Melodrama as Great Responsibility? No, wait...

Texts in mind: "Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium" (Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, eds. - particularly Umberto Eco's "Superman" essay), ""Science Fiction Culture" (Camille Bacon-Smith), "Science Fiction" (Adam Roberts), "Science Fiction: The Academic Awakening" (Willis E. McNelly, ed.), "Science Fiction and the New Dark Age," (Harold L. Berger), "The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction" (Paul A. Carter), "Not Just Men in Tights" (Henry Jenkins' blog).

As somebody else said, it's kind of funny that critiques of ethnicity, gender, and class are applied to geeky subcultures that usually drew the teasing and swirlies of the jocks and BMOCs. Similarly, it's kind of fun to consider the literatures of such a crowd - science fiction and comics, of course - in an age before they gained real-world credibility or box office power.

So it's hard today - when moon missions are a historical fact rather than a futuristic goal - to imagine that people might not have understood the vacuum of space (as the NY Times did when they critiqued Goddard's articles on rocketry) or an age when special effects couldn't duplicate the imaginations of comic book artists. (Though I suppose that in this day and age Flash Thompson would still be causing trouble for Peter Parker. Maybe that will become some sort of parable someday - "The geeks and nerds will always be with you...")

Conversely, there's also the purist's approach to these sorts of things - everything after this date is a debased version of the proper essence of this thing I'm enthusiastic about - so I'm less surprised now when compilations of writings on comics halt right around the late 1950s. Still, there's still some things that will surprise. "Arguing Comics" presents the thoughts of several literary luminaries on comics, and little jumped out at me until the end (i.e., last three pages) when Umberto Eco discussed the civic and political consciousness of Superman.

The key phrase that jumped out at me was that Supes is "a perfect example of civic consciousness, completely split from political consciousness." (164) Instead of changing governance (or taking over), Superman opts to be a good citizen of the United States (and doesn't do things like free the Chinese from Mao, Eco notes). Epochal acts would upset the issue-based storylines of the age (Eco writes this in 1962) so instead Superman merely presents small acts of charity - stopping bank robberies, cat burglars, and so on - as the height of civic engagement. In essence, placing supreme powers and alien abilities at the disposal of average human modes and models. Given the post-Wertham perspective on comics at the time (though Superman was probably well suited to the Comics Code Authority worldview), one should be able to assume that this sort of a model for superhero behaviour was the only acceptable one. After all, given the general tenor of Silver Age comics that Jenkins discusses - with the "classical" storytelling and characterization of superheroes fully realized, and prior to the multi-issue story arcs and character development that the 1970s introduced - the paradigm of superheroism that Eco discusses has a particular resonance.

The general discussions of the nature of science fiction, as discussed in several of the books listed above, presents a somewhat different notion of engagement. For some of these authors, the science in these stories alternatively provides threats and promises to humankind, just as authors alternatively defend human civilization and castigate its future debasement. The usual markers of a science fiction tale - a technology overcomes one of our current physical laws, a theoretical law is proven and harnessed, an alien civilization encounters humankind and hijinks follow, rockets fly and things blow up melodramatically - are usually predicated upon an encounter with difference that forces the protagonists and humankind to consider how to adjust.

(The one that doesn't easily fit this model - melodramatic rocketships - has its basis in such space opera stories as Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Barsoom" stories. These tales, Paul Carter notes, have a frontiersman as their hero, whisked to Mars by means unknown from the Arizona cave where he's hiding.)

Of course, many of these writers on SF point to the late 1960s as one of these points where everything changed. Bacon-Smith, who investigates modern fandom in her book, notes that "the New Wave, feminism, television science fiction, and a real-life moon landing brought whole new audiences to science fiction." (2) The addition of these new fans - who didn't necessarily adhere to the classic, golden age texts or who were only interested in the derivatives of the same - upset the established dynamic. Some welcomed this, others decried it. I had been very interested in the chapter "Youth Culture" in this book until I realized that it was entirely focused upon gothic/cybervampiric collisions with older fans at conventions. (I wonder how readily the irony of this encounter between "scientific" stalwarts and these fantastical creatures was apparent to those involved.) I'd still like to find another book that talks about youth SF culture in the 60s or in the 50s, but I suppose I may just have to write that one instead.

So there's a couple of key ways to consider the citizenship displayed in these texts - great power turned to the service of humankind, and great threats or advances that turn humankind towards a better (or worse) future. One asks you to fit in, and the other asks you to be ready to adjust. We'll have to see how well this duality holds up to the melodramatic angst of the Marvel Age...