The View from the Cheap Seats (23 page)

L
isten, now. Read this carefully, because I am going to tell you something important. More than that: I am about to tell you one of the secrets of the trade. I mean it. This is the magic trick upon which all good fiction depends: it's the angled mirror in the box behind which the doves are hidden, the hidden compartment beneath the table.

It's this:

There is room for things to mean more than they literally mean.

That was it.

Doesn't seem that important to you? Not impressed? Convinced you could get deeper, sager advice about writing from a fortune cookie? Trust me. I just told you something important. We'll come back to it.

There are, in my opinion, two major ways in which superheroes are used in popular fiction. In the first way superheroes mean, purely and simply, what they mean on the surface. In the second kind of fiction, they mean what they mean on the surface, true, but they also mean more than that—they mean pop culture on the one hand, and hopes and dreams, or the converse of hopes and dreams, a falling away of innocence, on the other.

The lineage of superheroes goes way back: it starts, obviously, in the 1930s, and then goes back into the depths of the newspa
per strip, and then into literature, co-opting Sherlock Holmes, Beowulf and various heroes and gods along the way.

Robert Mayer's novel
Superfolks
used superheroes as a metaphor for all that America had become in the 1970s: the loss of the American dream meant the loss of American dreams, and vice versa.

Joseph Torchia took the iconography of Superman and wrote
The Kryptonite Kid,
a powerful and beautiful epistolary novel about a kid who believes, literally, in Superman, and who, in a book constructed as a series of letters to Superman, has to come to terms with his life and his heart.

In the 1980s, for the first time writers began writing superhero comics in which the characters were as much commentary upon superheroes as they were superheroes: Alan Moore led the way in this, as did Frank Miller.

One of the elements that fused back into comics at that time was the treatment of some comics themes in prose fiction:
Superfolks
and
The Kryptonite Kid,
short stories such as Norman Spinrad's “It's a Bird! It's a Plane!,” essays like Larry Niven's (literally) seminal “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.”

The resurgence that hit comics at this time also surfaced in prose fiction—the early volumes of the George R. R. Martin–edited
Wild Cards
anthologies did a fine job of reinvoking the joy of superheroes in a prose context.

The problem with the mid-eighties revival of interesting superheroes was that the wrong riffs were the easiest to steal.
Watchmen
and
The Dark Knight Returns
spawned too many bad comics: humorless, gray, violent and dull. When the
Wild Cards
anthologies were turned into comics what made them interesting as commentaries upon comics evaporated, too.

So after the first Moore, Miller and Martin–led flush of superheroes (they weren't deconstructed. Just, briefly, respected),
things returned, more or less, to status quo, and a pendulum swing gave us, in the early nineties, superhero comics which were practically contentless: poorly written, and utterly literal. There was even one publisher who trumpeted four issues of good writers as the ultimate marketing gimmick—every bit as good as foil-embossed covers.

There is room to move beyond the literal. Things can mean more than they mean. It's why
Catch-22
isn't just about fighter pilots in the Second World War. It's why “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” is about more than a bunch of people trapped inside a supercomputer. It's why
Moby-Dick
is about (believe fifty thousand despairing college professors or not, but it's still true) a lot more than whaling.

And I'm not talking about allegory, here, or metaphor, or even the Message. I'm talking about what the story is about, and then I'm talking about what it's about.

Things can mean more than they literally mean. And that's the dividing line between art and everything that isn't art. Or one of the lines, anyway.

Currently, superhero fictions seem to break into two kinds: there are the workaday, more or less pulp fictions which are turned out by the yard by people who are trying their hardest, or not. And then there are the other kind, and there are precious few of them.

There are two obvious current exceptions—Alan Moore's
Supreme,
an exercise in rewriting fifty years of Superman into something that means something.

And then—and some of you might have thought that I might have forgotten it, given how far we've got into this introduction without its being mentioned, there is
Astro City
. Which traces its lineage back in two directions—into the world of classic superhero archetypes, but equally into the world of
The Kryptonite Kid,
a world in which all this stuff, this dumb wonderful
four-color stuff, has real emotional weight and depth, and it means more than it literally means.

And that is the genius and the joy of
Astro City
.

Me? I'm jaded, where superheroes are concerned. Jaded and tired and fairly burned out, if truth be told. Not utterly burned out, though. I thought I was, until, a couple of years ago, I found myself in a car with Kurt Busiek, and his delightful wife, Ann. (We were driving to see Scott McCloud and his wife, Ivy, and their little girl Sky, and it was a very memorable and eventful evening, ending as it did in the unexpected birth of Scott and Ivy's daughter Winter.) And in the car, on the way, we started talking about Batman.

Pretty soon Kurt and I were co-plotting a complete Batman story; and not just a Batman story, but the coolest, strangest Batman story you can imagine, in which every relationship in the world of Batman was turned inside out and upside down, and, in the finest comic book tradition, everything you thought you knew turned out to be a lie.

We were doing this for fun. I doubt that either of us will ever do anything with the story. We were just enjoying ourselves.

But, for several hours, I found myself caring utterly and deeply about Batman. Which is, I suspect, part of Kurt Busiek's special talent. If I were writing a different kind of introduction, I might call it a superpower.

Astro City
is what would have happened if those old comics, with their fine simplicities and their primal, four-color characters, had been about something. Or rather, it assumes they were about something, and tells you the tales that, on the whole, slipped through the cracks.

It's a place inspired by the worlds and worldviews of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, of Gardner Fox and John Broome, of Jerry Siegel and Bob Finger and the rest of them: a city where anything can happen. In the story that follows we have (and I'm trying hard
not to give too much away) a crime-fighter bar, serial killing, an alien invasion, a crackdown on costumed heroes, a hero's mysterious secret . . . all of them the happy pulp elements of a thousand comics-by-the-yard.

Except that, here, as in the rest of
Astro City,
Kurt Busiek manages to take all of these elements and let them mean more than they literally mean.

(Again, I am not talking about allegory here. I'm talking story, and what makes some stories magic while others just sit there, lifeless and dull.)

Astro City: Confession
is a coming-of-age story, in which a young man learns a lesson. (Robert A. Heinlein claimed in an essay in the 1940s, published in Lloyd Arthur Eshbach's collection of SF writer essays
Of Worlds Beyond,
that there are only three stories, which we tell over and over again. He said he had thought there were only two, “Boy Meets Girl” and “The Little Tailor,” until L. Ron Hubbard pointed out to him that there was also “A Man Learns a Lesson.” And, Heinlein maintained, if you add in their opposites—someone fails to learn a lesson, two people don't fall in love, and so on—you may have all the stories there are. But then, we can move beyond the literal.) It's a growing-up story, set in the city in Kurt's mind.

One of the things I like about
Astro City
is that Kurt Busiek lists all of his collaborators on the front cover. He knows how important each of them is to the final outcome. Each element does what it is meant to, and each of them gives of their best and a little more: Alex Ross's covers ground each issue in a photoreal sort of hyper-reality; Brent Anderson's pencils and Will Blyberg's inks are perfectly crafted, always wisely at the service of the story, never obtrusive, always convincing. The coloring by Alex Sinclair and the Comicraft lettering by John Roshell are both slick, and, in the best sense of the word, inconspicuous.

Astro City,
in the hands of Kurt Busiek and his collabora
tors, is art, and it is good art. It recognizes the strengths of the four-color heroes, and it creates something—a place, perhaps, or a medium, or just a tone of voice—in which good stories are told. There is room for things to mean more than they literally mean, and this is certainly true in
Astro City
.

I look forward to being able to visit it for a very long time to come.

This was written as the introduction to Kurt Busiek's
Astro City: Confession,
1999. The Batman story idea I talk about, that we came up with in the car, wound up being one of my favorite sequences in “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?,” a Batman story I would write a decade later.

I
've almost never written Batman, but he's what drew me into comics. I was six years old and my father mentioned that, in America, there was a Batman TV series. I asked what this was, and was told it was a series about a man who fought crime while dressed as a bat. My only experience of bats at this point was cricket bats, and I wondered how someone could convincingly dress as one of those. A year later the series began to be shown on English TV, and I was caught, as firmly and as effectively as if someone had put a hook through my cheek.

I bought—with my own pocket money—the paperback reprints of old Batman comics: two black and white panels to a page drawn by Lew Sayre Schwartz and Dick Sprang, Batman fighting the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin and Catwoman (who had to share a book). I made my father buy me
Smash
!,
a weekly British comic that reprinted what I now suspect must have been an American Batman daily newspaper strip as its cover feature. I was once thrown out of our local newsagents—literally picked up by the proprietor and deposited on the sidewalk—for spending too much time examining each and every one of the pile of fifty American comics, in order to decide which Batman product would receive the benison of my shilling. (“No, wait!” I said, as they dragged me out. “I've decided!” But it was already too late.)

What got me every time was the covers. DC's editors were masters of the art of creating covers which proposed questions about mysteries that appeared to be insoluble. Why was Batman imprisoned in a giant red metal bat, from which not even Green Lantern could save him? Would Robin die at dawn? Was Superman really faster than the Flash? The stories tended to be disappointments, in their way—the question's sizzle was always tastier than the answer's steak.

You never forget your first time. In my case, the first Batman cover artist was Carmine Infantino, whose graceful lines, filled with a sly wit and ease, were a comfortable stepping-off point for a child besotted by the TV series. Text-heavy covers, all about relationships—Batman being tugged between two people: look at the first appearance of Poison Ivy (will she ruin Batman and Robin's exclusive friendship? Of course not. Why did I even worry about such trifles?), looking here as if she's just escaped from the label of a tin of sweetcorn. Batman thinks she's cute. Robin's not impressed. That was what I needed as a kid from a Batman cover. Bright colors. Reassurance.

While humans tend to be conservative, sticking with what they like, children are
utterly
conservative: they want things as they were last week, which is the way the world has always been. The first time I saw Neal Adams's art was in
The Brave and the Bold
(I think it was a story called “. . . But Bork Can Hurt You”). I read it, but was unsure of whether or not I liked it: panels at odd angles, nighttime colors in strange shades of blue, and a Batman who wasn't quite the Batman I knew. He was thinner and odder and wrong.

Still, when I saw Adams's cover for “The Demon of Gothos Mansion” (
Batman
227), I knew that this was something special, and something
right,
and that the world had changed forever. Gothic literature tends to feature heroines, often in their nightdresses, running away from big old houses which always have, for reasons never adequately explained, one solitary light
on in a top-floor room. Often the ladies run while holding candelabras. Here we have instead a dodgy-looking evil squire running after our heroine, between what look suspiciously like two wolves. The spectral, Robin-less, Batman is not swinging from anything. Instead he is a gray presence, hovering over the image: this tale is indeed a gothic, it tells us, and Batman is a gothic hero, or at least a gothic creature. I may only have been ten, but I could tell gothic at a glance. (Although I wouldn't have known that the cover that Adams was intentionally echoing,
Detective Comics
31, was also part of the gothic tradition—an evil villain called the Monk reminds the reader of Matthew “Monk” Lewis's novel
The Monk,
and, as I learned a couple of years later, when the story was reprinted in a 100 Page Super Spectacular, the Monk from this story was a vampiric master of werewolves. Or possibly vice versa, it's been a long time since I read it. I do remember that Batman opened the Monk's coffin at the end, and, using his gun—the only time I remember Batman using a gun—shot the becoffined Monk with a silver bullet, thus permanently confusing me as to the Monk's werewolfish or vampiric nature.)

By the time I was twelve Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's
Swamp Thing
was my favorite comic; it was, I think, the comic that made me want to write comics when I grew up.
Swamp Thing
7, “Night of the Bat,” was the comic that sealed Batman in my mind as a gothic figure. The cover only implies what's inside, as Batman, his cloak enormous behind him, swings towards the muck-encrusted swamp monster, inexplicably hanging from the side of a skyscraper. The feeling that this was something happening at night, artificially lit, in the city, was there, almost tangible. But the things that made me remember this cover fondly are really inside—Bernie drew Batman with no pretense of realism. It was as far as one could get from Adam West: behind Batman an unwearably long cloak blew out: was it fifteen feet long? Twenty feet long? Fifty? And the ears, stab
bing upward like devil horns, were even longer than Bob Kane's Batman ears on the cover of
Detective
31. Wrightson's Batman was not a man—obviously: a man would have tripped over that cloak when he walked, the ears would have poked holes in ceilings—he was part of the night. An abstract concept. Gothic.

One of the greatest joys to the concept of Batman is that he isn't one thing, that he contains all the Batmans that have walked the streets of Gotham City in the last sixty-five years, Infantino's elegant Batman, Sprang and Schwartz's big gray Boy Scout, Frank Miller's Dark Knight. None of them more real, more valid, more true than any other. But in my heart, he is a spectral presence, a creature straight out of the gothic romances, and that, for me, is how he will always remain.

This was written for
Batman: Cover to Cover
, 2005. It's a book of covers of comics with Batman on them, with occasional essays. A web search will show you the covers I talk about here.