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Comic book masculinity and the new black superhero

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Jeffrey A. Brown

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Rather than overtly condemning comic book depictions of masculinity, Klein reserves his criticism for societal constructions that lead readers to value and identify with the hypermasculine rather than other potentially radical, liberating, or transgressive gender traits. In fact, Klein recognizes that, "insofar as these comic book constructs are part of childhood socialization, their dualism could be functional, even therapeutic, were one to acknowledge the positive attributes of the superhero's alter ego and the dialectical relationship between wimp and warrior"; after all, "both male and female coexist within the Superman/Clark Kent figure" (267-68). Unfortunately, the potential that Klein sees as possible in the superhero's co-dependant male/female-identified personae, were it not for our overvaluation of the purely masculine side, is presently even more disparaged in the extremely popular line of Image comics.

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Since Image's inception in the early 1990s it has become the fastest growing comics publisher in the history of the medium, and is currently second only to the industry giant Marvel in monthly sales. As might be predicted of a company formed by popular artists rather than writers, Image's success can be credited to their flashy artwork, depicting excesses of costumed heroism and constant large-scale battles. The Image books are identifiable by a distinctive in-house style of portraying the heroic body. As eager participants in the "Bad Girl" trend, Image women are uniformly illustrated as impossibly sexy, silicone-injected, and scantily clad babes wielding phallicly obvious swords. Even more pronounced than the unrealizable physical extremes of the Image women are the incredibly exaggerated representations of the male hero's body as a mass of veiny muscles. The Image trademarks of buxom cheesecake women and massive beefcake men are well-illustrated in a typical cover for one of the company's cross-over specials, featuring Prophet and Avengelyne [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. The male's hulking form dwarfs the dominatrix-like superheroine; indeed his bulging arms alone are bigger than her entire body. And these two characters are among Image's most modest.

With the Image books, the already reductive aspects of comic book masculinity are reduced even further into the realm of the purely symbolic. Image's very name suggests the extremes that their stylized portrayals of masculinity have taken as pure form, as pure image. Image provides hypermasculine ideals that are more excessively muscular than Superman or Batman ever dreamed of being. The Image heroes set a new standard of hypermasculinity. In fact, Image has frequently done away with the superhero's mild-mannered alter ego all together. Whereas the classic superhero comic book may have asked "boys to identify with Superman as a supermasculine ideal by rejecting the Clark Kent side of themselves" (Easthope 29), the Image books have made that rejection unnecessary. Clark Kent, it seems, no longer exists. By downplaying, or completely erasing, the hero's secret identity, the Image books mark an extreme shift to the side of hypermasculinity an ideal not even tempered in a token way by a softer, more humane side.

Comic book masculinity and the new black superhero

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Jeffrey A. Brown

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