I have a confession to make. When I sent the manuscript for Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero (Dittmer 2013) to its publisher, I fell off the wagon. After reading superhero comics for the better part of a decade, documenting the adventures of flag-draped superheroes in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom from 1940 to the present, I quit. I’m not someone who believes that a big wall separates the superhero comics from the rest of the comics world, but after over a thousand superhero comics I was definitely ready to switch things up a bit. So I dabbled in all the great new stuff that I had missed when my reading time was occupied by my book project – some of which were discovered by reading this very website (Fransman 2012) and are highly relevant to this essay. And all the while my monthly delivery of Captain America arrived like clockwork, joining its predecessors on my office desk. Last week, I was finally shamed by the verticality of the stack (almost a year and a half’s worth!) into taking them home and giving them some attention. The comics included the end of Ed Brubaker’s eight year run on the title (a pretty remarkable achievement nowadays), during which he famously brought Bucky back from the dead and walked Captain America through the Civil War crossover that made headlines around the world (e.g., Gustines 2007). One might expect a triumphant victory lap for Brubaker’s swansong on the title. Nevertheless, the end of Brubaker’s run seemed fixated on decline and the limits to power. In this essay I hope to briefly trace the ‘Powerless’ storyline (Brubaker and Davis 2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2012,d, 2012e), as well as the events leading up to and following from that storyline, before contextualizing it all with a tiny, painless dose of political theory. I will then argue that the trope of ‘Powerless’ (in which, not surprisingly, Captain America’s body loses its superpowers) is a relatively common one over the history of the character. While this is to a certain extent true of many superheroes, in the context of Captain America the plot device is freighted with the baggage of the nationalist superhero genre.
On September 11, 2001, Art Spiegelman, son of Auschwitz survivors and renowned author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus (1992), found himself on a “ringside seat” to the attacks on the WTC (Spiegelman, 2004: p. 2). This was it; the moment his parents had anticipated when they taught him “to always keep [his] bags packed” (Spiegelman, 2004 [1]). Personal life and world history collided once again on Ground Zero and, after years of writing and illustrating for The New Yorker – though never combining the two disciplines – the cartoonist returned to the medium that he considers to be ultimately his own: comix.[2]
Spiegelman’s second opus In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) contains ten large-scale cardboard pages, each with an eclectic collection of images and frames: comic figures from the dawn of the twentieth century feature prominently in the autobiographical story that is further built on references to popular culture, including the author’s familiar ‘disguise’ as a mouse. Produced in the two years right after the attacks, the shape of the towers is frequently mirrored in both single panels and in page structures. All together, the book provides a nearly surreal report of life in lower Manhattan; the neighbourhood in which the absence of the Twin Towers was ultimately present. Further, in order to do justice to “oversized skyscrapers and outsized events” (Spiegelman, 2004) the templates are extraordinary in size; each of them designed to precisely fill a full newsprint page, in colour.
This article examines the way a temporary inflexion towards a cinematic representation in City of Glass: the Graphic Novel – an adaptation which actively seeks to explore the specificities of the comics form – brings to the surface the fragmented and incomplete state of tradition in comics.
Among many other things, David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik’s adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass (City of Glass GN in the rest of this text) is a visual interpretation of the noir homage present in Auster’s book. City of Glass, the first novel of the New York Trilogy, initially relies on a loose pastiche of detective fiction and more specifically of the novels of Raymond Chandler, in which private eyes accept unclear missions for the sake of beautiful women. This archetypal scene is replayed both in the novel and in the graphic novel, when Quinn, the main protagonists, accepts to keep watch over a man named Stillman in part because of his attraction to Virginia’s Stillman, the man’s daughter-in-law.
Judging from my recollection, the most animated discussion (pun intended) at the Third International Comics Conference (“Comics Rock,” held at Bournemouth University, June 28-29, 2012) took place in the aftermath of the keynote address given by David Lloyd (Kickback, V for Vendetta) and Steve Marchant (The Cartoonist’s Workshop, The Computer Cartoon Kit). That their address was to be, at some level, reactive to a perceived challenge was a foregone conclusion based on the chosen title, “No Artistic Value that Anyone Can See.” There is a double-entendre in that provocative title. On the face of it, the title seems to allude to a dismissive comment made about the value – or, more precisely, the lack thereof – attributed to the entire genre. Yet simultaneously it is a camouflaged assertion, obtained by astutely rewording an opposing sentiment, namely “artistic value that none can see.” That is indeed the crux of the problem, especially for David Lloyd. The genre has an image problem. Ironically, in the same fashion that the Guy Fawkes mask popularized by David Lloyd immobilizes the physiognomy of the protagonist in V for Vendetta behind an incongruously comical smile, the merit of David Lloyd’s own serious artistic production is continually dissimulated, in large part, by virtue of the blanket use of the baggage-laden umbrella term comics to refer to the whole gamut of sequential art, everything from the Sunday funnies to graphic novels of notoriety such as V for Vendetta. It is certainly by design that the objectionable word is absent from the title of the keynote talk. Why continue to tacitly dignify a word, simply by virtue of using it, that one wishes to overthrow? Sequential art is the term David Lloyd would like to promote in its place.
I repeat here something I first mentioned in the discussion that immediately followed that keynote address: Historically speaking, sequential art is not alone in its disrespected misery. In order to thrive and evolve into something of substance, many art forms have gone through a necessary struggle and, in part, a revolt against their own roots before becoming something more than a diversion: fictional writing and film are examples. The process is not easy and the trajectories will not be the same, but sequential art is now pursuing a similar path in attempting to liberate itself from the constraints of its past, as perceived in the public eye. Of course the parameters of this problem are not the same in every country where sequential art has had prominence. For example, though usually not accorded the same standing as works of literary prose or poetry, there is nevertheless widespread acceptance of bande dessinée as a worthy art form in Francophone Europe.
Comics Forum 