I. Introduction: Comics as a U. S. Cultural Index

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. (1986) America. Translated by Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso, 1995.

Beebee, Thomas O. The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability. University Park: Penn State P, 1994.

Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Importance of the Comic. Translated by Vassilis Tomanas. Athens: Exantas—Nemata, 1998.

Brady, Matt. Marvel Encyclopedia, edited by Mark Beazley and Jeff Youngquist. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002.

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, edited by Carolyn C. Heilbrun and Nancy K. Miller. Gender and Culture series. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 334-49. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991.

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In Writing and Difference. Translated with an Introduction and Additional Notes by Alan Bass, 278-93. Chicago: The U. of Chicago P., 1978.

Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” In Richter, 866-77.

Fender, Stephen. “The American Difference.” In Modern American Culture: An Introduction, edited by Mick Gidley, 1-22. New York: Longman, 1994.

Foucault, Michel. “From Truth and Power.” Translated by Colin Gordon. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 1667-70. New York and London: Norton, 2001.

Frahm, Ole. “Weird Signs. Comics as Means of Parody.” Translated by Michael Hein. In Magnussen and Christiansen, 177-90.

Freud, Sigmund. (1908) “Creative Writers and Daydreaming.” In Critical Theory since Plato. Revised ed., edited by Hazard Adams, 712-16. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992.

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Groensteen, Thierry. “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” In Magnussen and Christiansen, 29-41.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.

Hillman, David, and Carla Mazzio. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. New York and London: Routledge, 1997.

Holman, Hugh C., and William Harmon. A Handbook to Literature. 6th ed. New York: Macmillan, 1992.

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Jung, Carl Gustav. “Approaching the Unconscious.” In Jung, 1-94.

Kaindl, Klaus. “Multimodality in the Translation of Humour in Comics.” In Perspectives on Multimodality, edited by Eija Ventola, Charles Cassidy and Martin Kaltenbacher, 173-92. Document Design Companion 6. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004.

Kroker, Arthur. SPASM: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh. Culture Texts Series. Montréal: New World Perspectives, 1993.

Lacan, Jacques. (1949). “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” In Davis and Schleifer, 382-99.

Lee, Stan (writer) and Jack Kirby (penciller). The Fantastic Four. New York: Marvel Comics/Marvel Entertainment Group, 1961.

---. “The Coming of Galactus!” The Fabulous Fantastic Four: Marvel Treasury Edition 1.2: 52-98.

---. “Captives of the Deadly Duo.” The Fabulous Fantastic Four: Marvel Treasury Edition 1.2: 4-27.

Mellor, Anne K. “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein.” In Romanticism and Feminism, edited by Anne K. Mellor, 220-32. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1988.

Mitchell, W.J.T. “Representation.” In Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1999. 11-22.

Mulvey, Laura. (1975) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Davis and Schleifer, 422-31.

Murray, Will. “Farewell to the King: Friends Remember That King of Comics, the Legendary Jack Kirby.” Comics Scene 42 (May 1994): 12-15+, 56.

Pustz, Matthew. Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers. Jackson, NC: U of Mississippi P, 1999.

Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. New Accents series. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001.

Voger, Mark. “Living Legend: A Half-century Later, Jack Kirby Is Still the American Comic Book.” Comics Scene Yearbook 2 (1993): 35-39.

von Franz, Marie L. “The Process of Individuation.” In Man and His Symbols, edited with an Introduction by Carl G. Jung, 161-254. New York: Dell/Laurel, 1968.

Zachopoulos, Christos. “Introduction.” In Greek Political Cartoons, edited by Christos Zachopoulos, 9-36. Prologue by Ioannis Varvitsiotis. Lefkomata series. Athens: The Constantinos Karamanlis Institute for Democracy—Sideris Publications, 2002.

Filmography

The Fantastic Four. Dir. Tim Story. Marvel Entertainment Group, 2005.

The Fantastic Four. Dir. Oley Sassone. Marvel Entertainment, 1994.

1 As seen in, among others, Ruth Vasey’s study on public and media images in America in “The Media,” Modern American Culture: An Introduction, Mick Gidley, ed. (New York: Longman, 1994): 213-38.

2 Christos Zachopoulos, “Eisagogi,” Helleniki Politiki Geloiographia [“Introduction,” Greek Political Cartoons], Prologue by Ioannis Varvitsiotis, Christos Zachopoulos, ed., Lefkomata series (Athens: The Constantinos Karamanlis Institute for Democracy/ Sideris Publications, 2002): 13-14.

3 See, for example, Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings, or The ‘Nam series by veteran Doug Murray, published by Marvel in 1986.

4 As seen in the inspired combination of Plato and Nietzsche in writer Alan Moore’s and artist Dave Gibbons’s 1986-87 acclaimed DC mini-series The Watchmen.

5 Lord Raglan’s monomyth and Mircea Eliade’s myth of the eternal return, not to mention Joseph Campbell’s schema of the heroic cycle, easily apply to such heroes as Marvel’s 1941 Captain America by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, or DC’s 1938 Superman by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

6 As in Marvel’s 1963 The X-Men by Chris Claremont, noted for its ongoing allegory on subjects such as racism (the 80s “Genosha” storyline), anti-Semitism (the first X-Men film), or homophobia (the “Cassandra Nova” 2002 storyline and the second X-Men film).

7 Thierry Groensteen, “Why are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, Shirley Smolderen, trans., Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen, eds. (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum P./U of Copenhagen, 2000); 29-41. On the negative view of comics, see: Amy K Nyberg, “Poisoning Children’s Culture: Comics and Their Critics,” Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America, Foreword by Madeleine B. Stern, Lydia C. Schurman and Deidre Johnson, eds. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002): 167-86.

8 Qtd. in: Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction, New Accents series (London and New York: Routledge, 1993): 98.

9 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Representation,” Critical Terms for Literary Study, Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds. (Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1999): 15. On the subject of comics as reflections of culture, see: Joseph Witek, “From Genre to Medium: Comics and Contemporary American Culture,” Rejuvenating the Humanities, Ray B. Brown and Marshall Fishwick, eds. (Bowling Green, OH: Popular, 1992): 71-79; also: Thomas M. Inge, Comics as Culture, (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1980).

10 Klaus Kaindl, “Multimodality in the Translation of Humour in Comics,” Perspectives on Multimodality, Eija Ventola, Charles Cassidy and Martin Kaltenbacher, eds., Document Design Companion 6 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004): 183.

11 Kaindl 183.

12 Matthew Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson, NC: U of Mississippi P, 1999): 13.

13 Examples of the latter are, among others, Astérix (a René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo hit since 1959-61), Raw’s 1972 Maus by Art Spiegelman and DC’s 1989 The Sandman by Neil Gaiman.

14 Sigmund Freud, (1908) “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” Critical Theory since Plato, Revised ed., Hazard Adams, ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992): 714-15.

15 Mark Voger, “Living Legend: A Half-century Later, Jack Kirby Is Still the American Comic Book,” Comics Scene Yearbook 2 (1993): 36.

16 Will Murray, “Farewell to the King: Friends Remember That King of Comics, the Legendary Jack Kirby,” Comics Scene 42 (May 1994): 14.

17 Voger 36.

18 Stan Lee, writer, and Jack Kirby, penciller, The Fantastic Four (New York: Marvel Comics/Marvel Entertainment Group, 1961). All Marvel characters examined in this article are property of Marvel Comics/Marvel Entertainment Group and are used by license graciously granted for academic purposes by their copyright owners.

19 The Fantastic Four, Tim Story, dir., starring Kerry Washington, Chris Evans, Jessica Alba, Ioan Gruffudd, Michael Chiklis, Julian McMahon (Marvel Entertainment Group, 2005); The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, starring Chris Evans, Jessica Alba, Ioan Gruffudd, Michael Chiklis, Julian McMahon, Lawrence Fishburne (Marvel Entertainment Group, 2007).

20 Matt Brady, Marvel Encyclopedia, Mark Beazley and Jeff Youngquist, eds. (New York: Marvel Comics, 2002): 68.

21 Brady 68.

22 Brady 68.

23 A methodologically similar, yet admittedly much more negative critique of fantasy-as-allegory of the pathology of culture can be seen in Louis Marin’s 1977 “Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia,” Contemporary Literary Criticism, 3rd ed., Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds. (New York and London: Longman, 1994): 283-95.

24 Hugh C. Holman and William Harmon, "Grotesque," A Handbook to Literature, 6th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1992): 219.

25 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, Carolyn C. Heilbrun and Nancy K. Miller, eds., Gender and Culture series (New York: Columbia UP, 1994): 7-8.

26 Jean Baudrillard, (1986) America, Chris Turner, trans. (London and New York: Verso, 1995): 95.

27 Arthur Kroker, SPASM: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh, Culture Texts Series (Montréal: New World Perspectives, 1993): 38.

28 Eco, Umberto, “The Myth of Superman.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 2nd ed., David H. Richter, ed. (Boston: Bedford, 1998): 867-68.

29 Eco 868-69.

30 Kaindl 173-74.

31 Marie L. von Franz, “The Process of Individuation,” Man and His Symbols, Introduction by Carl G. Jung, ed. (New York: Dell/Laurel, 1968): 214.

32 Eco 868.

33 Baudrillard 76.

34 von Franz 161-62.

35 Stephen Fender, “The American Difference," Modern American Culture: An Introduction, Mick Gidley, ed. (New York: Longman, 1994): 7-8.

36 Preoccupation with the space-race program, as seen poignantly in Oriana Fallaci’s journalistic memoir-novel of post-War America, If the Sun Dies (New York: Kingsport, 1966), had reached the point of national craze among all age groups, and led then to scientific speculations that appeared much more fantastic than even comic book scenarios.

37 Brady 68.

38 Jacques Lacan, (1949) "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Contemporary Literary Criticism, 3rd ed., Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds. (New York and London: Longman, 1994): 384.

39 von Franz 211.

40 An issue most thoroughly and controversially explored in Marvel’s 1962 The Incredible Hulk, again by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby—whose two film adaptations have joined 2008’s Iron Man, the three X-Men, and three Spiderman films (so far) as a Marvel screen blockbuster.

41 In the film, in fact, the hubris is lessened by having the space station (this time) belong to Reed's antagonistic former classmate who now funds Reed’s ambitious project, Victor von Doom (see more below). While Reed only wants to study the cosmic ray storm for medical purposes beneficial to humankind, von Doom’s faulty equipment, so to speak, and his insistence that the experiment go on, despite the danger, are what bring about the transformation. The change, though serving well the “Good Scientist, Bad Tycoon” motif, blunts the intricacy and sharpness of the questions posed by the original comic, on whose thinking this paper is based.

42 The character, a caricature of Henry Kissinger that became a cultural metaphor, comes from the 1964 offbeat film hit by Stanley Kubrick (who also wrote the screenplay with Terry Southern), starring Peter Sellers, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

43 In what has become by now an anecdotal piece of Americana, Oppenheimer, seeing his plutonium bomb explode at Los Alamos on July 16, 1945, finally realized the ramifications of his team’s creation and whispered the line from the Hindu epic of the Baghavad Gita: “Behold, I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds.” See: Mark C. Carnes, “About J. Robert Oppenheimer,” American National Biography (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), May 12, 2003, Online, Internet, available WWW: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a-f/aboutopp.htm .

44 Brady 87.

45 Echoing Alexander Dumas’s 1846 The Man in the Iron Mask--and acknowledgedly foreshadowing Darth Vader, according to: Donald D. Markstein, “The Fantastic Four,” Toonopedia, May 12, 2003, Online, Internet, available WWW: http://www.toonopedia.com/fant4.htm. In the film, Doom’s similarity to Reed and the rest of the group is in fact heightened by having him also be exposed to the cosmic rays and mutate into an organic metal being with electromagnetic powers. The difference there is that while Reed views the mutation as “an infection,” Doom enjoys it as a step towards godhood—reflecting the typical division between humanitarian (usually medicine-related) aspects of science and industrial technology that corrupts one’s humanity out of them and turns them into “robots.”

46 Groensteen 40-41.

47 Kroker 7-8.

48 Braidotti 63.

49 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991): 342.

50 Brady 73.

51 Television’s W.A.S.P. situational comedy idols of the 50s and the 60s, looking practically identical in their short platinum-blonde coiffs, blue eyes, matching pastel outfits and perennially sunny, angel-in-the-house disposition, these actresses/typecast TV characters (the former the star of several films and shows, and the latter the “mother” in the series Leave It to Beaver) created a slew of female imitators on- and off-screen, cementing the legend of the impeccable American suburban housewife.

52 Brady 73.

53 Bowing to the changed mores of the 21st century, this trait is turned to Sue's advantage in the film, where Reed admits that his ignoring of Sue's (and his own) needs and amorous feelings was what led to their earlier college breakup and subsequent estrangement.

54 As literally depicted in Stan Lee, writer, and Jack Kirby, penciller, “The Coming of Galactus!” The Fabulous Fantastic Four: Marvel Treasury Edition 1.2 (December 1974): 59.

55 Carl Gustav Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” Man and His Symbols, Introduction by Carl G. Jung, ed. (New York: Dell/Laurel, 1968): 17.

56 von Franz 195.

57 Brady 73.

58 Stan Lee, writer, and Jack Kirby, penciller, “Captives of the Deadly Duo,” The Fabulous Fantastic Four: Marvel Treasury Edition 1.2 (December 1974): 15.

59 David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 1997): xvi; also Cixous 342.

60 On the discussion of woman as monster, see also Braidotti, esp. 79-83; and Kristevan film theorist Barbara Creed’s book The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993).

61 Laura Mulvey, (1975) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Contemporary Literary Criticism, 3rd ed., Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds. (New York and London: Longman, 1994): 425.

62 For the gendered division of image and word, as well as the impact of technology on those concepts, see: Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick, eds., Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2003).

63 Cixous 343.

64 Braidotti 83.

65 Brady 88.

66 Brady 71.

67 Baudrillard 50.

68 von Franz 163.

69 von Franz 164.

70 Brady 71.

71 Aniela Jaffé, “Symbolism in the Visual Arts,” Man and His Symbols, Introduction by Carl G. Jung, ed. (New York: Dell/Laurel, 1968): 259.

72 von Franz 224. As Baudrillard also says about America, “It is metamorphic forms that are magical. Not the sylvan, vetrified, mineralized forest.{..} It takes this surreality of the elements to eliminate nature’s picturesque qualities, just as it takes the metaphysics of sped to eliminate the natural picturesqueness of travel” (8-9). Therefore the presence of a stone man draws attention both in primal and futuristic terms.

73 von Franz 221.

74 von Franz 206-07.

75 Hillman and Mazzio xvi.

76 Mary Shelley, (1818) Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus, Introduction by Diane Johnson, Bantam Classics (New York and Toronto: Bantam, 1981): 150-51.

77 Anne K. Mellor, “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein,” Romanticism and Feminism, Anne K. Mellor, ed. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1988): 224.

78 Voger 38.

79 On the subject of the new conceptualization of the body in technoculture, see: Ollivier Dyens, Metal and Flesh; The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over, Evan J. Bibbee and Ollivier Dyens, trans. (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2001).

80 Jacques Derrida, (1967) Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976).

81 Kroker 162.

82 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994): 13.

83 Eco 876.

84 Ole Frahm, “Weird Signs. Comics as Means of Parody,” Michael Hein, trans., Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum P./U of Copenhagen, 2000): 180.

85 Voger 36.

86 As seen in all of Michel Foucault’s work, but especially in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison (1975) and Power/Knowledge (1980).

87 As is also shown by the whole Derridean endeavor, seminally in his 1967 De la grammatologie, where there is nothing which is beyond the text and all one can observe is the “traces” in the text of anomalies, philosophical tensions and the “plurivocity” of writing”

88 Frahm 180.

89 Thomas O. Beebee, The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (University Park: Penn State UP, 1994): 17.

90 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Writing and Difference, Introduction and Additional Notes by Alan Bass, trans. (Chicago: The U. of Chicago P., 1978): 292.

91 Frahm 179.

92 Kroker 17.

93 Baudrillard 35.

94 Pustz 83.

95 Kroker 127.

96 Michel Foucault, “From Truth and Power,” Colin Gordon, trans., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Vincent B. Leitch, ed. (New York and London: Norton, 2001): 1668.

97 Northrop Frye, (1957) “Anatomy of Criticism: Mythic Archetypes,” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, 6th ed., X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, eds. (New York: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1995): 1810.

98 Erich Auerbach, “Odysseus' Scar,” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, David H. Richter, ed. (Boston: Bedford, 1998): 654-67.

99 Henri Bergson, Laughter, An Essay on the Importance of the Comic, Vassilis Tomanas, trans. (Athens: Exantas-Nemata, 1998): 27-29. Quote translation mine.

100 The Fantastic Four, Oley Sassone, dir., starring: Alex Hyde-White, Jay Underwood, Rebecca Staab, Michael Bailey Smith, Joseph Culp (Marvel Entertainment, 1994).

101 Beebee 250.

102 Baudrillard 28.

103 The infamous “dissimulation of the woven texture” (of the text, which “is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible.”—63) theorized in: Jacques Derrida, (1972) Dissemination, Introduction and Additional Notes by Barbara Johnson, trans,. Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers (London: The Athlone Press, 2000).

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