I. Introduction: Comics as a U. S. Cultural Index

VII. Conclusion: A New Bodily Aesthetics?

...just like P.T. Barnum strained through the technological imperative: a perfect fusion of the traveling carnival show and high technology. With this difference:... a perfect crystallization of technocracy’s loathing of nature and human nature [....] That’s the escape theme that pervades the promotional language...: escaping from earth, escaping from the body, escaping from America.⁹²

The imperative for physical beauty, the cult of becoming the body has recognizably become a hysteric concern for Western societies: “This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern.…”⁹³ Faced with the impossibility of ever matching screen idols or supermodels, the vulnerable teenager escapes into a fantasy world where this is realizable. On a deeper level, though, the obfuscation or distortion of the classical heroic form in some mainstream (and most alternative) comics, the stretching, pumping, twisting, mutating of the body is also an attempt to inscribe a new set of aesthetic codes for what is desirable, or “super,” one that liberates us (as seen from fan confessions in Pustz)⁹⁴ from the tyranny of prescribed form. It is no coincidence that, with the passage of time and the exacerbation of youth existential anxieties, superheroes have been cast in ever scarier, grotesque, traumatized molds, as evident in the comparison of the bodies of the FF in the 60s with that of the most popular X-Man since the 1980s, the Hobbesian—short, ugly, hairy and brutish—Wolverine. The FF themselves have also long been replaced as the flagship of Marvel by the more daring X-Men, the true “homo superior” mutants divorced from humankind as a species and as “uncanny” bodies (a trait especially stressed in the teenage mutant characters among them).

In other words, if anorexic air-brushed advertoids are recognizably one form of constructed fiction, setting standards more and more impossible to follow for the average person, why not construct and promote an antagonistic one, that reflects the stress (/stretch?) of perfecting the body? Even better, why not create a form that transcends the body problem, or at least agonizes over the inability to transcend—the “freak triumphant,” in Kroker’s words, “not...as a symbol of transgression, but of the impossibility of transgression”?⁹⁵ The Romantic (classical, actually) equation “Beauty is truth” and vice versa is now replaced by Foucault’s more sober realization that truth (and ergo beauty) “is a thing of this world…produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power.”⁹⁶ If, therefore, the “regime of truth” is dependent on power, in a world of super-powered beings it is this might that sets the rules for what is desirable, exacting a small form of revenge, on behalf of comic book readers (stereotyped as dysfunctional freaks) against what reality aesthetics dictate. Perhaps we are returning to an age-old staple of heroic myth, as identified by Northrop Frye, which operates “near or at the conceivable limits of human desire,” but a desire, nevertheless, non-attainable by even the hero, who must suffer—often via metamorphosis—for attempting to transgress those limits.⁹⁷ As Erich Auerbach noted, it is the scar that makes Odysseus recognizable by “foregrounding” his past into an “uninterrupted” flow of present (and, according to the heroic model, most heroes bear a signifying scar, from Siegfried to Harry Potter).⁹⁸ Modern heroes push this idea to its breaking limits and become the scar, a psychological one this time: Batman is his childhood trauma, Superman is his loneliness as Krypton’s last son, Xena is her guilt, reflecting a society where a personal therapist is no longer a dark, shameful secret, but a posh accessory, easily brought into conversation as a mark of social status, personal distinction, or Woody-Allenesque wit and style. But the FF remove the scar from any purely temporal signification and imprint it on, and as, the whole body declaring its vulnerability, while at the same time it signals the body’s healing-transformative potential.

Thus that the grotesqueness of comic-books like the FF (also eulogized at about the same time in Allen Ginsberg’s groundbreaking 1956 Howl) can be perceived as ideal, but also as a foreboding of the projection of certain continuing trends in our Western culture. The beautiful grotesque that, by provoking and shocking, allows its bearer not to be invisible any more, to stretch above the crowd and achieve, even momentarily, a shining escape from conformity (a quality much devalued since the 50s-60s) is perhaps a way to understand such youth culture trends such as the “grunge” look, extreme tattooing and piercing, the “Bear” movement among gay men, and even, briefly in the early 90s, cosmetic scarification. After all, the pluri- and multi- ideologies of the late 20^th-early 21^st century have made ample room for the easy coexistence of different physiques, despite the pressures of the entertainment industry. At the same time, in an era where the human body, compared to the machine, is losing in importance and superiority and is questioned as the grounding signifier for “humanity,” deconstructing the body by bringing to surface its inherent, or latent, potential for deformity—poking at the scar so to speak—is a kind of cultural pre-emptive strike against the fear of such future mutations (a fear that has been growing in our culture since the atom bomb effects on human genes first became known): not only an acceptance of the body’s imperfect status, but also a game of “chicken” with evolution. It is a mentality akin to that which Henri Bergson observes about the caricaturist:

He makes his models grimace as they would by themselves if they could take their grimace all the way. He guesses, under the surface harmonies of form, the deep insurrections of matter. He realizes the imbalances and distortions...that didn’t manage to reach their completion, since they were exorcised by a higher power. His art, that partakes somewhat of the diabolical, raises again the demon that the angel had thrown down.⁹⁹

This gambit of negative aesthetics became painfully obvious in the 1994 failure of a then-first FF film, which, in returning the comic bodies to an “angelic” realism sans medium conventions made their superhero oddity look abysmally inane.¹⁰⁰ Only the Thing looked real because he has never looked real. The grotesque annulment of classical beauty standards may derive from an overextension of those same ideal standards that is particularly fit for the comic-book medium, but it ends up one step beyond. What it aims at is a condition where, because its grotesqueness liberates form from any secondary significations other than physical utility, body as flesh is dissolved into the ideal concept of mere (or, rather, utter) capacity (and thus, if we extend Beebee’s theory, its new “use-value” becomes the foundation of a new genre—or species, perhaps?),¹⁰¹ and matter does no longer matter. In the grafting of the unreal onto reality (Baudrillard’s “hyperreality” of American utopianism);¹⁰² in an individuative process that can never be completed because we can never transcend, even in our most fantastic ventures, the mark of our physicality and our particular era (be it the 60s or the 2000-somethings); finally, in what it promises to give but always must withhold from the reader¹⁰³—a body so unfit, that it fits—does the comic book establish its never-ending, and utterly fantastic, charm.