continued from last Friday;1.
I. Can we all admit that it's just possible that on the faintest occasion even the most longstanding, jaded and cynical of superhero comic-book readers might idly imagine themselves swinging on a web around and between the skyscrapers of New York City. And surely only a few of us are entirely immune to the charm and excitement of imagining ourselves ripping apart a white cotton shirt to reveal that great and iconic red and yellow "S" on our chests beneath? Even Robert Bruce Banner's terrifying and painful transformation into the Hulk can still be thrilling by association even as the decades of observing it roll by, for who hasn't, at one moment or another, as an adolescent or as what's so often laughably known as an adult, wanted to dissolve into a rage that would scare the whole world far, far away?
This we know. Part, and often a substantial part, of the appeal of any fiction is how it engages the audience's imagination and encourages them to playfully fancy that they too, in comic book terms, are solving impossible crimes with Mr Wayne, or running so fast that they can play tennis against themselves, as can the Wests and the Allens, or, to take what's probably something of a niche market where daydreaming is concerned, escaping from an ant-hill in the guise of the miniaturised Henry Pym?
But no-one with the slightest knowledge of mental disorders ever vicariously imagines themselves becoming schizophrenic, whether it's the "king-sized" version or not. Oh, we might be happy to daydream of our bodies being transformed, so that we might rule the oceanic state of Atlantis or survive outside the JLA satellite in its geosynchronous orbit. But every single one of us would surely be reluctant to fantasise surrendering our very self of sense in return for what at its worst, and the worst is regrettably what's inevitably shown in superhero tales, the miseries of despair, for a disassociation between our thoughts and our actions, for an-almost total inability to share the society of typical human beings, to live in what Philip K. Dick called "the tombworld".
II. And so, though Henry Pym's various costumed identities never quite caught the comic-book reader's imagination as a marquee-heading star, his various mentally disordered guises must have only intensified the problems that his audience had in empathising with him. For Pym has been schizophrenic, a wife-beater tormented by a stress disorder, a shamed-out-of-the-superheroes-profession depressive, a sufferer from multiple personalities in multiple bodies, an apparently self-obsessed and potential bearer of Aspergers , and now, an extremely odd, arrogant, robot-loving, and perhaps quite delusional "scientist supreme", with what well could be borderline avoidant personality disorder.
Mind you, he's also been a decent and reliable team-mate, a fine husband, a repentant and attentive lover, a scientist of outstanding repute and a superhero of considerable achievement.
But as we've discussed, the label of mental disorder sticks, and when a character has had as many serious and protracted psychological problems as Dr Pym has, the label isn't so much stuck as tattooed through his marrow.
2.I. It's not as if suffering from madness per se alienates the readers of superhero comics. Comic-book consumers are perfectly happy to accept and engage with representations of mental disorders afflicting their superheroes which don't bear any relation to what they think a serious psychological problem might constitute in the "real" world. So while the simulacra of insanity that grips the likes of Ambush Bug and Deadpool might prevent the characters from ever being in the very front-line of commercial success, long-promised movies excepting, their unreal form of "happy" madness, all comic internal voices and wisecracks and trickster rule-breaking, can make us laugh out loud as we might at a Groucho or a Murray. In essence, these characters circumvent the audience-killing effect of their mental disabilities by revealing through their actions that the universe they find themselves is the truly insane character on view instead. The Marvel Universe is therefore the leaden-footed and yet quite absurd straight-man to which Deadpool plays court jester, and if everyone and everything's insane, then madness is nothing much to worry about at all.
But that's not madness. It's a joke, and it's often a very funny one too. But any behaviour or thought which carries with it even the slightest scent of true madness, or even such a label as "schizophrenic" when it's not associated with the buffoonery of a Jim Carey movie, well; that's an entirely different matter.
II. And so the superhero comic tends towards representing mental disorder as either a device to make us laugh or as an explanation for why people might want to do us harm. But what we rarely if ever see is the fact that many of those who bear many mental disorders recover, or with treatment and careful scaffolding manage their conditions so as to be able to maintain much if not all of what would be regarded as a typical life. Even the the much-feared and yet much-misunderstood schizophrenia is a condition which many manage to such a degree that they can pursue meaningful and successful lives.
Yet that concept of management can quite escape the writer of superheroes, for in the four-colour world recovery tends to either be complete, as with Pym's "king-sized" breakdown, or illusionary, as those who would do society harm relapse from their treatment at the various Arkham Asylums and return to their nefarious ways.
And those "complete" recoveries, unless there's a very convincing and canon-established explanation such as "Red Kryptonite" for them, tend to sooner or later end in relapse and catastrophe too.
III. Yet comic books would never show serious real-world physical conditions such as cancer or AIDs as being either a source of laughter or an unbeatable class of disasters from which only temporary relief could ever be gained. Nor would they tend to associate a vast proportion of crime and human suffering with the super-powered, or at least super-villainous, survivors of those conditions.
This is something we will return to next time.
3.
I. It might well be asked why the presence of even a single experience of mental disorder in a character's background should retain such an influence over the imaginations of cape'n'costumes comic-book creators and fans. But superhero fans have been trained from their first immersion in the genre to recognise trauma and despair as the central pillars of heroism. Whether it's the fact of young Kal-El's exile from long-destroyed Krypton, or the slaughter of the Waynes in what would become Crime Alley, or the entirely avoidable death of Uncle Ben, we know that trauma is the key to making sense of what drives the greatest superheroes into their costumes and out on patrol every night. In truth, every tale of The Batman is the story of what happened to young master Bruce after his parent's murder, whether or not their deaths are ever mentioned. (In fact, the "The" in Batman's title can be regarded as standing for "The boy who never got over Thomas and Martha's deaths who became", so omni-present are those horrors.) Loss and the inability to ever quite return from it powers so many of the most popular and famous heroes that it's sometimes hard to remember quite how saturated in despair these books can be.
And the superhero whose origins are founded in trauma rarely ever recovers. The reader knows this. After all, if recovery occurred, there well might not be a superhero left to enjoy the adventures of at all, and there certainly won't be that tragic dimension that helps modify the disturbing power of these superfolks with that underpinning of pity-inspiring bleakness. (*1) The debates over The Batman and his relationship to his alter ego of Bruce Wayne, and vice-versa, are very rarely about whether either of them should be shown to have gotten entirely over the events of that long-gone night following an evening showing of "Zorro". For it's inconceivable that The Batman will ever be, to one degree or another, free of that pain and suffering. Why ever would Bruce Wayne be something as remarkable as Batman if he wasn't compelled to be?
And why would we care if he wasn't so haunted and driven?
II. Yet if the butchery of Uncle Ben must never be forgotten by either Peter Parker or ourselves, and if readers very quickly learn that they must bring their knowledge of his murder with them to even the cheeriest of Spider-Man's adventures, so surely must all superhero miseries be similarly attended to. That's what we readers learn. They're the keys to the code, the shorthand for "why", the reductionist morality that provides the sub-text of all grand superhero adventures; "this is why we do these things, so that irreversible wrongs won't occur." And if that's so, then how much more significant must, for example, Henry Pym's recurrent mental breakdowns be in the minds of those readers used to
focusing on the single tragic enciting incidents that drive the existence of the greatest superheroes? In the crudest terms, knowing of the loss of Krypton helped Clark Kent face up to his mortality and strengthened his sense of mission, as in all the most typical takes of the heroes' journey. But what Henry Pym has lost, until the recent and supposed death of the Wasp, is not so much another person or another place, but himself. His mental problems, ranging from the challenging to the utterly devastating, are not a mark of any failure of duty on his account. He never asked to be ill or knowingly sought disorder out. And if the cruelty in the universe that encouraged Peter Parker to regretfully avoid the burglar, or permitted Krypton's core to explode, has an equivalent in Hank's tale, it would the fact of the vulnerability of his own psychology.
According to the laws of "superhero logic", Hank Pym should be declaring war on that thing which has so hurt him and so caused the pain that he's witnessed around him. And so perhaps Hank Pym should be dedicating his efforts to the fight against the vulnerabilities of human psychology, not pulling on a costume time and time again in order to fight villain-z and mad-god-x, because that's where his psychological problems, the cruelty in his existence, has tended to manifest itself. Just as Bruce Wayne knows what it's like to loose a family, Peter Peter an adopted father, and Clark Kent an entire race and culture, and twice, Hank knows what it's like to be betrayed by his mind. And in more different ways than any other single inhabitant of the Marvel Universe too, I'd imagine.
But a superhero who studies in a university and researches in a laboratory to the necessary exclusion of all else wouldn't be a superhero at all. And so Hank Pym pulls on another of his many spandex costumes and heads off again to do the four-colouring adventuring which every time has caused him, to a greater or lesser degree, to collapse in despair.
IV. It's as if the constant attempts to supposedly increase Pym's appeal through such extreme dispositional changes to his character have actually secretly been designed to achieve the very opposite. For no matter how much unhappiness, trauma, disorder and despair are poured into the frame of Henry Pym, his standing with the readers never increases to be anything other than that of a rather pathetically-disturbing second-stringer who on occasion can help win the day despite his "problems".
And we comic-book readers keep searching through the entrails of his misery in order to find the simple noble cause of suffering that'll inform his situation and eventually redeem it. But it isn't there, though a whole load of other unhappiness is. It's as if comic-book writing is a form of very primitive alchemy where Dr Pym is concerned, with the alchemists throwing every ingredient into the mix they can think of in order to produce the optimum Henry Pym, and with every new element sprinkled into the brew, the outcome becomes more uncertain and more confused. Not one Henry Pym, but many, and not a tragic hero, but a substantially ill-defined and rather irritating one because of it.
4.
I. But who can blame comic-book creators for latching onto Pym and pushing him in this way and that? There's so much that can be done with the character, because there's not actually a single character there at all, and there's so many ghosts of so many Pyms-past that just about anything can be justified by pointing to one of them and shouting "foreshadowing". He is, after a fashion, a writer's dream, for there's not a role that he can't be nominated to fill, and whatever he does, the author's get-out-of-jail cards are that Pym's had problems before and he's been shown acting in such-and-such a way before too.
Whatever that way might be.
II.Without Henry Pym's temporary succumbing to "king-sized schizophrenia", there would have nothing in his history as a character to indicate that he was capable of becoming a wife-beater and a deranged super-villain willing to send a killer robot after his fellow Avengers. Look elsewhere in Pym's past and there's not a single trace of psychological disorder that wasn't absolutely common to male superheroes throughout Marvel's Bronze and Silver Age beyond the fact that he'd taken three sets of super-powers and four code-names. His explosions of rage, for example, were absolutely common in Marvel's books of the period, in which anyone who wasn't a teenager or a woman marked their manhood by working too hard, caring too much, shaking fists at their comrades and aggressively calling each other "mister". If Hank suffered from the despair, for example, of being trapped at "giant-size" height, it was no more angst-filled an arc in his career than any other Marvel Hero went through when the likes of four-extra arms were grafted onto them.
But once that mental disability appears in a superheroes story, the threat of it being seen as the fundamental determinant of that character's personality appears and increases with every passing month. And so Pym's constant changing of costumes and code-names becomes an emblem of instability. Yet that might be more convincingly ascribed to Pym's admirable ability to constantly improve his power-set in the name of scientific innovation and efficiency, rather than a reflection of a deep-seated sense of personal inadequacy. Yet Henry Pym's personal career had a considerable similarity to that of Reed Richards himself. For example, Mr Fantastic was constantly undergoing psychological stress due to excessively long working hours and
profoundly unrealistic expectations of himself. He was constantly shown to be wired, over-worked, socially unresponsive, and just plain stressed. (When Galactus first attacked, Reed had worked so hard and for so long that he - gasp - grew a beard! What could be a more pronounced mark of weariness and tension than an unshaven '60's superhero?) A shouting, raging, clearly less-than-all-his-paddles-in-the-boat Reed Richards is constantly on show in the Lee-Kirby books, and indeed in the Stan Lee-written books beyond. Whisper it to those who haven't been reminded of the fact, but Mr Fanatastic even hit Sue Richards too, and without the convincing explanation of a severe mental breakdown mentioned explicitly in the text to explain, if never excuse, it either. (It was a deliberate strategy on Mr Fantastic's to free his wife from mind-control, though why a brain the size of a planet couldn't think of a less directly violent procedure to shock his wife free does somewhat escape me.) And if signs of a deep-seated and corrosive sense of personal inadequacy needed to be found in Reed Richard's past, then why not settle on his constant attempts to invent entirely new branches of mechanics if not indeed comic-book science, which resulted in something utterly incredible appearing in the laboratories of the Baxter Building most every month? But what in Pym are symptoms of madness and unpleasantness are in Richards markers of heroism and at worst a socially-competent condition of Aspergers. But then, this is how labelling, of course, works to ensure that the labelled are never perceived to be free of the "taint".
And given that Reed Richards could no more carry a book than Henry Pym could, it's interesting to speculate that all that's damned the latter's career since Jim Shooter's time writing the Avengers is that single temporary dispositional change of "king-sized schizophrenia" that afflicted Dr Pym.
"Schizophrenia", like the general label of "insanity", explains all other actions once its applied, even when it doesn't. That's, of course, what's so pernicious about labels applied without a considerable degree of knowledge and forethought.
Gasses, schmases. That Pym's not right in the head, and he's a bad lot too.
5.I. When an audience have a clear idea of who a character is, they have a clear idea of what that character will have to do to earn for themselves a sense of redemption. For Superman, Spider-Man and Batman, the sense that they've done their very best in protecting others at whatever cost to themselves helps to mitigate their own feelings of loss and inadequacy. But to ask "What would redemption be for Hank Pym be?" in the context of his role as a superhero in the MU kicks up so many possible and yet unsatisfying options that the indistinct nature of his character becomes, if such needed to be proven, obvious. Saving the Wasp from her apparent death by accessing whatever strange dimension she's supposedly in couldn't save Dr Pym, for example, because he's not only been shacked up with a robot substitute for his estranged and apparently-deceased ex-wife, but he's committed the only apparently-unforgiveable act in the Marvel Universe: he hit his wife, despite doing so while undergoing a complete mental breakdown. (*2) By adding "wife-beater" to the label of "madman", Jim Shooter ensured that Hank Pym's character could never be admired, let alone redeemed.
II. Dispositional changes that ascribe serious mental disorders to superheroes open the door to those characters being shown doing the most terrible things, and that's just what nearly always happens. After all, every person with a pronounced psychological problem does terrible things, don't they, and the very presence of such a shiver of psychological abnormality means that inevitably Green Lantern Corps will be slaughtered and Ninja gangs assisted in taking over New York. That's what all mad people do, isn't it?
*2:- I hope folks me know me well enough to realise that I'm not going to excuse wife-beating in this piece. I'm just introducing a point to be developed in the concluding part later this week, but I'm not going to be excusing violence against women.
And it's to that matter of redemption and insanity that we'll turn to in the concluding chapter. Yes, this was supposed to be a two-part piece, but three parts couldn't be held back. Mea culpe! I hope I might see you in a few days time for a consideration of how mad superheroes prove that they're still heroes!!!! Thank you very much for reading this piece. It's very much appreciated.
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