BUT I CAN’T SAY THAT I SEE THE POINT OF THE GIANT SPACE STARFISH: Scattered thoughts prompted by Jim Henley’s “Gaudy night: Superhero stories and our own,” and the comments thereto.

First let me get the polemical point out of the way: People who complain about superhero characters’ vigilantism are being too literal-minded and missing the point. The situations superhero characters confront are meant to mirror or illuminate situations we face. Sometimes the vigilante nature of the superhero helps call societal conventions into question, emphasizing the primacy of conscience and placing the hero alone in a moral landscape a lot like the landscape of the Western (another very American genre–and more on this stuff soon). Sometimes vigilante status is just a way to clear away bureaucracy and real-world constraints so that the storytelling can move fast and keep a tight focus on the central character’s choices. For those of us who read those serial-killer-profiling books, in the second kind of story vigilantism is m.o.; in the first kind, it’s signature. Obviously, many superhero stories use both aspects of the convention, with one or the other predominating.

Comparison: the costumes. Superhero comics use costumes for a host of reasons. Mechanical: Costumes make it easier to tell the characters apart, especially when the artists keep changing. They also make it easier for readers to slide into the fantastic–they’re like unicorns; when you see one you know you’ve left real-world conventions and should readjust your expectations accordingly. Plot: Costumes make it easier to suspend disbelief that characters with secret identities can maintain their secrecy. Thematic: Like secret identities in general, costumes help emphasize themes of identity-creation, personal vs. public persona, and the attractions and stresses of playing a role.

But costumes aren’t there to suggest that dressing up in colorful spandex is actually an effective response to trouble in the world or in one’s psyche. That’s just not what they’re doing. Ditto, IMO, vigilantism. It serves mechanical, plot, and thematic purposes, but there’s no point in trying to force it from symbol into policy prescription. Therefore, criticizing it for being a lousy policy prescription misses the point.

Having said all that…. It’s interesting–I don’t think I respond to the same things in superhero stories that Jim does. Possibly this is why Spider-Man bores me so much! I gravitate toward what I guess you could, if you really, really wanted to, call the existential questions rather than the ethical ones. Even in my Watchmen post I talked much more about the questions Jim doesn’t touch (Is there a pattern and a meaning to life? What does one death matter? What is the nature of creation?) than the ones he does discuss, even though the power-and-responsibility stuff is obviously all over Watchmen.

I gravitate to stories that seem to me to say something powerful about identity-formation, conflict between possible visions of the self, and leadership. The latter subject is probably closest to Jim’s interests, but even there, I’m especially interested by stories that explore the personal/public nature of leadership–the need to become one’s persona in order to lead, rather than artificially wearing the persona as if it were a costume (more on this in the next post)–and the interaction between personal leadership and some external ideal or rule set. (Anyone who can write the Scott Summers/Charles Xavier relationship well has a key to my heart–that negotiation between two generations or levels of leadership, that attempt to forge an identity while not only acknowledging but embracing the powerful influence of someone else’s dream. Thank you, Grant Morrison.)

Thus I want to read stories about Beast (identity-formation–again, I think Morrison has nailed Henry’s character), Daredevil (I talked about him here), and Jessica Jones (even the name of her book/business, Alias, gets at the “who are you? to what extent are you trapped in a role? what are the constraints on who you could become?” questions). Other characters seem to run into these questions less often, or else I haven’t yet seen the stories in which the questions arise, and so there is more of the duty-to-others stuff which, for whatever reason, I find less compelling. This isn’t meant as a slam on those stories. I’m just trying to point out another set of questions I think superhero stories have proven to be adept at addressing.