IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 16, No.3 (2015) 124
Aldo J. Regalado, Bending Steel. Modernity and the American
Superhero
Jan Baetens
Aldo J. Regalado, Bending Steel. Modernity and the American Superhero Jackson: The University of Mississippi Press, 2015, 289 p., b/w ill. ISBN: 978-1-62846-221-0 (hardback)
Aldo J. Regalado’s study on the American superhero is a highly refreshing and truly innovative contribution to our knowledge of a field that is often reduced to a single corpus (superhero comics, today revamped in superhero movies), a single way of reading (the superhero as reflection of an imperialist and techno-driven society), a single economic structure (the superhero comics or movies as part of a mind-numbing and profit-maximizing culture industry with no place at all for individual creators), of a single cultural context (that of 1930s and 40s in the USA), and finally a single ideology (a variation on Nietzschean themes of will to power). Recent and less recent scholarship has laid bare the limitations of such readings, but Regalado’s work is much more than just a clever update and fine-tuning of this ongoing research.
What makes this book so appealing is both its fundamental hypothesis and its method. On the one hand, Regalado puts into question the apparently natural alliance between superheroes and modernity. For him, the superhero myth is less an uncritical embrace of modernity –the supernatural power of the masked characters being the aggrandized version of our fascination with speed, technology, industrialization, etc. – as a sometimes quite unadulterated expression of discontent with and resistance to it –modernity being also the other name for a bureaucratic,
dehumanizing, urbanized and emasculating society born from the rise of capitalism in 19th
Century America. This resistance, moreover, although voiced by white male authors has not only strong gender aspects, it is also directly linked with issues of class and race, among others. Just as the superhero helps express and perhaps surmount the fear of losing masculine power in a social and political system ruled by finance and bureaucracy, it is also a channel for political claims addressing the needs of the social inclusion of minorities and other marginalized groups as well as the anxiety produced by the non-Anglo-Saxon other.
To elaborate these hypotheses, which are not new in themselves, Regalado relies on reading strategies that can easily be labeled as very inventive. First of all, he makes a sharp distinction between genre and medium, which enables him to scrutinize pre-comics version of the genre. Superheroes did exist before Superman, although in other media, and Regalado’s reconstruction of the history of the superhero character is fascinating. His rereading of Fennimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, H.P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan are very helpful in disclosing the historical continuity between pre-comics and comics tokens and representations of the superhero as well as in laying bare the ideological subtext of the genre. Cooper, Lovecraft, Burroughs, all these authors exemplify very well the fears and obsessions that are typical of their respective social groups, all of them having good or bad reasons to reject modernism and the societal changes it involves. The comparison with Schuster and Siegel’s Superman, who at first sight does not fall prey to these fears, leads to a much more nuanced interpretation of technophilia and power in their creation. The same applies to the subsequent generations of superheroes that Regalado examines in his book. Instead of reducing the
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 16, No.3 (2015) 125 superhero to a simplistic idea of technology-enhanced extreme will to power, the history disclosed in Bending Steel reveals successive shades of angst, distrust and utmost disillusion, all this much before the postmodern of the superhero in Moore and Gibbon’s Watchmen (1986) and Frank Miller’s Batman. The Dark Knight Returns (1987).
Regalado’s analysis is however not focusing primarily on the close-reading of comics. Instead he highlights the importance of biography, that of the superhero creators but also that of their editors, their readers, and their fans, as well as the importance of the structure of the comics industry, that of the making, but also that of the distribution and the reception of comics (historically speaking the medium that made the superhero genre into a social phenomenon). The results of this methodological choice are very convincing, for instance when Regalado explains the transformative role of fandom, a key feature in the countercultural reappropriation of the dramatically sanitized and ideologically streamlined superheroes of the post-Wertham years. As the author clearly demonstrates, the impact of fandom can itself not be dissociated from the creative reuse, if not détournement, of the very technocratic and bureaucratic technologies the counterculture was reacting against: the first Xerox machines, combined with the low costs of the postal system and a robust anti-establishment DIY culture, allowed for a vivid dialogue between fans and the comics industry that previous and later periods could never equal.
To summarize: Bending Steel is a great example of what cultural studies can offer to comics studies. It is also, in this period of burgeoning literary research in the field, a welcome broadening of the narratological and semiotic strands in contemporary comics scholarship. But on top of all this, it is a great read. Regalado is a magnificent storyteller, who has written with
Bending Steel an academic page-turner.
Jan Baetens is editor in chief of Image (&) Narrative.
