"Blown to atoms or reshaped at will": recent books about comics.

"Blown to atoms or reshaped at will": recent books about comics. Bukatman, Scott. 2003. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects special effects,in motion pictures, cinematographic techniques that create illusions in the audience's minds as well as the illusions created using these techniques. andSupermen in the 20th Century. Durham: Duke University Press. $21.95 sc.xvi + 279 pp. Klock, Geoff. 2002. How to Read Superhero su��per��he��ro?n. pl. su��per��he��roesA figure, especially in a comic strip or cartoon, endowed with superhuman powers and usually portrayed as fighting evil or crime. Comics and Why. New York New York, state, United StatesNew York,Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of :Continuum. $19.95 sc. 204 pp. Varnum, Robin and Christina T. Gibbons, eds. 2001. The Language ofComics: Word and Image. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi The University Press of Mississippi, founded in 1970, is a publisher that is sponsored by the eight state universities in Mississippi: Alcorn State University Delta State University Jackson State University Mississippi State University . $12.55sc. xix + 222 pp. Wright, Bradford W. 2001. Comic Book comic bookBound collection of comic strips, usually in chronological sequence, typically telling a single story or a series of different stories. The first true comic books were marketed in 1933 as giveaway advertising premiums. Nation: The Transformation ofYouth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University,mainly at Baltimore, Md. Johns Hopkins in 1867 had a group of his associates incorporated as the trustees of a university and a hospital, endowing each with $3.5 million. Daniel C. . $34.95hc. xix + 336 pp. Critics who cover established literary forms have spent much of thelast twenty years TWENTY YEARS. The lapse of twenty years raises a presumption of certain facts, and after such a time, the party against whom the presumption has been raised, will be required to prove a negative to establish his rights. 2. in flight from formalist and evaluative analyses;comics critics have spent much of those years developing just suchanalyses for their medium. Mike Catron and Gary Groth co-founded TheComics Journal in 1976 to "cover the comics medium from anarts-first perspective" (the cantankerous can��tan��ker��ous?adj.1. Ill-tempered and quarrelsome; disagreeable: disliked her cantankerous landlord.2. Groth remains itseditor); the long-revered comics writer and artist Will Eisner William Erwin Eisner (March 6 1917 – January 3 2005) was an acclaimed American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium and is known for the cartooning studio he founded; for his highly openedthe field to book-length criticism with his Comics & Sequential Art(1985). Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (1993) describeditself as "a comic book about comics," "an examination ofthe art-form"; McCloud advanced hypotheses about "how ... wedefine comics, what are the basic elements of comics," and"how time flows through comics," among other topics (vii).Because McCloud cast his work in comics form, his claims could oftenprovide their own illustrations. "To define comics," McCloudexplained, "we must first do a little aesthetic surgery aesthetic surgeryn.Plastic or cosmetic surgery. andseparate form from content" (5). (The panel showed him lifting agleaming axe.) McCloud sought to see the medium as a medium, rather than as agenre or a set of already-extant examples: he tried to describe not justits past but its potential and to establish a flexible language forfuture criticism, and he succeeded. (His more recent work involvescomics on the World Wide Web.) After McCloud, comics criticism founditself with three available paths. One path led deeper into form,examining comics less as a literary or narrative mode than as a mode ofvisual art. Another path eschewed aesthetic evaluation and downplayedformal analysis, looking at comics as part of United States United States,officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. (or Japaneseor Mexican) history, and looking not at a few best (or most innovative)comics but at what most consumers actually read. A third path focused ongenre, performing not art-historical but literary interpretationsfocused on characters and narrative. The first three of these four informative books demonstrate,respectively, those three approaches. Varnum and Gibbons'santhology of essays considers comics artists' formalaccomplishments (sometimes within heavy theoretical frames), fromnineteenth-century French magazine strips to contemporary United Statesgraphic novels. (Superheroes are pointedly not represented, perhapsbecause their commercial dominance in English-speaking countries canobscure the range of styles and ideas other genres contain.) Wrightchronicles only United States comics and only commercially dominantgenres--superheroes, mostly, but also the crime, detective and romancecomics popular from the late 1940s through 1954; he reads them all asclues to history and reads them well. Of the three, Klock covers thenarrowest range, with the greatest originality. Examining superherotitles from the past two decades, Klock tries to show how literaryambitions can operate in, and on, superhero comics as a genre. Each ofthese three approaches bears attractive results: Klock's shouldstimulate (or provoke) much more. Each, however, seems on its owninsufficient to a medium defined by its combination of stories andpictures, typified by certain characters, and most visible (in theUnited States at least) through some of its least sophisticatedexamples. Bukatman devotes just a couple of chapters to comics. Yetthose chapters make for ideal models--they acknowledge both theexceptional and the typical, exploring both writers' choices andcommercial or cultural meanings, without neglecting comics form. The University Press of Mississippi has taken the lead for years inpublishing comics scholarship generally; Varnum and Gibbons' TheLanguage of Comics represents its most ambitious, and least unified,offering. Most of its essays apply, extend, or claim to quarrel withMcCloud's formal ideas; some combine those ideas with comicshistory. Formalist critics sometimes take a special interest in wordlesscomics; David Kunzle appreciates Adolph Willette's early wordlessstrip Chat Noir (1884-1885), with its "symbolist sym��bol��ist?n.1. One who uses symbols or symbolism.2. a. One who interprets or represents conditions or truths by the use of symbols or symbolism.b. world," whileDavid Berona analyzes four wordless graphic novels (2001, 10). GeneKannenberg expertly explores the many "visual elements" in thework of Chris Ware, from panel-to-panel transitions to "text designon the level of the book-object" (176). Frank Cioffi's chapteron modern graphic novels does particularly well in reading Ben Katchor,whose gloomy cityscapes both show "the illusory nature of any worldin which images and words match up exactly" and suggest "thateveryone carries within them a great and silent ... tragedy"(108-09). One strength of Varnum and Gibbons's volume lies in thediversity of its contributors' fields; these include art history,the history of journalism The history of journalism, or the gathering and transmitting of news, spans the growth of technology and trade, marked by the advent of specialized techniques for gathering and disseminating information on a regular basis that has caused, as one history of journalism surmises, the , rhetoric and communications, and a kind ofvisual theory which appears to exist only on the Continent, where (JanBaetens tells us) "comics theory is often much more abstract"(2001, 147). Objects of attention span just as wide a range: theyinclude comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, animated cartoons,and even the New Yorker gag strip, the subject of Robert C.Harvey's detailed history. Denying that wordless comics present themedium's ideal-typical examples, Harvey shows us how "in thebest examples of the art form, words and pictures blend to achieve ameaning that neither conveys alone" (76-77). Some essays use muchspace stating the obvious: "Graphic representation is a socializedact involving many codes and constraints" (Baetens); "by beingdrawn a certain way, the text is laden with symbolic meaning"(Catherine Khordoc) (152, 165). The editors might have used a farstronger hand, or a more vigorous red pencil. (They might also havesought an essay on comics from Japan: Sharon Kinsella's Adult Manga(2000) appears to be the first English-language academic book about thatenormous body of narrative work.) Varnum and Gibbons's volumecertainly does not present an overall advance on McCloud'stheories, but there are few reasons now to think one is needed: morevaluable are thoughtful appreciations (most notably Kannenberg's)of particular works and careers. The Language of Comics arrives at a time when many readers alreadyknow that comics, as a medium, can produce very complicated art:Ware's graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan (2000) won Britain'sGuardian prize for first book of the year, and Art Spiegelman'sPulitzer Prize-winning MAUS MAUS Muensters Apple User ServiceMAUS Mobile Automated Scanner (1986) appears regularly on college syllabi syl��la��bi?n.A plural of syllabus. .A later Pulitzer winner, Michael Chabon's novel The AmazingAdventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), drew much of its plot from theearly days of the United States comic book industry. The Comics Journal,and those who follow its lead, takes pains to differentiate superherocomics from comics in general, and from the particular, moresophisticated comics they admire. Superheroes have, however, hadacademic defenders. Richard Reynolds's Superheroes (1992)appreciated the genre in Jungian terms; Will Brooker's BatmanUnmasked (2000) offered a cultural-studies approach to Bruce Wayne onpage and screen. William Savage's Comic Books and America 1946-1954(1990) used popular serials to show how young people viewed--or wereencouraged to view--the early Cold War. Both Wright and Klock followearlier critics' leads. Wright expands and extends Savage'shistorical approach; Klock (following, and improving on, Reynolds)argues that some superhero comics reward specifically literary readings,focusing on individual texts, and deploying intellectual tools developedfor use on poems. Both Wright and Klock provide--as their arguments require--someknowledge of United States comic books' history. That historybegins with a "Golden Age" of simple popular stories,inaugurated by Superman in 1939. (Comic strips such as "KrazyKat" or "Doonesbury"--as distinguished from comicbooks--have a distinct and a longer history, which several of Varnum andGibbons' contributors sketch.) World War II led to a comic bookboom, followed by a decline. Publishers made up for superheroes'sales collapse with crime, horror, and romance titles, aimed at slightlyolder readers, until the mid-1950s Comics Code (analogous toHollywood's Code, but far stricter) made most of those genresuntenable. During the early 1960s Marvel Comics under Stan Lee, JackKirby and Steve Ditko began a "Silver Age" of heroes withemotions and private lives, most of all Lee and Ditko's teenageSpider-Man. Marvel also created a shared "universe": events inone superhero's life affected others' (requiring onehero's fans to buy other heroes' titles). Marvel's fanbase extended to college students, who helped create by the late 1960sthe first comics "fan culture" with newsletters andconventions. The same years saw the rise of alternative"comix com��ix?pl.n.Comic books and comic strips, especially of the underground press: "the countercultural . . . comix of the sixties and early seventies, with their explicit criticism of American society"," taboo-breaking titles aimed at (and produced within)the new counterculture, by such artists as Robert Crumb. Those titleswould eventually inspire an international network of small-press andcreator-owned comics, which thrives to this day, and from whichSpiegelman and Ware emerged. After 1969, attempts at social relevance failed to stem mainstreamcomics' declining readership; financial help came in the early1980s with licensing money from TV and movies and then with the teenagemutants, intricate plots and strong young women of Marvel's X-Men.As drugstores and newsstands cut back on their comics shelf space,specialty stores began to take their place; these stores suited moredevoted (and somewhat older) readers, who responded not only to X-Menbut to the more complicated and pessimistic creations of Frank Miller,Neil Gaiman, Howard Chaykin and Alan Moore. Incorporating sciencefiction and film noir elements, Miller's Batman: The Dark KnightReturns (1986) is probably the first superhero comic that consistentlyrewards the methods of reading associated with literary modernism;imitators copied its grim violence, often without its psychologicalsophistication so��phis��ti��cate?v. so��phis��ti��cat��ed, so��phis��ti��cat��ing, so��phis��ti��catesv.tr.1. To cause to become less natural, especially to make less naive and more worldly.2. . Even more complex (and with a much larger cast)Moore's Watchmen (1986) is widely regarded as the best superherocomic so far: it also positions itself as the last, pursuing the mostdisturbing implications of the "power fantasies"(McCloud's term) on which the genre depends. A boom, and then bust,in collectible comics during the early 1990s left Marvel strugglinguntil movies revived its finances; meanwhile, smaller companies andcreators gained increasing attention, and sometimes sales, viaautobiography (Harvey Pekar's American Splendor), science fiction(Carla McNeill's Filnder), reportage (Joe Sacco's Palestine)or realistic tales of teen woe (Adrian Tomine, Dan Clowes). As "one of the first entertainment products marketed directlyto children and adolescents," Bradford Wright declares, mainstreamcomic books can say a lot about how youth in the United States saw theirculture and themselves (2001, xvi). His methods are those of previoushistorians who have focused on popular texts: he makes no aestheticclaim for (nor against) them, taking texts instead as symptomatic ordiagnostic. Often Wright simply gives, in reliable detail, the consensushistory of the comics industry (Superman, Golden Age, slump; Silver Age,older readers; X-Men, boom, bust). Yet his research makes for somesurprising readings. Early superheroes (Superman included)"repeatedly sounded the warning that business dealings free ofpublic scrutiny and government regulation ... led to ... crime"(24). "By pointing out the failings of local government and thedangers of provincial demagogues," Wright argues, "thesecomics books ... tacitly stressed a common interest between publicwelfare and a strong federal government"; "superheroes assumedthe role of super-New Dealers" (24). Most comics creators (andcompanies) worked in New York, and many were Jewish; superhero comicsflaunted anti-Nazi themes even before Pearl Harbor. (Chabon describesthese works in great detail.) During the war, Wright confirms,superheroes pursued patriotic fights on all fronts, while"paternalistic pa��ter��nal��ism?n.A policy or practice of treating or governing people in a fatherly manner, especially by providing for their needs without giving them rights or responsibilities. , imperialist and racist" "jungle"comics showed savages in need of Anglo-American rule (42). After the war, Wright notes, "adolescents constituted anemerging consumer group with tastes that ran more to the adult,"and publishers served them with the new genres--romance, horror, war("adventures of regular American servicemen"), and especiallytrue crime (2001, 58, 114). Romance comics "encouraged women tomarry young and grow up quickly from schoolgirl to housewife"(132). Neither the A-Bomb nor the Korean War Korean War,conflict between Communist and non-Communist forces in Korea from June 25, 1950, to July 27, 1953. At the end of World War II, Korea was divided at the 38th parallel into Soviet (North Korean) and U.S. (South Korean) zones of occupation. lent themselves to simplepatriotic themes (publishers tried them, but readers stayed away);superhero comics championed containment abroad and tolerance at home.William Gaines' EC comics offered both the most ambitious stories,(depicting, Wright says, evil "without ... resolution" andattacking "established authority") and the most grisly,shocking images: a moral panic ensued, led by the otherwise liberalpsychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Senate hearings in 1954 vilified Gaines,destroyed the EC line (and crime and horror comics generally), and ledto the "extremely restrictive" Comics Code, theindustry's effort at self-censorship: "Never again would thecomic book industry enjoy the ... mass circulation and readership thatit had" (179). Wright sees Silver Age comics partly as a response to changingyouth culture, in which adults gave more credit to "teenagerebellion," and partly through the lens of his own interest inpolitics (2001, 200). Creators initially supported the Vietnam War Vietnam War,conflict in Southeast Asia, primarily fought in South Vietnam between government forces aided by the United States and guerrilla forces aided by North Vietnam. andthen turned against it, as their readers did: Marvel's Iron Man,once an ardent anti-Communist, "underwent a dramatic politicalconversion after 1968" (241). Despite their own tendency to solveproblems with punches, "superheroes ... endorsed liberal solutionsto social problems while rejecting the extreme and violent responses ofboth the left and the right" (235). Some creators showed moreinterest in social issues than young readers did (or perhaps could):Neal Adams' and Denny O'Neill's Green Lantern/ GreenArrow (1970-71) tackled "racism, poverty, politicalcorruption," "pollution, overpopulation overpopulationSituation in which the number of individuals of a given species exceeds the number that its environment can sustain. Possible consequences are environmental deterioration, impaired quality of life, and a population crash (sudden reduction in numbers caused by and religiouscults" with didactic vigor, and "mainstream media"celebrated, but the title sold poorly (227). Once tacit New Dealers,caped heroes now arguably represented the Great Society, and ran intotrouble as it did: after Watergate, Captain America for a time"dropped his patriotic name and called himself 'Nomad, the manwithout a country'" (245). Wright stops almost exactly where Klock begins, with Miller andMoore's Reagan-era disillusion dis��il��lu��sion?tr.v. dis��il��lu��sioned, dis��il��lu��sion��ing, dis��il��lu��sionsTo free or deprive of illusion.n.1. The act of disenchanting.2. The condition or fact of being disenchanted. , and the boom and bust In economics, the term boom and bust refers to the movement of an economy through economic cycles. The Boom-Bust economic cycleAccording to most economists, an economic boom is typically characterized by an increased level of economic output (GDP), a corresponding thatfollowed. After Watchmen and Dark Knight, superhero comics hadambitious, and clearly self-conscious, precedents in their own genre, towhich later creators might (markets permitting) respond. Klock examines,and appreciates, those responses in a vocabulary drawn from HaroldBloom's 1970s poetry criticism, with its valorization val��or��ize?tr.v. val��or��ized, val��or��iz��ing, val��or��iz��es1. To establish and maintain the price of (a commodity) by governmental action.2. of"misreading," its struggles for poetic "priority,"and its revisionary ratios. "Superhero comics," Klocksuggests, "are an especially good place to witness the structure ofmisprision The failure to perform a public duty.Misprision is a versatile word that can denote a number of offenses. It can refer to the improper performance of an official duty. ," being "serial narrative[s] ... running for morethan sixty years" (2002, 13). Like literary history generally, butunlike individual novels and poems, "comic books are open-ended andcan never be definitively completed"; even the strongest writerassigned to Batman "cannot come to the character fresh" (27,28). Each new creative team on Batman--or on a book or hero indebted toBatman--must create its own Batman-figure, at once unlike and compatiblewith readers' sense of the already-extant hero; the"strongest" creators' version of Batman "isretroactively constituted" by fans "as always alreadytrue" (31). (In the same sense, according to Bloom, WallaceStevens's reading of John Keats, or John Ashbery's reading ofWallace Stevens, become our Keats and our Stevens in proportion asStevens and Ashbery subject us to their respective strong visions.) Klock sees in Dark Knight and Watchmen "the birth ofself-consciousness in the superhero narrative," when"tradition becomes anxiety" and "the superhero narrativebecomes literature" (2002, 3). Because superheroes very literallystruggle over who has more power, and because their writers inherit notonly ideas but characters in a shared "universe," superheroesand the comics which feature them not only exemplify Bloomian literaryrelations (as any literary genre might) but also show a unique capacityto allegorize al��le��go��rize?v. al��le��go��rized, al��le��go��riz��ing, al��le��go��riz��esv.tr.1. To express as or in the form of an allegory: those relations, depicting them through struggles withintheir stories. "Revisionary" comics become literary when theytake self-conscious advantage of this always-available allegory: theirchoices about character and narrative are always also readings of themedium (comics), genre (superhero comics), predecessors, and charactersinvolved. Even readers who cannot accept self-consciousness and"power" as the defining features of "the literary"will benefit from Klock's demonstration that superhero comicsreward such a reading. (So, by the way, do the tales of premodern pre��mod��ern?adj.Existing or coming before a modern period or time: the feudal system of premodern Japan.heroesthat have been told and retold--King Arthur, King David.) That reading,in turn, provides context and impetus for Klock's otherobservations about the genre's conventions, which gifted writerscan highlight or break. "Large-scale social changes," forexample, "are a supervillain signature": revisionarynarratives therefore ask what would happen if superheroes tried togovern the world (2002, 39). Where "earlier superheroes were anethical power fantasy that concealed [readers'] fear ofpowerlessness," Miller's Batman, Moore's Watchmen, andWarren Ellis' later superheroes discover "no stable point fromwhich to pass judgment, no standard other than the strength of thevision" by which a hero (or author) can know what to do (138, 49).Grant Morrison takes this conundrum even farther, as his heroes reject"traditional moral constraints" altogether in favor of"the 'enjoyment of power'"; citing Slavoj Zizek,Klock suggests that Morrison's The Authority (2002) "exposesunconstrained enjoyment to conceal the true horror that unconstrainedenjoyment exists nowhere" (138-39). Klock might have made clearer his use of the fraught word"power," which can mean superheroes' super-powers; socialand political power; power in the sense of emotional force; andaesthetic or creative power. Which relations among these many senses of"power" does Klock take as metaphorical, which as causal, andwhich as relations of identity? Like Bloom (and like Clement Greenberg)Klock propounds criteria at once definitional (what superhero comicsessentially or basically are) and evaluative (the best ones fulfillthese criteria most fully, or engage them most deeply). Just asBloom's methods of reading prove more appropriate to Stevens thanto Alexander Pope, Klock's methods prove more appropriate to somecomics than to others. Klock, and Bloom, favor obviously ambitious,self-conscious, "dark" or "tragic" works with bothreligious and Freudian overtones, concerned both with the history oftheir genre and with the exercise of great (nearly unlimited)"powers." Trying to fit Kurt Busiek's "moreplayful" Astro City (1995-present) into his superhero canon, Klockconcentrates on its intertextual in��ter��tex��tu��al?adj.Relating to or deriving meaning from the interdependent ways in which texts stand in relation to each other.in efforts, scanting Busiek'sattempts at psychological realism and his interest in urban history(2002, 91). He writes provocatively, on the other hand, aboutMoore's Tom Strong, which for Klock "remind[s] even the mostskeptical and intelligent reader [of superhero comics] how primed she isfor fascist propaganda" (107). Klock depends (as he acknowledges) both on well-known academictheorists and on the enormous body of nonacademic criticism by fans(some of it increasingly on the Web). His focus on how comics depicttheir own history may seem partial, or excessive. As Douglas Wolk hasalso noted, contemporary mainstream comics, with their shared"universes" and overlapping plots, posit a"superreader" who has been purchasing many titles for years;Klock's "macro-reading" assumes such readers as well (hisdetailed bibliography may help create more of them) (2002, 125). One ofhis favorite recent achievements involves a multi-company crossover, a"story that can never be retold re��told?v.Past tense and past participle of retell. " (hence "cannot bebrought into the symbolic order") for "reasons ofcopyright" (150-151). Such a story may well be original in itsparticular recuperation recuperation/re��cu��per��a��tion/ (-koo?per-a��shun) recovery of health and strength. recuperation,n the process of recovering health, strength, and mental and emotional vigor. of extradiegetic elements for artistic purposes;it may even bear the Lacanian freight Klock gives it. And yet thataccomplishment seems unlikely to win superheroes new friends. We can,moreover, find self-conscious, "revisionary" comics, whosestrong stories double as arguments about comics' history, amongindependent comics far from Klock's chosen realm. DylanHorrocks's Hicksville (1998) imagines a New Zealand New Zealand(zē`lənd), island country (2005 est. pop. 4,035,000), 104,454 sq mi (270,534 sq km), in the S Pacific Ocean, over 1,000 mi (1,600 km) SE of Australia. The capital is Wellington; the largest city and leading port is Auckland. village wherecomics have a power, and an anticommercial purity, the rest of the worldcannot know: it makes a superb centerpiece, or culmination, for anycollege course about comics as a literary art. Nor is Klock's take on superhero comics the only one fromwhich an interpreter might begin. United States "comic booksthrived" in the twentieth century, according to Wright, "as auniquely exaggerated ... expression of adolescent sensibilities"(2001, 284). In looking at superheroes' power fantasies as a seriesof meditations about literary (and sometimes political) power, Klocklargely ignores superhero comics' relation to adolescence: hisobjects of close analysis, from Moore to Ellis, largely ignore it too. Asimilar book in an alternate universe--comics readers might call itKlock-2--could see adolescence as central to the genre. Klock-2 wouldlook at superhero comics as culturally revealing (from the outset),increasingly sophisticated (at their best) explorations of the risks andrewards of adolescence, of the powers young people assume, and thedangers they face, as they become adults. Klock-2 could include chapterson Spider-Man, on the X-Men and their imitators, and on McCloud'sown Zot! (1985-2001). Such a book might begin with the Golden AgeCaptain Marvel, whose secret identity was a boy himself, and whoselighthearted exploits made him seem, Wright says, "like a bumblingovergrown overgrownsaid of a part that has not been kept trimmed.overgrown hoofovergrown hooves put unusual stresses on bones and tendons and allow for distortion of the wall and sole. child" (19). Where Klock ends by discussing the filmUnbreakable--which sees comics history very much as he does--Klock-2might end on Chabon's novel, or with the TV show Buffy the VampireSlayer, already the subject of an enormous academic literature (see thebibliography at www.slayage.tv). Buffy's creator Joss Whedon hasscripted comics himself, and his characters' dialogue invokes them:when one character turns evil, another says she has "gone all DarkPhoenix." Scott Bukatman's Matters of Gravity is not Klock-2, nor doesit try to be--and yet it hints at what Klock-2 might do. Matterscollects essays about "bodies that morph, that sing, thatfly," in movies, comics, novels, music videos, and theme parks;these bodies' unusual powers, Bukatman contends, "literalize lit��er��al��ize?tr.v. lit��er��al��ized, lit��er��al��iz��ing, lit��er��al��iz��esTo make literal.Verb 1. literalize - make literal; "literalize metaphors"literalise ... the American mythology of remaking the self" (2003, 7). Hefinds such bodies not only in superhero comics but in Disneyworld, intype-writers, in "the cosmic effects of science fictioncinema," in a Michael Jackson video, and in movie musicals aboutNew York. These chapters show the strengths and weakness of a writerwhose "home disciplines" are film studies, theory (Jameson,Baudrillard) and visual culture (Jonathan Crary, Susan Buck-Morss); themodels can overwhelm the material, as anxiously abstract,hyperprofessional prose alternates with its hypercolloquial opposite:"The sublime came to prominence in response to the increasingsecular rationalization of modern life and was later co-opted as a modeof accommodation to the power of industrial technology.... Butthere's something else going on" (106). Bukatman's twochapters focused on comics stay closer to their subjects; they includesome of the best academic work so far on superheroes, even on narrativecomics generally. Those chapters sketch separate arguments. The first (written in1994) compares the hypermasculine, combat-happy superheroes of thecompany Image Comics (then enjoying a boom) with the X-Men (in theirpre-movie heyday). "Superhero comics," this chapter contends,"embody social anxiety, especially regarding the adolescent bodyand its status within adult culture" (2003, 49). In superherocomics bodies can be "enlarged and diminished, turned invisible ormade of stone, blown to atoms or reshaped at will"; theirchangeability might represent both the physical changes of puberty andthe larger uncertainties faced by adolescents, whose status and futuresare by definition unfixed. Even by contrast with previous superheroes,Bukatman argues, the Image supermen--and superwomen--"simplyincarnate in��car��nate?adj.1. a. Invested with bodily nature and form: an incarnate spirit.b. Embodied in human form; personified: a villain who is evil incarnate. ... painfully reductive re��duc��tive?adj.1. Of or relating to reduction.2. Relating to, being an instance of, or exhibiting reductionism.3. Relating to or being an instance of reductivism. definitions of masculine power,"as if to assuage as��suage?tr.v. as��suaged, as��suag��ing, as��suag��es1. To make (something burdensome or painful) less intense or severe: assuage her grief.See Synonyms at relieve.2. those uncertainties (51). Image artists "turn eachpage into a stiffly posed pinup pin��up?n.1. a. A picture, especially of a sexually attractive person, that is displayed on a wall.b. A person considered a suitable model for such a picture.2. " reminiscent of bodybuildingmagazines and of the German soldiers' memoirs studied by KlausTheleweit (59). By contrast, the X-Men work against those reductivedefinitions; endangered because of their genetic inheritance, driven towork together for self-protection, and constantly embroiled in romancesubplots, these "Most Unusual Teen-Agers of All Time!" (as anearly issue billed them) are not just a "battle unit" but"an idealized, alternative society ... in which all members, andtherefore no members, are outcasts" (69, 73). Bukatman's concluding chapter--more recent (2000), moredetailed, and more confident--reads superheroes not as adolescents butas urbanites, who "encapsulated and embodied the same utopianaspirations of modernity as the cities themselves" (2003, 185).Superman, both "immigrant Kryptonian orphan and ruralAmerican," becomes "a skyscraper," "amonument," a "perfect citizen" (197-198); his nemesis LexLuthor recalls Robert Moses, "a corporate city planner discontented dis��con��tent��ed?adj.Restlessly unhappy; malcontent.discon��tent with this unpredictable individualist sailing through his skies"(202). Batman's Gotham City, of course, derives its gloomier NewYork from "the urban detective story," with its "hiddenspaces, corners, traps" (203). Spider-Man (as his creatorscertainly intended) becomes a representative New Yorker, neither flyingnor driving, but crawling and swinging, climbing up walls, "makinghis own path across the spaces controlled by others" (207). Notonly these comics' milieus but their visual elements--panelssometimes compressed and rectilinear rec��ti��lin��e��ar?adj.Moving in, consisting of, bounded by, or characterized by a straight line or lines: following a rectilinear path; rectilinear patterns in wallpaper. , sometimes opening on theunexpected freedom of a full-page spread--invoke the topography of themodern city, "founded on the relationship between grids andgrace" (187). Bukatman concludes with a flurry of additionalclaims, none pursued at length, each plausible enough for an essay, oreven a book, on its own. "Superheroes are acrobats," theirpowers and costumes derived from "circus performers" (215)."Superheroes are all about multiple identities and so embody theslippery sense of self that living in the city either imposes orpermits" (211). "Superheroes don't wear costumes ... tofight crime; they fight crime in order to wear the costumes" (216).(Some of the heroes in Watchmen admit just that.) The Comics Journal crowd is surely right to insist that 1960scomix, strip comics, and graphic novels can be analyzed and appreciatedwithout reference to Spider-Man and his like: a medium is not a genre.At the same time, it might be worth asking (Bukatman could help) whymany graphic-novel authors and artists acknowledge the superheroes theyrefuse to create: see, for example, the masks in Clowes' GhostWorld, or the pathetic Superman costumes and deluded would-be heroes inWare. Bukatman seems aware that his essays call for more, and moredetailed, criticism than we can soon expect: "The challenge inwriting about comic books," he concludes, "lies in both thedearth of scholarship and the inaccessibility of the actualobjects" (2003, 219). The first of these problems is a challengefor critics, though (as Klock argues and Bukatman notes), such writersas Horrocks, Morrison and Moore build criticism, even scholarship, intotheir imaginative creations. The second problem--where does one get thebooks?--dogs most critics who write on contemporary work, or on the"popular culture" of the past; it requires institutionalsolutions. Michigan State University Michigan State University,at East Lansing; land-grant and state supported; coeducational; chartered 1855. It opened in 1857 as Michigan Agricultural College, the first state agricultural college. holds a comprehensive comicscollection already (described, with links to other archives, athttp://www.lib.msu.edu/coll/main/spec_col/nye/comic/index.htm): otheruniversities and archives (among them Brown, Indiana, Iowa State, andthe National Library of Australia) have happily begun to follow thatlead. Works Cited Chabon, Michael. 2000. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &Clay. New York: Random House. Clowes, Dan. 2001. Ghost World. New York: Fantagraphics. Eisner, Will. 1985. Comics and Sequential Art Comics & Sequential Art is an academic overview of the principles of sequential art (focusing on the comics form) by Will Eisner. The expanded edition includes short sections on the print process and the use of computers in comics. . Tamarac, Fla.:Poorhouse poor��house?n.An establishment maintained at public expense as housing for the homeless.poorhouseNounsame as workhouseNoun 1. . Horrocks, Dylan. 2001. Hicksville. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Kinsella, Sharon. 2000. Adult Manga. Manoa: University ofHawai'i Press. McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics. New York: KitchenSink/HarperCollins. Miller, Frank. 1986. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DCComics. Moore, Alan, and Dave Gibbons. 1987. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics. Reynolds, Richard. 1992. Superheroes: A Modern Mythology. London:Batsford, Savage, William. 1990. Comic Books and America 1946-1954.Norman: University of Oklahoma Press The University of Oklahoma Press is the publishing arm of the University of Oklahoma. It has been in operation for over seventy-five years, and was the first university press established in the American Southwest. . Spiegelman, Art. 1986. MAUS: A Survivor's Tale. New York:Pantheon, 1993. Ware, Chris. 2000. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. NewYork: Pantheon. Stephen Burt teaches at Macalester College. He is the author ofRandall Jarrell and His Age and Popular Music.