In The Amazing Transforming Superhero, my collection on the revisionism that is inher-ent in the superhero story, I offered a critical paradigm that described several differinher-ent degrees and sources of revision; regardless, all types of revision refer back to the original in an implicit and unintentional way (unintentional in that current creators may not have any direct knowledge of the original, whatever “the original” might be).27In turn, I presented several texts that I considered to be central in the study of superhero revisionism, including Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes, Umberto Eco’s “The Myth of Superman,”
Richard Reynolds’s Superheroes: A Modern Mytholog y, and Geoff Klock’s How to Read Super-hero Comics and Why. Since I was narrowly focused on revisionism, this was not meant to be an exhaustive list describing the history of scholarship devoted to scholarship on superhero comic books. Nevertheless, it is a good place to begin, as I describe why studies of traditional art are helpful in understanding superhero comic books that I believe have now fully realized their potential in the digital age. All of these works deal with the way superheroes represent mythology, variations on ancient and modern folktales connected to the culture of its audi-ence in ways more direct than other mediums. While Feiffer’s very personal work is not
academic in a traditional way, he approximates a cultural studies approach and identifies comic books as “junk” (low culture) that serves particular social needs (Feiffer 78). In an essay contained within The Role of the Reader, Eco examines Superman’s design as consumable and yet inconsumable, possessing the illusion of development but never truly changing (Eco 111). In the work that dramatically spurred superhero studies forward, Reynolds compares the dynamics of classic superhero stories to that of classic mythology and analyzes how landmark texts like The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen fit into those dynamics. And in a work that is very academic is its rigorous use of theory, Klock applies Harold Bloom’s ideas to the evolution of the Modern Age superhero. When looking at superheroes as a sort of mythology, each work is indebted to popular notions of archetypal psychology and Marx-ist philosophy in varying degrees. Reynolds tends to see superhero mythology as a natural function of human psychology, and Eco identifies superhero mythology as a functional product of a society that disguises its own workings; without demonstrating an awareness of archetypal psychology or Marxist philosophy, Feiffer straddles the line between the two and with an acute awareness of literary theory, Klock chooses the Freudian anxiety of influence over the Jungian archetypal psychology.
Sometimes acknowledging these key texts and sometimes not, others have entered the fray to discuss the nature of superhero mythology such as Thomas Andrae (“From Menace to Messiah”),28Neil Harris (“Who Owns Our Myths?”),29and John Lawrence and Robert Jewett (The Myth of the American Superhero),30 among others. And the debate about the source and influence of superhero comic book mythology extends further back in time to fanzine work in collections like All in Color for a Dime and even further to the Frankfurt school influenced critics that Jeet Heer and Kent Worchester identify as “the New York intellectuals.” This debate about the nature of superhero mythology is important especially in the way that it identifies the cultural dynamic that accounts for the reader in more imme-diate ways than other print media, like the novel. Regardless, what interests me most is the way that the superhero has been identified as mythology: the fact that the superhero seems to change and yet reactivates a supposedly transcendent mythic sensibility. Despite the fact that superhero comic books are a print medium, the dynamics of their stories and their treatment of the audience resemble what takes place with epics in oral cultures. If we can determine why they operate like stories in an oral culture and not a literate culture, the debate about the natural or unnatural shape of superhero mythology is necessarily rechar-acterized; within the context of traditional aesthetics, mythology is something that naturally grows from the means by which stories are shared but that varies from culture to culture.
In other words, the mythology of superhero comic books should then be understood as both natural and unnatural, thus adding more depth to the discussion about mythology already in progress. The idea of the superhero industry as an oral culture demonstrates how comic book superheroes function as both myth and commodity, and how the two ideas are not as diametrically opposed as they purport to be. However, in order to determine how superhero comic books operate like stories in an oral culture, I need to provide some basic groundwork for studies in oral/traditional cultures.
Although I have used the terms orality, oral culture, and oral tradition rather freely in the introduction and this chapter, specific definitions of these terms are necessary to proceed effectively. Orality is the most extensive of the above-mentioned terms, referring to not just verbal expression and comprehension and also thought in societies predating the advent of writing and print matter. Therefore, orality is often set in contrast to literacy as literacy is understood in a more historical and academic sense of the word; literacy refers to written
expression and comprehension and also thought in societies postdating the advent of writing and print matter. An oral culture is a culture living in the midst of orality and the modes of thinking associated with orality. Oral tradition is the verbal and auditory means by which information is transmitted and received in an oral culture; the transmission of information is enacted within a specific social group, over the course of generations, and through a com-plex set of rules that govern the organization and reception of that information. Before pro-ceeding further, I will address what may seem to be crucially important conceptual impediments to my study (to which I’ve already briefly alluded). Comic books are produced within a literate culture, are the product of print technology (which is a characteristic of literate culture’s language-based transmission of information), and contain visual information (which seems far outside the boundaries of any sort of verbal transmission of information).
However, orality and literacy are not opposites, and more recent work in the field of oral culture has stressed this (often examining their coexistence). While orality and literacy imply radically different modes of consciousness and social organization, identifying the two states as opposed to one another is not wholly accurate as orality always precedes literacy (leaving residual traces of orality and the opportunity to study orality within a literate culture).31In addition, new media technologies have often been understood as technologies that add something new to the cultural mix, returning us to an era more like that of orality, synthe-sizing orality and literacy, or inaugurating an era completely different from those preceding it.32And orality has been broadened in many studies to also indicate a set of related practices (that may include different sorts of image transmission) and referred to as traditionality.33 Perhaps most important for the sake of this study, I want to make clear that I am identifying the ideals of oral culture as being enacted in certain terms within the culture of superhero industry. However, I am also using orality as a metaphor to describe the dynamics of comic book narrative and illustration.
In the 20th century, the prominent scholars who initiated the study of orality were Milman Parry and his student, Albert Lord.34 In a series of articles,35Parry would make several groundbreaking claims about the nature of epic poetry (later made cohesive by Lord’s The Singer of Tales in 1960). In a very general sense, epic poetry is a long narrative poem usually containing a heroic journey, and important cultural information is connected to that journey; regularly produced within oral cultures (Homer’s Odyssey and Beowulf are known as primary epics), epic poetry is also self-consciously produced within literate cultures (Milton’s Paradise Lost and Pound’s Cantos are known as secondary epics). Interested in the dynamics of oral culture in general (and Homer’s Odyssey in particular) and working with the notion that oral composition results in specific sorts of narratives, Parry would study performances of oral poetry in Yugoslavia. Based upon Parry’s field research, Parry would contend that Homer’s composition was based upon the skillful arrangement of formulae, fixed expressions usually adapted in performance of a narrative to suit metrical conditions.
Therefore, this meant a classic such as Homer’s Odyssey was the end result of generations of performers leading to Homer (and that it only ended its development by virtue of being fixed in writing) (Foley, The Theory 31–35). Lord would clarify that this written text was the product of a listening experience by the scribes and didn’t accurately represent the epic poem that changed with every performance (despite the typical assertions of performers that they were performing the poem as originally intended). Among other things, the reason that Parry and Lord’s work was considered so revolutionary (and controversial at first) is that they worked to refute certain conventions of art that were held as universal within the mindset of literate culture, such as fixity, originality, and primacy. Within the context of
oral culture, the greatest version of an epic poem was not the original source (as no sense of originality existed) but the most recent variation. Fixity, originality, and primacy were luxuries of a culture that could fix their ideas in print. The larger implications of their writing were that there was a definite difference between thought in oral cultures and thought in literate cultures (36–44).
The most significant of the scholars to articulate this difference is Walter Ong, who also applied his ideas to visual culture and electronic media.36Significant works such as The Presence of the Word would lead to summative classic Orality and Literacy, in which oral cul-ture is described as valuing: (1) repetition rather than innovation, (2) aggregation rather than analysis, (3) participation rather than objectivity, (4) the situational rather than the abstract, and (5) addition to rather than advancement beyond existing ideas (Ong, Orality 37–57). In essence, participants in an oral culture turn outward to group thought rather than inward to individual thought, and the innovation of writing and print culture “restruc-tures consciousness” (77), fundamentally altering the values just mentioned. However, Ong would always be quick to acknowledge that, despite the sweeping influence of writing and print, such change would never be as uniform as one might think (based on the vehemence with which literate culture defends its values) (Ong, The Presence 18).37Arguments of fixity, originality, and primacy became especially important in the 20th century, and new media forms seemed to violate those tenets and often provided the basis for the division identified by some cultural critics between high culture (literature) and low culture (comic books).38 As noted by Walter Ong and prominent media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, new media contains elements of oral culture in a prominent way that extends beyond the residues in print matter.39In order to account for the reemergence of orality in an “electronic” age, Ong would develop the idea of secondary orality (with attention paid primarily to new media like film and television that actually contained audio elements). Like primary orality, this phenomenon generates a strong group identity, but, unlike primary orality, this group identity is not the result of an inability to think in terms of the self; instead, it is a more self-conscious choice (Ong, Orality 134). Thus with Ong’s sense of secondary orality, the new media experience may require the label of postmodern to better explain the self-con-scious creation of oral culture.
Inheriting and refining the work of Parry, Lord, and Ong, John Miles Foley would turn his interests to the comparative study of oral traditions (his interests shaped in part by his rejection of scholars’ tendency to ignore the unique contexts and practices of individual oral traditions). Influenced by cultural studies, his works would explore the richness of individual oral traditions, in comparison and contrast, in Immanent Art and The Singer of Tales in Performance. In addition to establishing the field of study with a comprehensive bibliography and guide to teaching oral tradition, Foley has made connections between the practices of oral cultures and those of digital cultures in ways that may begin to explain how and why tendencies of oral epics are resurfacing in precursors to digital culture like comics books. In an essay that opens the collection Teaching Oral Traditions, Foley sug-gests that oral tradition is not something that can be contained within the confines of the literary canon or the museum, both constructs of power developed in literate cultures that uphold the “illusion of the object” and the “illusion of stasis” (Foley, “The Impossibility”
17). Oral performance changes every time it is performed for a variety of reasons and this makes oral epics multidimensional, unable to be confined on a static page. Rather than serve as information complete in itself, oral tradition provides pathways to information, much like the internet. As an open-ended, ever-expanding system, the internet serves as a
better means to conceptualize (and actualize) oral tradition, something that exists only in its multiformity (22). Represented now in his web-based Pathways Project, this speculation about the nature of oral culture not only explains the resurfacing of oral culture tendencies in contemporary culture but also builds a bridge between oral culture studies and digital culture studies.
With this rudimentary overview of the foundational concepts in the studies of orality, the connections between superhero revisionism and the concerns of superhero scholars are hopefully already becoming clear. If we agree the general definition of an epic is a heroic journey with broad characters that are integrally tied to the culture, superhero comic books would seem to belong in this category. Together with Lord’s assertion that the epic is devel-oped in segments that make use of formulaic repetition over long stretches of time, the stories of superheroes seem especially well designed as epics. Staying with this discussion of the superhero narrative in abstract terms, this provides an explanation for the acceptance of the most recent version of a superhero story as the authoritative story (Earth-1 versus Earth-2). Through the policy of corporate ownership, the industry erased the individual author (and past versions of the superhero’s story) and created a sense of collective ownership that stresses currency over primacy. In fact, even when variations are recognized as such, they are often valued by the public as much as the “official” version (with “imaginary” stories of superheroes in the 1960s culminating in the Ultimate and All Star lines of comic books).
Consumers of comic book stories demonstrate tendencies characteristic of people within an oral culture through their almost pathological desire to return to the superhero’s origin;
repetition is privileged and this repetition reinforces the basic truths of the story and the fan community. Without even fully considering the fact that the basic superhero narrative is known throughout the world, topping the international box office in their film form, a focus on avid superhero readers suggests that they have a devotion that leads to their par-ticipation with the ongoing story (via letters pages, costumes at conventions, and internet fanficton). These extreme forms of participation (similar to the active participation in sto-rytelling within oral culture) are continued within all age groups despite the general senti-ment that identifies superhero comic books as juvenile reading material.40If we’re tentatively willing to accept superhero comic books as an oral culture experience that has reawakened residual tendencies of oral culture, it could be argued that the direct market consumer of comic books might have a sensibility and community that refutes that sentiment (focused on continuity, creators, and collecting). But secondary orality describes the self-conscious deployment of traditional variations in a post-oral culture seen in the Modern Age of super-heroes, with self-aware revisers like Frank Miller and Alan Moore. Despite lacking a genuine oral component, comic books seem to be that new media form that stimulates an orally based intellectual response that in turn activates a state of mind largely structured in tra-ditional terms within a digital age. As seen in the works of Warren Ellis (The Authority and Planetary), superhero stories do not exist in an authoritative form but as a multidimensional, endlessly retconned situation that employs a digital culture sensibility and undermines the idea of a master narrative.
Whether or not practitioners are aware of the revisionism that occurs within the con-tinually repeated superhero narrative (and the level of awareness does vary), the idea of the superhero industry as oral culture does account for all degrees of revisionism, as well audi-ence-based critical participation in revisionism. In addition, this approach begins to explain why such different interpretations of the superhero phenomenon exist, from the assertion of archetypal mythology (that the superhero always remains the same) to the assertion of
Marxist interpretation (that the superhero always changes). The likely reason that the super-hero continues to exist is not that the supersuper-hero is beyond our conscious understanding as a figure with essential content or no real content whatsoever (either as part of the collective unconscious or part of the ideology from which we can never be free). Instead, the mode of storytelling initiated by superhero comic books requires a distinctive sort of repetition that is only beyond the conscious understanding of the literate mind (that thinks only in terms of literacy). This is why the cultural studies approach to the superhero has asserted that the superhero is very significant to our culture: because the superhero is both the sign of something new and something old. While some may question the application of oral cul-ture studies to superhero comic books, it circumvents the tendency to argue on behalf of a theory without fully considering the subject matter in question: superhero comic books, themselves. In his general description of orality and literacy, Walter Ong ambitiously states:
There is no “school” of orality and literacy, nothing that would be the equivalent of For-malism or New Criticism or Structuralism or Deconstructionism, although awareness of the interrelationship of orality and literacy can affect what is done in these as well as vari-ous other “schools” or “movements” all through the humanities and social sciences. Knowl-edge of orality-literacy contrasts and relationships does not normally generate impassioned allegiances to theories but rather encourages reflection on aspects of the human condition far too numerous ever to be enumerated [Ong, Orality 1–2].
My argument probably still leaves what might seem like some insurmountable barriers for a scholar of oral culture regarding the field in the strictest sense. After all, comic books are print matter and comic books have no oral performance per se; in addition, they also seem indelibly connected to a visual culture that is understood as antithetical to the mind of oral culture.41Even if I only chose to identify superhero comic books as a manifestation of sec-ondary orality, these ideas would be problems. Returning to my description of orality in
My argument probably still leaves what might seem like some insurmountable barriers for a scholar of oral culture regarding the field in the strictest sense. After all, comic books are print matter and comic books have no oral performance per se; in addition, they also seem indelibly connected to a visual culture that is understood as antithetical to the mind of oral culture.41Even if I only chose to identify superhero comic books as a manifestation of sec-ondary orality, these ideas would be problems. Returning to my description of orality in