What the Problem Seems to Be

What you say is: When you were a big comics reader, all through high school and well into college, you had a favorite superhero, The Crimson Viper. He was an important part of your life. Then real life took you away from comics. You met the person you refer to as “Her,” your own personal soul mate and nemesis, and married Her, and fought with Her every night and most mornings, and finally moved out and, seeking solace, visited the nearest comic book shop. When you saw a whole section of a rack devoted to The Crimson Viper, you did something you hadn’t done in months: you smiled. You blew some significant money buying all the back issues you missed, sped back to your (dreary) motel, flopped onto the (lumpy) mattress, opened a comic book and . . .

Five minutes later, you flung it across the—dingy—room. This was wrong! This was not your Viper!

No, it wasn’t. The Viper had changed significantly in the four years you’d been away from him. You’re outraged. You feel as betrayed as you did when you learned the real reason for all those visits to Her sister.

What the Problem Is

“Your problem is,” I say, “that you’re trying to do what Heraclitus said couldn’t be done.”

You’re still looking at the pavement.

“Remember that summer course you took when you learned that you needed another credit to get your degree?” I ask. “What was it called . . . ? ‘An In-Depth Look At the Great Philosophers From Parmenides to Foucault?’ Something like that . . . Anyway, you remember it?”

You raise your eyes and nod.

“Okay, then you might also remember reading about Heraclitus. Greek, lived about 2,500 years ago.”

Your expression tells me, eloquently, that thinking about Heraclitus is not at the very top of your priorities.

I blunder on: “Heraclitus said that we can never step into the same river twice. What he meant was, things are constantly in flux. Pretty much what modern physicists say.”

I’m not sure I have your attention, but at least you haven’t returned your gaze to the asphalt

“Now, some time before Heraclitus, around 2900 B.C.E.,” I continue, “over in China a guy named Fu Hsi was writing the I Ching, also known as the book of changes.”

You want to know if this is the same I Ching that your hippie cousin uses to predict the future, or so he imagines.

“The very same,” I say. “A lot of people, not just hippies, use it as an oracle. I don’t have an opinion about that and, to tell the truth, I’m not much interested in it. What concerns us is that one of the lessons the book teaches is that things and situations are constantly changing. In fact, the Ching says that things eventually become their opposites. Yin eventually becomes yang. Light becomes darkness. Heat becomes cold. Health becomes illness. The Republican Party of the mid-nineteenth century became its opposite in the twenty-first century, as did its rival, the Democratic Party.”

Your body language tells me that you’ve settled into the conversation. You’ll hear me out, unless I bore you absolutely to death. So I change my focus from ancient sages to a man who lived a lot more recently, though he’s hardly contemporary. I remind you that Charles Darwin introduced to the world the term “Evolution,” by which he meant the principle of change in the realm of biology—of plants and animals.

“The new Viper sucks,” you say, and I’m speechless, which probably does not cause you to grieve. Have you been listening to anything I’ve been saying? Anything?

Let me continue trying.

The One Constant Is Change

First, you have to realize that everything, every single thing in the universe, changes if it persists—that is, if it lasts any length of time. Remember old Heraclitus? Fu Hsi? And be aware that the Crimson Viper has been continuously published for more than thirty years. Now, there may be a dozen ways of looking at superheroes like the Crimson Viper, maybe even more, but we’ll restrict ourselves to just two—as archetypes and as memes. Your puzzled expression cues me to your need for a definition. Okay, we’ll begin with “archetype.” (Pay attention, we may have a quiz . . .)

An archetype, according to Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), who was a major-league psychologist, is an inherited memory represented in the mind by a universal symbol and observed in dreams and myths. In other words, it’s an image that’s hardwired into our mental computers.

Now, let’s consider where comic book . . . no, where all fiction comes from. I’m talking historically here, not psychologically; I’m asking, I guess, where the first stories were told. The answer is lost to antiquity. But, probably, the first stories were told by weary hunters gathered around campfires. The first recorded stories were in the form of drama and they were presented at the Festivals of Dionysius in Greece, about 600 B.C.E. Which means that they were part of the local religion and allied to mythology; after all, mythology is just other people’s religion, no? The plays themselves didn’t change much, as far as we know, but the myths did.

Want a few examples? Okay, try these: Nemesis, whose name is now synonymous with villain, began life as an idea of moral equilibrium. Odysseus was a hero to the Greeks, a creep to the Romans. Hades wore two hats: he was a god of wealth and a god of the dead. And to bring the discussion closer to our own culture, Satan went from being an early Egyptian god of immortality, to a judge, to an angel of light, to the source of everything rotten in the world. The guy who was originally Santa Claus wasn’t a right jolly old elf with reindeer and sleigh full of toys. Want more? The library and the Internet can probably supply it.

Can we agree that comic-book superheroes are modern incarnations of some of the archetypes the good Dr. Jung mentioned? I mean, think about it for a second. Isn’t Superman a science-fictiony version of Hercules and Samson? You look doubtful. Okay, let me quote something that Supes’s creator, Jerry Siegel, actually said when describing how he came up with the world’s most iconic cape-wearer: “All of a sudden it hits me. I conceive of a character like Samson, Hercules, and all the strong men I ever heard of rolled into one—only more so.”

We can go on. The Flash is a recasting of Mercury, the messenger of the Roman gods. Wonder Woman is actually presented as one of the bad-ass ladies in the Greek myths, the Amazons. The Marvel Comics character Thor is pretty much lifted whole from Norse mythology. Hawkman bears a strong resemblance to a couple of other mythic Greeks, Daedalus and Icarus.

Convinced? Then onward! Earlier, we agreed that the myths changed. Here, from George Lucas, the Star Wars honcho, is a description of the process:

Mythology is a performance piece that gets acted out over hundreds of years before it actually becomes embedded in clay on a tablet or is put down on a piece of paper to be codified as a fixed thing. But originally it was performed for a group of people in a way in which the psychological feedback would tell the narrator which way to go. Mythology was created out of what emotionally worked as a story.

So, in days of yore—way, way yore—bards or minstrels or whatever the entertainers of the era were called went from place to place, telling their tales and changing the material as they saw what pleased the crowds. That’s probably how Homer operated. But of course, he heard what pleased the crowds. And that worked just as well.

Today, things are different . . . well, not so much different as faster. The feedback that Homer got from one group of villagers at a time over years we get in a few weeks or even quicker. Readers either read or do not read your comic book. Audiences either watch or do not watch your TV show. Or listen to your music. Or buy tickets to your movie. Or play your video game or go to your amusement park, or . . .

You get the idea. Within a couple of months, at most, a purveyor of entertainment usually knows if his product has hit or missed. And that’s if he waits for the money or the ratings to be counted. If he fires up the ol’ computer, he can log onto an appropriate Web site and get a response virtually immediately, and if he’s selling comic books, that response can be pretty vehement!

Of course, there are exceptions. Sometimes, something that isn’t an immediate success finds patrons gradually and eventually triumphs. But it doesn’t happen often, not in twenty-first-century America. The days when a media magnate like William Randolph Hearst would keep a comic strip like Krazy Kat going for decades just because he, personally, liked it are pretty much history. Mostly, the storyteller knows pretty quickly if he’s succeeding and, if he’s permitted to, begins making alterations accordingly.

The Scheme of the Meme

You ask what all this has to do with the Viper; actually, you don’t ask, you grumble a question.

To answer, I’m afraid I’ll have to talk about the other way we said we’d consider superheroes, as memes, and that, of course, requires another definition. Here goes. A meme is, according to the unimpeachably authoritative Oxford English Dictionary, “an element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, especially imitation.” According to Richard Dawkins, the guy who made up the word, memes behave like biological genes; they’re cultural parallels to Darwinian natural selection. (It won’t astonish you to learn that Dawkins is a geneticist.) And, like genes, memes change as they pass from generation to generation. On the one hand, a meme is propagated into the future because it captures something that works. On the other hand, as it’s passed on, it changes under new pressures. That happens . . . well, for a lot of reasons. The creators get new ideas, or are forced to get new ideas because a hungry market demands new stories. (I suspect that was the case with Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, of Superman fame.) Or the creators age and gradually begin to think about the world differently, and these changes are subtly reflected in their work. Or new creators with their own ideas begin working with the character. Or new creators arrive at a fresh synthesis of the ideas of their predecessors. Or a character’s popularity wanes and innovations are introduced to rescue him. Or some fellow in a big, corner office near the top of a Manhattan office building has a brain-storm and everyone agrees with him because they have bills to pay and the job market’s tight. Or a witches brew of all of the above occurs and . . . voilà !—a transformation!

Examples? Okay, some quick, easy ones. Superman went from merely being faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound to moving at near-light speed and blowing out stars as if they were birthday candles. Batman began as one of those gentlemen crime fighters so abundant in the pop culture of the 1930s and 1940s, and then became, in turn, a father figure, a cop, a leading citizen, a comedian, and a dark avenger. Spider-Man lost a lot of his nerdiness. The Fantastic Four acquired superhero costumes—in their first appearance, they wore civvies. The Hulk changed color, from grey to green, and at times preserved his civilized ways when those devilish gamma rays transformed him from gentle Bruce Banner to the high-jumping giant, while at other times he seemed to be a king-sized stalk of unbridled id. Green Arrow started his career as an arrow-shooting Batman and grew into an arrow-shooting activist, though his political orientation swung from right to left, depending on who was writing his scripts. Another greenie, Green Lantern, even changed who he was: in the 1940s, he was a radio announcer, Alan Scott; in the 1960s and 1970s, he was Hal Jordan, a test pilot, and currently he’s a freelance artist, Kyle Rayner . . . Then there’s Nick Fury . . .

But you’re fidgeting. Clearly, you’ve had enough examples. So I return to my main point: If you’ve been faithful to the character who’s transformed and the changes have happened gradually, you might not be terribly offended by them; they might seem natural and organic. But to leave a beloved hero and come back and find him unrecognizable . . . well, as a former president might have said, I feel your pain.

If a character jumps from one medium to another, the process can accelerate. When Superman first moved from the comics pages to the radio waves in the early 1940s, he acquired a young pal, Jimmy Olsen, and something that could lay him low, Kryptonite. So, although Supes himself didn’t change much on the radio, his milieu certainly did. A lot of people probably knew Batman from his various television incarnations, especially the live-action laff-riot that starred Adam West and later, some of them picked up the comic books and there was this gloomy, obsessed, dark dude skulking around the shadows with nary a bam or pow in sight. The Caped Crusader morphed from comedian to avenger because, suddenly, nobody was finding the comedian funny anymore, but there was still profit to be made from the Batman franchise. When Captain Marvel moved to Saturday-morning television, he acquired a fifty-something mentor and traveling companion, catchily called “Mr. Mentor,” and a snazzy RV to cruise around the back roads of Southern California in—another case of a character’s milieu altering to accommodate the notions of new bosses. And when Wonder Woman first made the jump to video . . . well, fans of the Amazon Princess barely recognized her. (I’m referring to the TV movie aired in 1974, the one that starred Cathy Lee Crosby, not the later, much better Lynda Carter version.) I could go on . . . the movies gave Captain America a gun. Radio made the Shadow invisible. Television reduced Sky King’s sleek jet to a modest, single engine prop plane. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera . . .

What We Want and What We Get

It’s probably fair to say that every one of these changes, whether they stunk up the character or greatly improved him, caused somebody woe. Every fictional hero is somebody’s favorite, and if the hero was your favorite when you were seeking escape from boring classrooms, bullying siblings, and that cruel bastard in the seventh grade who gave you a wedgie whenever the play-ground monitor wasn’t looking, you have a special feeling for him. He was part of your childhood, a part that wasn’t rotten.

A few years ago, I spoke about comics to a class at a seriously major university, and at a reception after my talk, I asked a bunch of grad students what they thought comic book fans wanted. An extremely bright young man named Paul Dworkin had this opinion: Fans want comics writers, artists and editors to preserve a part of their childhood.

I think Mr. Dworkin was right. But comics creators simply can’t comply with these fans’ wishes, not without reprinting the same story month after month, year after year, decade after decade . . . which would eventually bore even the most dedicated devotee and cause him to look for amusement elsewhere. If new stories are written, the meme-archetype will evolve, for all the reasons already cited. And somebody will be outraged.

Something just occurred to me. The changes in Heraclitus’s river aren’t the only reason you can’t step into it twice. You’re another reason. You’ve changed. Okay, the current version of the Crimson Viper isn’t your Crimson Viper, but maybe you’re not his reader, either. You’ve aged and grown and done some tough living and maybe what was once an escape and an entertainment for you simply isn’t anymore.

And finally . . . Why should comic book heroes be the only things that don’t change? Consider the Crimson Viper a part of the vast, timeless dance of Being, one with the whole pulsing cosmos—shrinking, swelling, spinning, ever becoming Other, ever becoming Next, dying, becoming reborn, presenting myriad aspects of the eternal All . . .

“Still sucks,” you say.