Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans

4. The Readers

4 The Readers Whereas the last chapter focused on comic book fandom as an organized activity premised on certain subcultural conventions, this chapter will address a sample of actual comic book readers. The comic book fans discussed here were chosen because they come from a variety of cultural and economic backgrounds and because they exhibit some of the most important recurring characteristics that I encountered over the course of my research; specifically, they express a sense of continuity between themselves and the comics’ creators and they are experienced in a variety of the social aspects that define comic book fandom, aspects such as attending conferences and frequenting comic book specialty stores. The readers profiled here also situate their reading of comic books in relation to other media that explore common themes, hero-oriented video games, action movies, and such, all of which reveals the fans’ interest in ‘‘masculine’’ pursuits and in comic book characters as models of masculinity. In a broader sense, this chapter is also about the need for audience studies to address how young males interact with the media in ways that do not invalidate their pleasures, under the assumption that they, unlike female consumers, are more willingly indoctrinated into a patriarchal, hegemonic standard. As a media audience, the majority of individuals who participate in comic book fandom are clearly distinguishable by age and gender. Unquestionably, the largest bulk of comic book fans are males between the ages of eight and twenty-two. In fact, these two defining features—young age and male gender —are crucial for understanding the type of connections that exist between the readers and the media texts. The relationship between young people and the media is a constant concern. One of the fundamental beliefs of our culture is that children are innocents, susceptible to the corrupting influences of the The Readers 94 world around them. The agents of that feared corruption have changed over the centuries from literacy and free speech to the most familiar and the most contemporary of villains: the mass media. The image of a wide-eyed child held spellbound by television, hypnotized by violent video games, or writhing in sexual ecstasy to popular music is never far from the discourse on children and the media. This popular image, a precise, symbolic shorthand, has often been used to alarming effect in relation to the supposed corrupting influence of comic books (see, for example, figs. 4.1 and 4.2). Ironically, where we fear this undivided and rapturous attention to the media on the premise that it is ‘‘doing things’’ to young minds, it is the same sort of devoted attention that we would reward children for if it occurred in school. Of course we usually do not think of education as brainwashing; school is good, but popular culture is different— popular culture is bad. ‘‘Many parents I know have similar feelings,’’ wrote David Denby in a recent cover story for the New Yorker, ‘‘and quite a few are surprised by the depths of their ambivalence and in some cases misery on the subject . . . upset by the way popular culture in all its forms has invaded their homes, and the habits, manners, and souls of their children . . . And a few parents I know have given themselves over to bitter rage and are locked in an unwinnable struggle to shut out pop culture and the life of the streets—the two are now indistinguishable —from their children’s experience’’ (1996, 48). Despite Denby’s inac4 .1 A 1950s child reading a comic book. ‘‘Boy reading Menace,’’ Associated Press, September 30, 1954 (World Wide Photos). The Readers 95 4.2 The Empire’s Old Clothes curate conflation of popular culture and the life of the streets—the two are by their very definitions separate facets of the modern urban experience—he does explicitly voice a fairly common conservative and neoliberal concern that is usually dressed up by politicians in the rhetoric of reestablishing an idealistic culture of ‘‘family values.’’ That these romanticized, good old family values never really existed in the first place is irrelevant to the social and political agenda of saving innocent children from the evils of the media machine. Under the guise of protecting innocent young children, adults have always looked for scapegoats, outside forces to which we can point and say, ‘‘See, that’s the real problem. That’s what...