It’s a tricky thing, this whole appreciation of superheroes and comic books and such. Part of what seems so nerdy and embarrassing about it is how often people — even others who love the capes and the four-color reality — seem to get it wrong, how often they fail to grasp that we each love different things about the genre. No, not just this particular fictional genre — the whole idea of superheroes and comics.
I can’t blame people for not getting it, because a love of comics is just so personal. They’ve been part of our culture for so long now, pushed and pulled and reinvented in so many ways that they can be something different to everyone. Every fan of comics loves them for a personal reason, and is convinced that a naysayer just has to read the right comic that will resonate and change his attitude forever. But not even all lovers of comics appreciate them the same way. Venture if you dare into any discussion forum about comics and you’ll see what I mean. Some folks love the escapism, some folks love the intersection with or reflection of reality. Some folks are obsessed with details and continuity, and some with the core of any legend. Different strokes, y’ know?
And it’s hard to begrudge anyone who doesn’t get into comics, because even though he — or shockingly enough, she — might just need to read the right one, the fact is that there’s so much crap out there it’s easy to say they’re not worth any attention. And when the world of comics strays into other media — novels, TV shows, movies — the magic and myth usually just fall apart.
Usually, I say. Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is one of the most breathtaking looks at superheroes and comics I’ve ever read. It takes the whole world of comics and wraps up the mythology and the excitement and the context in a delicious little package. When I read it, I was stunned that he cut through all the bullshit and the cliches and the cultural baggage around superheroics and put his finger on the wonder of it all, and the way drams of men and women in tights can speak to kids and adults alike. Sometimes in different ways, sometimes in the same ways.
There’s a certain sense of wonderment and wish-fulfilment at the heart of my love of superheroes. It has endured, even as my world has expanded to other passions as I’ve grown up, and even as my taste in comics has slowly spread out to non-superhero comics. Again, Chabon shows that he gets it at the most basic level in Secret Skin, a lyrical, insightful essay for the New Yorker about the whole problem of men in tights. He gets down to the core of it all, the basic idea and how it defies practical reality because it’s not about reality. It’s about something other than reality, and perhaps closer to it than anything else:
We say “secret identity,” and adopt a series of cloaking strategies to preserve it, but what we are actually trying to conceal is a narrative: not who we are but the story of how we got that way — and, by implication, of all that we lacked, and all that we were not, before the spider bit us. Yet our costume conceals nothing, reveals everything: it is our secret skin, exposed and exposing us for all the world to see. Superheroism is a kind of transvestism; our superdrag serves at once to obscure the exterior self that no longer defines us while betraying, with half-unconscious panache, the truth of the story we carry in our hearts, the story of our transformation, of our story’s recommencement, of our rebirth into the world of adventure, of story itself.
Oh, hell yes.
