Imagine if George W. Bush had been forced to stay in office till he had personally gunned down Osama Bin Laden. Or if Obama can’t leave till he bags his own arch-nemesis, Edward Snowden. What would that sort of megalomaniacal mission do to a guy?
It turns him into Batman.
“The spiritual theme of Batman,” writes E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel, “is a battle against evil conducted too long or in the wrong way. Criminals are evil, and Batman is warped by constant pursuit until the knight-errantry turns into revenge.”
Okay, I’m lying. Forster wrote that about Meville’s Moby Dick. But swapping Batman for Captain Ahab (or Bin Laden for that big fat whale) shows how bizarrely time works in comic books. Or doesn’t work. Superhero time is both frozen and endlessly moving.
Batman’s parents were gunned down “some fifteen years ago.” That origin fact was first printed in 1939, so that meant 1924. Today it means 1998. Because Batman’s parents were always gunned down some fifteen years ago. That point in time is constantly shifting. Unlike U.S. Presidents (who, according to medical researcher Michael Roizen, age twice as fast while in office), Batman can’t age.
If his “war on criminals” were roped to real time, his character would become as monstrous as Melville’s obsessed whale-hunter. Batman is already carrying an unhealthy dose of the Captain in his utility belt, but without a time frame defining just how warped his mission might be, he skirts to just this side of self-annihilating megalomania. (Plus, according to E. Paul Zehr, he would only last three years—less than a Presidential term, but the same as an NFL running back. The human body can only take so much punishment.)
Superman lives in the same continuous present. In his 1962 essay “The Myth of Superman,” semiotician Umberto Eco analyzes that “temporal paradox.” (I’m not lying this time; Eco really does analyze a comic book.) Superman is mythic in the timeless, archetypal sense, while also adventuring in our “everyday world of time,” and so the “very structure of time falls apart.”
That requires some fancy story-telling. Eco particularly admires how DC created a dream-like climate in which the reader “loses the notion of temporal progression.” We keep looping back into Superman’s personal timeline to hear previously untold tales. When Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel was hired back to DC in 1969, his first assignment was a six-page script explaining how Clark Kent got hired at The Daily Planet. Siegel covered that in two panels back in 1938. The newspaper had been called The Daily Star then. No one minds the change, or even notices. It’s just part of the continuous dream.
At Timely (Marvel’s old name), superheroes refused to loop backwards. When the Human Torch reignited in 1954, it was 1954 for him too. He’d fought Nazis in the forties, and now he was fighting Commies in the fifties. We even got an explanation for his period of absence (he went supernova in the desert), and an explanation for his return (hydrogen bomb testing reawakened him). Timely time always marched forward.
Over at DC, superheroes only battled pretend villains, ones that bore little or no relationship to current events. Pick up an issue of Action Comics during World War II, and except for a patriotic cover endorsing government bonds, you wouldn’t have known there was a war on. Ditto for the Cold War. The Man of Steel never faced the Iron Curtain. It would have pinned him to real time.
Superheroes would have continued happily to inhabit their private, timeless planet, had Stan Lee not come along to screw things up. Like their Commie-bashing forebears, Marvel’s Silver Age heroes were cold warriors. They were literally timely. Rather than avoiding chronological progression, Stan Lee highlighted it. His captions even recapped past issues to nudge forgetful readers. No more continuous dream. Naptime is over.
And that created new problems. If tethered to our world, superhero time eventually falls out of sync. Batman’s “some fifteen years ago” is very different from the Fantastic Four’s origin-producing rocket launch. Parents can get gunned down in any decade. The Waynes weren’t scrambling to beat the Commies. The Space Race isn’t a mobile pocket in time. That’s 1961. That will always be 1961.
That’s also one of many many reasons why the 2005 Fantastic Four film didn’t work—and why I’m less than hopeful about the reboot now in production. No Space Race, no reason for Reed Richards’ botched radiation shields. The guy’s supposed to be a genius, but his girlfriend is shouting: “We’ve got to take that chance, unless we want the Commies to beat us to it! I – I never thought that you would be a coward!” The historical context is everything.
DC held out as long as they could. But by 1968 they ended their isolationist policy and introduced Red Star, their first Soviet superhero. California Governor Ronald Reagan made his first comic book appearance the same year. (Marvel wouldn’t notice him till he made it to the White House.) Because of Timely, superheroes had to stop reliving the same Daily Planet headlines. The planet was revolving daily whether they liked it or not.
I was on the other side of the planet, in Melbourne, Australia, when I read the Herald Sun headline: “Osama bin Laden is dead, US President Barack Obama confirms.” That was May 2011, so the U.S. government’s knight-errantry lasted just under a decade. The photo showed flag-waving college students cheering outside the White House lawn. Some of them would have been reading comic books when the World Trade Center came down. Bin Laden was their Hitler, their Lex Luthor, the monster breathing under their bed all night.
Imagine if we hadn’t caught him. Imagine America if that decade had drifted on some fifteen years. Or if September 9, 2001 weren’t a fixed point, but a whale-sized weight dragged forward by every new, time-warped President. Imagine a battle against evil conducted too long or in the wrong way. What happens to a country under a never-ending Patriot Act? To a government locked in a constant pursuit of surveillance? The national psyche can only take so much punishment.
A word of comic book advice to President Obama regarding whistle-blower Edward Snowden:
Time to move on.
Roger Stern wrote a fairly chilling essay: “Flash Thompson never served in Vietnam”. Thompson was a Spider-Man supporting character, and much was made in the ’70s of his status as a Vietnam war vet. He even married a Vietnamese.
But as Stern points out, Thompson wasn’t even born when the Vietnam War ended.
Yeah, anchoring to real world events is stupid; Black Widow was a baby during the battle of Stalingrad, which makes her about 70 years old…
But I get the gist of your point,Chris, and it adds a dark aspect to the famous Superman credo: “…fights a never-ending battle for Truth, Justice, and the American Way!”
Never-ending…brrr
This is a great piece, but feels kind of like a beginning of something longer – or perhaps I think you need to do a little more work to connect Snowden to Luthor to Bin Ladin to the Joker, etc. . . In other words, maybe develop some answers to the rhetorical questions about “What happens to a country under a never-ending Patriot Act? To a government locked in a constant pursuit of surveillance?” in a way that the time warp analogy is a little clearer? In what ways in the national narrative of security being made anew through a sense of recurring erasure required to make time both move and stand still?
Still, I think you are on the right track here.
Oh, and I think you meant Sept 11, not 9th. right?
Hey, AB – does that Roger Stern essay exist somewhere accessible?
The best part is that Flash has now served in at least 3 wars and lost his legs. . . how will they handle the loss of legs 15 years from now when he’d be too young to have fought in Afghanistan?
Oh yeah, there’ll be some other convenient conflict. . .
That idea of comics as a dream reminds me of what Alan Moore did with MarvelMan (or MiracleMan or whatever), making his comics adventures literally dreams.
I’d reckon it’s safe to say American superhero comics are a unique genre of fiction in their approach to the passing of time, at least with the Marvel and DC. The sliding timeline Marvel uses, where everything has happened since Fantastic Four #1 has been in the past fifteen years or so, creates all kinds of narrative quirks you won’t find in any other form of fiction. And its one of the things that makes Superhero comics so weird and fun (at least with stories by good creative teams). I’m of the school that that reader picks is or her continuity rather than staying with any hard and fast rule to measure past stories by. By sliding forward, the specifics of the past stories, the cultural and political references, transform into something that makes more sense, at least in my head. (And at least with Marvel. I don’t even bother with the ceaseless clusterfuck that is DC editorial, creative, and continuity.)
But the 9/11-Bin Laden analogy doesn’t quite work in the context Chris is attempting, nor does the Snowden analogy remotely work. Capturing Uncle Ben’s killer doesn’t remove Peter Parker’s motivation, or change the direction his life would take. If there had been a cop around the corner in Crime Alley the night Bruce Wayne’s parents got got, he would still wage his quixotic war on crime. When Bin Laden was killed, I was among the millions of Americans and New Yorkers who celebrated this, the only time in my life I have every been happy about the loss of human life. I felt (and feel) no shame in celebrating his capture (dead, not alive), because the destruction he helped create in my beautiful city was far more reaching than just a hole in a couple of blocks in Manhattan real estate. He punched a hole in the very being of America that was filled with corruption, greed, and a quest for political and financial gain by the powerful that corrupted America’s soul. The origin story of loss spurring a righteous quest does not apply here. My country lost its way and used Bin Laden as the excuse. Bin Laden’s capture did not absolve America of the sins committed in its name in the aftermath of 9/11, the treasure in resources and lives lost. Bin Laden’s death was a catharsis, but we are still on the same path the ignorant, greedy fools steering the ship pointed us at 12 years ago. America’s new origin story is 9/11, and to this day we are still dragging around that millstone in the form of the mistakes we made and sins we committed and continue to commit. Snowden’s actions and the Obama administration’s pursuit of him doesn’t even remotely rank. It’s time to move on, but only in the sense that the Snowden affair is a small symptom of the larger breakdown in priorities caused by the American response to 9/11.
Jeffrey, it seems to me that your characterization of 9/11 perfectly fits with Mr. Galaver’s essay here. . . esp. where you say it is America’s new origin story (just as Pearl Harbor and the Civil War and the Revolutionary War, etc. . .) could all be seen as previous origin stories as well – rebooting a new American narrative. Superhero origin stories comes in different sizes. They all rank because it is not the event itself, but how it is spun out into a superheroic/villainous identity.
Ultimately, it is these stories that invent “the very being of America,” because the story constructed from it that invents the event, not vice versa. In other words, we define what these essences are based on political expediency, not because of some real “essence.” There is no essence.
I was thinking the same thing Osvaldo…especially since the new origin story of 9/11 has us acting pretty much exactly the same way we acted before 9/11. More middle east adventures, more protestations of innocence, more imperialism in the name of righteousness, etc. etc., and so forth.