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Confusion in Relevance-Town

Political fiction, including comics, must brave a number of risks. The ideas can undermine themselves with their fundamental absurdity, inviting the guilty pleasure of derisive glee. The delivery can invite ignoring the concepts themselves, either through attempting to paint with a sledgehammer or by a kind of arrogance that suggests that the story intends more to insult anyone not already in on its supposedly-divine level of insight than to explore ideas. Sometimes the delivery just fails to get the ideas across. But this does not exhaust the ways in which such a work can go wrong. A lack of clarity can easily undermine a moral or political or ethical work though inept or overly-subtle elucidation. In other cases, lack of focus can bring down the intended lesson because the writer or writers don't really know what they wish to say.

A story called "The Day Superboy Became a Superman" demonstrates how sometimes the comics of "relevance" went astray through a particular fault: the lack of focus and intellectual rigor. Or, put in simpler language, the story sought to teach a lesson it didn't exactly understand. Perhaps not all writers had strongly-centered ideas usable in the delivery of "relevant" tales; perhaps both editor and writer pulled at the steering wheel of this story, causing it to swerve on the road. Perhaps, indeed, the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns made an appearance, meaning that one relevant story too many had made it to the printing presses and the time had come to explore other themes.

Here we need not dispute the various ideas presented in a political tale to refute the tale as a piece; and this refutation comes from the work's own implausibility, the way it undermines ideas via the very weakness it demonstrates in attempting to advance them. Somewhere, in the morass, perhaps a kernel of an idea existed about the role of a hero involving more of a civic duty than just putting people in jail. But this turned one way, then another way, and the reader actually attempting to decipher the Course for Right Action this piece intended to put across can do little more than shrug in dismay.

The Plot Congeals

The whole tale of Superboy's supposed enlightenment begins with the Adolescent of Steel, early in his days in college, encountering a series of incidents involving young men from the poor part of town. In one, a handful of rowdies from this crowd break into a country club during daylight hours and wade, fully clothed, into a swimming pool. Superboy deals with these disruptive young men as one might expect Superboy to deal with disruptive young men, and finds himself targeted by a tongue-lashing.

Marla Harvey, whom we recognize as occupying the moral high ground by the angry tone of her reprimands, reminds Superboy that he forgot, when viewing this act of disturbing the peace, to perform the required socioeconomic calculus on the perpetrators that, owing to their poverty, would preempt them from moral or legal judgment. We can probably infer, furthermore, that the country club patrons deserved their shaking up not only from their ability to afford memberships in the club (a sign of the crime of affluence), but from the character of such bodies at the dawn of the seventies: Though not immediately apparent to the reader circa 2001, one could expect such social organizations to practice segregation based both on race (Caucasians only need apply) and religion (no Jews need apply). We leave the latter observation among matters writers intended the reader to infer, because a too-deep exploration of the latter theme would invite an exploration a bit more radical than the purveyors of comics to the bourgeoisie might have intended.

This point aside, other episodes follow, including the theft of some catered refreshments, justified to Superboy by the claim that prosperous folks won't miss some food (though they might miss having the right to decide to whom belongs what they pay for) and, later, the theft of some textbooks (evidently "borrowed" for the purpose of creating a free school for the underprivileged who can't afford to attend the school at which Marla Harvey and Clark Kent matriculated, the source of the stolen books).

Tragedy, however, must appear to drive the point home. The abandoned building in which Marla begins her free school appears on the agenda of a handy bulldozer, and she, in an attempt to tie her mission to a piece of derelict real estate, attempts to arrest its demolition. In the ensuing mayhem, falling masonry mortally wounds her, making her a martyr to her cause, though the reader may variously define this cause as letting adolescents vandalize and trespass country clubs, as declaring catered refreshments officially the property of whomever she sees as fit recipients, of squatter's rights to abandoned buildings, or of creative reallocation of college textbooks. Probably the writers intended her to die for the cause of Opportunity for All.

At this point, Superboy appears to relent, after a few thought balloons of poignant soul-searching earlier in the story showed the blossoming of his once brittle and flinty soul. The notion of the free school inspires him. And, as Superboy makes Marla's case in her absence, he evolves through several ideas, remaining focused on none.

Arguments for Mercy

We should not preemptively foreclose the notion that a story - even a superhero story - can impart some moral lesson. Indeed, given the historical perception that comics remain devoid of edifying content, the medium could use more well-delivered, well-reasoned ethical content. However, if you take silly thinking and cliched notions and graft them onto trifling material, the synthesis does not dispose of the flaws of its components. You get a mixture of trifling material and silly thinking. And, to begin with, the story fails in attempts to sell the notion of compassion for troubled young people by never getting around to the notion of demonstrating their human virtues that would justify such compassion. Instead, political one-liners replace depth of thought or purposeful policy.

Slogans, of a mild sort pertaining to the school of the politics of victimization, proceed here rather than punchy commentary or lucid rhetoric. While we may share some sympathy with the underprivileged figures here, some questions may tend to undermine our compassion. For example, have any of the troubled youngsters around whom this story centers attempted anything like getting a job? Or, for that matter, doing something more productive with their time? However, such blunt questions seemed at the time (and, perhaps, seem today) like chanting an empty mantra, and thus, though doing something meaningful about poverty requires the addressing of the issue, we need show no surprise that the question did not appear in this story. The tone of the story essentially precluded such questions as a kind of uncivil treatment of the concept.

To make a convincing argument against Superboy's purported misdeeds in handling the disruptive youths, however, the story would have needed to treat these incidents somewhat less superficially. Arguing in general that an unnamed crowd of adolescents should in general receive preemptive absolution for the extenuating circumstance of a deprived upbringing they suffered in general leaves things too deeply in the abstract. Nameless figures typically elicit less sympathy, and therefore less mercy, compassion, or whatever kind of forgiving virtue that the story advocates for a few moments before wandering on to another equally underdeveloped point.

Before the story could attempt, more effectively, to make a case for leniency, the goalposts of civic growth shifted to another location, and the story took off towards notions of self-help.

Arguments for Self-Help

The notion of self-help most famously attaches to the name Garvey, the Jamaican-born founder of the United Negro Improvement Association, whose colors today still adorn emblems and wardrobe of the pan-African movement. While Garvey had some questionable notions that fade into and out of favor, the self-help notion he promulgated offered a great deal for Black Americans attempting to improve their condition in a frequently hostile nation. Plausibly enough, Garvey contended that Blacks in America could not rely on the goodwill of the descendants of Europeans to improve their circumstances; more subtly, though, Garvey also postulated that outsiders to problems of the various Black communities could not accurately diagnose nor effectively treat what afflicted them. Hence, self-help: People could do a great deal for one another by deliberate and purposeful application of things like limited financial resources to the betterment of communities. In specific, Garvey advocated patronizing Black merchants to invigorate the ethnic economy and dedicating more money to self-education (as in one speech where he recommended missing a few meals if this would allow the purchase of books). One can note that the benefits of self-help leave a community more in control of its own future, and, furthermore, less obliged to outsiders who might now little and care less about other peoples.

Garvey proposed his agenda and theory of self-help with an aim to directing Blacks living in the New World to create an independent and self-contained community of Africans, and included in his program a return to the African continent. However he targeted his ideas, though, the self-help notion reflects a kind of common sense that reaches beyond the people whose condition interested the man. For the notion that some messianic figure must come and rescue human beings from their condition may tempt some to wait for that kind of economic redemption instead of dedicating their own energies to self-betterment; and, furthermore, it places the center of responsibility outside, effectively infantilizing people as targets of charity rather than architects of their own destiny. Even worse, it creates a culture of self-appointed middlemen to administer the largesse, a class with a vested interest in preventing the assumption of autonomy by developing economic classes; Booker T. Washington recognized this crowd in such terms which the expression "poverty pimps" might describe well. The self-help notion had an appeal during certain moments of the intellectual ferment of the 1960s and occasionally appears in the comics of the era of "relevance."

This somewhat incoherent story, therefore, made a nod towards the self-help notion. It did not, however, become a treatise on self-help, since this redirection did not persist long enough to explore the notion long enough to impress. The self-help angle lasted perhaps a panel or so.

Arguments for Entitlements

An unfocused argument can expose the audience to the risk of a kind of cognitive whiplash brought on by 180-degree reversals. This story creates such a hazard in the rapid way Superboy shifts from arguing that the residents of the underprivileged side of town should do something for themselves to contending they should use their franchise to vote themselves the sort of facility Superboy began to build but failed to complete.

Examine, if you will, the reversal of Superboy's argument in the scanned specimen, below. At one point, he argues that completing the school for them will tend to cultivate their dependency rather than their underdeveloped talents; and, by the next word balloon - not even waiting until the next panel to derail his original premise - he argues for voting themselves some benefits, something critics might note as risking exactly what Superboy warned about in the previous panel. Should we expect such a self-contradicting argument to convince, even when preaching to the choir?

We need not preemptively reject any of the claims of this story - including the arguments for leniency for the disruptive youth, the plea that the local underclass act for themselves, or the suggestion that they vote themselves some improvements out of tax dollars - to recognize that if Superboy has a superior Kryptonian intellect, he has chosen, at least for the duration of this story, not to use it. Instead, what comes out of his mouth at the end of the story suggests the first few experimental forays into the politics of the day by someone rather unacquainted with their particulars. People talking about things they haven't thought about tend to frame arguments this way, concatenating a series of topical buzzwords in a way that superficially resembles an ethical claim but wanders over the landscape of ethical civics like a blind and drunken dog.

Relevance and Its Enemies

Some readers (including readers far too young to remember either relevance or even pre-Crisis comics) reflexively sneer at the comics of relevance as smug and pretentious. One could argue, anecdotally, that various stories, various writers, and various titles had individual approaches and leave it at that. However, muddled thinking does little to commend the body of work that appeared in this category.

This work makes one or two points we might expect to hear from readers who did not care for the era of relevance at all. To begin with, the notion that an ill-argued political position instantly converts trite content to dense and meaningful material worthy of somber recognition, thoughtful contemplation, and reverent regard must rankle even those who, though they might agree with the ideas poorly delivered in the lesser of such works, would nonetheless prefer to see ideas appear in better stories with better arguments.

However, selective analysis could serve well to undermine the credibility of any work, aesthetic or philosophical, if we make the shallow assumption that a poor presentation means a poor idea. Such a criterion, though, could prove dismissive to any idea if we assume that unfocused or incoherent presentation proves the worthlessness of a notion advanced badly.

Fairly enough, however, we might see in stories of this quality one of the forces that brought the comics of relevance to an end. One one front, the whole trendiness of relevant comics had a limited lifespan - fad qualities can undermine solid and frivolous concepts equally; on another, the very notion of relevance ran afoul of the fundamental escapist virtue of comics - the medium enjoys, as a strong point, their ability to elude reality rather than depict it. But even those who see relevant comics, particularly as viewed in context of the classic Green Lantern / Green Arrow run (investing, as one might say, virtue by association), as a kind of Camelot moment of the form can recognize that bad conception and bad delivery make for a weak piece, even if a real idea might - somewhere - hide in the material.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@yahoo.com.

Column 284. Completed 11-NOV-2001.