Author: Elayne Riggs

As I write this, the nation is still reeling from the deadliest shooting massacre in its history – if you don’t count wartime battles, and they never seem to. Once again, a disturbed young man decided that the best response to his problems lay in premeditated violence against total strangers. Once again, trusted and trained authorities appeared slow to act in protecting human life. Once again, we found ourselves yearning for a hero to make it all go away.

Comic book heroism is a double-edged sword, probably a fitting metaphor, given superhero comics’ fascination with weaponry. On the one hand you have a reflection of whatever the current national mood of the era happens to be. I was watching a history-of-Superman program on the Biography channel earlier this evening, wherein Mark Waid talked about how the character shifted from a rabble-rousing champion of the people at his inception to the "ultimate blue Boy Scout" symbol of authority after World War II. Superman, like other successful icons, was able to change with the times, allowing succeeding generations to project their desires onto him. And for some time, ever-escalating fictional violence as the appropriate (and often only) answer to frustrations has fueled the entertainment desires of Americans.

Comic books are, of course, incidental to this trend, which has encompassed virtually all forms of mass media, even more so as the news divisions — once sacrosanct and considered acceptable loss leaders to responsible corporations which made their money on other programming — morphed into 24/7 cable infotainment, hungry for the next fix of spectacularly gruesome visuals. Their mouths say "tut tut" to the carnage, but their wallets say "More please, sir!" And yet, critics of ultraviolent entertainment (and boy is that a Sisyphusean undertaking!) are always very quick to point fingers at "the comic book mentality" and wave around the latest issue of Punch ‘Em Up Man. Because, you know, it makes a good visual.

On the other hand, comics at their best can inspire and educate and lift us all up to our highest aspirational fantasies. To me, this attitude of being "part of the solution" rather than "part of the problem" has always been the essence of superhero fantasy — not beating up on badguys, but using one’s hidden reserves of power to triumph over adversity and bring hope to others, showing them by your deeds the way they too can become heroes.

Nowhere was this more keenly illustrated than after 11 September 2001, when the comics industry came out with a slew of amazing and poignant comics stories examining and trying to make sense the tragedy, in order to help raise money for victims’ families.

(more…)