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Comic book masculinity and the new black superhero
African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Jeffrey A. Brown
Yet, despite the derisively castrated portrayal of Clark Kent, it is this failure-prone side of the character that facilitates reader identification with the fantasy of Superman. This archetype of the Clark Kent who can transform in a moment of crisis into a virtual super man is a fantasy played out over and over again in superhero comic books. "Though the world may mock Peter Parker, the timid teenager," declares the cover of Amazing Fantasy #15 (1963), "it will soon marvel at the awesome might of Spider-man!" Spoiled playboy Bruce Wayne becomes Batman. Shy scientist David Banner transforms into the monstrous Hulk when he gets angry. Young Billy Batson becomes the world's mightiest mortal, Captain Marvel, merely by uttering the acronym "SHAZAM." Scrawny Steve Rogers becomes the invincible Captain America after drinking an experimental growth serum. The list is endless, for nearly every comic book hero is a variation on the wimp/warrior theme of duality. The story of superheroes has always been a wish-fulfilling fantasy for young men. Even comic book advertisements, such as the legendary Charles Atlas "98-pound weakling" ad, often revolve around the male daydream that, if we could just find the right word, the right experimental drug, the right radioactive waste, then we too might instantly become paragons of masculinity. For young comic book fans the superhero offers an immediate and highly visible example of the hypermasculine ideal. The polarized attributes coded as desirable/undesirable, masculine/feminine are simplified in the four-color world of the comics' pages to the external trappings of idealized masculinity. Even more than the flashy, colorful, and always skin-tight costumes that distinguish comic book heroes, their ever present muscles immediately mark the characters not just as heroes but as real men.
This link between masculinity and muscles is an important association for comic book heroes (and in a parallel form an important association within the stereotyping of black men). Yet, by focusing on the external trappings of masculinity characterized by the musculature of the superhero's body, young readers may run the risk of over internalizing these rather one-dimensional gender symbols. In his insightful ethnography of a southern California gym, Alan Klein discusses bodybuilders as men who have overidentified with what he calls comic book masculinity. "Comic book depictions of masculinity are so obviously exaggerated," Klein claims, "that they represent fiction twice over, as genre and as gender representation" (267). "Moreover," Klein continues, "the reader is set up to be simultaneously impressed by the superhero and dismissive of the alter ego, a situation that underscores the overvalued place of hypermasculinity for readers of this genre of comic books" (268). Klein argues that for many bodybuilders the obsessive quest for ever larger, more imposing, more powerful-looking physiques is very similar to the comic book readers' fantasy of negating the soft, fearful, feminine side that they so despise in themselves. Superhero comics clearly split masculinity into two distinct camps, stressing the superhero side as the ideal to be aspired to; but unlike the fascist ideology of phallic masculinity as mutually exclusive of the softer, feminized Other, comic book masculinity is ultimately premised on the inclusion of the devalued side. Even if Clark Kent and Peter Parker exist primarily to reinforce the reader's fantasy of self-transformation and to emphasize the masculine ideal of Superman and Spider-man, they are still portrayed as parts of the characters that are essential to their identities as a whole.
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