More Critical Approaches to Comics

Theories and Methods

Matthew J. Smith, Matthew Brown, Randy Duncan, Matthew J. Smith, Matthew Brown, Randy Duncan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429782756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this comprehensive textbook, editors Matthew J. Brown, Randy Duncan, and Matthew J. Smith offer students a deeper understanding of the artistic and cultural significance of comic books and graphic novels by introducing key theories and critical methods for analyzing comics.

Each chapter explains and then demonstrates a critical method or approach, which students can then apply to interrogate and critique the meanings and forms of comic books, graphic novels, and other sequential art. Contributors introduce a wide range of critical perspectives on comics, including disability studies, parasocial relationships, scientific humanities, queer theory, linguistics, critical geography, philosophical aesthetics, historiography, and much more.

As a companion to the acclaimed Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, this second volume features 19 fresh perspectives and serves as a stand-alone textbook in its own right. More Critical Approaches to Comics is a compelling classroom or research text for students and scholars interested in Comics Studies, Critical Theory, the Humanities, and beyond.

Part I

VIEWPOINT

1

CRITICAL THEORY

Celebrating the Rich, Individualistic Superhero¹

Matthew P. McAllister and Joe Cruz

Introduction

In the 2017 Warner Brothers movie Justice League, the seemingly ordinary Bruce Wayne (the alter ego of Batman) is asked by new recruit Barry Allen (a.k.a. The Flash), “What are your superpowers again?” Wayne replies, dryly, “I’m rich.” This exchange exemplifies a long-established key attribute of Bruce Wayne, a character who inherited Wayne Manor, Wayne Enterprises, and his vast wealth—net worth $9.2 billion in 2015, according to Time (Davidson 2015)—but through single-minded determination and training also molded himself into “The World’s Greatest Detective.” Similarly, Tony (“I am Iron Man”) Stark, also (in some versions of the character) an inheritor of a large family estate worth even more than Wayne Enterprises (Stark’s net worth $12.4 billion, again from Time²), developed his own path through ingenuity and individualistic vision. So central was Iron Man’s wealth to the character that Stan Lee even joked that he first considered as possible names for Tony Stark’s metal persona “Rich Man,” “Super-Financier,” and “The Mighty Industrialist” (Lee 1975). Although both Batman and Iron Man are clearly superheroes, they are also known as being abrasive and intolerant of others, often presented as a way of demanding greatness (for Wayne) or calling out BS (for Stark). Both characters have also been the heroes of their own stories for decades: Batman since 1939, and Iron Man since 1963.

Such characterizations flow with established cultural tropes about the value of individualism and the assumed connections between the accumulation of wealth, genius, and single-mindedness. The accumulative lessons of these tropes can justify the legitimacy of our dominant economic system, capitalism, which arguably is inherently exploitative and inequitable. This chapter explores the insights that one scholarly perspective, critical theory, can bring to the ideologically infused stories and characters that are found in comics. These stories and characters teach us lessons about what to value in society, who our heroes are, and what they should be like. These stories and characters, though, have relationships to larger structures of power, including capitalism, the patriarchy, heteronormativity, and whiteness, and often serve to legitimize these larger structures. Critical theory helps to highlight the relationship of media content to larger structures of power, and to remind us that, even in comic books, “there are no innocent texts” (Durham and Kellner 2012, 4).

Underlying Assumptions of the Approach

Social systems in any society can have embedded in them inequitable power relationships. Simplified examples include class differences in capitalism, gendered inequities in patriarchy, racism and whiteness in white-dominated societies, sexual identities and structural homophobia in heteronormativity, and hardships against the disabled in ableist systems. Critical theory in media studies typically explores why and how dominant ideology—cultural meanings that reinforce the perspectives and positions of those in various sectors of power in society—is reflected and reinforced in our media systems. When the celebration of dominant ideology is so complete that it becomes naturalized in media (and other cultural systems), it approaches hegemony. In hegemonic cultural forms (the messages that circulate in media, education, and religion, for example), the dominant power structure of a society is assumed, becomes essentialized, and is treated as inevitable. Although critical theory often is associated with exploring the values of capitalism and how media systems reinforce this economic system and the power of economic classes who benefit most from capitalism—the roots of critical theory are found in Marxist analysis—other social systems in which inequities occur and are enduring may be informed by scholarship with critical-theoretical assumptions. These include certain versions of feminist media studies, critical race theory, queer theory, and disability studies. Critical theory’s emphasis on dominant ideology in media is often contrasted with other approaches—such as particular versions of cultural studies—that foreground the fluidity and complexity of media’s ideological meanings, the degree to which the polysemic, multiple-meaning nature of media messages allow for oppositional ideologies, and how audiences appropriate these meanings in their own lives in sometimes negotiated or even subversive ways. There are instances of media content that is created outside of the dominant media system, and in such cases, critical theory may highlight truly radical or counter-hegemonic ideas in such oppositional or alternative media (in the case of comics, see Sabin 1993).

With its emphasis on the perpetuation of dominant ideology, critical theory is often associated with the intellectual tradition known as the Frankfurt School. In terms of its influence on media studies, this tradition is especially exemplified by Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno’s essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” originally published in the 1940s (reprinted 2012). As scholars who were influenced by intellectual traditions such as the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, and who fled Nazi Germany for New York City during World War II, the authors were concerned that the totalitarianism that they escaped from was being duplicated through the mass-production logics and cultural messages in US popular culture. Frankfurt scholars argued that the industrialization of cultural forms like studio-produced movies, syndicated comic strips, and pop music—by using the same economically efficient logic of the assembly line and mass-production factory—emphasized standardization and the uniformity of ideas. The role of advertising and promotion further reinforced production routines of media. An assumption in Frankfurt critical theory is that the same ideas are repeated through multiple outlets of mass entertainment. Critical theory thus often underscores continuities across different media texts, rather than an in-depth analysis of one text. They argue that mass-media entertainment forms tended to be more alike than truly different, including reoccurring character types like the plucky heroine, dedicated physician, and rugged cowboy.

While the Frankfurt theorists argued that “true” difference and individualistic thought can exist—especially in elite art forms like avant-garde theater and classic symphonies—it is rarely found in mediated content. Instead, character types found in media are more of a “pseudo-individualism”: heroes offer only minor stylistic differences from each other, and ultimately are offering the same range of values and behaviors. For example, one 1930s movie cowboy used six-shooters, another rifles, another wore black, another played a guitar, but all were basically the rugged hero who shoots bad guys on a lawless frontier. The scope of difference tended to be limited to ideas that flowed with capitalism. Ideas outside of this range—ideas that offered some potentially fundamental or structural criticisms of capitalism and inequity—were not portrayed at all, or were symbolically contained or negated. Rebellious heroes, for example, who seem to go against the system ultimately reinforce the status quo by bringing their stories to a satisfactory closure, returning in sequels, and working within the system even if they crack wise about its contradictions. Other characters who critique capitalism or other established systems of power were villains or tragic characters with mental health issues or hopelessly naive.

The Frankfurt authors emphasized that such messages were not intentional propaganda, but rather the result of how mass media were created in industrial capitalism. As they argued of media corporations, “their ideology is business” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2012, 60). Ultimately, modern US mass media are designed to generate a profit, and their production is designed to be efficient and predictable toward that goal. However, with the profit motive as the sole driver of decisions, there could be unintended consequences of media’s production logic, including the majority of meanings in industrial mass media as collectively celebrating conformity and acceptance of the realities of capitalism.

The Frankfurt School specifically, and critical theory more generally, has influenced modern media studies in several ways. Work engaging the political economy of media—critical approaches to media economics including patterns of ownership and advertising and their influence on content—is in debt to the perspective (Bettig 2002; Hardy 2014). Critical theory also resonates in scholarship that points to the repetitive nature of media, its commercial influences, and how it delegitimizes or negates criticism of social structures of power (about television see Gitlin 1979; Meehan 2005).

Critical theory can, then, highlight the hegemonic implications of specific cultural meanings found in modern media that reinforce the economic status quo. For the purposes of this chapter, one especially relevant message that previous critical work has noted involves stories found in media that celebrate a particular kind of business entrepreneur—the individualistic, industrialist genius—who thrives in capitalism; it is an enduring narrative found throughout the history of industrialized US media.

As the next sections detail, such characterizations and their ideological implications are also found in the comics.

Appropriate Artifacts for Analysis

Comics are especially suitable for critical theory analysis. Comic books occupy a dual reality in the public imaginary. On one hand, they are dismissed as fatuous and innocuous fantasies for young readers; on the other, they are seen as capable of capturing and reinforcing ideological discourses (a point argued by Dorfman and Mattelart 1971, reprinted 1984). Scholars have highlighted the ideological messages in comics (for example McAllister, Sewell, and Gordon 2001), even arguing, in one classic work of critical theory applied to comics, that Disney-based comics served as capitalist imperialism when distributed to South American countries looking to develop more socialist or left-influenced governments (Dorfman and Mattelart 1971; reprinted 1984). Many comics are created in the context of large-scale capitalist enterprises, most notably in the case of comic strips by large syndicators like King Features Syndicate (owned by Hearst Communications), or in comic books through publishers like Marvel (owned by Disney) and DC (owned by Warner Media). Both daily comic strips and monthly comic books are designed to be reproduced for long stretches of time, and in repetitive formats. Most comics are created and promoted around a single character or a small group of characters who appear in that comic for years. The stories may feature the same basic narrative arcs and plot progressions, and often the same themes. Some of the most enduring characters—and the circulation of a stable meaning in those characters—in our popular culture are based in comics. Horkheimer and Adorno, for instance, discuss the hapless white-collar worker Dagwood Bumstead, the husband of the title character in Blondie, a “gag” comic strip that has been produced and nationally distributed virtually every day since its debut in 1930. Many of its gags are about the lazy nature of Dagwood as a worker, or how much he eats and sleeps.

Comic-book characters such as Superman and Batman similarly have been fixed in the popular imagination for decades. They appear in monthly comic books that are consistently the same basic length and format. Thematically, they are part of the relatively stable genre of superhero comics that argues, over and over, that problems are best solved through physical conquest and that clearly designated evil exists, is a threat, and needs to be conquered. This genre dominates the medium to such a degree that the masculinist tendencies of physical conquest may mark it as a hostile space for girls, women, and non-cis males (Orme 2016).

The establishment of one particular type of comic-book superhero—the individualist with massive wealth—seems especially suitable for critical theory analysis, as the rest of this chapter explains.

Procedures for Analysis

Critical theory will often examine the industrial context of a media artifact, but typically a key focus is to engage the repetition of similar, hegemonic messages and themes in a series of media texts. It asks, what are the dominant ideological messages found in media, how do they relate to larger structures of power, and how may they be hegemonic (reinforcing dominant structures in society)?

Key steps in applying critical theory for media content such as comics include:

• Identifying hegemonic ideas that flow with dominant inequalities of society or celebrate dominant systems such as capitalism, and that may appear in mainstream media like comics. Previous work on critical theory is often a key aspect in understanding how such ideas have developed and their implications.
• Deciding on the category of media content to which to apply the analysis. A particular challenge in critical theory, as exemplified by Horkheimer and Adorno, is the emphasis on the repetition of ideas, especially as appearing in popular and well-circulated media content. An emphasis on repetition means that ideas circulate not only in one “text,” such as a single issue of a comic book, although analysis may focus on one text if it is viewed as especially significant to understanding a dominant theme. However, repetition of hegemonic ideas could involve an entire narrative world (such as the Marvel Universe), genre (superhero comics), series, character, or long-term storyline.
• Since such a textual category (narrative world, genre, series, character, serialized plot) may involve hundreds of individual texts (such as issues of a comic book), this can make the analysis daunting. In such cases, what may be involved is the reading of previous scholarship and popular examinations about a series or character to understand its history, and limiting the analysis to a few especially exemplar textual artifacts.
• Applying textual analysis to construct an interpretation of particular “texts” (e.g. film, tv show, advertisement, comic books) supported by various sources that include published scholarship, the researchers’ expertise, related cultural artifacts that may supplement the texts, and the texts themselves (McKee 2003, 33). Researchers build a case to make sense of the possible cultural meanings of these texts. Textual analysis may focus on a variety of elements in media content to highlight possi...