who returned limbless and featureless from his battles against the western “Bugaboo” tribe. I prefer Frank L. Baum’s twelfth Oz novel, The Tin Woodman of Oz, published near the close of World War I. In addition to the better known Tin Man, a Tin Soldier joins the cast. Both lost their human parts one enchanted axe or sword blow at a time, and employed the same tinsmith for replacements.

Actual maimed veterans of U.S. wars have to settle for Purple Hearts.

Even Tony Stark, wounded during a cold war excursion in communist Asia, gets to be Iron Man. Sure, removing the chest plate would mean instant death, but at least he can fly and shoot lasers from his palms. It’s the standard cyborg formula. Disabilities romanticized into cartoon super-abilities.

Austin Grossman, author of one of my all time favorite novels, Soon I Will Be Invincible, applies the formula to superheroes. His cyborg narrator woke up on an operating table after most of her memory and body were lost under the wheels of a runaway truck. Superheroing is the only job she can find, a desperate attempt to give her mangled life meaning. Her teammates aren’t so different.

Grossman explores “how violently altered the normal body is for a superhero” and “the larger theme of superhero life as trauma and recovery from trauma.” He explained to Girls Read Comics: “It seems like the trauma element gets glossed over a little bit in superhero comics; it gets glossed over even though it’s the motivating, defining attribute of the superhero. I guess it’s kind of the hopeful element of superhero comics; the idea of the trauma that shapes you is not just pain; it’s also the thing that makes you special.”

South African athlete Oscar Pistorius is a real-life example. The New York Times Magazine says Pistorius is nicknamed “Blade Runner” because of his J-shaped prosthetic legs, but it’s a more obvious allusion to the Philip K. Dick film adaptation and its nearly human robots. By some  calculations, Pistorius’ “posthuman” legs outdistance their meat-and-bone equivalents by twelve seconds per Olympic lap. But according to at least one biomechatronics expert, what makes Pistorius a “mutant” and “freak” is his innate athletic prowess and drive. The fact that he was born without enough calf bones and so had his legs cut off below the knees as an infant is beside the point.

But Pistorius and his superhero counterparts are the exceptions. Cyborgs are usually tragedies or horror tales. The first screen cyborg, the Automaton of Harry Houdini’s 1920 serial The Master Mystery, is a Frankenstein monster, a mad scientist who cut out his own brain and placed it inside a robot body. Never mind that the robot looks like a Sesame Street character. Audiences knew to be horrified.

DC’s Cyborg didn’t chose to become half-machine. He woke up on an operating table saved from death but lost to his former life. Leave it to comic books to turn that into a good thing. Now he even gets to be a founding member of the Justice League, right up there with Superman, Wonder Woman, and that guy who talks to fish.

That’s way better than Max Berry’s narrator. He ends up a little gray box with USB ports instead of limbs. I’m trying to get one of my colleagues to teach Machine Man in his first year writing course. I read it in paperback, which technically makes me a cyborg, if a laughably outdated one. I’m sure it’s available in Kindle and Nook editions, probably iPhone too. Whatever that is.

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January 9, 2012 Thrilling Tales

Classes start today.

I don’t teach my Superheroes seminar again till spring, but winter is just as good. My New North American Fiction is subtitled Thrilling Tales after the issue of McSweeney’s that Michael Chabon edited back in 2002.

Chabon’s editorial premise was simple: a lot of great fiction falls under the lowbrow category “genre.” That includes science fiction, horror, mystery, what folks called “pulp fiction” back in the thirties. “Pulp” because of the grade of paper the magazines were printed on, the cheapest possible, made from wood pulp.

I admit some of those stories were no better than their medium. A writer could hack out a 40,000 word novella in less than two weeks. Formula was everything. Thus “formula writing,” anything following the conventions of a genre, was no longer considered “literary.”

But no formula automatically produces bad writing. No formula automatically produces good writing either. Knowing a poem is a sonnet tells you it’s fourteen lines and (probably) rhymed. It tells you nothing about its quality. Believe me, there are a lot of horrific sonnets out there.

So why not literary pulp?

I’d say Kurt Vonnegut launched it with science fiction back in the fifties. Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin weren’t far behind him, casting their own literary spells on the realm of swords and sorcery. Margaret Atwood rewrote the future of speculative history with The Handmaid’s Tale. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, one of if not the most esteemed novel of the twentieth century, is about a haunted house.

But the pulp chips didn’t really start flying till Chabon’s The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay grabbed the Pulitzer in 2000. In the decade that followed, I count at least two dozen literary works firmly planted in genre soil originally deforested by pulp fiction nearly a century ago. All by authors of high literary pruning. In addition to the perennial Atwood and Chabon, add Philip Roth, Michael Cunningham, Isabel Allende, Sherman Alexie, Jane Smiley, Jonathan Lethem, Tom De Haven, Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Mitchell, Kevin Brockmeier, and Caryl Churchill.

Last year alone, we had Colson Whitehead writing about zombies, Glen Duncan about werewolves,Tom Perrotta about the end of the world,  and Stephen King (would you believe he’s “literary” now?) earning a place on the New York Times’ ten best books of 2011 with a time-travel tale.

My biggest challenge for Thrilling Tales is not overcrowding the syllabus. I pared it down to nine:


McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Ed. Michael Chabon
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
Zorro, Isabel Allende
The Final Solution, Michael Chabon
Flight, Sherman Alexie
Fledgling, Octavia Butler
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman

I’ll let you know what my students think.

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November 14, 2011 Superhero Guide to Love and Sex

How any Hollywood exec fantasized that last summer’s Green Lantern could have spawned a Harry Potter-replacing franchise remains an unfathomable mystery. Three exposition-bloated minutes in and my ten-year-old son mumbled: “This isn’t very good.”

But the writers (seven names in the credits, never a good sign) got one thing right. When Lantern drops onto his love interest’s balcony (how many times has Superman pulled that maneuver with Lois?), she sees through his silly little disguise in seconds. And when he finally gets his kiss at the end, she first asks:

“Hal, can you take off the mask?”

If I were going to write a Superhero Guide to Love and Sex, that would be the first entry. Rule #1: Expose yourself. A superhero’s most intimate act is unmasking.

The advice originates from the roots of the genre (Spring-Heeled Jack, Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro). It branches during the 1930’s into monkishly celibate heroes (Doc Savage, Superman) and earthier heroes with indulging fiancés (the Shadow, the Spider). And it’s still the core of 21st century superhero romances.

When DC turned their death of superman comic book arc into the PG-13 cartoon Superman: Doomsday in 2007, Anne Heche voiced Lois Lane’s annoyance with Superman for keeping their (surprisingly sexual) relationship a secret. Not only does he limit their trysts to the Fortress of Solitude (the ultimate bachelor pad), but he’s not confirmed his secret identity to her either. This Lois (for once) can see through Clark’s glasses, so she’s not miffed because he’s keeping her in the dark. She’s hurt that her lover isn’t committed to their relationship enough to show his real self. (That, by the way, is what you call a metaphor.) It only takes a scrape with the afterlife for the Man of Steel to come around. In the last scene, the post-coital Lois looks up from Superman’s bedsheets to see Clark putting on his glasses. Intimacy at last.

Staying in 2007, Austin Grossman’s novel Soon I Will Be Invincible plays by the same romance rules. The love-struck cyborg Fatale longs for her teammate Blackwolf:

“Our lips touch, and for a second it’s everything I thought it would be. The metal in my jaw is awkward but somehow exciting, and he kisses back. I pull him down to me, get his weight against me. I’d forgotten what it was like to want something this much. He reaches up under my shirt, and the feeling is so good it makes me want to cry. Nobody but a surgeon has touched me there for a really, really long time.

“Then I make a mistake. I reach for the mask, and he catches my arm, ready to break it. His jaw sets, and I’m dealing with Blackwolf again.”

For a superhero, unmasking is more intimate than sex.

It’s another team member who eventually lands Blackwolf. The two “are making out in the rain like high school kids,” and “Blackwolf’s mask came off, showing the shock of white hair he usually keeps hidden.” Even Fatale admits “it’s just about the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen.”

The mask means the same to gay superheroes. The hero of Perry Moore’s Hero (2007 was a banner year for superhero sex) masturbates to online porn of wide-nippled Uberman (the one page I mumbled over when reading aloud to my kids). But he doesn’t find real intimacy until he and the better half of his dynamic duo have shared identities. The novel’s most touching (and gently erotic) scene takes place not in bed but during a picnic lunch in a public park:

“I . . . placed my hands on his face. . . With one palm over his forehead and the other palm over his nose and mouth, I looked into those deep, dark pupils and saw the way he used to look at me when he was Dark Hero, when I didn’t know. Goran took my hand off his mouth and held it. He raised it to his mouth, placed his warm lips in the middle of my palm and kissed it. . . . I reached my arms around Goran, pulled him in, and our lips met.”

For a superhero, a happy ending means getting your mask off.

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October 10, 2011 When Superheroes Are Assholes

The first time I taught my honors seminar “Superheroes,” I scribbled character elements on the board as students called them out:

“Intelligent.”

“Superpowers.”

“Orphans.”

“Brave.”

No one shouted, “Assholes.”

But they are now.

Comicbook.com’s Scott Johnson isn’t the only reader to call Grant Morrison’s new Action Comics Superman a “cynical, arrogant jerk.” Johnson concedes that “this might be the real personality that would develop if an all-powerful alien being found himself stranded on earth. Those with great power, more often than not let it go to their heads.”

But Morrison isn’t the first writer to portray a superheaded hero. It’s been the trend for years if not decades.

We have yet to see what director Joss Whedon has in store for The Avengers, but Captain Hammer, his first take on a superhero, was a superasshole. Nathan Fillion hammed it up as the cheesy embodiment of superpowered privilege in Whedon’s 2008 musical Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. The guy dupes a social advocate into sleeping with him (“This is so nice / Just might sleep with the same girl twice”) by faking that he cares about the homeless (“I’m poverty’s new sheriff / And I’m bashing in the slums / A hero doesn’t care / If you’re a bunch of scary alcoholic bums”).

Look at Jonathan Lethem’s Omega The Unknown and his superhero is no better. In addition to womanizing, the millionaire Mink bribes politicians, stages photo-ops, and stars in his own Hollywood Squares TV show. Other characters call him “greedy and boastful,” a “jerk,” a “pig,” and (my favorite) “the worst person I have ever been seated behind in a movie theater.”

Hammer and the Mink are right up there with CoreFire, Austin Grossman Superman knock-off in his 2007 novel Soon I Will be Invincible.  CoreFire has a “smug air of invincibility” and seems to fly “purely out of a sense of entitlement.” His own teammate calls him a “jerk” and a “fucking racist.”

President Obama would never call someone a fucking anything (though, wow, do I wish he would), but he doesn’t like arrogant superheroes either. While on the campaign trail in 2008, he told Entertainment Weekly: “The guys who have too many powers—like Superman—that always made me think they weren’t really earning their superhero status. It’s a little too easy.”

Garth Ennis, on the other hand, would call anyone a fucking anything. His superhero-bashing Butcher in The Boys sums up what he hates most about them: “That arrogance. That fuckin’ DISDAIN they have for us, where our lives mean nothin’ more than a rat’s.” And if that’s not clear enough for you, Ennis has Homelander (another Superman stand-in) and his teammates require their virginal recruit to give them blowjobs before she can join.

Starlight: “I mean this is completely disgusting! It’s a betrayal of everything you stand for! You’re the Earth’s most mighty! You bring justice to all, you avenge the innocent!”

Homelander: “Yes, and we’d like to get our dicks sucked.”

Peter Berg’s 2008 Hancock started out almost as bad. Berg described the original 1996 script as “a scathing character study of this suicidal alcoholic superhero.” To keep a PG-13 rating, the revised “comedy” still had to trim back a statutory rape and a scene of Will Smith drinking with a 12-year-old minor (flying while under the influence stayed).

Hancock, Mink, Hammer, CoreFire, Homelander. That’s a lot of asshole. But they’re just the most recent examples.

Look at Rick Veitch’s Brat Pack.

Look at Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come.

Look (inevitably) at Alan Moore’s Watchmen.

Superhero-as-asshole is the shared premise of some of the very best comic book writing of the last quarter century.

But you can go back further. The 1960’s Silver Age happened because Stan Lee was the first writer willing to make a hero ugly. In Fantastic Four #1, the Thing calls frightened onlookers “Lily-livered cowards!” and picks a fight with Mr. Fantastic: “I’m going to paste you right in that smug face of yours!”

Spider-Man started out worse. After letting a thief run past him, he tells a cop: “Sorry, pal! That’s your job! I just look out for number one—that means—ME!”

The Hulk, Doctor Strange, Iron Man, Thor, they were all jerks.

But it’s not just the Silver Age. Comic books began with the biggest asshole of all, Jerry Siegel’s Superman.

Look at Action Comics #12. The guy busts into a radio station and shoves an announcer in the face: “Beat it! And tell that control engineer that if he shuts me off the air, I’ll make a bee-line for his gizzard!” He then announces his “war on reckless drivers” and, while dodging police bullets, demolishes a car pound (the owners are traffic violators), a used car lot (the cars are old and unsafe), and a manufacturing plant (the owner uses cheap materials). He even kidnaps the mayor and frightens him into obeying his orders.

This isn’t Robin Hood do-goodery on behalf of the common man. The guy is a superpowered egomaniac. It’s the trait DC covered up, made Siegel turn his Asshole of Steel into a well-mannered law-abider. But the arrogance has always been there, just under the leotard.

Good for Grant Morrison for giving us a peek again.

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