Eve Tushnet reminded me of Jim Henley’s “Gaudy night: Superhero stories and our own.” (“Alas” readers may be familiar with Jim for his excellent blog Unqualified Offerings). The essay and the comments thread that follows are well worth reading.
For me, the most striking part of Jim’s essay was his suggestion that superheroes are “the literature of ethics.” Here’s the key passage:
Fantasy provides external analogs of internal conflicts, and the subtype of fantasy about superheroes is a way of externalizing questions of duty, community, and self. How should the powerful behave? (Most Americans are, in global-historical terms, “the powerful” in one aspect or another.) These questions are salient whether you wear tights or not. They apply to you. Because most of us, certainly most of us in the developed world, have more power, wealth, or wherewithal than somebody. Certainly almost everybody reading this essay could, in principle, quit his or her present job and work pro bono for an African AIDS clinic while subsisting on donated food, or maintain a couple of homeless people instead of taking vacation, or — join the volunteer fire department. Depending on your politics, you may believe that people like yourself or people like Bill Gates really do owe some non-trivial portion of time, wealth, influence, or attention to something or someone. The poor, the ill, the frightened, alienated, the “doomed, damned, and despised” as Jesse Jackson once put it. […]
The core question of the superhero story might be phrased as What do we owe other people?
As Kip wrote, “I like the basic idea quite a lot: it’s made me look at superhero books with a less jaundiced eye since I first read it over at Unqualified Offerings: an ‘Oh, I see! Oh, I get it!’ moment, which I’d callously written off as hard to achieve these days with superpowers.”
Jim’s essay kicked off a rather long debate, with Rich Puchalsky taking up the dissent. Rich’s point (as I understand it) is that superheroes stories tend to be about vigilantism, and vigilante stories have virtually nothing interesting to say about ethics. I tend to agree with Rich about that (the only ethically interesting superhero stories tend to be stories that deconstruct the genre rather than exemplify it), but think he makes a stronger point when he writes:
Even really great superhero comics are often not really concerned with ethics. Just because you can find one or two great superhero comics that are concerned with ethics, that doesn’t say anything about the genre as a whole — after all, you can equally well find one or two great superhero comics that are concerned with metaphysics.
Jim then responded:
Although I’d like to agree with Jim, I think Rich has the better of the argument at this point, because Jim has convinced me that the “engine of ethics” is in no way a distinctive trait of superhero stories. Prioritizing Self or Other is one of the most common themes in literature; it’s a major theme in such diverse works as Anne Tyler’s novels, TV shows like Judging Amy, and the Talmud. Looked at broadly, any form of literature in which the main character makes choices could, in Jim’s terms, be seen as a “literature of ethics.” In which case, calling superheroes “the literature of ethics” tells us nothing distinctive about superheroes, and is not meaningful.
* * *
The subtext, it seems to me, is an argument over whether the superhero genre has literary worth or if it’s just kinda dumb. I’d say a genre cannot have literary worth; specific works have literary worth, but genres do not. There are a bare handful of superhero comics that are actually excellent work: Zot!, Miracleman, a few others. There are a few hundred which maybe aren’t that great, but are reasonably intelligent, entertaining reads. Then there are uncountable thousands of superhero comics which range from utter crap to mediocre pap. It’s not true that “ninety percent of everything is crap”; with superhero comics, it’s closer to 99.99%.
But so what? Just one example would be enough to establish that superhero comics can be worthwhile art. So look at Zot!, look at Big Man (a short story by David Massuchelli), look at Watchmen; that’s all the proof that’s needed.
Here’s the question: Why is it so much harder to produce a great superhero comic than to produce a great – well, almost any other genre – comic?
Consider funny animals. A list of the best comics featuring talking, thinking animals puts any list of the best superhero comics to shame: Krazy Kat, Pogo, Calvin & Hobbes, Quimby the Mouse, the Barks Duck comics, Maus, Beanworld, Peanuts, Barnaby, Frank, Bone, Cerebus (let’s say, pre-issue 186), and that’s just off the top of my head.
I’m not denying that most funny animal comics are crap (ninety percent of everything…); nonetheless, there are more superhero comics than funny animal comics out there, but the funny animals have produced more masterpieces. Why do you suppose that is?
It seems to me that superheroes are a more restrictive genre, and thus harder to work with. It’s difficult to do a superhero comic that isn’t, at some level, about fighting evil with violence, and that’s a relatively limited form to work in. Of course, some succeed, but not many. Funny animals aren’t as restricting, making it easier for cartoonists to reach great heights.
Of course, that’s just a guess..
Well, it’s specifically ethics as a question of “what do I do with all this power” that interests me, at least: the (of course) Great Responsibility question. Superhero stories(tend to) thrust a great deal of power into someone’s hands and then throw situations at them that force them to figure out how to use that power. What are the implications? What are the ramifications? (Unless you’ve got a “mature” superhero universe, with superpowered crimes divisions in every major urban police department, there won’t be a systematized response to super powers on the part of the Powers that Nominally Be, hence the necessity of vigilante action—mitigated somewhat by the tights: a very colorful way to say Hey! I’m removing myself from the normal bounds of ethics so that I can use my superpowers to get this job done! or something. [I remain amused at the extent to which DK2 was all about why the “tights” are necessary, even liberating; oy.]) —So you get X-Men, with its ethics of martyrdom—that noblesse oblige requires you to sacrifice your life if necessary to save a world that hates you, and that, I think, is why it’s so darned popular with adolescents to this day; you have Superman, the Big Blue Boy Scout, who unless he’s hauling war profiteers off to serve on the front lines of the wars they’ve instigated for a greasy buck, is dreadfully dull: all powerful, with no rough edges, his greatest ethical dilemmas are either tedious soap operas or disconnected, disaffected sci fi; you have Spider-Man (or on some occasions Daredevil), with a much grottier sense of ethics: a post-adolescent with a struggling free-lance job, whose powers don’t do much to help him out in his day-to-day life—though he can manage to catch wild action shots of Spider-Man and sell them to the paper when no one else can—the question of how much of his life can he afford to sacrfice to his sense of Doing the Right Thing is much more compelling, and much thornier; you have Batman (or on some occasions Daredevil), the “negative example,” whose stark, unforgiving morality has pretty much subsumed any sense of ethics—the original Bat killed without compunction, after all, and why not? He’s there to strike fear and terror, dammit. (His power, of course, being the will and monomania one can bring to bear on almost anything with enough money, but that’s a differently colored kettled of fish.) —As you can probably tell, my thinking on the subject is still chaotic, but Jim’s formulation has been something of a key: though “literature of ethics” can be applied to, oh, just about anything you’d care to name, just as “literature of ideas” (the more ick-making shorthand for SF, and if there’s anything that makes me pause in taking up that key, it’s my visceral reaction to the latter: “literature of ideas”? Please), it’s specifically superheroes that have some interesting tropes—stark, simplistic, expressionistic, restricting, but potentially powerful—for focussing the questions and the dilemmas. —Too bad they’ve been so swamped by so much other noise so often. (I’m getting comps again, sporadically, and mostly from one company, but it’s the most superhero comics I’ve seen in a while. Dear, sweet Jesus, but they suck.)
You’re right, of course, that genre in and of itself can’t have literary worth, and bully for you—but I wish you’d taken that lesson a little more to heart. Your final question makes much more sense if you stop focussing on it as a question of genre and instead look at the circumstances under which the two sets of comics you’re talking about were created: “Why is it so much harder to produce a great comic in a highly commercial, work-for-hire, by-the-numbers assembly line, than it is as a single creator pursuring a singular artistic vision?” Um. —The question then becomes, “Why don’t more single creators pursue superhero comics as a singular artistic vision?” —Which, I think, is a much more valuable line of inquiry.
I think a lot of it has to do with the monthly schedule. Super hero comics are not self contained stories in any meaningful sense. It is very hard to have a character arc if your income depends on people being able to pick up an issue and dive right in. Also, super heros have to be heros — they have to do something, which means they have to use their powers. Which means pretty early in they need to get past their ethical questions, or you get a repetition of “should I do this” book after book, and that can get pretty tedious. And, based on the tropes of the genre, the “this” is very likely to be pretty close to the same thing in each book.
Note that the only super hero books to deal with ethics in the most complete sense — Dark Night, Watchmen and even Minutemen, IIRC (been a while) — were self contained, stand alone works. I.E. short stories with pictures. Monthly books are more like a recurring sitcom: all problems are pretty simple and solved with clichéd homilies.
I dunno, Kip. If I said it there were fewer truly great Haikus (sp?) because Haikus are an unusually restrictive genre of poetry, that wouldn’t be controversial; it would be a truism. But if I say the same thing about superheroes, I’m failing to take my own lesson to heart.
The genre requirements of superheroes are more restrictive than (say) the genre requirements of science fiction; do you seriously deny that?
As for work-for-hire, the Image creators pretty much universally failed to produce anything that wasn’t dreck (with the exception of The Maxx, which was enjoyable but not a work anyone’s going to remember in 20 years).
Since I’ve started reading comics, there have been far more creator-owned superhero comics than creator-owned funny animal comics. But if you exclude Alan Moore’s work, how many of them are even remotely in the same class as Usagi, or Bone, or Maus, or Quimby? (Or, for that matter, as Carl Bark’s work – which was work-for-hire?) I don’t think you can write the lack of notable superhero comics off as a by-product of the work-for-hire system.
(Similarly, Kevin, are superheroes really produced under more schedules more difficult or unending than Krazy Kat or Pogo?)
Kip, as for your interpretation of superheroes, I like it; I think you could write an essay about it I’d enjoy. But it’s just one lens through which to view superhero comics, and if we declare that lens the exclusive best lens defining the superhero genre, we might not think to use other lenses when they’d be more useful. What you’re describing is a razor-sharp way to view Miracleman, but I think it’s a bit besides the point when it comes to Zot!, and a lot less interesting a way to look at Superman than looking at Superman as the utlimate immigrant’s story.
A) Yes, it’s just one lens; of course it’s just one lens. (Never define! says me, all too often.) And Lord knows I’m throwing out ideal versions of those four-color archetypes above. Almost none of those superheroes have been bringing their particular games to the table in anything but sporadic bursts in years. –I do think Superman-as-immigrant puts him in a much better position for playing ethical games; then, I also think a mild-mannered Clark Kent is essential to the myth, and they’ve long-since dumped that, too. And Zot’s ethical quandaries are more subtle than your usual superhero fare, but then the power differential is a lot gentler, too. Eh. I dunno what to do with it now. It has something to do with how the world of the superhero is rigged to allow the hero to take action, thinking of John Holbo’s posts on imaginative resistance, and Ray Davis’s all-too-germane point that SF and fantasy let us play with all sorts of morally deviant worlds, so where’s the resistance? The morality of a superhero world is rigged to allow, heck, to drive the superhero to take action now, dammit, which is why it makes perfect sense when two superheroes meet and have a disagreement that they should get into a fight. (No, it doesn’t make sense at all. Maybe there is something to this imaginative resistance idea.) –Does this help us explain Zot any better? No, not so much. Superman? Ask the war profiteer who’s been dumped on the front lines.
B) I never said superheroes weren’t restrictive. In fact, I believe I said they were: “stark, simplistic, expressionistic, restricting, but potentially powerful.” What I was objecting to was the question, “Why is it so much harder to produce a great superhero comic than to produce a great – well, almost any other genre – comic?” Maybe my knee’s jerking a bit much, but you phrase it like that with the run-up you gave it, you throw red meat before the overly defensive. –And anyway, almost all of the creator-owned superhero titles you’re thinking of, most especially including the Image crew, were produced within the same basic assembly line operation, and Carl Barks was working for hire on a terribly singular vision, so thbbpttpptt.
I’m not saying they’re not harder, Christ, no. But if we want to pretend we’re merely discussing the potential of a genre, it’s best to set aside production limitations and monthly pamphlets versus daily strips and just get down to cases, thereby avoiding Kevin’s point about monthly installments entirely (and if you can find a superhero book that’s regularly hit a monthly schedule for the past couple of years, let us know)–the thorny problems of long-form serial storytelling have usually been waved away by superheroes with a muzzy appeal to “myths” and how they keep getting told over and over again, and when it works, it works well, but mostly it’s just a long continuity bore. –You want to look at peers within the genre, to see how each does what it does; instead of comparing work-for-hire assembly-line superheroes with the cream of the daily strips and indie funny animal books, you should be looking to the work-for-hire assembly-line funny animals; to compare against the Usagis and Bones and Cerebi, you need superhero masterworks, singular visions working at the top of their game–and, as you note, there are terribly, terribly few. Why is that? –I realize this is almost exactly the same question you’re asking, but it’s peering through a different and I think more useful lens at it, so.
[Long digression snipped on superheroes requiring established brand to capture popular imagination, which is why single creators don’t mine that vein much; it was getting too nuts and out of control.]
Which brings us to C) it’s getting awfully late, and I need to find a bunch of tax paperwork and then go get some sleep. –Eh. I don’t even like superheroes all that much.
Well, I started writing this after only Kevin’s post, so this doesn’t in anyway respond to Amp and Kip’s conversation above.
Nonetheless…
Given the degree to which ethics is concerned with the particulars of human existence, I can’t really see any way in which superhero comics as a whole can meaningfully be a “literature of ethics.” To the extent that superheroes reflect reality, they reflect through a mirror that strips away situational (and therefore ethical) complexity. The question of whether to spin the world backwards and turn back time in order to undo the supervillians dastardly plan is so far removed from human experience that it simply says nothing about human ethics. Furthermore, it seems to me that superhero comics hardly ever treat it as a question anyway. Superhero comics seem to be about having that sort of power, and needing to use it, not about the ethical issues involved in using that sort of power. Although some authors have attempted to push the ethical complexity of using super powers back into superhero comics, this represents a rebellion against the form, not the archetype of the form.
It is not just that superhero comics are about ignoring the ethical questions of vigilantism; it is that they are about ignoring the ethical issues of super-powered vigilantes, where the super powers serve to remove the vigilantes from the normal structures of society. Even westerns, which are largely about ignoring the ethical questions of vigilantism, are at least forced to interact with normal human ethics due to the characters lack of super powers.
Super-hero comics seem more like the literature of power fantasy than the literature of ethics. Even the good superhero comics tend to be about the ethical issues of power fantasy, not ethical issues in general. Furthermore, as Rich points out, many good superhero comics are only tangentially about the ethics of power fantasies, but are instead about other aspects of power fantasies.
Much decent literature is about ethics. That decent superhero comics are often about ethics of power fantasies doesn’t make them the literature of the ethics of power fantasies are certainly does not mean that superhero comics are somehow particularly the literature of ethics. It just means that they treat their subject (power fantasies) as a subject for exploration, rather than as a given.
Although I agree that Jim seems to be attempting to argue that comics have merit because they are the literature of ethics, I don’t think denying that they are the literature of ethics means that they can’t have merit. The literature of power fantasies is also capable of having merit, although only to the extent that it is self aware of what it is about, to the extent that it becomes a literature about power fantasies, rather than a literature composed of power fantasies.
I’ll just note that for most superhero comics, “remov[ing] the vigilantes from the normal structures of society” is pretty much the point. It feeds into one of the prime subtexts of American genre fiction, which is setting things up so you can break the law and feel good about it; its peculiarity is the power disparity: hey! I can leap over tall buildings in a single bound! Now what do I do? Because they deal explicitly (if simplistically, restrictively, even childishly) with power, in a context of righting wrongs, superhero stories can’t help but be about ethics. The fact that most of them don’t seem to know this is just one way in which they fail, artistically. –This is far from the only way of understanding superheroes, and Jim’s literature of ethics is, I think, more one person’s hopeful ideal for the genre, rather than a broad, sweeping critical approach; but it is or at least has proven to be for me a very interesting spark. So.
Barry: check the title: “Superheroes.”
Because they deal explicitly (if simplistically, restrictively, even childishly) with power, in a context of righting wrongs, superhero stories can’t help but be about ethics. The fact that most of them don’t seem to know this is just one way in which they fail, artistically.
However, as Rich pointed out, there are plenty of interesting things you can do with power fantasies besides explore their ethical ramifications. I would say that both Doom Patrol and Animal Man are artistically valid super hero comics that don’t focus on the ethical dimensions of power fantasies.
Not disagreeing that, as I think you are basically saying, superhero comics could be used to explore the ethics of power or of power fantasies, I just don’t think that that is their inherent focus or the only way in which they can be good. Also, I think they are better for talking about the ethics of power fantasies than they are for talking about ethics of power. You have to break them pretty severely before they can say much of anything about the actual ethics of power (which are actually not divorced from social constraints).
“Similarly, Kevin, are superheroes really produced under more schedules more difficult or unending than Krazy Kat or Pogo?”
Yeah, actually, I think I do. Krazy Kat and Pogo were produced under a tighter schedule than comic books, even when you cannot for the size difference, but they also had a more constant readership. When the really good comics were done, reading the comics page was a part of the daily ritual of most of literate America, because the newspaper was the source for news. Therefor, comic artists were assured that a significant portion of their audience would be pulled along with the story, because they would read it everyday.
Comics don’t have the advantage. Comic ship schedules were a joke when I worked for a distributor in the 90s, and from i have heard, they haven’t really gotten any better. I think that leads to a fear of taking chances, because they want people to pick up a book and instantly recognize the character. A lot of the shop owners I dealt with complained when a title got to far from its base, presumably because their customers were dropping the book.
Actually, the more I think about this, the more I think that the weird business model comics has adopted for itself is a signifigant contributing factor to this issue.
I swore off of this stuff on my blog earlier this week, but everytime I leave my comfortable little Doom Patrol-critiquing niche, someone’s offering.
The only way I can bear to approach the topic of superheroes, as a genre, at this point, is to contest the definition most people are using. I don’t like “literature of ethics” any better than “power fantasy”, nor do I think that superhero stories have to be “about fighting evil with violence.” (Conway & Andru’s Gwen Stacy-clone saga from 1974-75, one of the truly great silver/bronze age storylines, certainly doesn’t fit into any of these categories…)
And, as Charles points out, Grant Morrison’s work is never about that stuff–and he doesn’t perform Alan Moore-style deconstructions of (what I believe to be) false interpretations of Silver Age comics either.
As far as I’m concerned, Morrison, along with Gruenwald, did the real interesting superhero work in the eighties–Miller & Moore are fine, but they embraced an aspect of the tradition that needed killing, rather than deepening, and I hope they go down with the ship.
I think of the genre, as re-envisioned at Marvel in the sixties, as the “literature of moral & epistemological inquiry”. It can go anywhere that Emerson (and his cranky disciple Nietzsche) could go…
Dave
p.s. As for the question of “seriality”, well, I hope it’s more complicated than some of you folks are making out (scroll down past item #4).
I like bananas. :p
(The first person to name the source wins… I dunno’, something…)
Fascinating discussion, but seems to me to be a kind of forest/trees dilemma. The myth of the Hero (with or without supernatural powers) goes back a lot farther than comic books about people in tights, and has been taken in a lot of different directions, and used metaphorically to externalize many different kinds of inner struggle. I don’t really see superhero comics as being particularly different; it’s just one of our various home-grown renditions of the myth.
Luke Skywalker and Buffy Summers don’t wear tights or capes, but aren’t they still superheroes? The vernacular is different, but it’s the same story.
I think the observation that many superhero stories are about the ethical use of power is a worthy one, and provides a very interesting new perspective on the genre. But I would have to agree that it’s going too far to say that superhero comics are “the literature of ethics”. Because, first, other genres address ethics equally directly, and second, ethics isn’t by a long shot the only theme that superhero comics *do* address. It’s a theme that shows up a lot, but not, I think, the raison d’etre.
Elsewhere, otherwise, but I did want to point out: Doom Patrol and Animal Man both had very strong moral and ethical components, springing pretty much from power differentials, and the larger landscape that’s accreted about them in superhero comics: Animal Man was all about what you go through when your superpower forces you into such close, intimate contact with animals–and how you deal with your own human world that unthinkingly exploits them. How do you work to bring about the change your power has convinced you is necessary? How far do you go? –In and among the metafiction, of course. And Doom Patrol was all about how utterly silly the usual moral and ethical structure of the game of superheroes and supervillains is–by ramming the throttle full-bore wide-open and revelling in that silliness. –In and among the automatic writing, of course. (The Invisibles was a less successful way of doing much the same thing, with chaos magic.) (And I haven’t yet got some bird’s eye glibbery to sum up his run on X-Men, just finished, but I don’t think it hinges so much on this question. Hmm.)
Luke isn’t a superhero, no. Buffy, I think, is awfully close, though. Hmm again. (Bond is awfully close, too.)
The main thing that (for me) keeps Buffy from being a superhero is the degree to which she is never divorced from the mundane social world. Either the divide between SuperMan and Clark Kent of the absence of a Clark Kent is a significant part of the superhero to my mind, and a large part of what makes them feel like power fantasy. Bond is divorced from the mundane social universe, although he still exists within a generally non-super powered social universe, which is a large part of what keeps him from being a full bore super hero for me.
I will readily grant that Animal Man and Doom Patrol have moral and ethical components, but I still am unconvinced that that is their primary focus (admittedly, I am sure that you have read them more recently and better than I have, so I should probably either reread or cede the point).
It’s not that they merely have moral and ethical components; geeze. It’s that the questions brought up deal specifically with the questions of power and power differentials: in a fantastickal way, to be sure–in much the same way fairy tales are about sex and family and puberty. (Slinging generalizations is fun!) –And Doom Patrol is very much wedded more to the furniture of the superhero than what you might call this core, central concept (for the sake of argument). But (the metafiction stripped aside) Animal Man’s concern with animal rights, springing directly from his acceptance of his power to take on animal powers (as it were), and the conflicts that he finds himself in because of this stand, is I think a pretty strong and striking if odd and unexpected example.
One of the strong points of Buffy, of course, was that it takes a village to keep a hero sane–still, seasons 6 and 7 were all about her divorce from the mundane social world (to the extent that they were about anything, and don’t try to spin my point by pointing out they were the nadir of the show; I’d concede it, but it wouldn’t get us anywhere). Her power–and the moral and ethical structure she finds herself in because of this power–constantly keeps her from fully opening up to her friends and lovers; not so much a secret identity as it is an identity she can’t share no matter how she tries.
But what’s more important to me is the way the genre tropes of Buffy and Bond and superheroes in general conspire to empower these heroes and then allow them to use their devastating power (devastating on relative scales, I guess: Buffy’s no Superman, but they both have power beyond normal ken; it doesn’t matter how much you have, just so long as it is more) to Get Things Done. Clearing the decks, I suppose. (The vampires all have bestial faces, so it’s okay to kill them with a quip.) –Which argues for power fantasy rather than “literature of ethics,” sure, but the best works push back against that fantasy, and that’s where the moral and ethical concerns regarding the use of power come in. It’s no fun if you get what you want without struggling for it. (Though the Buffyverse gets really fucking sloppy when it comes to what a soul is and who has it and who doesn’t–curiously enough, they get sloppy precisely because they try to draw a bright white line.)
But Luke Skywalker isn’t anywhere near a superhero, and neither is Harry Potter. So.
As for Bond existing in a non-superpowered social milieu: well, there’s very little separating Bond and SMERSH from Batman and most of his Rogue’s Gallery. –Except for the fact that Batman wears tights, and Bond wears a tuxedo. Granted, SMERSH et al are rarely as iconic as the Riddler, or the Penguin; it’s more a ’70s Batman vibe than a ’50s Batman vibe (with the ’60s TV show playing Austin Powers, but let’s not get into that right now).
A few thoughts from a Johnny-come-lately:
One problem is that on the whole superheroes as a genre have rarely been taken seriously by intellectuals and people who fancy themselves that (except during brief periods like the late 1960s and early 1970s when the “Marvel Revolution” caught the attentions of academic comics historians and theorists). And this is not unimportant, because to a large extent what is defined as a “classic” or “masterwork” is at least to some extent determined by what is called that in the handbooks and histories of comics that already exist. And these often focus on newspaper comic strips, who in their heyday considered the makers of comic-books their poor relations. (Maybe it is no coincidence that the Golden Age superhero who probably garnered the most attention and admiration on aesthetic grounds (as opposed on “history of the genre” or “archetype” grounds) is The Spirit – who appeared in a newspaper supplement, not in comic-books).
At any rate, the superhero comics that get admitted to the canon of “classics of the history of comics” as set-out by “non-geeks” – tend to be oddball ones (starting with the Spirit and Jack Cole’s Plastic Man) or self-referential or “deconstructive” ones (like the continually mentioned Miracleman and Watchmen). In other words, superheroes who are “refreshingly different” from what these comic scholars think of as “typical” superheroes (although personally I am beginning to wonder if the fad of “deconstruction” has become to the present what “camp” was to the 1960s). Rather much in the way that many film critics who more or less despised all Westerns praised “High Noon” as the greastest Western ever made because of its overt “artsy” aspirations (or pretensions) and departures from perceived conventions. (While many a Western movie specialist might find it easy to come up with a dozen or two “conventional” Westerns s/he considers as good as or superior to “High Noon”). Also, many of the old-time superhero creators tended to look on themselves not so much as Artists, but as people doing their job, but unlike e.g. John Ford, who held a similar position in public, they did not find later admirers (especially in France) who would critique them as Artists.
Are there really any superhero stories that fit into the perceived mainstream of the genre that have made it into the pantheon of “generally accepted” masterpieces? Where you are not immediately put on the defensive or at least are expected to explain your reasons for saying “it’s not that great” as you would be in the case of e.g. “Krazy Kat”, “Terry and the Pirates” or “Watchmen”. (Part of the reason is probably that fans, i.e. the “geeks” who really should know best, never really established a canon of their own because they are so tribal – Marvel fans vs. DC fans, indy fans vs. “Big Two”, Golden Age vs. Silver Age vs. post-Silver Age).
Another problem I think is that people still tend to be dismissive of overly productive creators (in German “Vielschreiber” (writer of much) is a pejorative term), and most writers and artists of superhero had and still have quite a prodigious output. And worse than that, superhero comics for the most part are collaborative works (usually the writer and artist are different people), and most people still tend to think of great art as something that is created by one person by his (or her) lonesome or at any rate by one great artist directing the efforts of subordinates (as in the “auteur” view of film-making). Ampersand’s list of masterworks certainly fits into that pattern, and so do many of the “exceptionally good” superhero stories mentioned in this thread (various titles associated primarily with Alan Moore (not his artists), Grant Morrison (not his artists) or Frank Miller (a rare-bird writer-artist)). But in superhero comics it is most often somthing like “Stan Lee and Jack Kirby”, “Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster”, “Bob Kane and Bill Finger”, “Lee and Ditko”, “Claremont and Byrne” etc., and in many cases the collaboration was so close and intermingled that afterwards it became highly contentious as to who was due credit for what, and e.g. the controversy between Lee and Kirby, to a large extent fueled and continued by other creators and by the fans, probably only served to diminish both creators’ reputations.
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