The Superhero Reader by Worcester Kent Hatfield Charles Heer Jeet

Author:Worcester, Kent, Hatfield, Charles, Heer, Jeet [Worcester, Kent, Hatfield, Charles, Heer, Jeet]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2013-02-15T08:00:00+00:00

A Song of the Urban Superhero

SCOTT BUKATMAN

Chapter originally titled “The Boys in the Hoods: A Song of the Urban Superhero,” reprinted by permission from Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century, 184–223. © 2003 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. www.dukeupress.edu.

There is a city, a glorious and singular place. Old and yet pristine, ornate and yet streamlined. A metropolis of now and then and never was.

STARMAN #1

IN THE STORIES THEY COME STRAIGHT AT YOU, IN BOLD, BLURRED STREAKS OF color against the ground of the great metropolis. At first glance they are terribly crude—especially in their first decades of existence—but familiarity and developing history endow them with copious nuance. Cloaking themselves in vibrant tones, they come straight at you in a blur and streak across the panel, the page, the city, the mind, and then they stop: wondrous polychrome monuments, somehow intimate and solid and untouchable in the sky.

I find it fascinating, or at least noteworthy, that superheroes, many of whom could, let’s face it, live anywhere they want, invariably reside in American cities.1 Other comics bring us to the ‘burbs (Archie) or beyond known space (Star Wars), but superheroes are homebodies as much as homeboys: Superman is generally content to operate in and around Metropolis, Batman’s name is synonymous with Gotham City, Opal City is Starman’s official place of residence, and for a strange while, all the Marvel superheroes jostled for room (and, presumably, apartments) in—where else?—New York. Crime remains at the level of heists and elaborate capers, the crowd exists only to gawk, and an anticorporatist populism marks the sole intrusion of a realpolitik. In the mid-1980s, creators began to explore the relation between heroic figure and urban ground, and the city became something more than a generic background for superheroic derring-do.2 The superhero-city link has become increasingly explicit in such recent comics as Kurt Busiek’s Astro City and Alan Moore’s Top 10.

Let me propose that American superheroes encapsulated and embodied the same utopian aspirations of modernity as the cities themselves. Superhero narratives thus comprise a genre that joins World’s Fairs, urban musicals, and slapstick comedies in presenting urban modernity as a utopia of sublime grace. These comics dream impossible figures in ideal cities. Even if those cities themselves were hardly individuated in the first decades of superhero comics—Coast City and Central City served as backdrops more than fully felt environments—still, they were cities, and while superhero comics don’t produce an urban analysis that city planners can use, they nevertheless provide a compelling iconography of a rich urban imaginary, unfettered and uncanny.

Because the audience for superhero comics largely consisted of adolescent and postadolescent males (as any visitor to a comics shop can attest), explanations of comics’ appeal have stuck to well-worn paths mostly trodden by Oedipus. Superheroes have been regarded as power fantasies for boys who have not yet acclimated socially (as with kids’ fascination with less-than-human/more-than-human dinosaurs). Superheroes are also said to embody the displacement of sexual

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