On January 10, 2007 The New York Sun ran an article titled “Bonding with a Superhero,” which turned out to be a review of Simon Binder’s book The Man Who Saved Britain, a study of James Bond. Is James Bond a superhero? The Sun copy editor who wrote that headline isn’t the only one who thinks so. The introduction to The Rough Guide to James Bond calls Bond “a superhero without superpowers,” a description that would place him in the same category as Batman and Captain America.
Well, you might think, the people who labeled Bond a superhero haven’t thought seriously about what the word means. Nor has New York Post writer Brian Niemietz, who recently began a fashion article (Jan. 25, 2007) thus: “Joe Namath. Bruce Lee. Superman. Cher. All superheroes. All men in tights.” (Cher?)
But then there’s the case of scholar John Shelton Lawrence, who, with Robert Jewett, wrote the book The Myth of the American Superhero (2002). In an interview for his publisher, Lawrence states that “Many of the great American superstars and superhero characters have built their franchises on roles that, like Spider-Man’s, show them circumventing laws and the leaders so that they can be saviors. Our book discusses Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone, Charles Bronson, John Wayne, and many others.” (What, no Arnold Schwarzenegger?) Superman is on the cover of the book, but so is Eastwood in his Western guise as the Man with No Name. Lawrence even goes on to say, “We also discuss the more overtly religious program Touched by [an] Angel, which highlights psychological manipulation rather than violence. We don’t find Touched healthy either, because it is just one more way of dramatizing failed institutions and calling for intervention by disguised superheroes who will leave after they exercise their special powers.” If Lawrence has extended the definition of “superhero” to include not only Rambo and Western heroes, but the angels in the television series Touched by an Angel, then the term has become so broad as to lose any practical meaning. Is Harry Potter a superhero? Or Luke Skywalker? Or Aragorn? Or Jack Bauer? Or Dirty Harry? Or Yojimbo? Or Austin Powers?
That’s one reason that Peter Coogan’s book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (MonkeyBrain Press, 2006) is a welcome and necessary addition to comics scholarship. Coogan’s name should be familiar to regular readers of this column, since he is one of the organizers of the Comic Arts Conference, an academic conference about comics that is held each year at the San Diego Comic Con. For many years he worked on his dissertation, which he revised and expanded into this Superhero book, whose principal purpose is to define the superhero genre.
As Coogan writes, “The term superhero is often applied to all sorts of characters and people from Beowulf and Luke Skywalker to Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan. These applications come out of a metaphoric use of the term to describe characters and people who seem a step above others in their class, whether epic, science fiction, or sports.” Coogan notes that people metaphorically refer to George W. Bush as a “cowboy,” referencing the Western genre, but that “many people do not understand that referring to Tiger Woods as a superhero is similarly metaphoric. The difference [is that] the Western is well defined scholarly and popularly, but the superhero genre is not” (Coogan, Superhero, p. 259).
This problem requires further explanation. Jordan and Woods are metaphorically superheroes because their athletic prowess is so far beyond that of ordinary people, or even of the majority of professional athletes in their field. But Woods and Jordan are not superhumans: they are actual people in the real world who cannot transcend the natural capabilities of a human being.
Larger than life heroes of adventure fiction, whether it is Beowulf or a classic Western hero played by John Wayne, may not be explicitly portrayed as superhuman, but they nonetheless perform feats that real people would be unlikely to duplicate. For example, in the new season of 24, Jack Bauer arrives shortly after 6 AM from being tortured for twenty months in a Chinese prison; within the hour, terrorist mastermind Abu Fayed is jamming a knife into one of Jack’s nerve centers. But towards the end of the hour Jack kills his guard by biting his neck (Hey, was this an in-joke reference to Kiefer Sutherland’s role as a vampire in The Lost Boys?), and by the next hour Jack is back to racing around Los Angeles, battling terrorists, seemingly back at his physical and mental peak!
In the case of Luke Skywalker, he literally, explicitly has super-powers, thanks to the Force. And so do the angels in Touched by an Angel, although their powers are supernatural in origin.
So just how do we differentiate the characters whom we normally think of as superheroes, like Superman and Batman and Spider-Man, from these pretenders to the title? That is Coogan’s self-imposed mission: to provide “a look at that scholarly lacuna, an examination of the superhero genre as a genre” (Foreword p. iv) in order to “provide a basis for the study of superheroes and help to make more studies possible in the future” (p. 60).
This is another reason that I find Coogan’s Superhero so welcome is that the current enthusiasm in mainstream cultural circles for comics tends to focus on alternative comics; in the main, with exceptions such as Watchmen, superhero comics, which make up the majority of American comic books over the last forty years, still aren’t taken seriously. So it is a joy for me to see Coogan devote this entire book to an academic (but highly accessible) study of the superhero genre: he simply accepts the idea that this body of work is worthy of serious study, without apologies or condescension. Although I disagree with it in certain areas, I believe that Coogan’s Superhero succeeds in being the essential basic text for studies of this genre. In clearly defining the genre, he better enables us to comprehend it.
In the past I’ve wondered myself how exactly to define a superhero. The most obvious idea–that a superhero has superhuman powers–doesn’t work, inasmuch as the second best known comics superhero, Batman, has none. My solution was that a superhero is a protagonist who is either literally or figuratively superhuman: he or she either has super-powers or takes on the figurative aspect of the superhuman. For example, the Batman costumes himself as a bat: he is figuratively a bat in human form, and hence, figuratively, a being greater than an ordinary human being. Thus Batman is like a tribal shaman who dons a mask and costume resembling the appearance of an animal in order to figuratively take on that animal’s abilities. Similarly, Captain America has no super-powers (with a few minor exceptions: the “super-soldier serum” he took enabled him to survive for decades in suspended animation). But his costume and shield evoke the colors, stars, and stripes of the American flag. Figuratively, Captain America is the American flag in human form. Indeed, Captain America sees his mission as upholding and preserving what he considers American values. (Of course, there are also superheroes who are normal humans who wield artificial super-powers. Tony Stark dons the armor of Iron Man, whoch endows him with superpowers. Green Lantern has no physical super-powers, but commands the powers of his ring through metal concentration.)
In classical mythology, figures like Hercules were demigods: sons an daughters of humans and gods, they were literally half-divine and half-human.
Similarly, superheroes are combinations of the (literally or figuratively) superhuman and the (literally or figuratively) human.
Spider-Man is Peter Parker, an otherwise ordinary human being who acquired superhuman powers. His is a typical case.
But not all superheroes are literally human beings. Even the first, archetypal superhero, Superman, is an extraterrestrial, albeit one who looks exactly like an Earth human. Other superheroes include aliens who don’t look entirely human (the Silver Surfer, the Martian Manhunter), androids (the original Human Torch, the Vision), gods (Thor, Orion), and even animals (Mighty Mouse).
Nonetheless, all of these non-human superheroes possess qualities that we associate with humanity. In most cases they look humanoid, if not exactly human: even Mighty Mouse is built more like a tiny human being than an actual mouse. Superman chooses to live among humanity as Clark Kent, an outwardly ordinary human being; the Martian Manhunter even uses his shapechanging powers to devise his own human persona, J’onn J’onzz. (In DC’s post-Crisis continuity, the Manhunter’s true form isn’t even humanoid, but, significantly, he shapeshifts into a green humanoid to serve as a superhero.) In Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s stories, Thor literally became the human Don Blake in order to live among mortals. The original Human Torch and Orion may be an android and a “god,” respectively, but they look and act like humans with superpowers. When Jack Kirby introduced the Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four #48-50 (1966), the Surfer was an alien who discovered the value of humanity, and, arguably, began developing human emotions and sensitivity himself; significantly, Stan Lee subsequently retconned the Surfer into a very human-like alien who had been transformed into Kirby’s superpowered creation. Mighty Mouse has human intelligence and can talk (and sing); in Silver Age comics Krypto the Superdog had a human-level intellect, and on his animated TV series, he too can talk, even if humans can’t understand him. (Since in the Silver Age comics Krypto expressed himself through thought balloons, I thought of him as being like a superpowered Snoopy.)
My own definition meant that I could even include Neil Gaiman’s Morpheus as a superhero. He is a superhuman protagonist of his series, he appears in human-like form, and one could regard Gaiman’s Sandman series as tracing Morpheus’s discovery of his own “humanity,” in the sense of his ability to empathize with others. At the beginning of the series the superhuman being Morpheus has been reduced to what his captor figuratively calls “a naked man in a cage.” At the series’ end Morpheus sacrifices his own life, and his successor as Dream is, significantly, a being who is simultaneously the former human Daniel Hall and Morpheus himself reborn, god and man as one. (I know that in his series Gaiman differentiates his Endless, like Dream, from “gods.” But if we specify only two categories, gods and humans, the endless fit into the former.)
My definition decisively excludes the likes of Bond and Bauer and any hero played by John Wayne. However extraordinary James Bond’s talents may be, he is not presented as either literally or figuratively superhuman: he is a man with an ordinary name who is a salaried employee of the British government. Bond may have a codename, but he can’t dress up as a “007” the way that Bruce Wayne can costume himself as a bat in human form.
My definition also enables me to differentiate between characters like Captain America and Nick Fury. Look at Silver Age Marvel stories by Lee, Kirby, and Jim Steranko, and you will find that Fury is capable of feats of combat that are just as spectacular as Cap’s. But Cap is a superhero, and Fury is not. Why? It’s a matter of self-presentation. As previously stated, Captain America is presented as the costumed personification of the American flag. But in Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, Lee, Kirby, and Steranko presented Fury as being as far from the conventional image of a glamorous Bondian superspy or a costumed superhero as possible. Lee and Kirby put him in ordinary business suits, not Bondian tuxedos; Steranko put Fury into skin-tight jumpsuits, but they still weren’t anything like superhero costumes. The point of the SHIELD series, which subsequent writers and artists appear to have forgotten, is that Fury is the proverbial fish out of water. Fury remains the unshaven, cigar-chomping, vulgar and unrefined, foul-mouthed (within Comics Code limitations), ill-mannered Army sergeant from Hell’s Kitchen, who has been thrust into a world of science fictional technology, costumed terrorists, and global conspiracies. Yet through his street smarts and the fisticuffs he learned growing up in the slums, Fury not only masters SHIELD but bests the likes of the Imperial Hydra. Fury is not a superman; he is the common man who triumphs over bureaucrats, elitists, and would-be dictators.
While it was tempting to include Morpheus in the category of superheroes, I was uneasy about it, since if he is a superhero, he is of a very different sort than the costumed crimefighters we usually associate with the term. Moreover, my own definition would still include characters with superhuman abilities like Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter, and, alas, even those Touched by an Angel heroines.
In defining the superhero I was focusing solely on the character of the superhero. What was eye-opening to me about Coogan’s book was that he looks not just at the character but at that character’s role and function in the story. Coogan is seeking not just to define the superhero but also to define the superhero genre. Hence, what makes a superhero is not just the character’s personal attributes but also the kind of story he or she is in. As Coogan states in his own definition, the superhero “is generically distinct, i.e., can be distinguished from characters of related genres (fantasy, science fiction, detective, etc.) by a preponderance of genre conventions” (p. 30).
In formulating his own definition, Coogan refers to DC’s lawsuit against Victor Fox, who in 1939 published Wonder Man, whose title character was an imitation of Superman (and not to be confused with Marvel’s later character of the same name). The wonderfully named Judge Learned Hand, in ruling on the lawsuit, identified three defining characteristics of that new creation, the superhero. “These three elements–mission, powers, and identity,” according to Coogan, “establish the core of the genre” (p. 39).
Hand stated that Superman and Wonder Man were each a “champion of the oppressed” who battles “evil and injustice” (p. 30). Coogan asserts that the superhero’s mission must be “prosocial and selfless” and “must not be intended to benefit or further his own agenda” (p. 31). Most superheroes do not combat wrongdoing in order to make money or gain some other kind of personal reward. Coogan points out that Hugo Danner, the protagonist of Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel Gladiator and a precursor of Superman, “uses his super-strength to earn a living as a circus strongman” (p. 31). Here’s another way of distinguishing Bond from a true superhero: however patriotic Bond is, he is assigned by his employer to combat the likes of Goldfinger.
Coogan also maintains that the superhero has a “generalized mission” to safeguard all people from danger and to combat all criminals, and hence “to do good for the sake of doing good” (p. 254). If James Bond were fired by British intelligence, he presumably would not continue to combat international conspiracies on his own. Once Luke Skywalker and his allies overthrew the Empire, their mission was complete. But Bruce Wayne did not become the Batman to capture his parents’ killer, but to war on all criminals. In pre-Crisis continuity, when that killer, Joe Chill, was murdered, that did not make any difference to Batman’s commitment to continue fighting crime. Even more significantly, it was after he caught his uncle’s killer that Spider-Man chose to become a crimefighter. In the typical form of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the hero completes his mission and returns to his community. The superhero typically pursues a mission that will never end for him, as long as he is physically capable of continuing it: once the superhero captures one bad guy, he moves on to pursuing the next one.
Coogan notes that this sort of mission is not unique to the superhero genre, and that it is shared by another of Superman’s precursors, the pulp hero Doc Savage. I’d add that Batman’s war on crime is just as endless as that of one of his own precursors, the Shadow, a crimefighting hero of both the pulps and radio, or that of another pulpish radio hero, the Green Hornet. Moreover, we can move beyond the pulps to find contemporary examples of the hero who does “good for the sake of doing good” in more contemporary material outside the superhero genre. Jack Bauer battles terrorists whether or not he is officially employed by CTU, the Counter-Terrorist Unit; in Season 6 he quits at the end of the 9 AM-to-10 AM episode, and then voluntarily resumes his mission once he sees the mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb the terrorists set off. In the classic British television series The Avengers (see “Comics in Context” #52), John Steed may be a government agent, but Mrs. Emma Peel is described as a “talented amateur,” who therefore presumably combats threats to British security simply because she considers it the right thing to do. There’s even a tradition of the fictional gentleman detective, like Lord Peter Wimsey or The Thin Man‘s Nick Charles, who solves murders not for financial recompense but for the intellectual challenge and to right the scales of justice. So, as Coogan states, this sense of mission does not by itself separate the superhero genre from the others.
Coogan’s next defining characteristic is superpowers, but, as I have already observed, superheroes need not possess actual superpowers. (Indeed, only one of the superheroes in Watchmen has super-powers.) Here I think my principle about superheroes either being literally or figuratively superhuman applies. And so does Coogan’s emphasis on the story in which the superhero protagonist appears. Batman has no super-powers, but some of his adversaries, like the shapeshifter Clayface, do, and they do not seem out of place in his stories. Captain America regularly battles superpowered opponents.
It’s important that Coogan comments here on “the exaggeration inherent in the superhero genre” (p. 31). Coogan is referring specifically to superpowers, which don’t exist in the real world; elsewhere in the book he refers to “superhero physics,” meaning the ways in which scientific laws operate differently in superhero stories than they do in real life. (For example, just where does all that extra mass come from when Bruce Banner turns into the much larger and heavier Hulk?) I’d add that the “exaggeration” turns up in other forms as well. No one in the real world would dress up as a bat and devise all that high-tech equipment to fight crime for the rest of his life, but in the superhero genre, it is a reasonable choice of career. Hence even psychology is somewhat different in the world of superheroes. From Stan Lee onward, superhero writers have sought to show what would happen if superheroes existed in the real world. But despite any realistic elements, ultimately and necessarily the superhero genre portrays a world of the fantastic, far less naturalistic that of many other action-adventure subgenres.
The superhero reader must accept these departures from strict realism as
necessary conventions of the genre, just as the Looney Tunes fan accepts the convention that animals can talk (my colleague Fred Hembeck can’t accept that, so he’s not a Bugs Bunny fan), or the opera buff accepts the premise that people sing, rather than speak.
One of those conventions that get in the way of some people’s acceptance of the superhero genre is the costume. The creators of the Smallville television series took as their guiding motto, “No flights, no tights.” (However, their version of Clark Kent eventually did fly, and this season they have introduced Green Arrow, in full costume; the demands of Superman history and the genre will out.) The makers of the X-Men movies outfitted them in undistinguished black uniforms rather than individualized, colorful costumes. SInce the villains in the first X-Men movie wore the same thing, there wasn’t even a visual distinction between the good guys and the bad guys. The absence of superhero-style costumes makes the X-Men movies look more like science fiction films, in visual terms, which, presumably, the filmmakers thought had a wider potential audience than superhero movies. And yet, the most critically and commercially successful Marvel movies are the Spider-Man films, which keep the title character in his familiar and distinctive red and blue costume. Maybe movie audiences aren’t as averse to costumes as filmmakers fear. (Unsurprisingly, Marvel Comics switched the X-Men into black uniforms after the first X-Men movie, but at least they had big “X” insignia, and inevitably Marvel ended up putting them back in superhero-style costumes. Similarly, in the 1980s Marvel put Spider-Man in a simple black costume with a white spider insignia, supposedly permanently, but thankfully, it did not last long.)
Yet even Stan Lee and Jack Kirby initially decided not to put the Fantastic Four in costumes, in order to make the characters seem more realistic: Coogan quotes Lee as saying, “If our heroes were to live in the real world, then let them dress like real people” (p. 43). But as Coogan points out, Lee and Kirby quickly gave in to what Lee claimed was pressure from fan letters, and the F. F. acquired their costumes as soon as issue three. Even so, these costumes were simple blue uniforms, with the team’s “4” symbol as their only distinguishing feature. In the early 1960s Stan Lee seemed determined to find rationales for his new heroes wearing costumes. Iron Man’s costume was the source of his powers. The original X-Men all wore yellow and black (later blue) costumes that were effectively school uniforms. Spider-Man wore a fantastical costume because he initially went into show business. Thor’s costume was actually what passed for ordinary garb in Asgard. Doctor Strange’s robes suggest the Asian culture in which he trained, and his cloak and amulet are sources of mystical power. The Hulk just wore torn purple pants. The first new Marvel star who donned a superhero-style costume for crimefighting was Daredevil, the last of the major new heroes to be created in the early 1960s. By 1964, it appears, Lee had finally fully given in to the genre’s demands that superheroes wear distinctive costumes.
According to Coogan, the third defining characteristic of the superhero genre is “the identity element,” which “comprises the codename and the costume, with the secret identity being a customary counterpart to the codename” (p. 32).
This indicates that the superhero must have a “heroic identity” and a normal, everyday identity. Coogan focuses more on the heroic persona, but I believe that the other side of the dual identity may be almost as important. The dual identity fits my idea that the superhero is a contemporary version of the mythological demigod, who was half divine and half human. The typical superhero is superhuman in one identity, and is an ordinary human in his alternate persona. It is the superhero’s non-heroic identity, the fact that he identifies himself as being “one of us,” that presumably prevents him from using his powers to dominate “normal” people.
Coogan holds that the heroic identity must express itself through the codename and costume: as he puts it, “heroic identities” must “firmly externalize either their alter ego’s inner character or biography” (p. 32).
Hence, though the Scarlet Pimpernel pioneered the concept of the double identity in heroic adventure fiction, Coogan points out that “The Scarlet Pimpernel does not resemble the little roadside flower whose name he takes” (p. 32). Certainly the flower seems an unlikely symbol for the Pimpernel’s daring deeds, and though the Pimpernel is a master of disguise, he does not actually wear a distinctive costume that signifies his heroic persona.
Johnston McCulley’s creation, Zorro, prefigures superheroes in many ways, including wearing a distinctive costume, and naming himself after an animal he has adopted as his personal symbol. But Coogan contends that “Zorro does not resemble the fox whose Spanish name he has taken, except perhaps in his ability to escape his pursuers” (p. 32). Well, certainly Zorro’s costume does not make him look like a fox, but Coogan has missed the main connection between Zorro and his personal fox totem: the fox, in fables, is the archetypal trickster, and Zorro is a trickster figure, as well. Not only does Zorro continually outwit his adversaries, but in the original The Mark of Zorro movie (1920), he even performs magic tricks in his everyday identity of Don Diego. Moreover, just as a real fox is a predatory animal, Zorro can be regarded as a figurative predator on evildoers. Certainly Zorro’s trademark “Z” is as much a symbol of his heroic identity as Superman’s “S” symbol or Batman’s bat symbol.
Coogan credits the two leading pulp heroes, the Shadow and Doc Savage, with having names that express their character or biography: the Shadow is “a shadowy presence behind events” and “Doc Savage’s name combines. . .the skill and rationality of a doctor and the strength and fighting ability of a wild savage” (pgs. 32-33). But, Coogan declares, “A pulp hero’s costume does not emblematize the character’s identity” (p. 33), and though he acknowledges exceptions to this rule, Doc Savage and the Shadow are not among them.
Then again, illustrator James Bama’s portraits of Doc Savage, with his close-cropped hair emphasizing his cranium, and his perennially ripped shirts, captures both the “doc’s” intellect and the “savage’s” combat ability. (Though Bama’s paintings came after the rise of the comics superhero, Doc’s ripped shirts go all the way back to the cover of Doc Savage Magazine #1 in 1933.) As for the Shadow, his black hat and costume not only make him look more like a living shadow, but black is also the symbolic color of death, which the Shadow metes out to criminals; the Shadow’s trademark red scarf adds the color of blood. Furthermore, the Shadow’s implacable, staring eyes and prominent, aquiline nose visually liken him to a bird of prey, hunting his victims, and this convey his personality. So Doc Savage and the Shadow were moving towards the idea of a costume which represents the hero’s personality and/or biography.
As Coogan states, Superman and Batman each had both a codename and a costume that expressed his identity. Superman is indeed a superhuman man,
and the “S” emblem on his costume symbolizes this fact. “Similarly, Batman’s costume proclaims him a bat man, just as Spider-Man’s webbed costume proclaims him a spider man. These costumes are iconic representations of the superhero identity” (p. 33).
Borrowing a term from Jim Steranko, Coogan refers to the insignia on a superhero’s costume as a “chevron” and insists on its importance. “The chevron especially emphasizes the character’s codename and is itself a simplified statement of that identity” (p. 33). This makes sense. As one-time Superman editor Mike Carlin has pointed out, Superman’s costume is basically that of a circus strongman. It’s the chevron, the “S” insignia, that makes it a superhero costume, and perhaps the cape as well. “Capes” have become iconic signifiers for superheroes, as exemplified by the use of the term “cape killers” in Marvel’s Civil War.
Similarly, it’s the “4” chevron that turns the Fantastic Four’s nondescript uniforms, which otherwise look like fairly normal clothing, into superhero costumes. The original X-Men’s 1960s uniforms don’t look like ordinary clothes, and the masks suggested they were superheroes, but it was the “X” insignia on their belts that expressed their identity. “X” suggested mystery, it was the first letter of founder Charles Xavier’s last name, and as Xavier explained in the first issue, each team member had an “x-tra” mutant power.
In the case of the FF and X-Men, the chevron identifies the heroes as members of a team. Notice that Pixar’s The Incredibles (see “Comics in Context”#62) likewise puts its team members into similar costumes, each with an “i” chevron standing for “Incredibles,” and the final shot of the film, preceding the credits, is a close-up of Mr. Incredible’s chevron.
Coogan points to Scott McCloud’s assertion in Understanding Comics that cartoons are more abstract than photorealistic pictures. Coogan states that “The superhero costume removes the specific details of a character’s ordinary appearance, leaving only a simplified idea that is represented in the colors and design of the costume” (p. 33). The chevron is a visual symbol of the superhero’s identity, and so is the costume. Even the colors become iconic symbols of the superhero’s identity. Coogan quotes McCloud directly: “Because costume colors remained exactly the same, panel after panel, they came to symbolize the characters in the mind of the readers” (Understanding Comics, p. 188). Hence, red and blue, and to a lesser extent yellow, are Superman’s colors.
This suggests to me a reason why certain costumes changed color. Spider-Man’s costume was originally intended to be red and black, with blue highlights, but it soon evolved into red and deep blue; similarly, the original X-Men’s uniforms started out as black and yellow, and became blue and yellow. Perhaps the brighter red/blue and blue/yellow combinations made more impact on the readers in a color medium, and hence proved more memorable and iconic. Daredevil switched from a drab combination of yellow and black to red, which is not only more visually striking but also underlines the “devil” aspect of his name, just as his horns do.
Coogan points out that a superhero’s body, if distinctive enough, can serve the same purpose as a costume. He quotes Stan Lee writing in his autobiography that in co-creating the Hulk, “Instead of a colorful costume, I’d give him colorful skin” (Lee, Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee, p. 122). Stan Lee quickly altered the Hulk’s color from the dull gray of the first issue to bright green, which proved memorable and iconic: the Hulk has been called old Greenskin and the Green Goliath, indicating that the color is part of his identity. This explains why Marvel’s shifting the Hulk back to this gray color in the mid-1980s did not last. As I’ve stated in by “Rubber Band Theory of Cartoon Art” (see “Comics in Context” #75), if you stretch a character too far away from its core concepts, it will eventually snap back.
Other superheroes whose distinctive physical appearances serve as the iconic equivalent of costumes include the Thing, the Beast, the Silver Surfer, and Metamorpho. Colossus and Nightcrawler of the X-Men don’t have costumes that proclaim their identity or biography, but Colossus’s metallic skin and Nightcrawler’s demonic physical appearance do.
In contrast to the superheroes, Coogan asserts that the Shadow’s face “contains too many details to reach the level of the chevron’s abstraction” (p. 34). Perhaps this suggests a rationale for filmmakers’ aversion to superhero costumes. Live action film is less abstract than cartoons, and the iconic representation of a movie star’s persona is his actual face. But still, the Superman, Batman and Spider-Man movies demonstrate the iconic power of “abstract” costumes even in the realistic world of live action film.
Coogan’s three defining elements–mission, powers, and identity–are extremely useful in distinguishing true superheroes from similar larger-than-life characters. Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker don’t have codenames, nor do they have costumes that express their identity. While they have goals (defeat Voldemort, defeat the Empire), they do not have lifelong missions like those of Superman (protect the Earth) or Batman (make war on all criminals). Morpheus lacks the prosocial mission, and though “Dream” is a sort of codename, it does not define a “heroic identity”. His black robes are not a costume that proclaims his identity; his helmet from the early issues perhaps did, but the series quickly discarded it. The angels from Touched by an Angel don’t come close to meeting the “MPI” standards.
The three elements also may explain ways in which superhero movies and comics can go wrong. When filmmakers put the X-Men into those dreary black uniforms, they lost the characters’ iconic colors. Does the current trend of exposing superheroes’ secret identities, as with Spider-Man in Civil War, make sense considering the importance of dual identities to the genre?
There are exceptions to Coogan’s rules, and there is another rule that I’ve picked up from another student of the superhero genre. And while I agree with Coogan’s definition for the superhero, I disagree strongly with his definition for the supervillain. Come back next week and you will see what I mean.
ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
I have nothing new to publicize this week, but I thought instead I would address the criticism that I sometimes get that these columns are too long. On Thursday, January 25, I went to hear novelist Norman Mailer speak at a New York City Barnes & Noble. It was Mailer who wrote the 1959 collection of essays, Advertisements for Myself, whose title I have borrowed for this section of my column. At the reading, Mailer was asked how he knew when to stop writing. He replied that it was the same principle that he used in “boxing, Making love and climbing stairs”: when you’re “out of wind,” stop. Exactly right.
–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson
The seminal rap group Wu Tang Clan has 
CHRISTOPHER STIPP: First of all, thank you for talking with me before you took off for 
RIFKIN: Yeah, HISTORY OF THE WORLD, exactly”¦HISTORY OF THE WORLD and BLAZING SADDLES, and BANANAS, LOVE AND DEATH, SLEEPER all those movies and just loving those movies is what gave me the kind of idea to do this movie.
RIFKIN: Yeah. David Carradine and Talia Shire play my parents. And, yup, Gary Busey plays the villain. Tom Arnold plays the first gay caveman to come out.
STIPP: With a cast this large, and with the budget being the size it was, how did you coordinate everyone’s schedules with regard you having to be done within a certain period?
STIPP: And at anytime did the process of moviemaking turn into personal motivator after all this hustling?
RIFKIN: We totally lucked out. Aside from the fact we were thrilled to get her because she was perfect for the part, because she’s a legitimately good actress, but as soon as we finished the movie she booked Heroes which is obviously one of the biggest shows on TV right now. Amazing luck on everyone’s part.
One place to get attention for an independent film is at a film festival like Slamdance. So, what we’re hoping is that we get some positive feedback, some positive attention, some positive buzz from our Slamdance screening and 
The challenge in HOMO ERECTUS, then, is that it is set in caveman times so where would you ever stick a product of any kind?
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The new Mary Poppins stage musical is playing in Manhattan at the New Amsterdam Theatre, the former home of the legendary Ziegfeld Follies. The interior of the theater, beautifully restored by the Walt Disney Company, is a miracle of Art Nouveau splendor: my only regret when I saw Mary Poppins there was that I didn’t have the opportunity to explore the theater itself as I did when I saw The Lion King musical there a decade ago. In the theater’s lobby and elsewhere, Disney has placed photographs of various performers who appeared at the New Amsterdam in the Ziegfeld days, from W. C. Fields to Louise Brooks. But what most impresses me about the lobby are the relief sculptures along the walls, illustrating scenes from Shakespeare’s plays and Wagner’s cycle of operas, The Ring of the Nibelung. In short, at the New Amsterdam one finds the juxtaposition of high art and popular art, which is the theme of this week’s column.