Ours is a Comic Book Culture

While the majority of us may not actually read comic books, we all feel their influence.

Hollywood A-listers like Angelina Jolie and Seth Rogen are geeks. Or at least they seem to be, judging from the company they keep. Both attended the annual love-in for geek culture known as Comic-Con this last week in San Diego. Dating back to 1970, the annual convention celebrates not only comic books, but also science fiction, horror, anime, video games, and associated collectibles. It has become so popular that fears of overcrowding have afflicted the organizers since 2006 – 126,000 visitors attended last year, jamming the San Diego Convention Center to the rafters

Yet being surrounded by faux Klingons and life-size cardboard video-game vixens didn’t seem to faze these new gods of Hollywood. Why? Well, the sheer size of the crowd gives them a captive audience to promote their newest films, Salt in Jolie’s case, The Green Hornet in Rogen’s. Yet even more, Hollywood has come to a realization in the last 10 years that we live in a new sort of culture. We may not be, at least on a mass scale, a culture that reads comic books – though a subculture of comic fans certainly does. But we are a comic book culture. Our culture is one where image and text and pulp narratives are deeply intertwined, one where the fantastic is everywhere.

This isn’t to say that we live in a culture where actual comic books are a primary mass medium, as they were for kids in the early 1950s and to a lesser degree the 1960s. In the early days of television, when the internet and home computers were nothing more than pulp-fiction dreams, at least 90 per cent of boys and the majority of girls were regular visitors to the local newsstand or variety store to pick up a copy of Sheena, Tales from the Crypt, or Young Romance for some mildly salacious thrills they could hide from their parents. Before the Comics Code of 1954 shut down most of the sex, violence, and mocking of authority seen in the most popular books of the day, 650 titles could be found on North American newsstands. This caused a moral panic led by psychologist Fredric Wertham, whose 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent warned American parents that their children were being led by comics down the garden path to juvenile delinquency and sexual perversion.

Though sales declined in the post-Code period, a decade later Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko at Marvel Comics revolutionized the superhero genre with a new breed of more down-to-earth costumed adventurers with their own panoply of personal problems (Lee loved alliteration too, by the way). And so were born troubled-teen Peter Parker, a.k.a. Spider-Man, a band of much-reviled mutants known as the X-Men, and that hard-drinking industrialist Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man. Although largely apolitical, the Marvel silver age walked hand-in-hand with anti-Establishment counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. All its major characters are still with us today, but more as TV and film icons than denizens of the printed panel.

So why do I say we live in a comic book culture while comic books themselves rate fifth or sixth on the list of most popular entertainment media today? There are two basic drives at work here, one largely positive, one largely negative.

The negative aspect of our comic book culture is that we live in what French theorist Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle.” More and more it’s not things that we consume in our all-pervasive shopping-mall society, but images, logos, and brands. From Hollywood blockbusters to widescreen TV miniseries, from portable video players to the unimaginably huge cyberspace that is the Net, we’re immersed in moving images on screens. Even more, few of these images escape commercial motives: YouTube, a web channel dominated by singing cats and illiterate commentary, was sold for $1.65 billion to Google in 2006.

So it’s no surprise that the society of the spectacle is one where the combination of text and images seen in comics becomes very seductive, far preferable to boring old Dickens or Dostoevsky.

Yet there’s another side to this explosion of geekery in our comic book culture, one less commented on. This is the rise of the fantastic narrative to respectability alongside more everyday standard narratives.

In standard narratives, we see things that could happen, given the basic laws of physics and the rudiments of human psychology. In the fantastic narrative, we see things that cannot happen given our current understanding of science, technology, and human nature. But they do anyway. Buffy slays vampires, Cylons mate with humans and produce cute hybrid offspring, cyborg cops chase super-criminals in the streets of Tokyo, and millionaires dress up like bats to expunge the memory of their murdered parents.

In a sense, the fantastic narrative has always been with us, going back to the Sumerian legend of Gilgamesh, who may or may not have worn a cowl and cape, and the Greek myths of the lost island of Atlantis and a tribe of warrior woman named Amazons (none of whom were named Diana Prince). Yet as an active aspect of mass culture, the rise of the fantastic can be dated fairly precisely to the pulp fiction and masked marvels of the 1920s and 1930s (with apologies to Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker). The power of such narratives has ebbed and flowed since then, though in the last decade has risen to such a height that would amaze even the Shadow and his contemporaries.

Why the fantastic? And why now? The positive explanation of its rise is that the thrills and free-flowing imagination found in the fantastic are a potent antidote to the drab conformity we find in the three assembly lines that have dominated modern society: the factory assembly lines that drove western economies from the 1920s to the 1980s; the bureaucratic assembly lines of the corporations, governments, and schools that regiment the mind; and the digital assembly lines that chain workers and players alike to the personal computer as a primary mode of production and leisure.

The fantastic represents an escape from this Fordism of the mind and body, with its mind-forged manacles. To paraphrase Shelley, the fantastic uses a secret alchemy to transmute the repetition and boredom of everyday life into something better, something exciting. If leavened with just a touch of reality and a sprinkle of political relevance, it can produce great art such as Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galatica or Warren Ellis’s comics series Transmetropolitan and Planetary.

That’s why over a 100,000 people go to Comic-Con. That’s why we live in a comic book culture.