Secret Identity Reader: Essays on Sex, Death, and the Superhero (review)

The primal scene of superhero comics occurs in Action Comics #1 when Jerry Siegel pens a caption for Joe Schuster’s drawing of an exploding city: ‘As a distant planet was destroyed by old age, a scientist placed his infant son within a hastily devised space-ship, launching it toward Earth!’ The primal scene of the author of superhero comics criticism is less traumatic: that magical stretch of childhood when one felt an intense and unshakeable passion for these beings who stand somewhere between gods and men. It is often through superheroes that boys and girls are introduced to the interplay of adult males and females, to the dialectic of good and evil, to the virtue of loyalty and the shamefulness of betrayal. And, of course, comics provide the vicarious thrills of strength, flight, and so on. Recollected in mature tranquillity, these unforgettable formative moments, rooted in crude text and gaudy image, are the kernel justification for superhero comics scholarship, which not only refuses to put away childish things but actively invests them with high meaning and purpose. If these deeper levels of fictive relevance cannot be located, well, then let’s face it: why should any serious person expend much thought on a minor genre mostly aimed at kids?

Secret Identity Reader seeks and finds these levels of relevance. The primal comics moments of Lee Easton and Richard Harrison are themselves revealing: Easton – whose nascent fascination with the superhero body might have ironically confirmed 1950s comics opponent Frederic Werthem’s worst fears about the homosocializing power of superheroes – and Harrison, who drew superheroes in homage to his own powerfully built soldier-father, together build a strong case for understanding superhero comics as manifestations of cultural memories, psychosexual dispositions, and existential quandaries. The co-authors come at comics from different but complementary directions. Harrison is the modernist, the mythopoetic critic, emphasizing those tales ‘in which, fantastic as they were, the lives of the heroes still stood for something in mine.’ As with the Silver Age comics he especially treasures, Harrison believes literature – even lowbrow comics literature – still has something to teach us and that the world, through art, can be made intelligible. Easton is the postmodernist, interested in the ‘3 Cs of continuity, character and community’ that underlie the business of generating and retaining comics readerships and that structure and constrain the fictive superhero universe and its audiences. Easton is no less passionate about his comics than Harrison, but he is drawn to those aspects of the form that lead to contradiction, paradox, and aporia.

Easton and Harrison write alternate chapters. This structuring principle allows a dialogue of sorts to emerge. For example, in his chapter entitled ‘The Fantastic Paper Man,’ Harrison considers the physical proportions of the superhero in everything from his own juvenile sketches to Marvel’s Captain America to Michelangelo’s David. He sees our fascination with the perfect physique as indexing another, more important factor: the need to exteriorize our images of perfection so as to be able to reinsert those images back into our lives for inspiration and guidance – doubtlessly a function of art since time immemorial. In the chapter that follows, ‘Sharing a Quick Look: A Gay Man Reads His Comics,’ Easton works on this same superhero body against Harrison’s modernist, heterosexual grain. Yes, Werthem was wrong: comics were not actively promoting homosexual behaviour either through their visible depictions of heroes whose ‘primary sex characteristics are seldom ever on display’; or through the homosocial space of the comic world itself, which, in Werthem’s time, revolved around father-son, teacher-pupil dyads (e.g., the various hero and sidekick tandems that populated the Golden Age). Nothing scandalous there. But for Easton, superhero comics are nevertheless a distinctly queer space. Why? Because the Comics Code that Werthem helped inspire cannot ‘regulate the fact that the very beauty of so many male bodies on display – ostensibly to provide healthy images of what boys...