What Happened to the Silver Age?
Apr. 5th, 2016 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wingedbeastFirst, a disclaimer. I am not big into comic books. I just don't have the money for it. My main interaction with the Silver Age is with such shows as The Superfriends and similar Saturday Morning Cartoons of the 80s. Feel free to correct me on what I get wrong.
In my Scene I'd Like to See: The Incredibles*, Gehayi had a good comment. When talking about how the world had to work, in the twenty years after lawsuits drove superheroes into hiding, apparently I had described the Silver Age. The Silver Age respected normal people in a number of ways.
Batman worked with the police and even at Commissioner Gordon's request. Superman would ask the authorities if they needed help before going to work. And, ordinary people were the important matter when superheroes went to work, saving lives and property. More importantly, the openly praised people who weren't superheroes and didn't have superpowers. They were still heroes.
That and other bits of the Silver Age seem to have fallen out of favor. Again, I don't know comic books all that well, but I do know a bit about more recent comicbook movies, such as Man of Steel and Batman-v-Superman. There's also such characters as The Punisher and Wolverine and other people who do dark deeds for the greater good, the rise of the anti-hero.
There's a natural question to ask as not only comic books, but fictions in general find themselves going more and more into the Dark Age, why are we abandoning the Silver Age Values?
I actually think there's a good reason for growing past the Silver Age. Not all of the values should be rejected just for being Silver Age. I still think that The Punisher does far more harm than good even ignoring the immediate morality of murder.
But, let's look at how the Silver Age would answer the questions the Punisherm might ask. Why doesn't Superman kill Lex Luthor? Why doesn't Batman kill the Joker? Why doesn't He-Man even just let Skeletor fall to his death?
The answers I've usually gotten from the Silver Age, usually dealing with the latter scenario of letting someone die rather than save them, is that that makes the difference between a good guy and a bad guy. Good guys save lives, bad guys are willing to kill or let someone die. That answer does not satisfy me.
Let's take a look at The Joker. Ignoring the Adam West series and The Super Friends, the Joker will kill. That is inevitable. The Joker will kill and the only thing that will stop the Joker from killing is killing the Joker. How many lives is being a good guy worth? How many of other people's lives is being the good guy worth?
Faced with that, such answers as "that's what makes the good guy a good guy", "it's against the rules", and "it's just wrong" all fail to satisfy. The Silver Age cannot defend its own morality against such questions because it refuses even to acknowledge them as legitimate questions. Without those satisfying answers, a refusal to do dark deeds can seem like weakness.
So, we have to answer those questions. With that in mind, I intend my next two Cases to be in large part about answering those questions, looking into the lives and origins not of Superman and Batman, but of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne.
* http://wingedbeast.dreamwidth.org/53513.html
In my Scene I'd Like to See: The Incredibles*, Gehayi had a good comment. When talking about how the world had to work, in the twenty years after lawsuits drove superheroes into hiding, apparently I had described the Silver Age. The Silver Age respected normal people in a number of ways.
Batman worked with the police and even at Commissioner Gordon's request. Superman would ask the authorities if they needed help before going to work. And, ordinary people were the important matter when superheroes went to work, saving lives and property. More importantly, the openly praised people who weren't superheroes and didn't have superpowers. They were still heroes.
That and other bits of the Silver Age seem to have fallen out of favor. Again, I don't know comic books all that well, but I do know a bit about more recent comicbook movies, such as Man of Steel and Batman-v-Superman. There's also such characters as The Punisher and Wolverine and other people who do dark deeds for the greater good, the rise of the anti-hero.
There's a natural question to ask as not only comic books, but fictions in general find themselves going more and more into the Dark Age, why are we abandoning the Silver Age Values?
I actually think there's a good reason for growing past the Silver Age. Not all of the values should be rejected just for being Silver Age. I still think that The Punisher does far more harm than good even ignoring the immediate morality of murder.
But, let's look at how the Silver Age would answer the questions the Punisherm might ask. Why doesn't Superman kill Lex Luthor? Why doesn't Batman kill the Joker? Why doesn't He-Man even just let Skeletor fall to his death?
The answers I've usually gotten from the Silver Age, usually dealing with the latter scenario of letting someone die rather than save them, is that that makes the difference between a good guy and a bad guy. Good guys save lives, bad guys are willing to kill or let someone die. That answer does not satisfy me.
Let's take a look at The Joker. Ignoring the Adam West series and The Super Friends, the Joker will kill. That is inevitable. The Joker will kill and the only thing that will stop the Joker from killing is killing the Joker. How many lives is being a good guy worth? How many of other people's lives is being the good guy worth?
Faced with that, such answers as "that's what makes the good guy a good guy", "it's against the rules", and "it's just wrong" all fail to satisfy. The Silver Age cannot defend its own morality against such questions because it refuses even to acknowledge them as legitimate questions. Without those satisfying answers, a refusal to do dark deeds can seem like weakness.
So, we have to answer those questions. With that in mind, I intend my next two Cases to be in large part about answering those questions, looking into the lives and origins not of Superman and Batman, but of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne.
* http://wingedbeast.dreamwidth.org/53513.html
no subject
Date: 2016-04-06 03:43 am (UTC)Batman doesn't kill because he knows that he really wants to kill some of those assholes like the Joker, and he also knows that if he takes that first step, he won't stop. He's like Sam Vimes, in a way--he knows he's not a good man, so he makes the extra effort to act like a good man.
Superman knows he's immeasurably powerful and that he could be judge, jury, executioner and god all in one--but he believes he's got no right to play god. Or to paraphrase the words of Gandalf, "Some that live deserve to die, and some that die deserve to live. Can you give them life? No? Then do not be so quick to hand out death." i.e., Superman is a "good man", and good people don't murder other people they find inconvenient. (Almost anyone short of Doomsday, Mongul or Parasite is at most inconvenient to Superman.)
Actually putting Joker in an actual maximum security prison, as opposed to a comic-book cardboard prison, would stop him from killing people. So let's not argue that Batman ought to kill the Joker to save lives because that's the only way to stop him--Joker only escapes Because The Plot Requires It. Characterization should not be judged based on meta-plot considerations. In-character, Batman ought to take a closer look at whatever corrupt fool is sending Joker to a low-security facility.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-06 04:01 am (UTC)The Batman I think of when I think of Batman is Batman: The Animated Series. When you take a look at episodes like the one with Babydoll (the first one) or the one where Harlyquin attempts to go straight, I think you see that. And, I think that should be recognized a bit more.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-06 04:11 am (UTC)The Doylist reason, I think, is the nature of a serialized story. Once you had the hero kill all the villains, you'd eliminated the obstacles in his life. Even as a kid, I could see that comic book writers were not going to have Supes kill Luthor because there were more stories that they wanted to tell.
Also, the Silver Age (and Bronze Age, since I apparently read a lot of reprints of Silver Age stories as well as original Bronze Age ones) did address the issue. One method of dealing with villains that Superman had that Batman didn't was the Phantom Zone, a prison in another dimension that contained the worst criminals from everywhere. People in the Phantom Zone weren't solid in relation to people in our dimension, hence the name. Superman had a ray that could banish villains to that dimension and a radio by which he could talk to the police and the prison guards. Lex Luthor and Brainiac ended up banished to the Phantom Zone quite a lot. Both Luthor and Brainiac had their own self-built spaceships with weapons and gadgetry...including time travel. Thus, it was possible for Superman to lock both villains up for decades...only for this to be invalidated by one or the other's ability to mess with time.
Several times, the Joker was sent to prison (not to Arkham Asylum). I can recall two occasions when he was supposed to be legally executed. This didn't work, thanks to the Joker's minions and the Joker's manipulation of a guard and a cop, but the intent of the in-universe judicial system to get rid of the Joker legally was there. He was a killer and he was treated as such...insofar as a kid's comic book could, in those days.
Batman also occasionally attempted to kill the Joker...though it was never planned. I can recall his throwing the Joker off a cliff once during hand-to-hand combat. The Joker didn't catch hold of the cliff at the last moment. He fell. He was even believed dead for a while, in-universe.
I didn't believe it, and I doubt if any readers did. Any fan of comics can tell you that nothing is more temporary than a character's "permanent death." The Winchesters on Supernatural have more chance of staying dead than a comic book villain. Heroes can die for event comics. Friends and relatives will die and sometimes stay dead. But villains move the plot. They're the ones who prevent the comic from being dull.
The question that you're asking--why not kill the villains?--is very much a Dark Age question. It wasn't something that bothered most readers in the Silver Age for a very good reason:
Not everything was in continuity.
Some stories were invalidated by time travel. Others happened on alternate Earths or in different timelines. DC was very fond of "imaginary tales"--ideas that writers wanted to explore but were unwilling to say had really happened to Bruce or Clark.
So quite a lot of stories involving villains were just that--stories. They weren't real even in-universe. They existed solely to entertain.
So it was never a question of not dealing with the villains...but of how the audience expected the superheroes to deal with them. Kids in the 1960s and 1970s, by and large, had little problem with the idea of supervillains being equal but opposite to the hero, or with the hero not killing the bad guy.
So what happened? Let TV Tropes tell it:
The Dark Age of Comic Books was the culmination of a gradual move towards an older audience for Comic Books, particularly those featuring superheroes that had started in The Bronze Age of Comic Books. It's sometimes also called The Iron Age of Comic Books, to follow the Gold/Silver/Bronze progression, but Dark Age is the much more common term. Usually characterized as a Darker and Edgier period featuring an increased focus on sex, violence and dark, gritty portrayals of the characters involved, much of the content produced during this era is very controversial among comic book fans and is usually (depending on who you ask) considered either a welcome breath of fresh air after the medium languishing so long in its own version of the Animation Age Ghetto, a period of grotesque excess and immaturity...or a little of both.
The Dark Age is generally agreed to have begun in 1986 — a watershed year in comics, seeing the publication of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen. While works both by these authors and others in the field had also displayed Dark Age sensibilities prior to these such as Moore's V for Vendetta and Miracleman (both 1982), and Miller's Ronin (1983), Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns were the two works which provided much of the direct inspiration for what followed. Both were dark, gritty and complex works which took the superhero genre and deconstructed it, infusing it with greater political and psychological complexity and a greater amount of graphic sexual and violent content than had been seen previously.
They also kick-started a trend for portraying superheroes not as the whiter-than-whitebread heroes of pure moral standing that had been the common default prior to these works, but as neurotic, tormented and at times borderline-fascistic Anti Heroes whose violent methods masked a whole range of psychological and sexual issues. They also achieved widespread mainstream attention, and acclaim within intellectual circles, something unheard in the industry before. This in effect briefly turned comics into the "hip" and "rebellious" medium.
:::
However, at the other end of the scale, a number of critics argue that in many cases "mature" content was actually closer to "adolescent"; while creators were taking inspiration from The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, many had completely missed the point, focusing merely on the surface details in order to Follow the Leader without coupling them with the depth of narrative and the thematic and psychological complexity that had made these works unique and well received. Complaints center around a crowd of deeply disturbed and unpleasant 'heroes' who were quite frequently little more than psychotic thugs cut from the same template.
The portrayal of women – rarely at its most mature to begin with in this genre – plunged to ever more absurd depths, at times bordering on outright misogyny (except for Wonder Woman under George Perez, which is actually considered one of the best runs on the character). For example, during the Dark Age an entire sub-genre of "Bad Girls" comics started to appear, featuring female characters (usually Witches, Demons, Vampires, etc) in highly Stripperific outfits in Supernaturally themed, borderline pornographic storylines. An early Trope Codifier for this was Lady Death. There was a time when this kind of material made up 90% of the material produced by Avatar Press. The "Bad Girls" genre has more or less died out, however some series like this (most notably Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose) are still around.
An overly dark, cynical tone appeared even in works for which such a tone was unsuitable. While not always a deconstruction of The Silver Age of Comic Books, it was certainly a deliberate opposition, and although touted as being more adult and mature, in too many cases the works produced during the age were no more sophisticated than or superior to earlier, 'immature' works – merely nastier (this is Alan Moore's big complaint about the era).
Much of the Dark Age way of doing things (and you can make up your own mind as to whether we're in the Iron Age of Comics or the Modern Age) was a deconstruction of the old way that was imitated by a lot of people who didn't quite get the deconstruction. But TV Tropes doesn't mention one of the big things that had a huge impact on the comics industry--and that still does.
9/11.
Which, remember, struck New York. Where the comics industry is based.
I think that you can see how angry that would make creators. Quite a lot of people just wanted to kill villains (such as terrorists) or people they perceived as villains (Muslims, government officials, etc.). And if writers and artists can't lash out in real life, they'll lash out fictionally.
So killing the villain became legit. The idea of Batman continually fighting the Joker instead of just killing the bastard seemed ridiculous in a post-9/11 world.
Also, even before 9/11, the comics industry had dived into some serious idolatry involving Batman, to the point where almost every superhero, regardless of background or personality, was written like Batman. Dark. Gritty. Furious at the world. Distrustful of fellow heroes. Afterwards...well, Wonder Woman killed a man on TV. The Amazons attacked Washington, D.C., devastating it. Injustice: Gods Among Us (and even the title says how differently superheroes are regarded now)--well, take a look at this scene:
To quote the person whose blog the pic came from: "To be fair to Supes, Joker had just murdered Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane AND her unborn child (which was Superman’s). But…wow. That’s a hell of an image."
Superheroes fill a different niche now. When I was little, they were role models for boys and girls. Kids need to learn to control themselves, to help others, to stand up for what's right while retaining compassion. Now...they're a power fantasy, and they're marketed to a largely male 18-44 demographic. (Though about a third of comics readers are adult women, the comics industry doesn't want to hear that.) The perception is that adults don't want to control themselves, to be compassionate or to help. They want to--and I'm repeating a line I've heard a thousand times--"solve their problems with one punch." After all, that's what they would do if they had superpowers...so why would a superhero be any different?
I really don't like the idea that we can't expect a nominal hero to obey the law or hold to a code of decency, or that just having the power to kill at will entitles you to do so. (That last idea is a little TOO widespread these days.)
Anyway, that's what it comes down to, in my book--different audiences, different eras, and vastly different expectations.
Looking forward to what you have to say about Clark and Bruce.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-07 02:58 am (UTC)Linkara (Atop the Fourth Wall) addressed this in (I think) his recent group review of Batman vs Superman by asking why the Joker isn't executed. And going on to talk about how pushing the responsibility of the Joker - and his endless escapes and murders - off on Batman is a dodge. Both in the sense that the legal system of Gotham is equally to blame and in the sense that there would be serious problems with a world that did let superheroes decide the fate of people that the legal system didn't want to decide the fate of.
I think that's actually a pretty good point. Most superheroes are acting as vigilantes, but with in the bounds of bringing people to justice - they make citizens arrest and let the existing laws take care of the rest. Stepping beyond that changes a lot of things. (And would probably lead to supers either ruling the world or being killed, themselves.)
Even when the superheroes are more part of the establishment, having them be judge, jury, and executioner is a problem. We've decided ordinary people can't be - that's why the police are supposed to arrest people, not shoot them full of holes and call it a day. Why would we want to give more power to super people?
no subject
Date: 2016-04-13 02:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-15 02:26 am (UTC)http://atopthefourthwall.com/vlog-3-27-16-batman-v-superman-dawn-of-justice/
no subject
Date: 2016-04-15 02:45 am (UTC)