Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice, and the American Way

1. Holy Criminology, Batman!: Comics and Constructions of Crime and Justice

1 1 HOLY CRIMINOLOGY, BATMAN! COMICS AND CONSTRUCTIONS OF CRIME AND JUSTICE Comic book readers around the world know that the medium’s unforgettable heroes and villains are capable of leaping out of their pages and into our lives. Upholding “truth, justice, and the American way” with super-powered strength and agility that is “faster than a speeding bullet,” Superman emerged from his Kryptonian rocket ship and onto the American cultural landscape, an origin story told and retold countless times to no less fanfare. Iconic Spider-Man inspired a generation of youths who related to his soft-spoken geekiness, yet reveled in the “great power” he gained from a spider bite—also saddling him with the proverbial “great responsibility.” Wonder Woman’s golden “lasso of truth,” originally forged from the magic girdle of Aphrodite, gave the world a woman super-empowered to squeeze the truth out of even the toughest villain. Captain America, Batman, and Green Lantern: the list goes on, and yet so many have become mainstays in American popular culture , nearly universally recognizable and often deeply loved. Comic book lore inspired generations of readers—even members of the criminal justice community who work with real-life criminal offenders . Such was the case with Judge Jack Love of Albuquerque, New Mexico . Judge Love sentenced the very first offender to electronic monitoring after reading a Spider-Man story in which the superhero is tagged with a device that tracks his movements. Judge Love saw the potential for such a Holy Criminology, Batman! 2 device to keep tabs on probationers and developed electronic monitoring, now commonly used in community corrections across the country.1 Although comic books are far from manuals for how to run the criminal justice system, we can learn much about American society by interrogating the ways in which cultural meanings about crime and justice are negotiated and contested within them. In this context, comic books offer expressions of contemporary life that tap into our hopes, fears, personal insecurities, and uncertainties about the future, as do popular media in general. Comic books, particularly those of the superhero genre, are replete with themes of crime and justice, yet are frequently ignored by criminologists.2 We explore the ways in which meanings about crime and justice are negotiated and contested in comic books and the way these imaginings form part of a broader cultural context in which readers absorb, reproduce, and resist notions of justice. We examine comic books in terms of what criminologist Stephanie Kane described as an “experimental ethnographic space,” a place occupied by characters as its virtual inhabitants.3 Indeed, the world of Superman drops the reader into a kind of alternate America, where Smallville and Metropolis act as proxies for real American towns and cities. Batman invites us into a dark and dystopic Gotham where we meet the Riddler and the Penguin and get lost in the dark passageways of Wayne Manor or vicariously play with the technological gadgetry of a reclusive and crimeobsessed millionaire. Through extended virtual visits to these imaginary worlds, we paid attention to both the visuals and the text—the juxtaposition of which provides a wealth of opportunities for interpretation. “[C]omics are more flexible than theater, deeper than cinema,” explains Pulitzer Prize–winning comic creator Art Spiegelman in a 1991 New York Times interview.4 Comic creator Scott McCloud states that the “heart of comics lies in the space between the panels—where the reader ’s imagination makes still pictures come alive!”5 Unlike other mediums such as film or television, comic books rely much more heavily on the reader as participant—to use his or her imagination to fill in “the gutter ,” or space between the panels. McCloud further explains that the more abstract the artistic rendering, the more the reader fills in, or creates his or her own level of detail. Comic books then provide a means for exploring images of villains, heroes, and notions of justice in a participatory and fluid medium.6 Holy Criminology, Batman! 3 Like other scholars who have investigated the relationship between cultural artifacts and fandom, our approach also considers the plurality of the audience and explores the ways in which devoted readers, sometimes colloquially referred to as “fanboys,” not only absorb comic book narratives but also may actively negotiate and shape the narratives themselves.7 At times, readers have directly influenced plot lines, such as in DC Comics’ decision to let...