I’ve read/skimmed a half dozen for TCJ pieces and they have all let me down. I mean books that are about superheroes in general. There are some good books about the superhero comics industry, a caveat I lob in only to take care of Gerard Jones’s work and a few stray items like the Spurgeon/Raphael biography of Stan. But most books I’ve seen about the industry have been bad, as have been all the books I’ve seen about the superhero genre. You can have Yale University Press, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Costume Institute, Conde Nast, and Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Chabon wade in together and what they pull into existence is Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, a book dedicated to demonstrating the absence of any link between superheroes and fashion while pretending to illustrate said link. The writing is pompous and trivial at the same time, as if you were listening to an Ohio congressman at a 4th of July picnic in 1856, only instead of speaking about the immortal Union he’s going on about Hot Wheel cars. It’s like these guys feel entitled to be boring about absolutely anything.
Remove all those factors, the dilettantism and flossy self-satisfaction, and replace them with the hands-on experience of a comics industry veteran who prizes his rare copies of Airboy. The book will still suck. I mean books, actually, both of them by a man named Shirrel Rhoades who was Marvel’s publisher during the takeover wars of the 1990s. If anyone could write a decent account of the modern superhero comics industry, or collaborate on one with someone who can manage words, you’d think Mr. Rhoades might be a candidate. But his books suck too. Because his audience is fanboys and not slummers, the books suck in every way, from text to design to their masses of typos. At least Yale Univ Press and the Met have some resources to deploy and an understanding that a book may be a shuck without being an embarrassing shuck. Rhoades’ volumes (they’re called Comic Books: How the Industry Works and A Complete History of American Comic Books) benefit from no such understanding. Mr. Rhoades cut-and-pasted a heap of Internet items and then no one took a look to make sure the books would be anything beyond a pile of misspelled words.
I can’t say how depressing I find this. Superheroes are so low prestige that any book about them gets automatically backhanded by the people who put it together. Yet the books keep coming out, most often from pokey little outfits that commission a cover showing some fellow with a generic outfit (cape, blank chest) and then fill the book with frolicsome grad student essays on the X-Men and Baudelaire. The author bios weigh you down: you think about life at Indiana State University at Bloomington and the fun the poor grad student is having with her mug of mint tea and her whimsies in regard to Smallville and gender theory.
Grad students, comic book executives, a top-grade academic publisher, low-grade academic publishers, low-grade nonacademic publishers, a fellow with a Pulitzer Prize — they all take the subject of superheroes as an occasion to be as slack and dim as possible. Only a star attraction like Batman or Superman breaks thru to receive a level of professional competence, and then it’s always from Les Daniels. You’d think that, just by accident, some of these superhero books would be decent. Not yet.
Update (by Noah): On the theme of bad-books-about-superheroes; my review of Tim Callahan’s Grant Morrison, the Early Years
Hey, Bloomington's a cool little town. IU's there; Indiana State is in Terre Haute, which could be a circle of Hell.
Your rant here makes me hope you find enough to write a full column on it. Have you looked at UP Mississippi's catalogue? They're the most aggressive of UPs in doing comics books, Groensteen's among them.
This one could be awful or terrible:
http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/713
There's a couple of others, one on black superheroes & Milestone.
I wonder if Yale UP ends up making trash because they decide it's a high-concept book that has to sell, rather than the product of one person's investment.
I'll never wonder, though, at academics who write godawful books like "X-Files and Philosophy" to try to justify their suspect tastes.
One of the worst books I ever read was Stan Lee’s autobiography, Excelsior. I got it as a Christmas present, but fruitcake would have been preferable. A ghost written collection of fluff anecdotes, I think Stan’s real memories were replaced by the stories he created for the convention circuit. Pure dreck.
I have read a few of the Companion books published by TwoMorrows, inside baseball collections of interviews and art about a particular subject. In particular, the Krypton Companion covers Superman comics from the 50’s to 80’s and some of those interviewed offer up real criticism of Superman. I remember Keith Giffen referring to Superman as a junk culture icon.
Have you read Geoff Klock’s How to Read Superheroes and Why? I have some serious issues with its methodology (ignoring anything not then avaialble in TPB form) and spotlighting the then barely more than 50% done Planetary bites it in the ass a bit, but about 5 years on its still one fo the best critical examinations of the genre.
The Richard Reynolds book that Bill links to has some ok moments…pretty obvious for comics afficianados, but not bad for those trying to catch up. Overall, it’s pretty bad though. Worst of all is the quality of art reproduction, which looks like it’s done on an old photocopier. Other UP of Mississippi books are significantly better, although usually not on superheroes. Charles Hamilton’s book on Alternative Comics is probably the best of the bunch.
The best academic superhero book is definitely The Many Faces of Batman (or something like that). It came out late 1980’s, early 1990’s from Routledge in the wake of the Tim Burton film.
Academic voyages into comics can have their benefits (I’m thinking of Hatfield, Witek, Reynolds, etc.), but you’re right in asserting that most of what is published at UPs is pure drivel and shouldn’t be remembered let alone critically considered by anyone. But the problem isn’t that all academic work on comics is bad–some is actually quite insightful; rather, I think that academic books in general tend to be quite awful, whether you’re looking for something on Sartre or Superman.
Critical examinations of superheroes are especially problematic. Because it’s not a discrete discipline, contributors to something we might call “comics/superhero studies” come at us from wildly variant academic backgrounds, each with their own methodological quirks and lexicons that have trouble speaking to one another when prompted. The result, I think, is a rush to the lowest common denominator, which in turn gives us either the fanboyish, non-rigorous work you attack, or work that is so broad in its analysis that it can’t possibly contribute anything positive to “comics/superhero studies.”
I’m not sure if I have an answer to the problems you bring forward–everyone is going to expect something different in a book about superheroes–but if “comics/superhero studies” is ever to get off the ground, we should be prepared to stomach the bad methodologies and overly simplistic analysis for a while. Let those grad students work out the kinks while they’re still grad students, and maybe we can expect good things in the years to come.