Marco Arnaudo, The Myth of the Superhero, Trans. from Italian by Jamie Richards [Il fumetto supereroico: Mito, etica e strategie narrative, 2010], Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U.P., 2013, 206p. [July7]
Better late than never! This book was published in English four years ago (and in Italian seven years ago), but apparently it fell through the cracks. It is difficult to explain why it received so little attention, with only one book review by Jason Archbold from Macquarie University according to my library research engine. Maybe it is because the back cover blurb does not seem to propose anything new:
“Through a series of close readings of DC and Marvel comics, Marco Arnaudo explores the influence of religion and myth on superhero stories as well as their relationship to the classical epic.”
Situating the superhero phenomenon within mythology and religion has been done in many articles, chapters or entire books (e.g. Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Knowles’ Our Gods Wear Spandex, Weinstein’s Up, Up, and Oy Vey!, all cited in his book).
However, I just read Arnaudo’s book and found it an excellent short (150 pages for the main text), dense, and clear synthesis with, actually, some original ideas.
The first original idea is the use of almost exclusively the weekly or monthly published stories instead of the ones considered part of the canon like Watchmen — to show that even these more ordinary stories could be very interesting. Second, contrary to the common belief about comics, they are diverse and growing more tolerant and open-minded than other medias of the same period. Third, the author defends the comics world for its complexity against some critics’ (negative) generalizations like the ones found in Jewett and Lawrence’s idea of “American monomyth” (95). Overall, Arnaudo presents a very positive, rich and complex picture of the genre.
Arnaudo argues rightly that the genre/media accumulated a vast amount of information, techniques, and styles within the 70 years of its existence. It is arguably the longest storyworld ever in known history with over 2 million pages and countless transmedia remakes. Hence, characters and episodes of these long series repeated with variations are gaining thickness and roundness adding each time new elements (sometimes contradictory) over the years. Consequently, it is also very difficult, actually impossible, to master this literary-artistic-cultural phenomenon. However, as shown through his numerous examples, the author has an impressive knowledge of the genre, from the most obvious superhero like Superman to less known ones like Silver Surfer to some almost forgotten ones like Starseed. Furthermore, it is very well written(/translated) with a number of examples clearly used.
The book is made of a short introduction, three full chapters, and a very brief conclusion. In the introduction, Arnaudo explains his “heavy concentration on the primary texts [comics] and, conversely, a limited (or more limited, compared with the ‘average’ in comics criticism) referencing of sociological, semiotic or anthropological sources” (9). We might regret not to see some key names in the field used to support his thesis, but it is a short book and his prerogative.
Chapter 1, “Myth and Religion,” deals chronologically with religions in a broad sense. It starts with pagan religions (mythology-Greek-Roman, Norse) and Shamanism, mostly referring to Native American examples of the 1960s during the civil right movement and the rise of new age spirituality. It then moves to Judaism and its multiple references to it since many authors were Jewish (even if Martin Lund just published a critique of that perspective in Re-constructing the Man of Steel, 2016), ending with Christianity. Arnaudo’s thesis is that these religions are all potentially present through the flexibility and seriality of the genre (31). He argues that by emphasizing one religion over another, devotees of other religions could take offense. This was certainly one reason why Jewishness was veiled by, for example, Christianizing/Westernizing Jewish names (e.g. Stan Lee for Stanley Lieber). Also, too precise references to some sacred aspects of religion can be offensive for devotees. Hence, many references are made through metaphors, allegories, symbols, concluding: “Christian symbolism, which seems to be used in the superhero genre primarily to please readers, can also enable the construction of rather ambiguous, unsettling messages that invite us to reject facile escapism of someone who would want to leave the task of resolving all conflict up to the messiah-hero” (59).
More interestingly, Arnaudo also argues that these simultaneous references to multiple religions are also a form of multiculturalism that became more common ground in the 1990s. He gave very good and precise examples of the various interpretations of religious symbols that varied in time including in some movies (e.g. Donner’s Superman and Raimi’s Spider-Man). Under the subtitle “Polytheism and Multiculturalism” (59), he concludes the chapter writing that this polytheistic universe is a multicultural one since “they will have to find their own ways to live together with the Other without losing their own identities, and this, precisely, is the key concept of any multiculturalism” (60), and “[o]nce […] they convince themselves that the divinity is unquestionably and exclusively on their side, they unfailingly end up becoming the worst of villains” (62).
In chapter 2, “Ethics and Society,” Arnaudo explains to which extent superheroes show the mythic ‘American’ values such as individualism, pragmatism, and optimism, especially through the reality of the immigrants. The superhero genre reaffirms the U.S. as land of opportunity while progressively becoming a real land for multiculturalism. In the first section “Why the US?” the explanation falls a bit short, but is good if limited to these ideals. It goes on criticizing the traditional critique of superhero as conservative (i.e. maintaining status quo), vigilantist (i.e. vengeance and solving violence by violence), fascist (i.e., the cult of heroism), and escapist (i.e. by producing the readers’ passivity). The escapist critique is rejected through the rational argument that these fictions could also interpreted, like exemplars in the Christian Middle Age, as positive examples to follow. The fascist argument is dismissed by concluding that if “all fascist cultures have emphasized the cult of heroism, it still doesn’t mean that all heroism is by definition fascist” (73).
These stories are often conservative to some extent, but they defend citizens more often than order itself. Moreover, they are conservative only if they defend a conservative society which is not always the case (e.g. Green Arrow & Green Lantern). The next section addresses the issue of vigilantism and violence in order to show how the genre quickly developed “a code of superethics” (74). Except if one is a complete pacifist (i.e. a tiny minority), the majority of the population accepts the idea of a minimum of violence as necessary in some cases; but most of comics uphold the least possible violence. Historically, skeptical representations of the police were common in the 1930s-40s such one could see in hard-boiled fictions and film noir. “If the superhero’s excellence doesn’t automatically suggest ineptitude on the part of the police force, neither does it imply act of apologia or propaganda for it” (78). Hence, if the precept “thou shall not kill” (78-85) was not applied at the beginning; roughly only after the 1954 Comics Code, it was almost systematically applied, while sometimes finding subterfuges to avoid it, and when it was the case, the superhero would show remorse (86). “These stories show how an apparently superficial genre such as that of superhero comics, ostensibly not very introspective and based on the main characters’ concrete actions, actually entails an ongoing ethical discourse behind motives and the significance of those actions” (91).
In “Killing in the movies” (91), he states that this ethical rule is not applied in movies since “to maximize the production’s financial investment, the film will have to meet the expectations and familiar formulas of viewers, not necessarily those of the more limited number of comic book readers” (92). That is what one can see with Daredevil killing Elektra’s murderer (2003) and in Nolan’s movie with Batman leaving Ra’s to his certain death (2005). Here we deeply see how Arnaudo is a comics fan defending firmly the genre against superhero movies maybe a bit too simplistically.
In the section “For or Against the Government” (95), the next ethical problem superheroes have to face is whether to go along with the government or the country’s founding democratic values. The answer actually changed in history from WWII to Vietnam War to 9/11, even for the most patriotic characters like Captain America. In the last section, “’Fanta-chronicles’ of the present “(102-115), Arnaudo shows how the stories are always close to the present due to their realistic style and the necessity to maintain contact with their audiences constantly renewed for 75 years while still operating in the semi-fantastic world of SF and SH. He gives several examples including the one of Wonder Woman who goes to the Middle East to help women in distress in a village but is then stoned because of her offensive clothing (109).
In chapter 3, “Epic and Neo-baroque” (117-155), Arnaudo starts with a thorough definition of epic in 20 points, coming from one of the specialists of epic, Sergio Zatti’s definition. He shows that “although the authors may often not be conscious of these correspondences, the fact remains that reading a superhero saga stirs the reader to responses that are remarkably analogous to those activated with an epic poem” (131). In the section, “American epic,” if “epic is the chronicle of a past so recent that its protagonists are still experiencing its effects yet that has already crystallized in public consciousness as history” (quoting Zatti 132), the “cult of the present is deeply rooted in American culture” (132) through its cult of free mobility, not overly constrained by the past.
In a second part of this last chapter, “The Return of the baroque in Superheroes” (134), he compares the neo-baroque of comics to the 16th century baroque “philosophy” in three points: its passage from totality to fragments (136), its penchant for citation (139), and its loss of the center (149).
These three chapters are followed by a good conclusion although very brief (two pages, 156-58) and a bit wobbly since, after mentioning chapters 1 & 2, strangely enough it does not mention chapter 3 and the word epic at all. It ends with the traditional copious academic footnotes (twenty-two pages out of one-hundred eighty) and a solid bibliography — made of a lot of primary sources and fewer secondary ones with some big specialists missing, as explained in the introduction — and a good index.
Overall, this is a good reading that I would recommend, above all to skeptics about the genre/media (colleagues and students), since it presents such a positive view of comics through its extraordinary abundant and complex material.