Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium

“The Middle Against Both Ends”

122 Leslie Fiedler “The Middle Against Both Ends” Encounter, August 1955, pp. 16–23. Reprinted in The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, Volume II (Stein and Day, 1971). Reprinted by permission. I am surely one of the few people pretending to intellectual respectability who can boast that he has read more comic books than attacks on comic books. I do not mean that I have consulted or studied the comics—I have read them, often with some pleasure. Nephews and nieces, my own children, and the children of neighbors have brought them to me to share their enjoyment. An old lady on a ferry boat in Puget sound once dropped two in my lap in wordless sympathy: I was wearing, at the time, a sailor’s uniform. I have somewhat more difficulty in getting through the books that attack them. I am put off, to begin with, by inaccuracies of fact. When Mr. Geoffrey Wagner in his Parade of Pleasure calls Superboy “Superman’s brother” (he is, of course, Superman himself as a child), I am made suspicious. Actually, Mr. Wagner’s book is one of the least painful on the subject; confused, to be sure, but quite lively and not in the least smug; though it propounds the preposterous theory that the whole of “popular literature ” is a conspiracy on the part of the “plutos” to corrupt an innocent American people. Such easy melodrama can only satisfy someone prepared to believe, as Mr. Wagner apparently does, that the young girls of Harlem are being led astray by the double entendres of blues records! Mr. Wagner’s notions are at least more varied and subtle than Mr. Gershon Legman’s, who cries out in his Love and Death that it is simply our sexual frustrations which breed a popular literature dedicated to violence. But Mr. Legman’s theory explains too much: not only comic books but Hemingway, war, Luce, Faulkner, the status of women—and, I should suppose, Mr. Legman’s own shrill hyperboles. At that, Mr. Legman seems more to the point in his search for some deeply underlying cause than Fredric Wertham, in Seduction of the Innocent, with his contention that the pulps and comics in themselves are schools for murder. That the undefined aggressiveness of disturbed children can be given a shape by comic books, I do not doubt; and one could make a good case for the contention that such literature LESLIE FIEDLER 123 standardizes crime woefully or inhibits imagination in violence, but I find it hard to consider so obvious a symptom a prime cause of anything. Perhaps I am a little sensitive on this score, having heard the charge this week that the recent suicide of one of our college freshmen was caused by his having read (in a course of which I am in charge) Goethe, Dostoevsky, and Death of a Salesman. Damn it, he had read them, and he did kill himself! In none of the books on comics1 I have looked into, and in none of the reports of ladies’ clubs, protests of legislators, or statements of moral indignation by pastors, have I come on any real attempt to understand comic books: to define the form, midway between icon and story; to distinguish the subtypes: animal, adolescent, crime, Western, etc.; or even to separate out, from the dead-pan varieties, tonguein -cheek sports like Pogo, frank satire like Mad, or semisurrealist variations like Plastic Man. It would not take someone with the talents of an Aristotle, but merely with his method, to ask the rewarding questions about this kind of literature that he asked once about an equally popular and bloody genre: what are its causes and its natural form? A cursory examination would show that the superhero comic (Superman. Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, etc.) is the final form; it is statistically the most popular with the most avid readers, and it provides the only new legendary material invented along with the form rather than adapted to it. Next, one would have to abstract the most general pattern of the myth of the superhero and deduce its significance: the urban setting, the threatened universal catastrophe, the hero who never uses arms, who returns to weakness and obscurity , who must keep his identity secret, who is impotent, etc. Not until then could one ask with any hope of an answer: what end do the comics serve? Why have they gained an immense body of readers precisely in the past fifteen or twenty...