Some folks of the conservative bent are throwing public snits over Marvel’s SAM WILSON: CAPTAIN AMERICA #1, in which the current Cap, a black man, fights white supremacists.
They take open offense at this, saying among other things that superhero comics are no place for politics.
Now, this is shooting fish in a barrel.
I could reply that Superman fought the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s, that the Justice Society fought a fanatical anti-immigrant movement that very decade, that the Fantastic Four fought a villain in a klan hood in the 1960s, that the Sons of the Serpent are Cap villains who first appeared fifty years ago, that this is nothing new, and that if you cry personal foul when somebody presents a fictional two-dimensional racist, then you are standing with the racists and that you deserve all the offense you take.
But this is all so easy to talk about that I think I just exhausted the subject, already.
What I want to talk about is one particular complaint, that takes it out of the realm of whites being panicky: that comics really ought to go back to the storyline where Captain America punched Hitler.
It happens to be true. Captain America punched Hitler, on the cover of his very first issue.
But you really miss a lot about the narrative art when you call that a “storyline.”
That’s not a storyline. That’s not a plot. That’s not even a scene.
That’s a story beat.
A thumbnail is not a story.
Heed this: I have spoken to any number of comic book fans, sometimes at the behest of their parents, who knew I had written Spider-Man novels, and wanted me to assess the talent level of kids who were eager to tell superhero stories of their own. I hate to tell you, I did not discover any vast reservoirs of talent in any of them.
In each case what the kids — who were as old as college age — showed me was a sketch book of drawings of superheroes they had created, basically costume designs, with an accompanying list of powers. “This guy is super-fast and can hurl lightning bolts!” Okay. And? “That’s what he can do!” And have you figured out anything else about him? Who he is under the mask? What drives him? Why he puts on this brightly-colored costume and goes out to fight crime, or possibly to commit it? “Oh, he got exposed to some radiation! And…”
And, who is he? Anywhere in that notebook of yours, do you have any stories?
Captain America punching Hitler is a potent image, to be sure. But the character of Cap has been around, with occasional intermissions, and switch hitters like Sam Wilson or Bucky Barnes, for seventy-five years. Do you think that it’s been nothing, in all that time, but punching Hitler? Boom, there’s Captain America, there’s Hitler, there’s the punch, there’s the garish sound effect, there’s your story? How is that a story?
Batman is constantly fighting the Joker. He has fought the Joker hundreds of times, probably too many times. Are any of those stories, even the worst of them, just “Batman punches the Joker?” If you went to the editorial staff of DC Comics today and told them that you wanted to write comics for a living, and they asked you, well, what have you got, and you beamed, “Batman punches the Joker?”, just how long would they laugh at you?
Now, as it happens, comics have published stories that schematic. The very Marvel method of producing a comic used to be that the writer gave the artist some vague plot, and the artist drew it, and the writer added dialogue. Sometimes the writer was lazy or harried by deadlines and said something like, “Okay, villain X attacks Spider-Man on the rooftops one day, and they fight for twenty pages, until Spidey gets the drop on him; just draw that and I’ll figure out shit for them to say.”
Depending on how much on his game the artist was, the result could even be fun. But you really can’t have a satisfying superhero, or a satisfying story, if all he does is defend himself from random assailants. These are after all comics, a medium which can and has been first-rate which has all too often sailed by on the third-rate, and even at their very worst they still need villains who have some reason for doing what they’re doing. The hero has to have some reason for doing what he’s doing, something involving has to take place between breaks in the action, and there have to be stakes.
Those well-meaning children I spoke to, the ones who honestly thought that all they needed to do to create comics was to draw some lightning bolts on an unitard and say that the guy who wears it has electrical powers, only absorbed the most garish and thinnest requirements of storytelling, and nothing else; they thought the moment was the storyline.
It’s fair to say that some talents of that level have gone on to write or draw comics while not learning anything else of consequence, except possibly technical polish, and that it shows. I could name names.
But they are not alone.
I was once accosted by a guy who wanted me to know that he had a great science fiction novel and that all I had to do was spend months of my life writing it and that we would split the money.
The usual answer to give such folks is, “Okay, write half of it, I’ll write the other half.” It is an easy bet that I will never hear from them again.
This one guy managed to blurt out his idea before I could get away. “An expedition – to Mars!”
I was stopped in my tracks. I asked him, “Are you aware that science fiction writers have been telling stories about expeditions to Mars for over a hundred years?”
“Well, this one would be different! It would be ours!”
“Fine,” I said. “How do we get there? Who do we send there? What do they find when they get there? What problems complicate their lives? What conflicts set one character against another?”
“That’s for you to figure out!”
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this fellow honestly believed that he had done half the work. Like those children, he had an image, a moment, and he’d mistaken it for a story.
Look. You don’t need a brilliant idea. You really don’t. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Here’s one: Grieving husband decides to track down street thug who murdered his wife. That’s an image. That’s a thumbnail. It’s been done a million times if it’s been done once. You can probably already guess much of the plot. But I guarantee you that you can hand this story to a hundred different professional thriller writers and get a hundred different results.
Lee Child would not produce the same story as Gillian Flynn. Joe R. Lansdale would not produce the same story as Harlan Coben. Michael Connelly would not produce the same story as Stephen King, who would not produce the same story as Heather Graham.
The reason they wouldn’t is that the thumbnail above describes only the least important part of the story. From that thumbnail the writers would start with figuring out just who this grieving husband is and who the wife was, what their relationship was like, whether the murder left things unspoken between them, not to mention who the thug is, and they’d work up entire levels of complication between the intent and the deed, including any number of emotional consequences, and in some cases vast international conspiracies that happen to lie behind this seemingly ordinary street mugging.
But even if it turns out to be just an ordinary street mugging, the writer would still figure out the process that leads our vengeful husband to that hood, the details of every room passed through on the way, the lives and personalities of every supporting character encountered along the way…it’s hard work, but it’s work that can grow into wildly different delicacies, of wildly different flavors.
A number of those stories will address the poisonous nature of revenge; others will whole-heartedly endorse it.
Some will end in blood, others will end in futility.
The idea is not the story.
Nor is this just true of thrillers. Do you know how many wildly different stories have been told starting from the image, “Boy meets girl?”
That’s why we have more than one writer. We could have billions; that’s how many different stories there are on this planet – not to mention others.
Telling those stories is not a job for the half-assed. (Though it certainly has been, and will be again; but as I saw a well-known comics editor tell a wannabe writer who protested that his work was at least as good as one piece-of-crap story that had made its way to the printed page, “Do you think I should leap to hire some guy who can write only as well as the worst things we publish?”)
So when the folks on FOX AND FRIENDS think that “Cap Punches Hitler” is a story, they show a fundamental lack of understanding regarding the nature of the art, even in the context of comic books.
It’s not that easy. It really isn’t.