Superhero Comics Deserve More Respect As An Artform
Comics have long been considered a lower level of art, but it's about time that ended.
Comic books have been around a lot longer than most people realize. While newspapers often used drawings to illustrate their stories long before photos became a part of the process, the first comics as we know them today appeared in Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, a British publication from 1884. However, even before that, there were prototypes for the current thing that we call comic books, like the 1842 hardcover printing of The Adventures Of Obadiah Oldbuck. Artwork used for sequential storytelling became a hallmark of “penny dreadfuls”, those cheap horror stories that appealed to “low” sensibilities of the time, boys’ “story papers”, and humor magazines like Punch. Comic strips became a staple of newspapers, but it wouldn’t be until 1933 that the first modern American-style comic book would be published - Famous Funnies: A Carnival Of Comics.
Comics in the United States would usually be in strip form, and eventually would become a part of the “pulp” genre, with characters like the Shadow, Doc Savage, the Phantom, and more. There were humor strips and adventures strips, but it wouldn’t be until Action Comics #1, with the debut of Superman, that superheroes would become the main thrust of comic books. Superman and the other early superheroes shared a lot of similarities with the pulp heroes that came before them, but were made for children and younger readers.
This last part has stuck with the genre in the eyes of many for decades.
Comics have changed a lot since those old days, and yet there are still those who look down on comics because of that early stigma. Comics were “for kids”, so they didn’t get the respect that was afforded to other artforms. Even today, with superheroes being the most lucrative genre in movies, comic books are still looked down upon by the masses and that’s completely unfair to the people who labor every month to put these works out. Comic books are art in every sense of the word.
Art is something that is both easy to define and yet hard to quantify. Any creative endeavor that a human being does is art. It doesn’t matter about their skill level, art is all about a person expressing something that is inside of them. However, are the drawings that my five year-old does up to the standards of one of the Renaissance greats? I mean, I love them more than those, but we all know the answer to that question. That said, they’re still doing what those Renaissance greats were doing - showing the world through someone else’s eyes, putting their imagination on paper for others to witness. While skill doesn’t really matter to art, it does help for the people involved to have some level skill in order for what they’re trying to do with the piece to come across. When most people talk art, they aren’t always talking about the art itself, they’re talking about the feelings associated with the art. They’re talking about the interpetation. The best art is meant to strike something inside of us, to talk about the world around us. So, for our purposes here, let’s define art as anything that talks about the human condition.
Using any nearly any definition of the word “art”, superhero comics are definitely an artform. They are created by talented individuals - writers, artists, color artists, letterers, editors - who have refined their skills to a high level. They can be interpreted in a variety of ways and often say something about humans on a fundamental level. Yet, for some reason, they are still looked down upon.
Of course, there are superhero comics that get the respect they deserve. Watchmen springs to mind immediately as a comic that is lauded as the greatest piece of art that superhero comics have produced. It’s safe to say that most people who love superheroes love Watchmen. It’s also safe to say that it is a brilliant work. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons took the tropes of superhero comics and injected them with realism, while also using the narrative conceits of comics as a storytelling device to create a work that resonates decades after it was published. However, if you look at Watchmen with a discerning eye, most of what it does that is revolutionary has always been there in comics. Social commentary has always been a part of superheroes. Watchmen is certainly more graphic in some ways that superhero comics that came before it, but violence has always been a part of the medium. Most of what makes Watchmen special is watching two masters of the medium use the tricks of sequential storytelling to tell a story in a way that was different from anything else out there. Watchmen is an amazing work more for how it tell its story than what the story is.
However, Watchmen isn’t the only comic from the mid-80s that tried to do a “superheroes in the real world” type of story. Squadron Supreme, by Mark Gruenwald, Bob Hall, Paul Ryan, John Buscema, John Beatty, Sam de la Rosa, Keith Williams, Jackson Guice, Christie Scheele, Mark Phillips, Bob Sharen, Michael Higgins, Max Scheele, Janice Chiang, John Workman, and Rick Parker, edited by Ralph Macchio, was a twelve issue series that was being published at the same time as Watchmen. It starred the Squadron Supreme, a Marvel created pastiche of the Justice League of America from an alternate universe that sometimes fought the Avengers. The story revolves around these heroes realizing that their battles against supervillains were something of a waste of time and that they had the power and technology to create a utopian world. Squadron Supreme is all about this group of superheroes using their powers to create a “perfect” government, one where people trade their freedoms for a guarantee of safety and security. Eventually, a group of heroes and villains decide that people’s freedoms are more important than a benevolent dictatorship ran by gods with machines that can literally change people’s minds and there’s a massive battle. The Squadron’s dictatorship is ended.
Squadron Supreme takes the idea of superheroes in the real world and does it in a less grounded way than Watchmen does. It doesn’t use the same storytelling tricks that Watchmen does to tell its story. It’s a much more “commonly”, for lack of a better term, told superhero comic and yet I defy anyone who reads it to discount its genius. Watchmen posits that if superheroes were in the real world, they’d be bundles of neuroses and violence, used by those in power for war and to rubberstamp despicable actions. Squadron Supreme posits that if they were in the real world, they’d eventually become benevolent fascists, their dreams of a better world forced on everyone around them. Both of these are interesting ways to look at the superhero and yet only one of them gets credit as the greatest superhero story ever.
Watchmen tears down superheroes and leaves nothing in their place. Squadron Supreme does the same thing but it also shows that superheroes wouldn’t be all bad, that despite some of them losing their way, there would still be others who would fight for what’s right. Watchmen gets all the praise, and Squadron Supreme gets left of the backburner of the medium, despite also taking an intelligent and mature look at superheroes.
There’s something about the concept of the superhero that is generally looked down upon by pop culture. The best example of this is Superman. If you look at the people who hate Superman, they all say the same thing - why would this alien god look out for us? They can’t believe that someone with power would actually care about human beings. Now, obviously, this says a lot about how humans look at those in power in the 21st century, and it’s extremely depressing. Superman is meant to be an aspiration for what humans could become if we actually lived up to the ideals that we present as the best parts of our species. Yet there are people out there right now who hate Superman for that very reason. These people want evil Superman stories. They want to see this being who’s meant to inspire us dragged through the mud and made into one of us.
Watchmen gets all of the praise, in my opinion, not just because of the way the story is told but because of the message - that superheroes would be just as fucked up as the rest of us. Most people who read Watchmen aren’t longtime comic readers, so they don’t really marvel at the way is story is told like those of us who love the medium do. They love it because it’s dark, it’s violent, and it’s full of fucked up human beings. Squadron Supreme is dark, it’s violent, and yet the Squadron doesn’t take over the world because they’re monsters; they take over the world because they want to stop the monsters, but lose their way. Watchmen gets praised because it’s “realistic”. Squadron Supreme is unheard of by the vast majority of people in the world, even the superhero fans who are only here for the movies and TV shows, despite also being realistic.
Watchmen, along with The Dark Knight Returns, started a trend in comics where things got “grim and gritty”. Realism became the order of the day. The more hopeful parts of superhero comics were left by the wayside because the bean counters in charge of the major comic companies thought that what sold wasn’t the masterfully told stories by masters of the medium, but what sold was the darkness and violence. This led to years of copycats, stories that missed out on what made Watchmen special and just used the easiest parts to replicate - the darkness and violence.
Superheroes can be a very childish thing, there’s no way to look past that. Most of the time, it’s people in tights whomping on each other while dealing with how that sort of thing affects their personal life. They’re soap operas for people who wouldn’t admit to liking soap operas. They’re fantasies and wish fulfillment - what if the nerdy kid got superpowers or what if the billionaires actually cared about poor people - and this has often held them back from being talked about as high art. However, that’s also completely unfair.
Let’s go back to 1961. Superheroes were big business again, with DC having weathered the post-WWII years better than Timely (Marvel for those who don’t know their history) and Fawcett - mostly because they sued Fawcett into oblivion - and survived the graphic horror/crimes comics of EC Comics. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman always sold and Julie Schwartz decided to bring back superheroes. A new Flash and Green Lantern were the first, science fiction inspired superheroes that got popular and soon the Justice League came about, combining the heroes that DC had been creating since the late-50s. Marvel decides to get back into the superhero game, and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who had been working on the publisher’s monster, Western, and romance comics, come up with the Fantastic Four, itself basically just the Challengers of the Unknown with superpowers, who Kirby had co-created for DC with either Joe Simon or Dave Wood (no one knows for sure which of them were part of the equation). Fantastic Four #1 explodes in popularity and Marvel is back in the game.
Stan Lee didn’t want to write comics, he wanted to write the great American novel. Lee was hoping that writing superhero books would be his ticket out of that world, which was often considered a bastardized art form. However, looking at Lee’s work - and yes, I know it’s hard to say “Lee’s work” since Kirby and others did so much of it - it’s easy to see that he had something to say about the world of the 1960s. Marvel in the 1960s was basically “American exceptionalism with superpowers”. The Fantastic Four were intrepid scientist-explorers as a nuclear American family. Iron Man was an arms dealer turned into a protector of American sovereignty, often battling villains with ties to the Soviets or communist China. Ant-Man was a super-scientist and his girlfriend the Wasp was a fashion designer and wealthy socialite, both of them representing the cream of the crop. The Hulk was creating weapons to end the communist menace and transformed into a subtle critique on nuclear weapons. Thor was an American doctor who transformed into a god. Spider-Man was a typical American teenager, a studious genius even without his superpowers. Even the X-Men played into this, as despite being a hated minority they still fought for the freedom of the American way.
These comics weren’t “mature” as we would see them now, but they all talked about the United States as a concept. Lee’s books were Cold War propaganda, like the WWII books that came before them, and were written with characters that also had to deal with similar problems to the ones the readers had. Lee wanted his stuff to be seen as “pop art”, and his approach marked Marvel for years to come. Even when Marvel books weren’t dealing with Cold War propaganda, they were still trying to talk about the world that the readers’ experienced, the ones that the creators themselves saw through the windows of their offices everyday.
Marvel’s 1960s superhero books were for “kids”, but they were also trying to be something more. Just look at Jim Steranko’s Nick Fury stuff. Steranko took over Nick Fury. Agent Of SHIELD and went all in on making it a provocative, pop art book, with stories unlike anything else out there both from a writing and artistic standpoint. Steve Ditko was constantly trying to fit his objectivist viewpoints into The Amazing Spider-Man, often writing dialogue that Lee would have to go in and change because it made Peter Parker unlikable. Lee and Kirby tapped into a rich vein of cosmic horror with Galactus, and tried their hand on social commentary with the X-Men and with the introduction of Black Panther. It’s no coincidence that Kirby co-created mutants and the Inhumans - two properties that played a lot with the concept of evolution - or was all gung ho about welding comics to mythology with Thor. Marvel was treating superheroes as art over sixty years ago, but never got the credit for it because superhero comics were for kids.
Superheroes are everywhere nowadays, yet superhero comics are still looked down on by many, including those people who love superhero movies. Somehow, superheroes movies are looked at as being better for older audiences, despite their stories, especially those of the MCU, being much more simplistic. Sure, there are movies like The Winter Soldier, which is a spy epic with superheroes, that aren’t as simplistic, but are superhero movies really saying anything about out current culture? I know I’m in the minority here, but I look at something like Civil War, a story that definitely traded heavily on the politics of the War On Terror and the Bush Administration, as vastly superior to its movie counterpart. What did Captain America: Civil War say about the United States circa 2016? Nothing. It was just an efficient action scene generator.
Despite how often the MCU is called “woke”, is there any social commentary whatsoever in it? Most of the time, the anti-fan chuds out there have to go digging into things that the people who made the movies/TV shows said in interviews or whatever to find anything to complain about, other than the fact that not everyone is a white dude. The MCU is not “woke”. It’s the most center-right bullshit ever and anyone who doesn’t believe that needs to watch Sam’s speech at the end of Falcon And The Winter Soldier again.
My point with this little aside is that it doesn’t seem like most people want superheroes to be anything but empty calories. And that’s why I think that superhero comics are looked down on. The “for kids” stigma has infected every aspect of superheroes. And in the end, that’s why I think superhero comics don’t get the respect they deserve as a whole.
Not every superhero comic is meant to be some deep meditation on the human experience, in the same way that not every movie or painting or song or TV show is meant to be. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t, though. Look at TV shows. For years, TV shows were considered to be lesser than something like movies. Movies were the five course gourmet meals and TV was the microwavable dinner. There were always some standouts, but in the end, TV shows were looked down upon as a medium for artistic expression. However, prestige shows like Oz and The Sopranos came along and showed that TV could be an amazing medium for storytelling if the creators and actors put the work in. Suddenly, we get the Golden Age of TV. Nowadays, I would go so far as to say that TV is the superior medium for entertainment as art, all because it allows artists of all kinds, from writers to actors to set designers and everyone in between , to create brilliant experiences for the viewers.
Superhero comics should get the same kind of treatment as prestige TV. Not every TV show is The Sopranos or The Wire, just like not every superhero comic is something like Mister Miracle by King and Gerads or Avengers: Twilight. Superhero comics can be used to tell a variety of stories about humanity, using the nature of the medium to tell serialized, longform stories. The superhero is such a versatile storytelling tool because while they have the benefit of being superhuman in some ways, they are still very human. That humanity is what has made them continually popular for so many decades. People like stories about great individuals that they can relate to, and superhero comics give us those. Sure, I don’t know what it’s like to have an adamantium skeleton and a healing factor, but I know what it’s like to lose people I love. I know what it’s like to make terrible mistakes. I’m not a person who has been transformed into a weapon, but I know what it’s like to want to be more than what I am or more than how people see me. I know what it’s like to want a better world and I know what it’s like to be willing to do the worst things so that no one else has to.
I love Watchmen. I love seeing superheroes as broken and as beaten as we are. Yet, I also love Squadron Supreme, a story that shows that there’s broken and beaten people out there who want to do the right thing and are willing to die for it. Superhero comics suffer because we live in a cynical world. People don’t trust those in charge and things are constantly getting worse. It’s hard to have hope right now and superheroes are all about hope. That’s looked upon as childish - that any view of the world that isn’t full of despair is just for children. Yet, I think that we need that sort of thing now more than ever. And superheroes should be the place we look to for that.
Superman is one of my favorite fictional characters because of what he says about us. Superman is a god who loves us so much that he’s willing to fight to make sure we have a better world. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created this character with power during the Depression and he fought for the little people. Since then, the character has gone through multiple changes, but the core is the same: a powerful person who exists to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves. I like this idea. I like that we as humans can create something that is greater than ourselves and not have it automatically be some kind of monster out to destroy us. Superman, and superheroes in general, say a lot about humanity and all of it is good.
Superhero comics have given readers amazing stories over the years, yet they’re always looked down upon by the mainstream. Hell, even someone like Alan Moore, who did more than most to make superheroes serious, looks down on them now, equating them to fascism. However, I look at something like 2023’s The Human Target and see a brilliant story. I love the X-Men’s Krakoa Era and what it says about the concept of ethnostates - even if the fans and later creators lost the thread and took it in some stupid directions. One of the reasons I prefer DC stories to Marvel stories is that there are so many DC comics right now that push the boundaries of what a superhero story can be.
Superhero comics can be high art. They can be anything the creators can make them. They are a valid medium for artistic expression of all kinds. You know, there are plenty of paintings for children out there, but no one says that paintings are for children. There are books out there that are written for children, but no one says that novels aren’t valid artistic expressions. The same can be said for every single artistic endeavor out there - there are the simple works and there are the profound works, but the existence of the simple works doesn’t mean the profound ones don’t exist.
I want to live in a world where superhero comics get the same kind of attention that a novel or movie does. I’m so tired of people looking down on comics. The irony of the whole situation is that comics haven’t been written exclusively for children in years. Comics are read by adults nowadays. There’s literally no reason for people to look at superhero comics and say they’re for children, other than an old stigma that has long since been disproven.
Maybe one day we’ll live in a world where something like Ram V’s run on Detective Comics and its brilliant use of the medium of superhero comics will be spoken of in reverent tones, where Chris Claremont’s work on Uncanny X-Men will be praised like the greatest novels, where the work of artists like Adam Kubert and Greg Smallwood will be hung in galleries like that of the old Renaissance masters. I want a world where we talk about the significance of Superman on modern culture or how Avengers: Twilight was brilliant commentary on 21st century American politics. We can make this kind of world a reality and we should.
Who’s with me?
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I’m thinking about writing about the rise and fall of the X-Men’s Krakoa Era, but I haven’t decided if I want to do it all as one long post, or do it in several long posts. Either way, I’ll be doing that next.
See ya next time!