Because Stan Lee & Jack Kirby Said So!; Making Sense Of The Mighty Avengers (Part 2) "But What Diabolical Scheme Shall I Employ?"

continued from last Saturday;

1.

There are without doubt a host of reasons why someone might declare a particular version of a serial fiction property to be the definitive one, but, of course, there is no right answer. It's always a matter of opinion, and that's what makes each new re-invention of a comicbook as fascinating as it might be disappointing. We want to know whether a new approach to an old character can get it right, even as we know that there's no exclusively correct version at all. Yet, re-reading the Avengers work of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby has made me wonder whether there are some objective qualities that might be found in their work which make their portrayal of characters and concepts seem definitive. By this I mean that I've recently started to ponder whether the fusion of style and content that a team of creators adopts can carry a greater or lesser sense of authority with its readers. Is it possible that there's a way of presenting the superhero on the page which is more likely to cause the reader to decide that that is the version, that is the take, which should in future be acknowledged, respected and kept to? Because I suspect that some creators present their tales in such a way that causes, regardless of the story they're actually telling, the world they're depicting and the characters they're describing to appear to be more objective, more real, more definitive.


We might love a version of Spider-Man because it was the first comic book we ever read, or a take on Batman because we were exposed to it at a particularly vulnerable moment of early adolescence. We might be drawn to a specific artist's style, or to an emotional moment which touches us. But perhaps, beyond the content of the narrative and the nature of the superheroes involved, there are qualities of storytelling in this sub-genre which demand that we take what we're being shown seriously, that impose upon us the creator's version of events in such a way that leaves our imaginations less able, and less willing, to question the validity of what we're seeing.


2.

I'm not suggesting that the work of Lee and Kirby can be argued to constitute that least convincing of propositions, the utterly closed text, where meaning is completely fixed and narrative exists in a form that can't be quibbled with. (Such a comic book would be a form of Anti-Life Equation, after all, nullifying free will and stultifying the reader's creativity! Mr Kirby would never have approved.) And yet I am starting to believe that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's work during the first two or three years of the Marvel Revolution of the early Sixties worked to often create an intense and supremely effective form of what we might call "Paternalistic" storytelling, in which far more of the authority for dictating what is happening on the printed page is held by the creators than is typically found today. "Paternalistic", of course, is a word which has been long held in disrepute by large swathes of folks who intuitively associate any kind of power with repression and tyranny, but I mean "paternalism" is the best of senses. After all, what could be more admirable than parents who take an appropriate responsibility for those they're looking after? And in the pages of Lee and Kirby's work from 1961 to 1965, roughly speaking, can be found a combination as well as a collision of styles which, in the most kindly and entertaining fashion, demands that the reader accepts the sense and detail of what's on the page regardless of how ridiculous and even nonsensical it is.


Put simply, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's combined efforts work on the reader to guide them through a story in a highly controlled and specific sense. When first reading "The Coming Of The Avengers", for example, there's little space for the reader to generate doubts about whether events actually happened in the way that's shown. There's little need on first reading to start fleshing out Lee and Kirby's version of events with extra material, for most if not all doubts and questions and confusions are either obscured by their craft or made to seem irrelevant when considered in the light of how much sheer fun the reader is having. Lee and Kirby pick the reader up with that first splash page of Loki's splendid and haughty nose and propel their audience through the story at an ever-intensifying and yet deliberate and controlled pace until the final page is reached and roared past and there's finally a moment to blink, take a breath, and wonder what the business about the Hulk pretending to be a green robot was all about.

And that's what I'd like to try to discuss today, although I fear I lack the knowledge and the critical language to in any way fully explain the points I'm going to touch upon. But I'm so in awe, of the work that the two gentlemen produced for "The Avengers" # 1 that I'd like to try to earn myself just the slightest measure of a greater understanding of how they achieved what they did. To read "The Coming Of The Avengers" is to be given a snapshot of one moment in the revolutionary process by which Lee and Kirby took the paternalistic traditions of the American superhero book and, in fusing their craft with a previously unseen degree of vigour and innovation, changed everything.

3.

In praising the paternalistic style of Mr Lee and Mr Kirby as expressed at this particular point in their careers, I should say that I'm not suggesting that such an approach should be, or even could be, used in today's superhero comic books. That there's a huge amount about storytelling that might be learnt from just one page of the first issue of "The Avengers" shouldn't be taken as meaning that I'm asking for a return to the style and content of 1963. And yet it should be noted that a great deal of Alan Moore's very finest work, for example, has been in collaboration with artists who've used variations upon the three-tier, nine panel layout for their artwork so common to the first years of Marvel's rise.

And that three-tier, nine-panel grid is as apposite a marker of the Paternalistic style as any other, just as the innovations within it in the early Avengers are emblematic of the mutiny against the conventional that was the Marvel Comics of the period. By 1963, the nine-panel page was already a decades-long default setting for the organisation of the comic book's pages, and before that, for the comic strip too. But its survival as a staple of storytelling reflected its utility, its fundamental versatility, as much as its historical ubiquity. The nine-panel, three-tier page is perfect for providing a story which is packed with a concentration of incident and excitement while ensuring that the progression from action to action, to scene to scene, is as clear and involving as possible. The audience for comic books in 1963 was made up, after all, with the exception of an exceptional minority of almost exclusively male and young adult readers, of children. They were as likely to be extremely young as they were to be limited in their literacy. Comic book publishers survived by working on the assumption that their readers had never come across a comic book before, and by necessity presumed that their audience needed guiding through the process of consuming a story consisting of words and pictures, frames and gutters.


Indeed, the industry worked upon the assumption that each generation of comic book readers would be entirely replaced within at the most 24 months, and understood how important it was that each new replacement reader should be supported and claimed. The reader wasn't seen then as an active consumer who might want to take the time and energy to learn about the detail of continuity before being able to buy into each month's comics. It was the primary task of the comic book creator to paternally ensure that what was before the reader was not just interesting and exciting, but immediately and consistently comprehensible.

In such a context, the nine-panel page was as vital a method of attracting and holding a reader's attention as might be imagined. It permitted comic book creators to focus not just on the individual events that each story was constructed around, but also on the transitions from event to event. There was space in such a page to show not just, as in the example below, how The Hulk disabled Iron Man, but how that event came to be. The reader's hand was held tightly and, yes, caringly , by such a careful process through each comic book so that at no point did their attention waver because the jump from point "a" to point "b" confused and alienated them.

4.

It's certainly true that to the modern eye, the three-tier, nine-panel grid can look old-fashioned, monotonous and formulaic. Such an impression is in part undoubtedly true, and yet such rigid storytelling traditions permit slight digressions made within the standard formula which evoke considerable effects. As we'll discuss, the simple matter of replacing a three panel tier with a two-panel one emphasises the importance of the events depicted in the unexpectedly and untypically larger panels. And when an extreme digression occurs, such as when the Hulk appears on page 9 of "The Coming Of The Avengers" in a panel which takes up two entire tiers, the reader almost has to take a step backwards to cope with the sudden change of scale and the sheer impact of the scene before them. The principle of significant effect resulting from slight digressions from a norm is one which modern comics has largely lost, and it's a terrible shame. Worse than that, it's a tragedy, because one of the simplest techniques for creating amazement and focusing attention in a reader has been abandoned because the industry has in part forgotten how the nine-panel system actually worked. For the paternal approach wasn't entirely conservative. Within its constraints were pioneered a host of techniques for making what seemed like a deadhanded and static approach exciting and innovative.

We'll discuss some of those innovations in a moment, but before we do, it's important to note that the paternalistic nine panel grid doesn't just ground the reader in the business of reading comic books. It also reminds the creator that they are writing and drawing comic books which need to make transparent sense to their audience. It would take a remarkably willful and ignorant creator to take such a layout and consistently misuse it. Catastrophic failures in storytelling which are often obscured by sequences of story-thin pin-up pages in today's books just can't be masked within such a layout. The three-tier, nine panel page doesn't just make the reader compliant and attentive, it makes the creators into responsible tale-spinners too.


5.

Perhaps the best place to start in attempting to find something of the source of the authority that lies in Lee and Kirby's paternalistic collaborations of this period is to look a little closer at what each party brought to their work in The Avengers. For in "The Coming Of The Avengers", what's remarkable is that there are actually three more or less distinct storytelling voices often operating at the same time. There's the effect that arises from the combination of Mr Lee and Mr Kirby's work, but, almost uniquely, their individual voices don't disappear at all in their collaboration. Just as their work has a identity of its own which neither man's endeavours elsewhere carries, so their early Avengers's pages simultaneously carry their individual signatures too. Put simply, each page in the first issue of the Avengers has three intense and demanding voices all dominating and guiding the reader's attention at the same time; there's Mr Lee's words, there's Mr Kirby's art, and then there's the combined force of the two creating an effect through synergy which must have been utterly confounding and thrilling in its day, just as it remains vibrant and beguiling today.

6.

Perhaps the best way for me to try to illustrate this point is to start by looking at what each creator brought to a specific page. I thought it only fair not to load my argument before I'd made it, so I picked one of the less dramatic pages from the first issue of The Avengers, page 14. (See scan directly above.) And the foundation of this page and its effect is obviously the peerlessly clear and yet quite thrilling storytelling of Jack Kirby. We'll look at the fine detail of how each tier in this page "works" in a moment, but just to make a point, I'd like to present the page with Mr Lee's words removed from it;


Without Lee's words, the clarity and power of Jack Kirby's art becomes all the more impressive. Even though the above scan of the art can hardly carry the force of the original, having empty captions and balloons obscuring large areas of the original art, the absence of text still emphasises what a beautifully precise and supportive sense of storytelling Mr Kirby had. Not only does panel 1 flow into panel 2 and so on, but it does so in a way that's intriguing even if it's not appropriate for the scene to be exciting. Again, we'll talk about the details in a moment, and so I won't preempt myself for fear you'll think I've not noticed this or that point. But the key issue here is how Mr Kirby's page fulfils the three key criteria of paternalistic storytelling. It's clear in each panel, the transition between panels is similarly transparent, and even in its quieter moments, it's intriguing and involving.

It's not that the page we're discussing is absolutely typical of The Avengers in this period. In fact, it's the most narration-heavy example in the first few issues of The Avengers until the sixth page of issue 3. But as extreme examples often do, it allows us to see something of the various typical contributions of Lee and Kirby in a more obvious, exposed form. And here what we can note is how insistent and compelling the different contributions of Mr Kirby and Mr Lee could be, both individually and together.

It's fascinating, or at least I'm going to argue it is, to then study this same illuminating page with Mr Kirby's art removed and Mr Lee's words restored;

What's immediately noticeable is how Mr Lee approaches the matter of storytelling in a fashion that's remarkably rare today. For Mr Lee isn't just complimenting Mr Kirby's work, he's also in some senses competing with it too. Note how the placement of the captions and balloons is designed to carry the eye with some considerable momentum from the beginning to the end of the page regardless of whatever art is on display. It's a process that's been enabled by the professionalism of Mr Kirby, who had left the top third, and in particular the top-right third, of his panels free of major incident to allow the text to be added there. Lee's placement of narration, thoughts and speech regardless of its content into that space, is exemplary, and it's something which just doesn't get wide enough credit these days. Through his skill, the eye is drawn swiftly to the end of each tier, and then pulled downwards for the process to repeat itself. It's quite possible for the reader to experience a great deal of the sense of the page without doing anything more than glancing at the artwork, and yet, of course, Mr Kirby's work has its own narrative momentum and force working both with and parallel to Mr Lee's words. The text and its placement therefore acts as more than an extra level of information supplementing the art. It's a vital part of the construction of the page's visual meaning for the reader, and the source of a parallel, powerful and yet often redundant narrative running alongside Mr Kirby's storytelling.

Combined with this is the fact that Mr Lee's words themselves tell pretty much the same story as Mr Kirby's art does. It's an old tradition of both comic-strip and comic-book, of course, and it's a process rightly often lambasted for its redundancy. Yet, and here's another mark of Mr Lee's excess of competence, his text, though neither as competent or as daring as Mr Kirby's art , is vigorous and compelling. In this pinnacle of Lee and Kirby's use of the paternalistic style, both text and art power the reader across a page crammed full of movement and power, detail and excitement. To the raw, threatening and even now still-disturbing shots of Mr Kirby's Hulk is added the strange mix of immediacy and hyperbole that marks Mr Lee's words. Of course, Lee's words are ultimately somewhat purple and often quite unnecessary, whereas Mr Kirby's art stands in its own right as unambiguously excellent. But we're discussing the distinctly forceful brand of paternalistic storytelling these two gentlemen produced here, in this comic at this moment in time. My point is not to suggest that anything here is the highest form of comic book storytelling, though I suspect that much of it is relevant to such a concept, but to rather try to scratch away at why it was, and remains, a so very powerful and attention-fixing form of storytelling. The question is not "Would we do that today?", but "Look at how that effect was created then, and how might it be still be applied today!".


We can perhaps show how Mr Lee's text in part overcomes its own redundancy by showing how, in combination with the fact of its placement, it intensifies rather than merely describes the events in Mr Kirby's art. Below is a scan of the text from the first tier of this page with the captions placed in sequence, and it can be seen that not only is the story being told in Lee's words just as Kirby's art describes, but that Lee's style is as broad and forceful, if less subtle and effective, as Mr Kirby's panels are;
Of course, the words are often nonsensical. It's not the point of the paternalistic style to make sense! Rather, it's the point of the paternalistic style to be thrilling and clear in the terms of the story at hand while spiriting the reader past any looming uncertainties and sillinesses. "The Avengers"# 1 is full of scenes which make no sense at all, and of sentences which collapse at even a partial glance. But effect is all here, and the effect is invigorating and distracting, as thrilling as the first three chords of a garage band's first single. It doesn't matter that the phrase "the speed of a charging dreadnought", for example, makes even less sense than Mr Kirby's anatomy often did. Both that marvellous abstraction of the human and superhuman form by Mr Kirby and that broad and engaging silliness of Mr Lee performs the same function. It explains, excites, and then pushes, encourages and hauls, the reader onwards.

7.

Yet it's Mr Kirby's art which tends to provide the subtly of effect which is achieved in such scenes. It's not a rule which can be applied to all circumstances in The Avengers # 1, but it tends to be the best first analytical port of call. In order to try to show something of the little I can gleam of the matter, perhaps we start by looking at that first tier again;


The paternalistic approach needs to ensure that the reader is absolutely clear where incident and the progression between incidents is concerned, and, as we've said, the nine-panel, three-tier layout is undoubtedly a helpful if somewhat rigid method for achieving this. Yet the subtly of Mr Kirby's work, and the incredible depth of skill that he so modestly and effectively puts to use here, still staggers me. In those clever and slight digressions from the most obvious storytelling choices within a metronomic form lies a measure of Jack Kirby's genius. Perhaps I might be able to show this by presenting you with the scan of a photocopy I took of the above, from which I've removed the guttering between each of those first three panels;


Now, perhaps you were always aware of the things I'm about to say, but I wasn't, and I must have read the first issue of The Avengers in one form or another fifty or so times since the 1970s. And yet I never noticed that each of these panels, which appear fairly distinct in the printed layout, is far more closely linked to its fellows than first appears. The line of the ground remains constant from panel to panel, for example, creating the sense that the reader is almost watching key frames from a flicker-film book. The guttering on the page, as we can counter-intuitively see from its absence here, permits Mr Kirby to stage the Hulk's out-smarting of the Hulk with remarkable skill and to some considerable effect. Look, for example, at how the lines that indicate the Hulk's descent in the first panel continue into the second, creating a sense of momentum while allowing the presence of the gutter to indicate that a small amount of time has passed between the Hulk falling and rising again. And while the first two panels are close in composition, in order to show the relation of Bruce to Tony clearly, and to explain what's happening, the third panel is quite different. The Hulk and Iron Man are suddenly thrown together and drawn as larger figures, which accentuates the force of the Hulk's blows, and the sense of power and of the world turned upside down is doubled by the fact that the previously level ground now falls away to the bottom right-hand side of the last panel of this tier. (The landscape is suddenly dotted with sharp peaks too, increasing the sense of jeopardy.) In the previous two panels of the sequence, the issue was the way in which in the two super-people travelled above the ground and related to each other. In the third, part of the focus of the art is to show that Stark is going to crash to the ground, which tumbles away after the eye had registered Iron Man taking a pummelling from The Hulk.


Those three panels are so skillfully and effectively designed that it's hard to comprehend how much skill and knowledge is reflected in their composition. Without fracturing the three panel layout of that first tier, time is manipulated, anticipation and mystery created, and then the explosive and destructive effect of the final confrontation established. Most of all, the second panel is perhaps the most important. How audacious is it that only Iron Man's boots are being shown, for example, a matter which few if any modern-day artists would consider showing. (It seems such a silly thing to place at the extreme right-hand side of a panel!) And yet that frame not only continues the sequence established in the first, but it creates a pause in the action which forces the reader to calculate what will happen next. And that anticipation is actually heightened by Stan Lee's declaration in the narrative box above that the Iron Man who we can see little of is "startled" by the Hulk's strategy, meaning that we can see the action through Stark's perceptions too as well as through Mr Kirby's staging. This is not going to end happily for Tony, we realise, because the force of his forward momentum is going to be added to the downward force of the Hulk's fist.. And that's exactly what happens.


Perhaps I might be forgiven saying the point again. The modern-day artists has a vast arsenal of techniques to manipulate time and anticipation in their command, and many of them use those skills fantastically well. Yet Kirby is achieving remarkable effects within a quite static panel layout, and he's doing so within what would today be considered as tiny little panels. And Lee is increasing the speed at which this scene is perceived and the intensity by which it is understood by the placement of his text and through words he uses to describe events.

Creators are often are their most interesting when they're discovering how to thoroughly shake up expressive forms which are well-established and somewhat limiting. The cleverness and capability which marks Mr Kirby and Mr Lee's work here is remarkable in many ways, and not least because we can see them continuing to stretch how the old Paternalistic forms were usually put to use. Kirby in particular had long been doing so, and soon the whole paternalistic approach would start to collapse, to be ultimately replaced, as we'll discuss later this week, in a more post-modern form which characterises much of The Avengers work of Brian Michael Bendis.

To be continued;

My sincere thanks for the Splendid Wife and her skilled and steady hands for removing text and art from photo-copies of the page we discussed above. That Silversmithing degree and the many and varied skills it involved sure does come in handy!

Next time; we'll take a look at the mid-tier, last panel scene changer, the masking of nonsensical aspects of superhero tales, the irrelevancy of closure and the informing presence of continuity even at the dawn of the Marvel Era. We'll also start to compare it with what we might call the post-modern style of the BMB era of The Avengers, and I come not to bury either the old or the new Caesars, I assure you! I hope you might consider popping in as I try to express something of the peculiar force of Lee and Kirby's adaption of the paternalistic style, which I clearly grasp little of! A splendid day is wished to all and sundry, and do "Stick Together!".


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What Did Iron Man Forget & Mr Fantastic Too?: Extreme Dispositional Changes In The Characters Of Superheroes:- Part 3 of 3

continued and most certainly concluded from last Monday;

1.

Hal Jordan. The Scarlet Witch. Magenta. Daredevil. Arsenal. Bloodstone. Quicksilver. The Sentry. Henry Pym. Mento.

Mento? Mento?

Well, considering how everything turned out there, that's a sensitive and supportive code name, isn't it?

2.

There's a fine line between making a mainstream superhero tragically interesting and both depressingly dull and off-putting, and it really isn't quantum mechanics working out where that line should be drawn, if uncontentious commercial success is the motivation: the fun to be gained by a reader through imagining themselves as that superhero shouldn't be outweighed by the unease and unhappiness inspired by any such act of wishful association. And, quite obviously, any hint of a serious and recurrent mental disability in the personality of a super-person is going to run the risk of acting as a deterrent to the daydreamer considering engaging with their adventures in a traditional superhero narrative. Where Henry Pym is concerned, for example, the cost-benefit analysis here is always going to count against him unless the stories he's placed in and the way his character is defined are completely changed. After all, take any of his costumed identities and he inevitably comes over as under-engaging even before his psychological problems are considered. Imagining being Giant-Man, for example is to


summon up an experience which would undoubtedly thrill the first time, but after that the excitement fades. Giant-Man grows tall. That's what he does. And when he does it, he's hemmed in by buildings, curtailed by wires, bent double to see whoever he's fighting, and unable to move around for the certainty of destroying everything beneath his feet including his fellow citizens. And it's somewhat the same process with engaging with Ant-Man, except that there the extra complications of being unable to walk across a floor without a pack of little sandwiches, two pints of water and a free afternoon come into play. (And that's not even considering the exciting privilege of being able to ride on flying ants.) And Yellowjacket? Well, Yellowjacket's just a second-rank Spider-Man, with none of the charm and some exceptionally daft elongated shoulder pads that are sometimes supposed to function as wings.

And Henry Pym as the Wasp? Oh, dear.

And then, if we might transfer our attention to the debit column of our role-fantasising, well, Pym's a frequently-disturbed ex-schizophrenic, subject to pretty much every serious psychological problem from despair to wife-beating-inspiring stress disorders. He can stand as tall, tall, tall as a skyscraper, but he can't keep from breaking down, and even when he's apparently sane, he's self-regarding and shiny-silver-robot-snogging odd.

If ever the odds were against a superhero earning marquee-headlining status, that superhero was whichever one Henry Pym was trying to be at the time.


II. It's not simply that it'd be a depressing and alienating business imagining ourselves being Henry Pym as he's been portrayed. It's also the awareness on the reader's part that Pym's possession of super-powers is inevitably tied up with the social stigma of being the distrusted and disturbed superhero, the one who's commonly despised as an unheroic whiner, in addition to being labelled as one of those mad, bad and dangerous to know people.

The character's broken where anything other than conflict-inspiring second-string roles are concerned. Or at least it is as long as it's a standard-issue superhero the reader is looking for.

Though if a publisher was looking to show respect to the psychological problems faced by so many hundreds of millions of people world-wide, then perhaps a superhero who wasn't so "standard-issue", who was shown in a sympathetic and accurate light facing problems which others might define as "odd" and "off-putting", would be a very good idea indeed.

And a really interesting one too.


III. There are, as we've discussed, mentally disordered superheroes who've been designed by purpose or chance to display mental disorders which enhance rather than diminish their appeal. Wolverine, for example, may be psychotic, but in his case that seems to mean that he's as disciplined and moral as any sane individual except for the fact that he gets to slice up his enemies whenever his writers want him to while - and this is the key point - feeling noble when he does so and noble when he chooses not to! How wonderful a trick that is, to have an uncontrollable killer who isn't uncontrollable, to possess as a property a superhero who's admirable enough for kiddie's comics and yet so tortured that he can blood'n'guts his way across the Marvel Universe whenever it seems thrilling and angsty.

But other characters who aren't possessed of such a fortunate madness are tipping over that fine line mentioned above, and this is almost unavoidable, for reasons we've discussed before. For if the label of a serious mental disorder has been stuck to them in the past, it will quite likely continue to afflict how they're presented today. Daredevil, for example, is currently so "driven" that he appears to have quite lost his sense of what's moral under the rule of law and what's very much not, which for a superhero really does involve straying beyond an extreme of acceptable behaviour. Inevitably, since Matt Murdock has already spent decades collapsing into the kind of depression and mania which inspires the digging up of the corpses of dead ex-girlfriends, his past is now totally interpreted in the light of mental insecurity and disorder and his adventures are now utterly directed by the omnipresence in each writer's mind of this. And there's no escape for Matt Murdock as a character now. The fresh start of a sane life that Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli lent him a quarter of a century ago is now so much of an anomaly that it reads like a "What-If" story. For almost immediately after Mr Miller had written Murdock into a happy state and a stable role protecting Hell's Kitchen, Daredevil was back wandering the borderlands between being a functioning superhero and a candidate for care outside the community. And the approach to Daredevil since then has nearly always been to focus on the version of a broken Matt Murdock which appeared at the beginning of "Born Again" rather than the healed and redeemed man at the book's end


And so Daredevil's behaviour has got worse and worse, as has his state of mind, and the process shows no signs of slowing, let alone reversing. And the cost/benefit wish-fulfillment analysis, or CBWF because the very idea of an acronym for that makes me laugh out loud, is beginning to get difficult to maintain. It's getting harder to care for Daredevil, let alone want to be imagining experiencing his life on the level of wish-fulfillment. (Whose dreams are that grubby and conditional?) Daredevil's super-senses, his acrobatic skills, his bed-every-beautiful-woman super-power, and his street-level thug-beating appeal remains, to a degree. But there's that awful and despairing madness to take into account.

3.

I. But don't worry. The superhero with a serious mental disorder nearly always ends her or his trials in redemption. True, that redemption is usually followed by more periods of greater disorder, and more trials, and then yet more redemption, and eventually all that will remain is the fact that screwing up will be their defining characteristic, but the big fights to save their souls through, er, big fights will reoccur like Stargate re-runs on Sky-UK TV. For the fact is that these psychologically-wounded superheroes are usually permitted to temporarily get better for long enough to punch out a super-villain or two, and thereby prove that they're not so disordered any more.

Until they become disordered again. And so on.


II. There are two well-worn paths to superhero redemption for those whose mental problems have that trace of a real-world and challenging disorder which would make the thought of possessing it disturbing to the reader of superheroes.

The first is the straight-forward and traditional way of how the "disturbed" super-person can prove that they're fine, and, indeed, as good as any other benevolent super-person, and that's by pulling on the costume once more, charging up the Kirby Krackles and thrashing around a fearsome super-villain that nobody else can defeat. What, after all, could signify super-heroic virtue - as well as sanity - better than dressing up in spandex and knocking seven bells out of another person, who's also wearing a costume, but who's bad and in need of punching too?

The second method to the redemption of the mentally disordered superhero is to never have been mentally disordered at all. This is a more difficult narrative strategy to pull off, because lots of readers will probably have noticed how one of their superheroes had been shown going mad. Even more so, that character will almost certainly have been shown doing some very bad things indeed of just checking into a clinic for some treatment and support. (*1) It's hard for a readership that's invested a fair degree of fan-angst in watching a character change so catastrophically from sane to insane, from world-saving hero into crazy dangerous mad-person, to suddenly accept that the mental disorder had never been there in the first place. After all, it was tough enough watching Hal Jordan psychologically implode literally between the pages of a single comic book, from a venerated and experienced space-cop into a mass murderer of epic proportions. But then to be told that he was never mad in the first place because something else had made him do it does threaten to make a mockery of all the original upset. Still, a remarkably focused and determined narrative operation to remove the taint of comic-book madness from a superhero can be pulled off, as Geoff Johns did with his favourite Green lantern. And if scrubbing out that stain is tough work, its removal does return the character concerned to something other than the madness/redemption/madness/redemption cycle.


And anyway, many readers were so pleased to see Hal Jordan returned from his unconvincing dispositional change from sane to insane that they went happily along for the ride, even accepting that it was the Parallax monster who'd done all those terrible things while in control of Hal's mind and body rather than Mr Jordan himself. Still, even though he'd apparently never been mentally disordered in the first place, it was still obligatory for Hal to go through the first path to redemption too, proving that he'd not been weak to surrender to the alien madness-causing thing, and showing that, yes, he could be trusted to fight alien warlords and not wipe out great numbers of his colleagues again.

Which of course he'd never technically done in the first place.

It's not enough to be free of the label of mental disorder, for even other super-characters who really should know better seem to believe those pernicious labels have justifiably stuck. No, in order to prove a superheroes sanity and virtue, folks have got to get punched too.

*1 - Of course, the vast majority of the mentally disordered pose no danger to anybody, except on occasion in some conditions to themselves. But this again is not a commonly grasped fact, especially in the superhero narrative, where psychological problems tend to indicate a failure of the part of a superhero in fulfilling their duty, or a compulsion to become a super-villain.


III: Hasn't this struck more of the creators and consumers of superhero books as being a rather insulting and medieval attitude to mental illness? That the victim and survivor of terrible circumstances quite beyond their control should have to prove themselves either through public displays of violence, or a professional absolution from the taint of mental disorder?

Is what used to be known as "mental illness" so unacceptable and so shameful still that the only choice for the afflicted superhero is to be better than everyone else or proven never to have been vulnerable to "real" disorder at all?

After all, even Superman suffered his psychological crisis in the Nineties, after feeling compelled to execute some alternate-universe Kryptonians, and he was returned to mental health, even though it seems the process of that was less than thrilling to some readers. Why is such an option so often ignored today when the big red "S" has undergone it and not lost his lustre?


IV: Of course, the superhero narrative functions symbolically. We know this. But the stories of the MU and the DCU still manage to quite appropriately show their respects to serious physical illnesses which are so challenging and dangerous to those that suffer them. Cancer, Leukaemia, AIDS, and a host of other blameless and appalling diseases are never represented as being conditions which must be overcome with a cape, an energy blast, and perhaps the revelation that that cancer had never been there all along.

And those who survive these physical conditions are never thought to be blameworthy for the condition which has afflicted them so awfully. Yet Henry Pym is still haunted as a character by the stigma of having lashed out and fiercely swatted away his wife while undergoing a complete "mental collapse". And while the act of a man beating a woman is patently abhorrent, a man who commits a single if appalling act of violence while psychologically disintegrating seems to me to be an ill person rather an evil one.

Or is it always and utterly the act and not the actor that we judge when determining guilt?


VI: For if Henry Pym is simply a weak man, or even an unpleasantly self-involved one, and thereby nothing but a"wife-beater", then we're back in the middle ages, where the sufferer was responsible for their own suffering, where victims were all considered sinners and where the psychologically self-brutalised were thought of as immoral brutes. Or is it that Dr Pym is an embodiment of a more modern form of prejudicial "diagnosis", the man who became mentally disordered because he was too weak, because he didn't try hard enough to stay sane, the man who was neither good enough nor strong enough to resist madness?

Which is pretty much all the same thing, actually. Both Medieval sin and modern weakness have an equal validity when evaluating mental disorder, which is to say, none at all. They're both absolutely appalling approaches to the question of representing mental disorder in the 21st century.

VII. The truth is that repeatedly representing mental disorder in such a light is no more helpful, or moral, or believable, than taking a character who's just survived chemotherapy and insisting that she smokes three packs a day in order to prove her bravery.

Which would be worse than insane where the character is concerned, for it would be cruel to the people reading the comic too, and especially to all of those who are survivors of the disease itself.

4.

I: Henry Pym, as we've discussed, has never been convincingly diagnosed, for the simple reason that his various disorders have been so broadly and inaccurately drawn that a diagnosis that covers all his symptoms would be so broad as to be meaningless. (Well, he's "Aspergic-manic-depressive-stress-traumatised-chemically-imbalanced-multiple-personalitied-and-really-not-well-ish", isn't he?) But those stories of his disintegrations have included a great many explicitly represented symptoms;

• Roy Thomas gave Hank "king-sized schizophrenia" caused at least in substantial part through an accidentally gas-based drug overdose.
• Jim Shooter described a "mental collapse" and what appeared to be a pronounced stress disorder founded in part on an excessive inferiority complex
• Steve Engelhart portrayed Hank as suffering a major depressive disorder, with the character doing more than merely flirt with the idea of suicide
• Kurt Busiek had Hank suffering stress, depression and a strange and unique comic-book take on dissociative identity disorder too.
  

And yet after every "incident", Dr Pym has eventually returned to duty as a superhero, despite the fact that all of his breakdowns have occurred at least in significant part as a result of the stresses and strains of performing as, yes, you''re there already, a superhero. It's not that it's Hank Pym's weakness, weirdness or wife-beating sinfulness that's caused him to be so ill-fated. It's being a superhero that's undoubtedly caused it, and yet being a superhero is the only way that the writers and editors who've been responsible for him could imagine representing his triumph over adversity, could envisage portraying his redemption.

Being a superhero helps break him, but being a superhero is the only thing that anyone can lastingly think to do with him either.


II. Being a superhero isn't good for Hank Pym. (*2) Any competent counsellor, let alone psychiatrist, would've immediately identified this fact and advised him to right-this-moment hang up his spandex and his growth pills and his shiny booties. The stressors of functioning in the challenging and unregulated environment of super-heroing has laid low our boy every time. It places responsibilities and expectations upon Pym that he feels he can't fulfil unless he works himself into the ground. It provides excessive stressors which his psychology could probably bear in a typical environment, but which, through no choice or fault of his own, he struggles to cope with when fighting Kang or preparing for the possibility of one day doing so. Being out with the Avengers or the Defenders or whoever places him into situations which he's not capable of controlling or bearing, and produces challenges which his character isn't adapted to cope with.

Well, I think that would describe just about each and every one of us too. I suspect that Pym's mental state is one that we'd share if we were in the cape'n'costume brigade after the fourth multi-dimensional crisis of the month. (There's an irony in the fact that Pym's response to being superheroic is much closer to what a "real" persons would be than is often considered.)

Still, he's a brilliant scientist, a caring colleague, and a brave man. Indeed, I'd go as far as to say that he's braver than most of his super-powered colleagues, because the whole business of trying to be a superhero in a superhero world has defeated him time and time again, but he keeps trying, and he really ought to be allowed to stop.

*2 - Steve Engelhart seemed to grasp this in West-Coast Avengers, and then had Pym become a superhero again, though without a costume, as if the absence of the spandex would make the stressors disappear. Before him, Roger Stern had understood the issues completely and presented a Henry Pym abandoning his superhero role despite Captain America's desire for him to continue, saying: "Trying to play super hero was the biggest mistake I ever made with my life!"

5.

I. I've a great deal of time for Dan Slott where his work on Hank Pym is concerned. (In fact, I've a great respect for Mr Slott's work in general.) He's fond of Dr Pym and he's worked hard to find him a role of some importance as a superhero in the Marvel Universe. But a second glance at the first few issues of Mr Slott's run on "Mighty Avengers" show that the standard-model "redeem-the-mentally-disordered-superhero-through-super-hero-ing" narrative is still being used, despite the best intentions of Mr Slott to treat Pym with some greater measure of kindness.

II. When the reader first encounters Dr Pym in "Mighty Avengers", he's locked himself away in a spectacular and secret laboratory, and he's not pleased to see the super-people who've come to ask for his help. In fact, he's plain unwelcoming. And if those facts on their own aren't a sign that Pym's back into a bad place, he's created yet another superhero identity, which is often a foreboding sign with the unstable Doctor, and he's named his new new alter-ego after his dead ex-wife too.

And then there's a quite untypical display of self-regarding mania from Pym, as a result of displaying all the above concerns, should have anybody who understands anything about mental health thinking about the welfare of their obviously-sick colleague;

"I'm in the middle of some extremely important work. It could change the very nature of a universe. Not our universe, mind you, but that's still very impressive."


Now, the Bendis-era has had Dr Pym portrayed as a selfish, self-regarding beater of women, but this is way beyond even that derogatory reading of the character. This has taken a self-involved man and puffed him up with an astonishing measure of self-importance and even, yep, mania. (The arrogance on the character's face as he says all of the above is quite chilling.) And taken along with Pym's unpleasantness, his desire to be isolated from human beings, his adoption of a new identity, his association of his own superhero guise with that of his dead wife's, shouldn't someone have cared a little more?

Look, Avengers-folks; Pym's telling everyone how brilliant he is and he's thoroughly unpleasant while doing so, and he's living in a secret home he's designed to allow him to hide away in from the world. He's sharing his safe hidden hidey-hole with a female robot who carries his dead ex-wife's "brain patterns", and he's taken Janet Van Dyne's code-name and her powers for his own. Isn't he rather obviously in need of help so that he doesn't seriously relapse into whatever of his previous problems, or combination of them, is threatening here?

For since continuity is held to be so important, and since this continuity and a respect for extreme and inconsistent dispositional change has frozen Pym into this role of the mentally dysfunctional hero, shouldn't respect for continuity also mean that care for the mentally disordered, whether or not they're recovered or they're relapsing, should be a prominent concern in the text?


III. His fellow Avengers ought never to have even considered pressurising a disturbed Hank Pym to lead them into an end-of-the-world brawl without having made some provision for medical support. (In fact, regardless of his apparent state of mind, they ought to have left him alone or provided care for him, giving his propensity for relapsing under pressure.) The very fact of his obvious mental difficulties combined with his psychological history should have had at least Jarvis realising that help was going to be needed, if it wasn't already. And if nobody but Pym could go once more into the breach, dear friends, then some psychological professionals should have gone with him. That needn't have undermined his heroism. Quite the opposite, actually, because it could have very effectively illustrated how brave, and indeed important, Pym is. The only way to establish heroism isn't to show the gritting the of the teeth, the girding of the loins and the wearing of the cowl. And Doc Sansom and Night Nurse assisting Henry, laying into Hercules and USAgent for their ignorance, and Stark for his cruelty, would have made for a fascinating dynamic in the book.

It's not that folks don't inevitably fail to recover from psychological incapacity, absolutely not. And it's not that Pym needs his hand held in all situations at all times. But it is that he shouldn't be going into the very environments and performing the very roles which have most exacerbated his problems in the past, and especially not when he's showing signs of distress. That's a bad message to send out to the readers of comic books, that those with mental disorders need to prove themselves by being someone else rather than themselves, that they need to be fulfilling dysfuctional expectations rather than learning how to be what they are and how to contribute in the light of that.

Dr Pym is a brilliant back-room boy, and the backroom gals and guys are often, it should be remembered, the women and men who turn the course of wars. There would be nothing shameful in Pym serving the cause in a way that allowed him to escape triggering the stress-fractures of his mind.


IV: Dan Slott's tale of Pym's partial redemption follows the typical pattern which is outlined above. The odds are against him, the danger is extreme, but the disordered man proves himself to be a superhero simply by acting as a superhero does.

But there are moments in the story which, while quite appropriate in an ordinary superhero tale, strike a very ugly note indeed in the context of Pym's history, and which make many of the Avengers seem quite repellent. For example, we might expect Hercules to be insensitive and unhelpful, so it's possible to understand him declaring to Pym that "You're a founding Avenger. Now act like one!", though surely somebody else there might have noticed that Henry needed support and encouragement rather than contempt and hectoring. And perhaps Hercules's decision to abandon Pym and, with the notoriously hard-hearted USAgent, follow Iron Man's lead, can be seen as a reflection on those character's personalities rather that Hank's. But the fact of how Tony Stark responds to Pym illustrates how this tale is actually one about the Avenger's stupidity and cruelty, about their ignorance of and disinterest in the mental health of their colleague. For Stark is a man who's twice succumbed to alcoholism, and the second time he did so, it happened despite him being in full position of all the information about how that illness operates. Iron Man knows what a psychological disorder is and he


knows how it can take and profoundly damage a person despite their very best efforts. He knows that individuals who suffer such disorder aren't to be blamed or held Medievally culpable for their actions. He's been at the bottom himself, he's hurt people, and, let's be honest, there was nothing but luck between the alcoholic Tony and mass murder, given his habit of driving drunk while in possession of a super-powered armoured suit.

Tony Stark's been there. He ought to know, and care.

But he doesn't. "I'm sorry, Yellowjacket, but we don't have time to deal with all of your baggage." he declares with the maximum measure of dismissive disdain when Pym attempts to help him. And later, when Henry Pym really has saved the day, Stark's response is repellent: "Don't screw up!"

That's all he says as he flies away. "Don't Screw up!". Not "Well done." or "I'll help whenever I can." or even "Thank you for saving the entire world."

If the function of Tony Stark's alcoholism, as we discussed before, is to humanise the character, the effect of Mr Slott's script is to establish him despite all that as a utterly despicable arse.


V: And for heaven's sake, let's not discuss Reed Richards and his spectacularly ignorant and cruel way of treating Pym later in the pages of "Mighty Avengers". These are brightest men in the MU? They know pretty much everything?

Everything except compassion for its own sake, and mental disorders in particular.

VI: The habit that writers have of creating conflict for the sake of the dynamics it offers a story can be quite nauseating when it leads to such unpleasant and out-of-character behaviour.

For one thing, the Reed Richards shown to us previously by Mark Waid, who was bent double by the weight of the guilt he'd cursed himself to for having caused his colleagues to become the "Fantastic Four", simply wouldn't judge another so harshly. Not when this most conscionable man was still bearing the responsibility for the death of Bill Foster. That makes no sense at all. For either these characters are psychologically consistent or they're nothing at all, and I for one would rather believe that the folks I'm reading about today pay some feasible relationship to their past fictional selves.

6.

No-one would deny that comic-books have a responsibility to engage responsibly with issues of sex and gender. Nobody would reject the premise that matters of race should be dealt with respectfully in the pages of the superhero tale. (Indeed when they're not, as in the virtual wiping out of a generation of multi-cultural heroes at DC, there's an appropriate response from a substantial number of readers.) But the treatment of superheroes with conditions redolent of those psychological disorders seen as frighteneing and disturbing in the real-world can be, albeit entirely unwittingly, extremely problematical. In the case of Henry Pym, and regardless of whether his story in "Mighty Avengers" can be read to show him as disturbed or not, he should always be presented in the light of an awareness of what his psychological problems have been, and in a way that reflects how someone with those problems should be treated. (The first step, of course, is to clearly define those problems.) And if there's a possibility of a script seeming to be dismissive of the responsibility to be supportive and respectful of those who've survived such disorder as we've been discussing, then the script also needs to compensate for this by putting forward a more positive view of the situation too.

It's not that Dan Slott or any of his colleagues are consciously meaning to portray some issues relating to mental disorder in the light of a terribly old-fashioned and often counter-productive narrative tradition. (I'll always read a Dan Slott book. I thoroughly enjoy his work.) It's that the various traditions of the superhero tale and the habits of superhero creators and fans have meant this substantial blind spot has developed over decades, and no good can come from that.


Or to put it another way: if a reader is suffering from anxiety, or has undergone a schizophrenic incident, as a number of teenagers in particular do, what might they learn about their situation from the superhero comic? Do they learn that their condition must be ignored, that it's shameful or a mark of weakness, that it must be denied through will and extremes of physical daring, that they're on their own until they prove themselves to be as "good" as the best of the "normal", and super-normal, folks, or worse, that they'll never be well or free of stigma?

For it's not just that extreme dispositional change involving serious psychological problems to superheroes creates endless problems for the characters as time progresses. It's also that the message being sent out here, about bravery and suffering, responsibility and blame, isn't an accurate, helpful or fair one. I'm certainly not suggesting that the solution is to produce a simple-minded set of happy survivors of disorders being loved by their communities and supported by trained professionals, anymore than the solution to the problem of race in comics is to make every black character a hero and a take on MLK too.

But we could all do better here. For once those labels are applied to a character, it's the responsibility of the creative teams to respect wider issues than simply those of what makes a superhero tale more supposedly thrilling, just as it is their responsibility to do so where issues of sex, and race, and gender, and a host of other social issues, are concerned.

7.

And the Sentry? Oh, don't get me started on The Sentry. For a man with so many thousands of friends, he didn't seem to know a single competent psychiatrist to help him on any consistent and productive basis. (Or was that covered in a story while I was hiding away from another daft Sentry tale?) What a lonely life he had, and what a futile message his existence sent out: not only can't mental disorder be cured, but it can't even be treated. In fact, even the insane superheroes can't even be trusted to stay safely in whatever secure accomodation we leave them in, whether it's a prison of their own mind or something more material in Avengers Tower.

And those messages are the ones that the Sentry's life and death sent out, because no character of equal prominence to the Sentry since that character's invention has made the opposite journey, from hopelessness to hope, to indicate any other more inspiring possibility at all.

These mad people. They're going to get you, you know, one way or another, and there's really only one solution.


But it's not clever, and it's not funny. It's actually rather .... well, upsetting actually.

We should all be doing better than this by now. Creators shouldn't be writing this stuff, and readers shouldn't be buying it either. We should all simply know better. And though in the very near future, these stories are undoubtedly going to be as embarressing as, for example, Ebony in The Spirit, and as cringeworthy as "adorable" and marriage-crazy Janet Van Dyne tricking the schizoid Henry Pym across the altar, in today's world they're far more worrying than that.

Or, as Mr Terrific would have said: "Fair Play".


I'm sure I've expressed myself badly here, and that I've used terminology in an awkward way. It's not been my intention to offend anyone, let alone Mr Slott, who was never meant to be getting the blame for what's an utterly common problem. Do shoot me down for my screw-ups and I'll amend the above or sign up a relevant comment. And there were so many other characters to discuss, from Morrison's "Doom Patrol" to the Hulk and onwards. But there just wasn't time, and I fear this wasn't such a well-expressed piece anyway to justify fourth or fifth chapters. Ah, well. I'd like the opportunity to write about the above situation with the super-villain in mind, so perhaps that'll be up for your consideration at some time in the future. Thanks for reading. TooBusyThinkingAboutMyComics will be back in a few days time with a piece or two on Mark Millar and The Fantastic Four, and probably Wolverine too, long promised in the comment boxes. It would be a genuine privilege to see you there.

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