Of Masked Men and Spandex: A Critifictional Musing on Superheroes

In 1995, I wrote an essay entitled "Up,Up, and Awaay! The Emergence of the Postmodern Superhero," in which I defined postmodern as "a state, quality, mode of thinking or acting in which the traditional definitions or boundaries do not hold as true; a state of hyper-self-consciousness, confusion, and moral and ethical ambiguity" (34). I attributed the postmodern to the superhero in that he or she is not above that ambiguity and confusion (as they had been in the past; superheroes are supposed to be, after all, stalwart). I concentrated mostly on the violence inherent in that chaotic swirl of right and wrong, and the psychological dilemmas this "new" breed of heroes faced. As they say, hindsight is 20-20, and I now have, I think, a better understanding of postmodernism, and how it ap plies to those things which have for so long occupied my life: superheroes. And I'm here to say that, though not wrong, I was premature in my previous assessment—the postmodern superhero is more than just a tendency towards violent means justifying a judicial end, or possessing a murky moral make-up, i. e., the superhero is about a lot more than any one character or title can convey. It is about the genre (and in some ways the medium) itself and my (our) relationship to it. Here is, then, my postmodern aesthetic, two years later, on the superhero. It is a journey I have actually been on since about 1986 (though I had never heard of the term "postmodern" before 1993), when I first took notice of something major happening in the realm of superheroes and not just in terms of the particular title(s) I was reading—I had the sense that the genre had metamorphosed, that it had (to borrow from Thomas Kuhn) paradigm shifted. Or at least my understanding of superheroes had undergone this shift, though it wasn't the first time.

It's 1977 or 1978. The actual year does not really matter for our purposes here, my purposes, as time no longer has any meaning in this hyperreal state of affairs we find ourselves (indeed, time is ephemeral, malleable, yet we cling to the old Newtonian idea(l)s of time out of some respect for our three-dimensional selves), but I can safely say that it was somewhere around twenty years ago that I found a new world. And I was ripe to do so. From a psycho-social standpoint, I was poised on the brink, well, several brinks, actually of a self-discovery. My mother had just divorced my father (who ended up not being my father, in the biological sense, after all, a slip of the Freudian tongue revealed a few years later) and we had moved to hell—Mattawa, Washington. Population: 73 and two cats. Home of one of the first solar powered school buildings in the United States of America, hallelujah. A place where, in the summer, you couldn't step outside for fear of severe in-canceration of the skin, and in the winter, couldn't open your door for all the snow. God's country. I knew then that my mother was looking for some sort of escape, and I viewed it as a sort of adventure. At first. You see, I had the unenviable task of being The Man of the Family. I was sole protector of my mother, brother, and sister, at least, that's how I saw it. How could I see it any other way when every adult holding a can of Coors or a glass of Fuzzy Navel told me so? "You're the Man of the House Now, son. You help your Mom out when she needs it." Wink. Slosh.

So, here I was. Poised. On the brink. Nine going on ten. A man early. Living the Oedipal dream. But I needed something to fill the void I suddenly had in my life. (In postmodern terminology, I had a run-in with Derrida and Lyotard, the theoretical combination of which produced a shattered [decentered] metanarrative [family unit]. Yes. My first postmodern moment. A revelation to me as I write this.) What I got was comic books.

I remember that night well. My mother was seeing someone. Not a big man (unlike my father, who appeared to me a giant for so many years, even after I surpassed him in height—a Titan), probably much the same build as I am now. He had a mustache and a calf-skin coat with white sheep's wool-like lining. He was a truck driver, I think, which would explain why he was hardly around (and why would he? He didn't need an instant family with a potential son as rival, opposition—but I ask myself even now, would I have opposed him, playing the role of devoted son to my liege-father and protector of my mother?). I always think of this man as Frank, not really remembering his name and not needing to, but pulling one out from the depths to provide an identity beyond that-man-my-mother-was-seeing. But maybe it was Dan or Steve, both which fit nicely, too. You choose. We were at our cramped two bedroom duplex and Mom needed something at the store-milk, maybe. Bread. We always need more of those two staples, especially the milk because we were hardly "home" and usually at the house of the only people we knew in that withering town, thus the milk constantly spoiled. So there was me and Frank, walking into the store from the brisk night air. He goes to get the supplies and I come upon the magazine section; at the bottom are some comic books. Not that I'd never seen comics before, but there was something different with these. There were the Superman comics, Spider-man, the Avengers, and others. Steve was back by now, standing behind, watching me take in the splendor I held (again, forgive the melodrama, but I see this as a pivotal moment). I did not then know of the rivalry between the two companies' whose characters were vying for my dwindling bankroll, but the Marvel titles won out over DCs, mostly because, hey, it was Spider-man (and the live-action television series had aired the year before), and the Avengers comic was chock full of heroes and a villain that looked, well, pretty cool (that and the late seventies was the pinnacle of Marvel's popularity, thus they had more of the creators who were doing something important in the genre). I started to put them back.

"Why don't you get 'em?" Steve suggested. I couldn't. Mom wouldn't like it. I don't have enough money. "How much you need?" Reaching in to get his wallet. Mistake. I paid for them myself and we left.

Mom was not pleased. Frank, to his credit (and well-meaning, I know), said something like, "There're just comics." My mother never said another word, unless she felt I was spending too much of my allowance on them (a stance that later she also never spoke of, though I'm sure she wanted to). I immediately read them in the frigid air of my room. I read about the now epic (though I didn't know it then) battle between Spider-man and his arch foe, the Green Goblin (Marvel Tales). A battle which resulted in the death of Gwen Stacy, the love of Spider-man's alter ego, Peter Parker. And here was the twist. It was Spider-man who actually killed Gwen. Sure, the Goblin had pushed the unconscious blond beauty from the top of a bridge, and she was hurtling to certain doom, but it was Spider-man's last ditch attempt at webbing Gwen's legs to stop her descent that caused her head to jerk back and her neck to SNAP! This was unlike anything I had ever read. The hero inadvertently causing the heroine's death? What sorrow, what emotion, what angst. I knew Peter's pain, on some weird connected level because I too felt responsible, in some way, for my father's departure from our family. I was hooked. I couldn't wait until the next issue. I even went back every week for three weeks to see if it had come in (not really knowing the schedule of these things and finding out much later that the fine print at the bottom of page one would've told me), but I never found that next issue, and only years later found out through somebody the conclusion to that storyline.

As for the Avengers, here was a hero team fighting a hugely and incomprehensibly powerful villain who wielded "The Power Cosmic!" But more importantly in this tale of death and resurrection (The Avengers), of love and justice, there were the heroes: Captain America, the Black Panther, the Vision, Wonder Man, Thor, Iron Man. Each one fell to the awesome power wielded by the villain Korvac, whose only desire was to bring peace and prosperity to the world, even if he had to force it upon these puny mortals. The story ended with Korvac defeated (how could it not?)—scorned and betrayed by his true love—and all but a few of the world's mightiest heroes dead or nearly so, with Thor's human alter ego, Dr. Drake, left to attend those who were resurrected by the dying command of their fallen enemy, a god in his own right, but still so very human.

Whenever I could I bought as many comics as I could (which, at the time, was not many; 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. Some have said that superheroes are the 20th century's mythology (Wiater 146). Whether you subscribe to this or not1, superheroes have made an indelible mark upon our collective American psyche over the last 60 years (which is perhaps where the mythical quality of the genre gets its power-to be so pervasive in our culture in such a short amount of time is impressive, indeed), and they certainly have made a mark with me.

Let's jump ahead some months (and if this were a comic book—a presentational format I toyed with for this critifiction, but I can't draw!—we would move from one panel to the next with probably a caption reading "Some time later. . ."). I have returned to my birthplace having endured the isolation and cold nights in that south Washington town (the hero returns!). In fact, we have retaken the castle that my father occupied in our absence. "Our home" has taken on a new definition. When I return at the new semester to my old grade school, I reacquaint myself with a friend who, I find out, shares my excitement for comics to a certain degree (I have always felt that because I had to hoard my money and spend it ever so carefully I developed a greater appreciation for comics than did my friend, whose weekly allowance matched my monthly one); we began to share what comics we have and my world of superheroes grows. It is within a year or so that I find that there is such a thing as a comic book store that sells nothing but comics and comic book related merchandise, and it is in the next town over (in Washington! What interesting parallels. . .). My collection, and it is a collection now for I keep them in a box, safe from prying younger siblings' fingers, increases. At this time I am reveling in the adventures of The Legion of Super-heroes (a group of teenaged heroes set in the 30th century written lovingly and meticulously by Paul Levitz, a detailist and juggler of trivia and information in the tradition of Nabokov) and, especially, The New Teen Titans. The Titans play an important role in my experience with comics in general and in my own avocation as a writer of superhero stories. The Titan's comic followed the exploits of a group of late teens who banded together to fight a force of evil from another dimension. Included in this group was Robin, the protégé of the Batman, and leader of the group. It was this character who most affected my teen years—he was intelligent, determined (he suffered many a ribbing from those who quipped, "Determined? You're downright grim, Bat-boy."), and most of all loyal to his friends and to his ideals of what justice was. As Alan Moore says, many of us "learned our morality from these simple, silly-ass superhero books" (Wiater 171). While not entirely the case, superheroes did play an important role in my moral make-up: my family did not attend church regularly (if at all), my father was absent, and my mother was struggling to provide a home for us-where else could I develop my ethical and moral codes2? And with the Titans it wasn't all about beating up the bad guys and saving the world each month (the purview of the superhero comics of the day), it was also about the heroes unmasked. With issue number eight, Marv Wolfman (writer) and George Pérez (penciller and co-plotter) treated fans of the comic to what was so rarely done in those days: showing us what happens to these heroes when the masks are off and human inter(intra)action begins ("A Day in the Life. . ."). In most comics and before this time (and I'm not saying it was because of Wolfman and Pérez that this occurred, but they did have a high profile, mainstream comic, thus more attention from an eager audience), alter egos served as the tools of the heroes. It is the difference between saying that Clark Kent is Superman or that Superman is Clark Kent. In the latter, Superman is the identity that Clark uses to right wrongs and promote truth, justice, and the American Way (something he developed living in rural, mid-Western America with his foster parents), while in the former, Clark Kent is the identity Superman uses to walk among normal people and to stave off isolation. It is a subtle, but distinct, difference, and at various times both viewpoints shaped the stories about Superman/Clark Kent. However, it was the stories featuring Clark (or Peter Parker or Dick Grayson) that I found the most interesting3. But to show these heroes on their "day off" was something a comic book did only once or even twice a year to remind us that the heroes were human and experienced the same problems we do (sort of). But Wolfman and Pérez integrated this element into nearly every issue (incurring the criticism that they were writing soap opera-esque storylines), and other creative teams also played with this idea.

This was around the early 1980s. And, much like those theorists who were simultaneously examining and identifying the elements of postmodernity in the previous and intervening years, other creative members in the superhero genre were starting to examine the human element, the human side of superheroes, without knowledge of others doing so. One such person was Alan Moore. In 1982, Moore began working on a series of stories for the British Warrior magazine involving an old character, Marvelman4. Three years later, Marvelman became Miracleman when Eclipse Comics acquired the rights to the character for fear that Marvel Comics might cry fowl and sue Eclipse for trying to cash in on the hallowed company's name. And it is with naming that this character and title seems to me to represent Beaudrillard's concept of simulacra quite well. Indeed, as the story in the comic Miracleman unfolds, it is learned that Miracleman's fantastic adventures (all those stories from the original comic in the 50s and 60s) were actually a form of artificial reality designed to control the Miracle Family by keeping them busy (and complacent). According to Dr. Gargunza, the scientist who helped create the Miraclemen,

"I had decided to enslave their minds with dreams. With stolen alien science, I constructed a device that would shape their dreams and nightmares. All that I needed was the appropriate fantasy . . . a pseudo-logical system that would explain their abilities to my over-men in a credible fashion . . . . One day . . . I chanced upon a flimsy, black and white children's paper, left there by some semi-literate engineer. I picked it up. I read. And then . . . I laughed . . .". (Moore "A Little Piece of Heaven")

The "paper" Gargunza finds is a copy of a Fawcett Captain Marvel comic. Because of all this reality bending, "reality" for the characters bears little resemblance to what they think is "real"—their lives become simulacra. Or another way to look at it is to consider Derrida's notion of the ruptured center and of freeplay. Miracleman's alter ego is Michael Moran, a man who finds one fall day that with a word, he can be a god-rupture one. The nature of that godhood (powers given to an orphan to do "good" by a benevolent "wizard") ruptures when Miracleman finds that Gargunza made up everything that he takes as "reality," as well as discovering that Gargunza's long term goal was to have Miracleman impregnate his mortal wife in order for Gargunza to transplant his mind into that of the newborn demi-god's. It is because of these very ruptures that the freeplay comes in. Moore is not restricted by the conventions of an established character or plot (the character acts a certain way because of the experiences he's been shown to have in the past) so that he can examine the superhero in a new way, but he does so in a logical and believable way (if you accept the premise of a man who can fly and crumple steel in his hands), a slight departure of other stories and characters in which things were changed and no explanation given (or written off as "imaginary" stories, after the fact).

But waxing philosophical wasn't Moore's intent with Marvelman (you'll notice I use both names depending on the context; either way, they are the same character for our purposes here. It was his main goal to simply examine the superhero in a different way than had been done before, with a "more extreme and radical approach . . . than had been attempted . . ." (Moore "M*****man: Full Story and Pics" 31). What Moore was after in Marvelman was, quite simply, the logical examination of a superhero in a representation of our world, albeit a world possessing some fantastical elements, such as a crashed alien spacecraft whose technology was somehow used to create a latter day Übermensch, but it was a world without "superheroes." It was a kind of injection of realism in the superhero genre, as well as a "shocking exposure of the superhero as god without wisdom . . . " (Jones 285). It was this very idea of superhero as god (myth) examined so diligently in Moore's Marvelman that began a process which lasted in Moore's work for only a few short years, but was something that shook the superhero genre (and its fans), forever shifting how that genre was looked upon, and intimated the possibilities. Rick Veitch (who worked with Moore on Saga of the Swamp Thing) credits Moore's Marvelman for "bringing into focus" for him (Wiater 248) a "more literary and honest approach" to the genre (246). "I felt then and still feel today that there are many layers of depth to be explored," (246) says Veitch, who sees the "superhero archetype as central to the twentieth century American culture. . . . And if this archetype is as vital and important as I think it is to our culture, then it has to grow. . . . We have to break it out of the form its been stuck in for so long" (252-53). Once again, it was Alan Moore, along with artist/co-collaborator Dave Gibbons, who showed one way that the genre could grow. In 1986, Watchmen appeared and the superhero genre would never be the same.

Watchmen was a twelve issue comic published monthly starting in September, 1986, and "no one connected to organized fandom dared miss an issue" (Jones 308). But it was due to Moore's work and that of a few others around this time (most notably Frank Miller's stint as writer/artist on Marvel's Daredevil, as well as his Dark Knight Returns for DC; Scott McCloud's self-published Zot! and Destroy!!; and especially Bill Willingham's Elementals5) which transformed, not just how young writers began writing superhero tales, but how the general public reacted to what was considered juvenile dreck:
What had been relegated to a child's medium suddenly proclaimed that, "Comics aren't just for kids," and begun producing sophisticated material to back up this once preposterous claim. . . . An entire generation of readers who grew up on comics but left due to outgrowing familiar stories geared toward younger readers suddenly returned, hearing that comics were cool again. (Lucas 73)
Those of us who were reading Watchmen each month knew that something new was being formed, and for me planted the seeds that are just now ripening.

But what was it with Watchmen that made it so exceptional? After all, DC had taken a risk in publishing this non-standard tale. In fact, it was the powers that be at DC that had changed the original premise of the series. Initially, Watchmen was to feature characters newly acquired (at that time) by DC from the defunct Charlton Comics company: The Question (who became Rorschach), Captain Atom (Dr. Manhattan), Nightshade (Silk Spectre), Peacemaker (Comedian), et al. But DC felt that Moore and Gibbons' treatment of, as Moore explains, "a world in which super heroes had consequences" (qtd. in Daniels 196), would be "unmarketable in the mainstream" outlets (Jones 307). But it was precisely that original premise that Moore and Gibbons utilized that made Watchmen one of (if not simply) the most influential comics of its time. And that influence continues to this day: "In its moral and structural complexity, Watchmen is the equivalent of a novel, and it remains a major event in the evolution of comic books today" (Daniels 196). But in terms of the genre, it hasn't always been a good thing. Moore himself has lamented, "how do you follow Watchmen? . . . Do you do something that's an even more complicated superhero book? (Which I'm sure is what DC would have loved me to do.)6 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).

In 1984, I began a series of stories in which, in prose form, I told superhero stories with characters of my own (though most of them began as carbon copies of established DC characters—much like Moore and Gibbons did with Watchmen). With the help of a friend, we conceived a group of five young teenagers who had remarkable abilities and the will to do what was right in their world. They were called The Defenders (a defunct Marvel title at that time, later resurrected) and then The Crusaders (also a defunct title from Guild Publications, later acquired by DC Comics). The main character (despite my best efforts to make it an ensemble cast—I have always been drawn to the Batman-like loner) was Rick Spensor, code-named Robin (a direct copyright violation of the DC character; but even then, although I didn't realize it, I was embracing a pla(y)giarist's attitude, becoming Lévi-Strauss' bricoleur), who later became Warhawk. And in a penultimate story (only one more was written about these characters afterwards) in which a dimensional juxtaposition caused multiple realities to exist simultaneously and the fate of all mankind rested upon the mental fitness of Spensor, the "reality" where he had been Robin vanished—it didn't feel right that I used someone else's idea, not to mention the legal implications (such as they were); I now wish I had not "retconned" (a term used by fans to connote a retroactive change in the continuity of a character or title; it is a risky gambit which, more often than not, incurs the wrath of fans—see http://www.bonner.rice.edu/morrow/faq/gloss.html for a more thorough explanation) Spensor's superhero identity, as I always liked the idea of a world in which superheroes exist who were inspired by the comics that they read, which also happened to be the same ones I did. To me now, it seems very Beaudrillardian, in terms of the simulacra: the characters themselves were superheroes because of comic books which really don't exist in their world, whose identities, as I had established them for the first two years, had changed to reflect a different sensibility on my part in that dimensional nexus story. Over the course of two years I published twenty-five issues of The Crusaders, keeping a somewhat regular monthly schedule, as most comic books do. The length of my stories were almost always twenty-four to twenty-five pages, the same number as most comic books at that time (attempting to reflect the comic book business, something I knew, really, very little about, and my creations were hardly "comic books"—brocolage, indeed). In May, 1985, I stopped "publishing," due mostly to having run out of good material for five to seven characters to do each month. That, and the feeling of disenchantment I was experiencing about superheroes in general. Oh, I kept reading their adventures (but in lesser and lesser quantities) in the comics, but there was nothing for me to say of my own. Well, that's not quite accurate. I felt there was something to say, but I didn't know how, although I tried using a different character.

Blackwing was a series of stories I started within three months of The Crusaders and featured yet another Batman-like masked vigilante whose secret identity was . . . Eric Isaacson.7 I had put myself in this other world and attempted to explore the grittier reality of the streets that my hero swore to protect. That series ended with my—his—"death" at the hands of a criminal boss (who also happened to be Eric's half brother); actually, by the story's end, it was revealed that Blackwing had not really died (death is such a fickle thing in superhero-land), but in the end retired from adventuring. In fact, in the last story I told about the Crusaders, it was shown that most of the young, but ever aging (in my superhero universe, my characters aged: Rick Spensor turned twenty-nine this last November), heroes had retired and were pursuing their own interests—this result seemed inescapable to me. A person simply can't go on too long wearing tight clothing and a mask and still respect themselves as adults; in other words, there's no future in it. This revelation came about at the same time, or perhaps because of, the Watchmen series, which was in its fourth issue then. I don't recall making any conscious connection, but, as Raymond Federman claims, "plagiarism is the basis for all works of art . . ." and that all texts are plagiarisms, for no one knows where their thoughts and those of others begin to merge and converge (52)—it all becomes, in a Derrida-esque sense, freeplay.

But of course Watchmen influenced me far beyond any unconscious thievery—it remains to this day a pivotal superhero text, one which all others, perhaps unfairly, are judged. Basically after Watchmen, Alan Moore "retired" from writing about superheroes, becoming "thoroughly sick" of them (Wiater 170). I, on the other hand, still can't get enough. This is both a problem and a comfort. I believe I am wanting to explore what a postmodern superhero is in my own writing, to pick up where I left off with The Crusaders and Blackwing8, to go that one step further to really examine who and what a superhero is and why he or she does what she or he does. If it's impossible to tackle superheroes on the level that Moore and Gibbons' created, then I'll have to look at and present superheroes differently (another paradigm shift) and hopefully that vision will be one that others will want to share. For Alan Moore, a desire to write about superheroes (post-Watchmen) came in the form of trying to recapture a certain nostalgic innocence, a charm from comics of the past with the series 1963 (Wiater 172). I guess I'm trying, too, to recapture a nostalgia, one in which superheroes are still a viable fantasy for someone now with ten years of Watchmen's influence and twenty years of reading superheroes behind him. But it is imperative that I go forward at the same time (a seemingly incongruous duality only postmodernism can allow) and get to that place I really want to go, even if I don't know what it is . . . yet.

Footnotes

1 I used to believe this (see McCue 143), but now do not necessarily, as I'm tending toward Neil Gaiman's remark that most superheroes are characters with no definitive story connected to them (Wiater 196), but, as always, there are notable exceptions—Superman and Batman being two of them—but most superheroes will never achieve that status. Or perhaps Gaiman and I are thinking about this the wrong way; perhaps we're applying old definitions to a new mythology . . . .

2 In fact, 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. I can only tell you how much courage it took an awkward and extremely shy teenager to do that. Consequently, no one seemed to understand.

3 This was the premise of the recent Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman on ABC Television (1992-1996). Even though Superman was a constant presence, it was always the relationship of Clark and Lois that drove the series, providing its raison d'étre.

4 Marvelman was actually a reworking of the Fawcett Comics Captain Marvel series (including Captain Marvel, Jr. and Marvel Family) because of the Fawcett/DC lawsuit in which it was determined that Fawcett violated copyright law in that the Big Red Cheese was too much like the man of Steel. The publisher of those British reprints, L. Miller & Son, suddenly found themselves without any material. Solution: continue the popular character, albeit in a slightly modified form, with new material by house artists and writers. Thus, Captain Marvel became Marvelman (Skinn 32-33; Moore "M*****man: Full Story and Pics" 15, 31).

5 I say this because Willingham was pushing 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 attempted 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 viscious 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 that "As of this moment, we stop acting like we're in a some stupid comic book!" Although this particular issue came after Watchmen, the direction of The Elementals had always been progressing towards this goal and culminating with that issue.

6 Interestingly, Moore was going to do just that. He had proposed to DC a thematically identical storyline, only this time he was going to mess with established DC characters in a possible apocalyptic future where certain areas of the United States were controlled by feudal-like houses of the various heroes. For more information, visit this website:

http://www.hoboes.com/html/Comics/Twilight/.

7 Actually, Blackwing was the new identity of mine, er, his (that Eric Isaacson) after he was called Robin—Rick Spensor's Robin was as a protégé who takes on, with approval, the mantle of his mentor. This series also pre-dated The Crusaders (you'll notice I do not refer to them in their original title—the retcon is in effect here as well) and actually served as a foreword to the superhero group's stories—to put it in television terms, Robin was the dramatic series in which the pilot for The Crusaders was test run.

8 I had made plans to begin writing another series a few years ago, but kept running into blank walls because, I believe, I kept trying to bring back characters which shouldn't and wouldn't be doing that anymore; how could I have them go back to fighting the villain of the month when their lives as retired crimefighters seemed so much more interesting?

Works Cited

Avengers,The issue 178 (New York: Marvel Comics, June, 1977).

Daniels, Les. DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World''s Favorite Comic Book Heroes. New York: Bullfinch Press, 1995.

Federman, Raymond. Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. New York: SUNY Press, 1993.

Isaacson, Eric. "Up, Up, and Awaay!: The Emergence of the Postmodern Superhero." Essay. University of Idaho, 1995.

Jones, Gerard, and Will Jacobs. The Comic Book Heroes: The First History of Modern Comic Books from the Silver Age to the Present . Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1997.

Lucas, Mark. "1986: Mark Lucas Waxes Nostalgic." Comic Con International: San Diego Souvenir Program Book . San Diego: San Diego Comic Convention, 1996. 73-74.

Marvel Tales issue 78 (New York: Marvel Comics, July, 1977).

McCue, Greg, and Clive Bloom. Dark Knights: The New Comics in Context. Boulder: Pluto Press, 1993.

Moore, Alan, and Alan Davis. "A Little Piece of Heaven" in Miracleman issue 5 (Guerneville, CA: Eclipse Comics, Jan., 1986).

---. "M*****man: Full Story and Pics" in Miracleman issue 2 (Guerneville, CA: Eclipse Comics, Oct., 1985).

---, and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1987.

Skinn, Dez. "Miracleman alias Marvelman, Mightiest Man in the Universe" in Miracleman issue 1 (Guerneville, CA: Eclipse Comics, Aug., 1985).

Wiater, Stanley, and Stephen R. Bissette. Comic Book Rebels: Conversations with the Creators of the New Comics . New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1993.

Willingham, Bill. "The Conversation" in The Elementals issue 15, vol. 2 (Norristown, PA: Comico, July 1990).

Wolfman, Marv, and George Pérez. "A Day in the Life . . ." in The New Teen Titans issue 8 (New York: DC Comics, June 1981).