“Just an amazingly good looking guy.”

Folks in the Boston Comics Roundtable alerted me to a new blog by Jim Shooter, editor-in-chief at Marvel Comics during the late 1970s and 1980s, when the company overtook DC not only in innovation but in sales. He began work in the industry at thirteen, scripting stories for DC’s Legion of Super Heroes.

After work at other companies, DC hired Shooter to script some new Legion stories in the past decade. Among the assignments was to take a stab at creating a new Superboy since the courts might assign the copyright of that character to the heirs of co-creator Jerry Siegel. (Long story.) Shooter shared his response in a posting titled “Super Lad.”

I’m among the many people who can’t keep the Legion straight, and I don’t care about the original Superboy. What interested me about Shooter’s posting is what he, as an industry vet, saw as the necessary essence of Superman. In other words, what DC had to retain for a “Super” character if they couldn’t use any of the character history that would become the intellectual property of the Siegel family:

If a Super were anything but a noble being with an iron will and tremendous self control, impervious to the failings bad writers nonetheless foisted upon him or her, the Super would have been a villain. Period. And all the rest of the heroes, all the world for that matter, would have had nothing on their minds, and nothing else worthy of devoting their efforts to than destroying the Super. Period. 
. . .

I see him as a genuine good guy. Someone who does the right thing, who has tremendous willpower and courage, who is smart and reasonable. Smart about using his powers, as he learns how. The nicest, best guy you ever met. NOBLE, in the best senses of the word. Not that he can't make mistakes, not that he doesn't have humanity--but he's the best of humankind, one of the few survivors of his particular kind, determined, therefore, to give a good account of himself. 



Elliot S! Maggin once wrote an imaginary story in which Kal-el did not become Superman. Since that didn't occur, he was chosen as the Green Lantern of his sector because he among all beings there had the greatest courage, greatest will and noblest spirit. Right on. That was ES!M's finest hour.


Fair enough. But comics are a visual as well as verbal medium. How would that character be embodied in art? Shooter wrote:

- A strong, young man's physique. NOT overbuilt, NOT Hercules. Strong-looking but slim. Like Ditko's early Spider-man. An ATTAINABLE build. He's Kryptonian. He doesn't have to be absurdly musclebound.



- Handsome. A really, really good looking guy. No lantern jaw, no jock sensibility. Just an amazingly good looking guy. 



- Haircut: timeless. A haircut that wouldn't look out of place in almost any era. I wouldn't mind something pretty close to Superman's. Nothing dated or trendy. No mullet, no crew cut, no high-and-tight, no long hair, no Pet Detective, no spike-y do, no dreads, no curls, no mop. Timeless.

In sum, a good superhero has to look good. Really good. Even if he’s not musclebound or lantern-jawed, he has to be “amazingly good looking.” Or, as critic Douglas Wolk put it in Reading Comics:

The default style of the superhero mainstream [is] designed to read clearly and to provoke the strongest possible somatic response. You’re supposed to react to it with your body before you think about it. Most of its characters, especially the heroic ones, are drawn to look as “sexy” as possible…

The result is that the most underrepresented group among superheroes isn’t women, or non-white ethnic groups, or sexual minorities—not that those people aren’t underrepresented relative to their proportion of the general public. It’s people who are plain or unattractive.

Male or female, young or old, whatever color or orientation, superheroes are almost all drawn as physically attractive people. The main alternative is physically attractive people who turn into wildly exaggerated monsters.

Comics readers have long pointed out how artists routinely draw female heroes with big busts and little costumes, but are there any female heroes who aren’t conventionally attractive to begin with? As for men:

• Are there any mainstream balding superheroes? Not hairless, like Steel or today’s Luke Cage—balding. Even the star of the new Captain America movie (who previously played the Human Torch) says “How horrible would it be if this superior man has male pattern baldness?” But unless you’re Firestorm, what does hair have to do with heroics? 
• Any potbellied guys besides Bouncing Boy, a third-string Legionnaire introduced for comic relief and later retired to the background? (Incidentally, also co-created by Jerry Siegel.) 
• Any men with receding chins? crooked noses? one droopy eye? 

This is, after all, a genre in which Peter Parker was created to represent nerdy guys.

The 99’s Name Is Legion

The Atlantic Monthly is devoting a lot of pixels and ink to The 99, a comic book about young Muslim superheroes. In addition to the print article, there’s a slide show of characters and an interview with creator Dr. Naif al-Mutawa.

The 99’s website offers a free download of the series’s “Origins” issue, written by Mutawa and Fabian Nicieza (who has once again taken up the mantle of writing former Robin Tim Drake for DC Comics). That issue also shows the emergence of one young hero, but eventually the series promises ninety-nine, each with a distinct power.

Which makes me think that Dr. Al-Muttawa has basically reinvented DC’s Legion of Super Heroes. Originally conceived for a Superboy story, this is a group of young people from the future who develop various powers and band together to fight…well, that varies somewhat depending on which “continuity” one reads. As does the lineup of heroes, beyond a core handful.

The 99 offers some innovations, to be sure. One character appears to be a superpowered grant writer. And the kid with circuit lines on his face? He’s not green like Brainiac 5. Most significant to its launch, all of the 99 are Muslim; each is supposed to represent a different Islamic virtue. Though those virtues look very much like the virtues of other belief systems.

In one way, this approach is a good fit for the symbolic nature of modern superheroes, as Douglas Wolk discusses in Reading Comics. Each character offers a chance to explore what his or her defining power and virtue mean. In practice, however, The 99 faces some big storytelling challenges.

One is that such a large group presents too many heroes for most readers to track. The Legion of Super Heroes has the same problem. Some fans argue that its characters are simple to keep straight since their professional names state their powers: Lightning Lad, Triplicate Girl, Invisible Kid, Bouncing Boy, Shadow Lass, and so on. That worked fine back when the comics showed them addressing each other by those names every other balloon. Now, in the cause of realism, stories show more of the characters’ private lives, and they address each other by their given names. For most readers a new Legion issue is like tuning into a long-running soap opera they’ve never watched before.

For its established fans, in fact, the Legion’s size appears to be a plus. They apparently go gaga over pictures of the whole group, judging by the number of images available. Can The 99 build to that level of following without half a century of gradual growth?

The second challenge is the tension between collective and individual heroism. Al-Muttawa is trying to make a point about worldwide unity. He sends his characters out on adventures in teams of three or four. (Batch-processing seems inevitable when you’ve got ninety-nine heroes to introduce.) Though readers might identify with favorites, they’re supposed to follow the entire group.

But superhero fans the world over might be seeking a different sort of story. The Atlantic found a “a 36-year-old [Muslim] filmmaker, photographer, and comic-book enthusiast” who said he’s looking for something else:

“I like the image Dr. Naif is bringing with The 99, but unfortunately it’s not very successful here,” he said. Al-Duwaisan still preferred his Batmans to The 99—and not because of too little Islamic subtext, but too much. Al-Duwaisan felt that groups of heroes working collectively missed the very point of the Western comics he adores: the triumph of the individual.

“In the West, there’s one hero,” he said with visible longing. “If there are too many of them, you can’t idolize anyone. I don’t feel the heroism. I am reading Batman because I see part of myself in it.”