Academic Courtship

I was given a rare opportunity here at Aberystwyth: to give a lecture to the department (well, really anyone that wanted to come, but most people were from the English department).  This was not as part of a larger conference, or as part of a panel.  This was an hour dedicated to my research.  This lecture was part of the department's Work in Progress series that allows for staff and PhD students to talk about whatever research project is going on.  So far this year, (newly made) Professor Damien Walford Davies, Chair of the department, gave a lecture on literary cartography, and Professor Peter Barry, my supervisor, gave a lecture on place and time in elegiac poetry.  Next week, fellow PhD student, Bill Welsted will be speaking about braided narratives in Welsh eco-poetry.

I was given a spot in the series, and with some trepidation decided to talk about Marvel comics.

The crux of my argument is that Marvel comics tries to keep their stock of heroes relevant by using major cross-over events to examine the role of superheroes in American culture while still maintaining the continuity of the established Universe.  This, I argue, is in stark contrast to DC who generally just erase the more unseemly or confusing aspects of their continuity by either rebooting characters or having all the parallel Universes fight each other.  I argue that Marvel's method of restructuring allows for their character to better reflect the complicated relationship America has to superheroes.  For example, Captain America's brand of blind government obedience is no longer relevant in an America which is riddled with political and corporate corruption.  To make Captain America better represent the new American spirit, they had him duke it out with Iron-Man.  At the end of the fight, where both took opposite sides of a debate regarding freedom and identity, Captain America realized the errors of his ways, and gave himself up.  In this way, Captain America (the character) makes the changes needed to stay relevant (though they did kill him shortly after).

Not the most academic of arguments, particularly in light of those that came before me and those that are to come after.  I wasn't dealing with "great" literature, or Literature.  I wasn't even looking at the arty, gritty black-and-white "adult" comics that people like to bandy about as "graphic novels".  I was doing a cultural analysis of a popular medium, so I was a little worried that no one was going to show up.  And also, it wasn't very well advertised.

But...I wrote what I considered to be an interesting paper, whipped up a Flash animation using Prezi, and prepared as best I could for the Q&A session.

Firstly, to my surprise, it was very well attended.  I was expecting some of the younger academics, and especially my friends, to show up.  But there was also a mess of people I didn't know.  So many people, in fact, they had used up all the chairs, and people were left to squat or sit on the ground (though, to be fair, it wasn't a large room).  Besides the young kids who might read it, there were also three senior members of staff, and two junior members.

Secondly, I was surprised at how well it was received.  There are two big concerns I have when I look at superhero comics in the UK:

1) (and this is a concern that manifests itself in America, too) Comic book fans consider themselves to be experts in comicbook theory.  Let me explain this problem another way: if you were giving a paper on, say, the role of the supernatural in Gothic fiction, only people familiar with Radcliffe and the like would feel like they are experts; not anyone who has ever read a novel.  But with comics, people equate knowledge of a character or series with expertise.  I will be one to admit that I am not well versed in DC after 1985.  I am aware of the stock of characters, the general back stories, and so forth, but I have never been a fan of DC.  That said, I have done research on what Superman and Batman represent as cultural artifacts.  I understand the history of the superhero and understand the role the two play in the development of the medium.  I might not know every story line, but I know more critical material relating to DC and Marvel than most people would.   Many people might know that Superman fought Muhammad Ali, but not so many would be able to articulate why that is culturally relevant.

So, when I talk about superheroes, I am often faced with a crowd that bases credibility on depth of knowledge (and the more arcane the knowledge, the more credible I appear).  There were a few people in the crowd like that who were looking to challenge my argument simply because they knew a lot about DCs recent New 52 reboot.

2) 2000AD and Tank Girl aside, the British don't get into superheroes the way that Americans do.  It wasn't part of their cultural heritage, so that requires me to be very thorough in my explication.  The characters, the history, the major (though difficult to spot) differences between DC and Marvel: these are not part of their vocabulary.

So, unlike with the people mentioned in #1, I have to be more generalized and possibly gloss over some of the intricacies of the character's history (like, for example, I didn't feel it was necessary to talk about all the different side-kicks that Captain America had; or that time when Steve Rogers, and later Bucky replacement Jack Monroe, were Nomad, fighting for the American dream underground-style).  I'm left usually making sweeping generalizations for the sake of clarity rather than make a more nuanced argument that requires a lot of detailed knowledge.

One paper; two audiences.  It's a fine line to walk.  On the one hand, I'd like not to underestimate my audience by overly explaining the essentials of superheroes; but on the other hand, I don't want to get bogged down in a "who's who in the Marvel Universe" paper.

This was a good practice for maintaining that balance, and in the Q&A session, one of my colleagues asked how I managed to keep it all straight.  For that, I can thank the Internet, particularly Wikipedia and ComicVine.

But, this is not really a post about how awesome I am at presenting.  This is a post about "impact".

That's a word that is floating around British Academic Departments a lot these days, and it's not entirely clear what is really meant by it.  By my understanding, it's meant to be the reach my research is to have beyond the walls of academia.  The more impactful your research, the more the general public will be interested, the more the department can shop you around as a commodity.  As I near the end of my thesis, the more I am worried that a structural analysis of comic books is not an impactful thesis.

So, when I signed up for this presentation, and I was asked what work-in-progress I was going to present, I had two options: 1) I could look at how the layout of comics conveys meaning (the chapter I am working on now); or 2) I could look at how the international political influences in contemporary America have influenced the superhero, as well as what that might say about America's understanding of itself.  It seemed the second of the two options would reach and appeal to a larger audience.  I've tried floating my structural work on comics by a general audience and it tends to fall flat, so I thought I would try the second.

I am by no means a historically-informed critic.  In fact, I tend not to know when things are written, but more have a vague understanding of when works came in relation to others.  For example, I know that the Modernist writers were at the beginning of the 20th century and followed the Victorians who followed the Romantics.  I know that Lyrical Ballads came after Shakespeare but before The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.  So, thinking about the way contemporary politics have influenced comic books was a new territory for me, but I feel it went well.  At least people keep telling me it did.  And that's good enough for me.

But most importantly, it went well in front of a sizable audience of my peers and colleagues.  What I hoped to show with this is that I can adapt my scholarly interests to the audience that is going to attend.  For an audience that is interested in narrative structuralism, I can do something a bit more theoretical; a more generalized audience, a more generalized scholarship.

I guess, at the heart of it, I've learned something from superhero comics: you need to stay relevant to the readership that is going to be buying your commodity (in this case, me as a knowledgeable expert in something).  I can do as Marvel has done, and run parallel scholarly arcs that try to wrestle with the changes while maintaining a sense of continuity.  Or I can do as DC has done and reboot my scholarship every few years, totally erasing and marginalizing what has come before.