It started out as an escape. It was 1978 and I was
thrust into a new world. My
parents had divorced and my mother moved us out to
After that initial exposure, I
bought as many comics as I could (which, at the time, was not a lot—maybe three
or four a month). Spider-Man continued
to be a staple, the Avengers less so.
But soon came Batman, Superman, the Legion of Super-Heroes, the Teen Titans.
Joseph Campbell believed that superheroes formed the mythologies of the
20th century (Wiater 194). Whether you subscribe to this or not, they
have left an indelible mark upon our collective American psyche over the last
60 years and they certainly have left a mark with me.
So much so that I began to emulate
what I was reading through drawing (first tracing, then freehand copying the
existing pictures and later altering them to create my own costumed characters)
and writing. The latter began in 1981
with a character much like myself—in fact it was me,
only as a superhero. My fictional self
took the name Starblaze and began fighting crime in
some unnamed big city. It was six and a
half double-spaced, hand-written pages—barely a story synopsis. A few months later, I remade my hero-self,
becoming the character Robin, and starting my crime-fighting career in
In 1984, I decided to start over,
sort of. I handed over the Robin
identity to a new character named Rick Spensor. I wanted to stop using myself and my friends
and relatives as characters and I felt I had written myself into a corner in
that Eric had become a violent, callous person, and rather than work my way out
of the situation, I chose to turn away from my fictional self. This way I could start
having a bit more fun (mostly because everything was “new”) with other
characters and stories. Rick Spensor was a fresh start, in a manner of speaking, for he
was me, but more of the me I was at age 15, not the
fictional twenty-something I wrote about.
After two “issues” of Rick as Robin, a friend of mine
and I created a group of teen superheroes called the Defenders (later changed
to the Crusaders), with Robin as the group leader. This mirrored with fantastic plagiarism
another team called the New Teen Titans.
But I kept writing story after story over the next nine years until I
had amassed twenty-five regular issues and three “specials” (longer stories featuring
a major turning point in the series; for example, the last special featured the
Krolan War that is mentioned many times throughout
this collection) before I retired, at least until now, the Crusaders.
During the same time period I also
wrote a series of stories featuring Eric Isaacson, the former Robin now known
as Blackwing.
Gone was the emotional and psychological angst of the previous
series. Instead, I focused more on the
adventure aspect that mostly defines the superhero genre. Blackwing lasted for seventeen issues before I retired that
character again (until “Choices,” that is).
The last year I wrote about
superheroes was 1993. I had made several
plans to start another series, but it never seemed to work. This was about the time I was trying to write
more “literary” fiction (and was about the time I attended graduate
school). I felt I should have been
writing about more “serious” topics with more complex characters and
situations. So I segregated my superhero
work from the literary, with perhaps a bit of disdain for the former. But I’m glad I focused on the literary
writing, for without that experience, I wouldn’t have been able to produce the
fiction in this collection.
Despite my betrayal of the genre,
writing-wise (I was still reading superhero comics, though not as many as the
more fantasy-based ones—Sandman, Hellblazer, The Books of Magic, among others), I
kept coming back to them because I knew that there was more to accomplish in
the genre, even if I didn’t know what it was I wanted to explore. To that end, I made notes in my various
journals that might some day get me back into superheroes.
Then, in the summer of 1997, I wrote
an epistolary story featuring the Usenet, called “Down-Time.” It started out with this simple idea: What would a superhero do after a long night
of crime fighting to wind down? Like
many of us non-crime fighters, he might get online. And why wouldn’t superheroes use the Internet
to communicate, inform, and discuss things with each other? I showed it to some close friends (also long‑time
comics readers) who had been reading my superhero
fictions for years and received a favorable response. I knew then that it was time to write about
superheroes again.
Of course, I couldn’t simply repeat
what I’d written years before. Most
superhero stories are adventure tales, with “the plot, characterization, and
theme [being] relatively simple” and formulaic (Bongco
86). A quick perusal of many mainstream
superhero titles (i.e., those published by the Big 3 companies—DC, Marvel, and
Image) will demonstrate this basic premise:
a villain disrupts the status quo in some way, usually in robbery or
physical harm to others; the hero opposes the villain, which almost always
involves a fight between them; and the hero captures or at least drives away
the villain, guaranteeing the villain’s return and continuing the cycle.
For over sixty years superhero
comics have rarely strayed from this formula, regarded by many to be no more
than adolescent male power fantasies.
But, as Scott McCloud boasts in Understanding
Comics, comics in general have a potential as a medium that is limitless
(3). I contend that the somewhat worn
idea that is the superhero in particular has yet to be fully
explored.
So I started with the idea that I
would write those stories I never got to read, stories
that featured superheroes as people first—the men behind the masks—with the
typical adventuring as secondary. This
line of thinking had its genesis many years before when reading a comic called Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man. It always struck me as odd that Peter Parker
spent very little time in the comic named after him. Why emphasize the man behind the mask and not
use him except as a mere extension of the superhero identity? This is a backwards concept to me, for it is
the man who is the super, not the other way around. Examining this aspect of
the superhero is where comics often come up
short. By emphasizing the super over the
man, the superhero becomes less accessible (and less interesting) to more
sophisticated readers. A more
interesting hero is the one who, despite his or her faults (or maybe because of
them), still manages to inspire us. It
is this quality of humanity—rising above our baser natures—that can draw
readers into the story and characters and allows a certain amount of
identification. Jessica Linker, in an
issue of Sequential Tart, wrote,
“Flawed Superheroes are brilliant, because they are simultaneously exaggerated
representations of good, and yet they're not so irritatingly perfect that there
isn't something that we can relate to.
This is why a lot of people, deep down in their subconscious, have an
overwhelming devotion to Superheroes” (para. 8).
Despite the usually simplistic
nature of the characters and plot, the superheroes remind us what we all can
(and should?) do for the world. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph
Campbell writes that the modern hero is the one who must “guide and save”
society (391). Superheroes certainly
have the potential as role models to accomplish this. In fact, Alan Moore has said that “if I had
to look back to the biggest single factor that shaped my moral code as a child,
it wasn’t my parents . . . it wasn’t the school; it wasn’t the church. It was Superman.” The simple code of morals that Superman
espoused included such basic concepts as “Don’t lie. Don’t kill anybody. And always try to help other people out if
they’re in trouble”; codes which would do “until you can grow up and can shade
in some of the more subtle areas” (Wiater 171). For a speech I had to give in the ninth grade
in which we had to bring something from home that we felt was important to us
and explain why it was so, I brought the second annual (a special larger-sized
issue usually put out during the summer months) of The New Teen Titans. I spoke
of justice and loyalty and honesty—all things I felt that particular comic
contained.
Not that there haven’t been
superhero comics that examine the man behind the super. Two notable ones are Alan Moore’s
and Dave Gibbon’s epic Watchmen and
Kurt Busiek’s
I would add that Watchmen even overshadows
the genre somewhat, i.e., all superhero fictions eventually get compared to
it. Even Moore himself asked,
how
do you follow Watchmen? . . .
Do you do something that’s an even more complicated superhero book? . . .
Or do you do something that just repeats the Watchmen formula over and over again? Or do you do something else? And if you do something
else—what? (Wiater
169)
Essentially
what followed was more of the same lackluster superhero adventuring, pale
imitations of “real world” superheroes à la Watchmen and Frank Miller’s dark and
violent Batman in The Dark Knight Returns,
or a complete turn‑around to more light-hearted, comedic fair (such as
1987’s Justice League).
Because of the postmodern
deconstruction of the superhero, a new take began to emerge. According to Kim Herzinger,
postmodernism
made everything possible, including a return
to story, character, and the conventions of representation. . . . The effect . . . is to revitalize certain
literary values once thought exhausted, and to defamiliarize
what we thought was familiar. . . .
(qtd. in Runyun 6)
Defamiliarizing the familiar is Kurt Busiek’s
specialty. Image Comics published his
series Astro City, a creator-owned project that has been called a “sturdy and streamlined reconstruction” of
the superhero genre (McCloud, Reinventing
Comics 117). It features a cast of
superheroes that are mostly DC clones—Samaritan is like Superman, while Winged
Victory is Busiek’s version of Wonder Woman—though
there are representatives of most archetypal characters. Astro City appealed
to superhero fans because it brought with it a bit of nostalgia for the
superhero genre when it wasn’t merely about fighting and shock (or is that
schlock?) story elements. Astro City went further by exploring, as Busiek puts it, “the rest of the genre, celebrating the
power it has to make ideas come to life and seeing what it can do” (Bongco 213) besides mere superhero adventure.
So Busiek
told stories featuring the human element of being a superhero. For example, the first issue of Astro City features the Superman-like
character of Samaritan doing what he does—helping people as best he can—but the
first person narrative also tells us something else about the man:
while Samaritan feels compelled to help because of his abilities, all he
really wants to do is fly. In fact, the
opening page shows him soaring through the clouds with a small caption that
reads: “In my dreams I fly” (Busiek, Life in the
Big City 1). The remainder of the
story focuses on him counting the minutes of uninterrupted flight during the
day.
While Busiek
succeeds in bringing the god-like superhero down to earth, he also is able to
retain a sense of wonderment in the god-like character by giving us the worm’s
eye view, so to speak. Many stories are told from the points of view of the citizens who live
among the superheroes based out of
Last night was insane. It was horrible. But . . . watching the heroes . . . seeing
the people today, the city workers, the neighbors . . . it’s dangerous. It’s frightening. But words like honor, and trust, and commitment—they’re
just words most places but here. . . . (Busiek, Family Album 38)
Again,
superheroes have the ability to inspire us.
In Watchmen and
When I first started planning this
project, I kept asking myself what would I do that’s different from Watchmen? How do I follow it? At first, the answer was simple. I would explore the man behind the mask—what
it would be like to be the man who is a super.
The focus would be less on the adventuring (unlike my previous forays in
superhero fiction), and more on the psychological aspects of the characters
because that was where interesting things lie.
I also wanted to infuse that sense of wonder I carried for superheroes
through my fiction. But to some degree
Kurt Busiek had beaten me to it. Now my task was doubled: how would I follow both Watchmen and
I then decided that even though I
didn’t know exactly what I had to contribute, I still had all these characters
and stories to tell. At the very least,
I would explore, as Busiek himself proclaimed, “the possibilities of the genre” which “are endless, and the
terrain rich and inviting” (Busiek, Life in the Big City Introduction). Only it would be my terrain. This included all those stories I had always
wanted to read but couldn’t because no one had written them. Yes, some aspects had been examined recently
elsewhere, but there were still more to tell, and for that I could draw upon my
earlier superhero fictions. I had, over
the course of ten years, developed a universe of characters and possibilities,
and thought up some new ones along the way.
So at each story’s core is a single
question that I attempt to answer, and in doing so, explore even further. For instance, “
The past and the future feature prominently
in the next story, “Fragments.” Its
genesis was the scene where Flashback kept replaying time in order to save his
girlfriend. Over and over he brings her
back to life, forcing her to “relive” her death each time. The underlying question here is how far
should a superhero go to save lives? For
no matter how noble a hero’s actions, there are limits to what he should
do. Of course, Flashback acts mostly out
of selfishness in that he can’t accept his girlfriend’s fate and doesn’t allow
her the dignity of death. But despite
the tragedies in the story, it still ends on a hopeful, though perhaps
desperate, note. Whereas Rick Spensor in “
“Fragments” is also the first story
to use form as a means of storytelling.
To express the idea of fragmentation, I start the story off as a
pseudo-transcript of a news special hosted by Connie Chung. And while most of the other segments are told in a more familiar narrative style, it is told out
of chronological sequence to mirror the chronal
aphasia suffered by Flashback and others.
Also, the points of view shift from one character to another as a means
of unbalancing the overall tone.
“Second Stringers,” while mostly a
comedy of the absurd, carries in it a serious undertone. The central point in the story is how being a
sidekick can mess a person up psychologically, as well as having the right to be taken seriously for who and what you are. The story serves another purpose, as it is,
at least partially, a metaphor for how I felt about telling others that my
thesis would be about superheroes. I
felt like those sidekicks—not being considered a serious
writer because of the associations people have about superheroes and comic
books in general. So, in effect, writing
this collection has been a form of therapy for me for I no longer feel
inadequate as an author and freely speak of the content of this thesis and its
importance to me.
Though it is the fourth story,
“Down-Time” was actually the first written. It started out as a melding of my two
passions at the time: superheroes and
reading newsgroups. I figured that with
the dawning of the very public Internet, superheroes would take advantage of
this new tool and at the very least communicate with each other. They also might, as Warhawk
did in the story, check up on their public approval rating. The question “Are superheroes important to
us?” raised to some degree in the previous stories continues here, though more
explicitly. “Down-Time” also serves as a
kind of crossroads in that many elements in other stories are mentioned here
(the Krolan War, the Incident at
In “Choices,” I come full circle in
the sense that I am the star of the story once again. I inject myself, or at least my name and some
of my personality and life, into Blackwing. Some of my friends and family join me, as
they did long ago in the original Robin stories. “Choices” is exactly that, the willingness to
make a choice in the direction of one’s life.
The original question here was if you could choose between what we tend
to think of as a normal, ordinary life and the exciting and peculiar life that
a superhero might have—even with all its pitfalls—which one would you
choose? But the interesting part of
“Choices” for me is that, as an author of superhero fiction, my hero-self
straddles both worlds, and seems to function well, for the most part, in
either.
Most of the themes I have explored
so far in this collection are, I hope, at least somewhat subtle, but in
“Dancing on a Pin” I took them up a notch and asked the big question underlying
all heroic fiction: what is good and
evil? Or more precisely, what is the
perception of good and evil? In Western
civilization, angels have always been the symbol of good as they are God’s
agents, while demons are evil as they serve the Devil. The narrator of the story discovers that this
perception is not always accurate. He
even begins to believe in the validity of his involvement with the renegade
angel at the expense of his morality.
And isn’t that the very nature of evil?
Important, too, is the narrator’s view of Ikon
as a superhero. Here is one of the few
times a “normal” person gushes about a superhero. His description of Ikon
demonstrates his love for and devotion to the ideas Ikon
and others like him represent. In other
words, Ikon inspires him, and by extension, us.
The final story in the collection,
“For the Uniform,” brings us 180 degrees from where we started. In “
Of course, I didn’t come up with any
of these ideas strictly on my own. This
collection has been inspired by many different
sources. Other comics that have explored
the more real and human side of superheroes are Miracleman, Animal Man, and The
Elementals,2 to name a few. But not all influences have been comics. For example, the works of Raymond Carver have
heavily affected my writing. Carver has
long been noted and criticized for his sparse prose and open endings, and I
have developed a similar style for some of my fiction (in terms of the open
ending style, consider especially “
Some authors have helped me in terms
of generating ideas and how the look of the page can contribute something to
the story. Raymond Federman’s
idea of Imagination as Pla(y)giarism has helped me in both areas, as he advocates
that writing is playful. Wanting to play
with certain superhero conventions is what initially inspired me. Federman also notes
that writing is
a montage/collage of thoughts,
reflections, mediations, quotations, pieces of my own (previous) discourses
(critical, poetic, fictional—published
and unpublished) as well as pieces of discourses by others (spoken or
written—published and unpublished,
authorized and non-authorized). (51)
Of
course, my appropriation of Robin, a DC Comics character since 1940, is a prime
example of pla(y)giarism. And
since my Robin assumed the identity of a comic book character that he was inspired by, I was dabbling, though I didn’t know it at
the time, in superhero meta-fiction.
Further employing Federman’s idea of pla(y)giarism, I have “stolen” ideas
from other authors and incorporated them into these stories. For instance, many years ago I read Piers
Anthony’s novel A Spell for Chameleon
in which a minor character has the ability to reverse time and allow it to
replay, but only the previous five minutes and she is unable to affect the
outcome. This interesting concept stuck
with me and the end result (with a bit of tweaking) is Flashback.
Another set of fictions influencing
this collection are the non-comics superhero stories appearing in book
format. These fall into four
categories: 1) those novels
published using either DC or Marvel characters usually featuring storylines
already published in comics form (though sometimes books featuring a specific
character with original content are published, such as the wonderful Elliot S. Maggin Superman novel Miracle
Monday); 2) novels where fictional superheroes greatly influence or help
define the main character(s) (Joseph Torchia’s The Kryptonite Kid or Michael Chabon’s The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier and Clay); 3) collections
of original fiction not using established characters, usually by science
fiction authors, written mostly tongue-in-cheek or with an almost embarrassed
self-conscious nod (or, as editor John Varley put it,
“anti-superhero” stories) but still exploring the concept of superhero (two
collections entitled Superheroes, one
edited by John Varley [1995] and the other by Michel
Parry [1978]; also the novel Superfolks by Robert Mayer); and 4) collections of original
fiction also not using established characters, usually by science fiction
writers, written to celebrate and explore the superhero (the Wild Cards series of shared-world novels
edited by George R. R. Martin).
While this collection is not a
novel, I am drawing upon established characters, at least from my previous
works (Warhawk, Blackwing, the Crusaders). I
also tend to play around with the genre a bit, especially when paying homage to
comics (e.g., in “Choices,” the Kirby Gang is mentioned—Jack “King” Kirby was a
major creative force in superhero comics’ early days; and Flat Stanley in
“Reunion” is a nod to a minor villain in The
Legion of Superheroes) or just pointing out the absurdity of certain
elements (taking a sidekick’s angst and inadequacies and magnifying them to the
point of needing a support group, as in “Second Stringers,” or the Acme School
for Supers application in “Down-Time”).
But mostly I examine issues and relationships that have been reserved,
for the most part, for the so-called genre of realism and try to take the
reader who is only casually (as well as the one who is intimately) familiar
with superheroes to new, exciting places, places he or she had never imagined
the superhero could go.
So I hope that these stories revel
in the pretentiousness and the significance that are superheroes, and that they
demonstrate a conversation between fantasy and literary realism, between prose
and graphic representation, and more important, between our own baser human
natures and our desire to transcend them for the good of all.
Notes
1
2 First published in
1983, Bill Willingham’s The Elementals
pushed the superhero envelope in ways that no other writer/artist had up to
that time. The very theme of
“superheroes in a real world” that Moore and Gibbons refined in Watchmen had its birth pangs in
Willingham’s scripts, only he worked on the theme over the course of years,
rather than the one year that Watchmen
appeared. In fact, one of the characters
brings in a bunch of “funnybooks” to demonstrate to
his colleagues that they have begun to imitate a vicious cycle: fight bad guys, put them in jail; bad guys
escape, fight bad guys. . . . “Not only
does life imitate art,” he tells them, “life imitates bad art. We are these stupid
comic stories made flesh. We have become
farce” (Willingham 8). Indeed, the cover
for that issue has this character proclaiming to the readers “As of this
moment, we stop acting like we’re in some stupid
comic book!” Although this
particular issue came after Watchmen,
the direction of The Elementals had always
been progressing towards this goal and culminated with that issue.
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