The New and Improved Rorschach Test - The Meaning of Superhero Comic Books

(or, How Miller and Moore Analyze the Superhero)

While this is only one example in the midst of many other superhero stories written by both, it is not unique to either (despite the growing differences between these two writers hereafter discussed); it is simply distinctive. In order to further this claim, I will begin my examination of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen by highlighting several aspects of their plots. Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns is a Batman story and begins with Batman in his 50s. By beginning in the middle of things (or at the end of things), Miller necessarily has to work with clichés already in place for the character, the collective knowledge of the

community. As a boy, Bruce Wayne witnessed his parents killed in Crime Alley and commits his life to fighting crime; Wayne chooses the bat as a costume and symbol to frighten crim-inals and thereafter, uses his intellect and the family fortune to develop the means to realize his fanatic fight against crime; the police commissioner, Jim Gordon, and Wayne’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth, enable Wayne to do what he does in Gotham City as the Batman; he operates as a vigilante, fighting against colorful, questionably sane criminals that serve as a counterpoint to his law and order. In The Dark Knight Returns, Batman has retired and Gotham has endured a crime- ridden spiral into despair as the gang that calls themselves the Mutants now control the city. Wayne is a shell of his former self, suicidal and thinking of Batman in the third person. When Wayne returns to fighting crime as Batman, Miller extends Batman’s vigilante status by revealing that he lives in a world that has forced super-heroes out of existence. With Cold War paranoia as a motivating factor, all supersuper-heroes were viewed as suspicious threats and all were forced into retirement with the exception of Superman (who works at the behest of the national government). When Bruce Wayne brings Batman out of retirement to fight the mutants, he is viewed as a public enemy, particularly by the national government. The need for Batman and his effective action demonstrates the ineffectiveness of the national government and this leads to the series’ ultimate conflict between Batman and Superman.

Miller’s expensive ($2.95), square bound, and glossy papered four- issue series (even-tually to be collected and kept in continuous print as a graphic novel) would seem to depart from traditional aesthetics by providing a close to the story of Batman and by ﬁxing a certain extreme interpretation of Batman with a permanently available version of that story.¹⁷Miller himself suggested that he had a difﬁdent relationship with the source material with statements such as “We’ve got 50 years of crap, and people talk as if we have a heritage behind us.

We’ve got lots of bad stories, just one after another. There is good work back there, but there isn’t a lot of it. And there isn’t enough to have made an impression on the world at large” (George, Frank Miller 39). By distancing himself from his source material, this places Miller in a somewhat disingenuous position characteristic of creators in the literate world supposedly creating something cut from new cloth. However, Miller balances this perspective with other statements such as “In the early adventures of Superman and Batman, the super-hero was an unusual, often mystical element that focused and defined real- world situations and issues in a way that was clearer and more direct than a simple recitation of the facts could” (34). As someone who consciously distances himself from the traditions of superhero stories and yet harkens back to them as mystical, real- world influences, Miller seems more likely than most to operate in a fashion out of step with the conventions of literacy. With that stated, Miller works in the self- conscious vein of new traditionalism that allows him to develop a variation on the existing story that evokes Batman stories of old.¹⁸While Miller and Moore would be credited with fashioning the mentality of the nihilistic and violent superhero of the 1990s, both have stated that that was far from their intention. Miller may seem to extend the clichés of Batman’s superheroism to a breaking point, but he largely redeploys and accentuates standard tropes associated with the genre and medium from the split identity of the superhero to the tension between the superhero as vigilante and agent of the state. The paranoia builds on the film noir inspiration of Batman but also comments on contemporary U.S. politics; like Umberto Eco suggests to a degree in “The Myth of Superman” and as has been seen with epic heroes, the superhero is both timeless and rele-vant.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen is superﬁcially a thornier example of a work

of new traditionalism in that it reads as a work that more clearly wants to set superhero tropes aside with a story highly critical of the genre. Even Miller states, “It was funny how Dark Knight and Watchmen were grouped together, because even though both of them rep-resented kinds of end points, they were approached from completely opposing points of view. Alan was eviscerating the entire notion. I was very sentimentally celebrating it”

(George, Frank Miller 105). While I might take issue with Miller’s characterization of the two works as “end points” made with “completely opposing points of view,” I think he accurately sums up the popular understanding of the two works in comparison. However, every story has a life beyond the author’s own sense of it (both in traditional and literate contexts). Moore states that he intended to do something different with a self- contained superhero universe that he could creatively control ( John B. Cooke, Q9). While Moore superﬁcially works with an original cast of characters and crafts a story with a discrete begin-ning and ending, there are many aspects of the story that defy the understanding of the story as literary. To begin, the characters were based on the Charlton superhero universe and Moore’s original proposal dealt with “Who Killed the Peacemaker?” When DC editor Dick Giordano rejected Moore’s original proposal in order to preserve the recently acquired Charlton superheroes as they were, he still encouraged Moore to work with the story idea.

Moore states:

I forget how much of the idea was in place then, but I think that it would start with a murder, and I pretty well knew who would be guilty of the murder, and I’ve got an idea of the motive, and the basic bare- bones of the plot — all of which actually ended up being about the least important thing about Watchmen.... Eventually, I realized that if I wrote the substitute characters well enough, so that they seemed familiar in certain ways, certain aspects of them brought back a kind of generic superhero resonance or familiarity to the reader, then it might work [John B. Cooke].

Curiously, the story that would become Watchmen began as what Walter Ong characterizes as the ultimate product of literate storytelling: the mystery with its closed ending. As Moore states, the resolution (the closed ending) of the murder mystery eventually became unim-portant, and resonance between source characters and newly created characters became important. Charlton superheroes, including the Peacemaker, the Question, Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, Thunderbolt, and Phantom Lady all have a correspondence to characters in Watchmen, but Watchmen’s characters are more widely connected to superheroes in general as a consequence of the change. Working the clichés shared by superheroes in general, the Comedian not only resembles the Peacemaker but Captain American and Nick Fury;

Rorschach not only resembles the Question but Batman and Wolverine, and so on. As a consequence, Moore’s practice resembles something like a self- conscious version of the ref-erentiality that Foley describes in Immanent Art, with a speciﬁc element evoking the larger context of the tradition itself (7).

Watchmen does begin with the murder of Edward Blake, the Comedian, and Rorschach investigating the crime. In the wake of the Keene Act, a nearly decade- old piece of legislation that outlaws superheroes, the Comedian and Rorschach represent the two extremes among the superheroes who did not retire. The Comedian works for the U.S. government and his amoral love of violence serves him well in that capacity both in domestic and international conﬂicts; Rorschach continues to work outside the law and his paranoid, obsessive perspective convinces him that only his morally motivated violence outside the system can realize true justice. Other retirees include Rorschach’s ex- partner, the rumpled Dan Dreiberg (formerly Nite Owl) who seems a weak reﬂection of his former self, the super- intelligent Adrian Veidt

(formerly Ozymandias) who uses his superhero image to amass great wealth, and the lonely Laurie Juspeczyk (formerly Silk Spectre) who lives at a government facility mainly to keep her boyfriend Dr. Manhattan happy. None of them believe Rorschach’s anxious ravings about a masked- killer until certain elements begin to validate this theory, like the exile from earth of Dr. Manhattan (the only truly super- powered costumed crime fighter). Like The Dark Knight Returns, the outsider status of the superheroes is accentuated through not only the Cold War legislation of the Keene Act but also the disturbingly sociopathic Rorschach (lost in his mask) and perversely dispassionate Dr. Manhattan (lost in his powers). With the costumed crime fighter phenomenon beginning roughly at the same time superhero comic books first appeared (both Nite Owl and Silk Spectre are second generation super-heroes), history has departed from one we know. Alan Moore states:

Our intention was to show how superheroes could deform the world just by being there, not that they’d have to take it over, just their presence would make the difference... On another level, if you equate [an incredibly powerful superhero] with the atom bomb, the atom bomb doesn’t have to take over the world, but by being there it changes everything [Groth and Fiore 100].

Richard Nixon is still the president in 1985, and the nuclear clock is perilously close to mid-night (and nuclear armageddon). Convinced of Rorschach’s masked- killer theory, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre team with Rorschach and discover too late that Ozymandias has planned a hoax alien invasion of New York, killing millions of people to substantiate the hoax. As a consequence, the USA and USSR end their nuclear stand- off and pledge to work together to protect the earth against their new common enemy. Again, the work seems to stretch conventions to a breaking point but the stretching more clearly identiﬁes the tropes at work.

In addition to those already mentioned in relation to The Dark Knight Returns is one also used by Miller but which is so much more obvious in Watchmen: the self- conscious pres-entation of the power fantasy. Rather than featuring Spider-Man clobbering the Green Gob-lin in order to save a busload of children, Watchmen exposes the tenets of that moral paradigm by showing Ozymandias kill millions of people in order to save billions.

The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen address concerns central to the study of tra-ditional and literate cultures, most notably the tension between the tribalism of the tradi-tional world and the civilization of the literate world; in the process of exploring this tension, these works transition to their treatment of new traditionality through critiques of new media and examinations of the way time is perceived. In other words, Miller and (perhaps more so) Moore have the instincts of scholars who put their ideas in a narrative form conscious practitioners of traditional art). Again, as I stated in reference to Gardner Fox, I do not mean to suggest that either creator has a first- hand familiarity with studies of orality and literacy (or even media studies in general) and thereby implements ideas specifically drawn from such fields. However, I do mean to suggest that an intimate awareness of comic books and graphic novels necessarily leads to a consideration of the medium and the culture in the terms outlined in this study. To continue, it is important to consider a tension between tribalism and civilization that is central to both works and that drives the narrative devel-opment of each. The traditional culture is the tribal culture, one that thinks very little of the individual or the world outside the tribal unit; the literate culture is the civilized culture, one that validates the individual and various cultural units as equally valuable within the wider global culture. The long acknowledged starting point for such studies is Claude Strauss’s The Savage Mind, a book whose title in French begins with a bit of wordplay;

“savage mind” also implies wild or undomesticated thought. Therefore, central to

Strauss’s work is the idea that the mind of the “savage” is not uniformly different from the mind of civilization, but, rather, it is the content and conditions that affect the mind that has changed (Fox 19). According to Levi- Strauss, the tribal mind works in ways that knit together people and thoughts that would be regarded as individual within the context of civilization. After establishing that the mythic, totemic thought of tribes as a means of problem- solving and confronting reality in a way not clearly recognized in the scientiﬁc thought of the civilized world (17), Levi- Strauss describes such thought as bricolage:

Mythical thought appears to be an intellectual form of “bricolage.”... Science as a whole is based on the distinction between the contingent and the necessary, this also being what distinguishes event and structure.... Now, the characteristic feature of mythical thought, as of “bricolage” on the practical plane, is that it builds up structured set, not directly with other structured sets but by using the remains and debris of events.... Mythical thought for its part remains imprisoned in the events and experiences which it never tires of ordering and re- ordering in its search to ﬁnd them a meaning. But it also acts as a liberator by its protest against the idea that anything can be meaningless with which science at ﬁrst resigned itself to compromise [21–22].

This is an important facet of the current discussion because it not only describes the practice of traditional storytelling but also describes the supposedly paranoid psychology of Miller’s Batman and Moore’s Rorschach. Individual elements are given meaning not in their own terms but by their relationship to other variables within the system (whether that be an epic poem, a comic book, or a worldview).

Although not as extreme in his opinion as Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Dis-contents, Levi- Strauss does suggest that the attempts of Rene Descartes and Jean Paul Sartre to separate the individual from the group diminishes certain basic human tendencies to think (249). While subsequent scholars (such as Jack Goody) have suggested that Strauss drew too discrete a line between the savage and the civilized, Levi- Strauss remains the standard for such cultural studies. Referring to Levi- Strauss’s sense of the savage mind, Robin Fox demonstrates the problems with understanding the move from tribal to civilized as an evolutionary move in The Tribal Imagination. After teasing out the problem of universal human rights by suggesting revenge was a human right in tribes, Fox examines how the civ-ilized world’s notion of human rights differs from that of the tribe. Laws against drug abuse, infanticide, and abortion show how:

non- kin collectives are taking over the function that originated and have their logic, in the kin group.... It is in the interest of a nation, for example, to reproduce itself. Thus it tends, in its delusional- ideological system, to pass itself off as a super kin group. At a primitive level of evolving humanity ... there was no need for such pretense. The kin group was the social collectivity. This is why I have argued ... that at the most basic, and hence most “human,” level, there is no “rights” issue [48].

This growth of civilization in the Western world pushes people beyond reliance on kin groups and toward laws that require faith in strangers to enforce what is now referred to as human rights within the democratic order of modern civilization (69). The tribe or kin group was the basis for all understanding and valuation in the world (as limited as the geog-raphy of that world might be) and the individual had no identity outside that group.

Although I don’t want to fall into the trap of romanticizing traditional culture, these types of studies are important correctives for a civilized world that tends to privilege the society and art of literate culture. In addition, Levi- Strauss and Fox are quick to point out that the tribal (or as we have stated, the traditional) mind hasn’t been replaced; it coexists within

the civilized world in ways domesticated to relative degrees. As a consequence, civilization has not replaced the tribal, and, as a consequence, the savage mind competes with and also informs the basic tenets civilization.

In The Dark Knight Returns, we begin with Bruce Wayne in Gotham City, and, in short order, it becomes clear that he has a symbiotic relationship with the city. Through a newscast, it is revealed that the gang calling themselves the mutants commit horriﬁc crimes despite Commissioner Gordon’s best efforts to stop them. Batman has been in “retirement”

for ten years and the city and Bruce Wayne have become more socially and psychologically troubled in the meantime. The color palate has expanded in Modern Age comic books and Miller (and colorist Lynn Varley) uses a variety of grey tones to evoke the bleak despair of Wayne in Gotham.¹⁹In the city’s ﬁrst street level depiction, Wayne walks through an urban landscape ﬁlled with trash and street people carrying signs with phrases such as “We are damned” (Miller, The Dark Knight 12). Wayne walks to Crime Alley and muses, “But Batman was a young man. If it was revenge he was after, he’s taken it. It’s been forty years since he was born ... born here. Once again, he’s brought me back — to show me how little it has changed” (13). Mutants then approach Wayne seemingly to torture and kill him, but they leave him, saying, “Look at him. He’s into it — Can’t do murders when they’re into it”

(13–14). Like the city, Wayne has a schizoid personality, torn between decay and corruption and a nostalgic sense of what might have been. Suicidal with an end times sensibility, the nostalgia is probably baseless, as divorced from reality as Wayne’s sense of self (with Batman as another person). With his reference to Batman (and with Batman’s eventual return), there is a question of how Batman ﬁts into the scheme: as the noble knight who will save the holy city or as something else, not wholly good but necessary to save the world Wayne knows.

The enemy of the Dark Knight texts is also Gotham City. Its very structures and history engender crime.... This postmodern Batman quickly discovers that crime is a structural feature of the city as a whole and not simply the willful actions of the have- nots, who iso-late themselves from the wealthy and proper citizens of Gotham ... the bat is no longer a

In document The Meaning of Superhero Comic Books (Page 180-193)