Useful Play: Historicization in Alan Moore's Supreme and Warren Ellis/John Cassaday's Planet

Publication: Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

Date published: January 1, 2010

IN CONSTRUCTING POSTMODERNISM, BRIAN MCHALE TRACES JEAN-FRANÇOIS Lyotard's Postmodern Condition and its influence on later postmodern thought. According to McHale, Lyotard asserts that postmodernism rejects metanarratives (aka "master narratives" or "grands recites") because they claim to explain the entire universe through a single story, idea, or ideology because "nobody believes in them any more" (Lyotard xxiv, 23, 60; McHale 5, 19). McHale identifies a tendency of postmodernists after Lyotard to reject narrative entirely: "Lyotard's description has been turned into a prescription: avoid at all costs the appearance of endorsing metanarratives [...]; or, more briefly: avoid story; don't narrate" (5). McHaIe recommends that, instead of rejecting all narratives out of a desire to avoid master narratives, we can "'turn them down' from metanarratives to 'little narratives,' [thus] lowering the stakes" (24). McHale's version of little narratives are not the same as traditional Marxist petites récits. Instead of acting as the narratives of the petites bourgeoisies, McHale's little narratives are simply master narratives that have had their volume knobs turned down. McHale's little narratives can then "do useful work for us" (24) because they retain the power of narrative itself as a way to understand culture and history but without the totalizing claims of master narratives.

It would be pretentious indeed to claim that superheroes can be master narratives, although they certainly participate in various master narratives and even embody them on occasion (e.g., nationalism, rugged individualism, liberal humanism, etc.); therefore, turning them down to little narratives would be unnecessary. However, McHale's proposition that little narratives can do useful work for us applies quite readily to the manner in which the superhero genre is presented in Alan Moore et al.'s Supreme and Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's Planetary if we change one word. In these comics, superheroes do not do useful work for us, but that is not their function. Instead, they do useful play for us if we can turn down their pretensions to universality and realism, qualities that previous eras in American superhero comics attempted to perform in earnest. The cleverness and self-awareness that these two series display grants the audience members permission to indulge their sense of child-like wonder, to be immersed in a fantastic narrative world that is familiar from childhood but re -presented in fresh terms. This combination of child-like wonder and mature self-awareness is the useful play that Supreme and Planetary can do for their audience.

Supreme (#41-56) and Supreme: The Return (#1-6) signal Alan Moore's return to the superhero genre after pursuing alternative and politically oriented comics for several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Planetary (#1-27) is part of Warren Ellis's on-going meditation on the superhero genre, which stretches back to Stormwatch (1996-98) and extends to the recent Supergod (2009-10). In performing useful play, Supreme and Planetary mount parallel critiques of two other modes of superhero comics that came before them, what fan culture calls the Silver Age and the Dark Age respectively,1 specifically the former's tendency to efface its own history and the latter's preoccupation with amoral violence. Both series reincarnate the child-like wonder of the superhero while simultaneously historicizing the genre, deliberately putting on display the literary and media influences that gave rise to comic -book superheroes in the first place. The Silver Age style is most identifiable by its unproblematic hero-worship and light-hearted tone; the Dark Age is most recognizable by its superficial representation of violence, angst, and sexuality in an attempt to reproduce the commercial successes of earlyeighties comics that depict the superhero as a brutal fascist (e.g., Moore et al.'s Miracleman [aka Marvelman], Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen, and arguably Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns). Supreme and Planetary belong to a third, frequently metafictional mode called Revisionist comics, which often historicize the American comic-book by putting its tropes, clichés, and generic tendencies on display. Supreme and Planetary actively historicize themselves by combining the self-reflexivity of early Revisionist work with the playful wonder of Silver Age comics, and thus they symbolically reject the angst of the Dark Age. Three concepts correspond closely to these three forms of comics: the neverwhen with the Silver Age, violent verisimilitude with the Dark Age, and historicization with the Revisionist mode.

Superhero comics have, almost since their beginning, gone out of their way to erase their own narrative history using a device called retcon, a portmanteau of "retroactive continuity."2 There are two types of retcon at issue in this article, the second of which is inherent to the neverwhen. The first is the more common kind; it alters previous, published comics by disingenuously "revealing" that the events that occurred in the old comics were depicted incorrectly or incompletely; to this end, retcon often employs false memories or simply restages events that were ostensibly not depicted the first time. Retcon can also employ time-travel to actually alter the history of the narrative. The key to this version of retcon is that both audience and creators freely regard it as genuinely unplanned, but they nevertheless treat it as the new "truth" of the story. A planned plot twist does not qualify as a retcon; a haphazard narrative change that goes unnoticed by the audience also does not qualify as a retcon. Mutual recognition is an inherent part of the phenomenon. The second, less obvious form of retcon occurs when the creators incrementally update the settings, characters, and politics of their comics to create the impression of a perpetually contemporary setting. I have elsewhere called this subtle form of retcon the neverwhen.3 Incremental change creates the appearance of stasis, an illusion that is all but invisible in the moment because, at any given time, the comics superficially match the cultural and historical moment in which they were created, aside from the blatantly fantastic elements of the genre, of course. Over any span of time more than a few years, however, this incremental change becomes obvious, and it exposes that eternal, unchanging, historical present as an illusion. Mainstream American comics have not traditionally cared about how easy it is to shatter their temporal illusion because they assumed an audience that grew out of comics every few years (Kupperberg). Any kind of historical awareness ruins the illusory nature of the neverwhen, however, and Revisionist comics have been preoccupied with doing just that since their inception in the early eighties.

Retcon is a particularly powerful gesture in American superhero comics because shared universes have been the norm since the 1940s. There is a lot of history to retcon there, feigned though it may be. Furthermore, shared universes require continuity that extends backwards potentially as far as the 1930s and laterally to other comics set in the same narrative universe. Retcon is an extremely convenient tool for maintaining continuity among all of the comics published by a particular house but created by potentially hundreds of different writers, pencilers, and editors. On the macro-scale, blatant retcons can explain away glaring inconsistencies, while on the micro-scale, incremental retcon can draw attention away from the passage of time and the shifting of culture. The sum effect is that American comics create the impression of a rich history of iconic characters and universal values, but they achieve that effect by continuously retconning major events within that history and continually updating their narrative worlds to match the contemporary world. This ahistorical paradox is exactly what Supreme and Phnetary set out to dissect and problematize.

Fredric Jameson describes a phenomenon that is similar to the neverwhen, the "reduction to the present" ("End" 710), in which capitalist consumer culture reduces all time to "now." It naturalizes whatever happens to be contemporary, "explicitly identifie [s] it [...] as what is out of time altogether" (712). The opposite of this reduction to the present for Jameson is historicity: "a perception of the present as history," which "defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance" that constitutes "a historical perspective" (Postmodernism 284). Historicizing is, then, a specific form of denaturalizing: transforming something that has been rendered falsely "natural" into something that is understood as having been formed by culture, economy, or in Jameson's case, the movement of history itself. I read Jameson quite distinctly against the grain though. Comics are part of the entertainment industry, and yet they can historicize, an assertion with which Jameson would no doubt disagree on the basis that they cannot critique the capitalist reduction to the present when they are complicit in capitalism.

However, Linda Hutcheon argues, in The Politics of Postmodernism, that there is a form of discourse that can both acknowledge its complicity and mount a critique of that complicity. She calls this discursive mode complicit critique (4), a name that alludes to Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play," in which he argues that "we cannot give up [...] complicity without also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity" (355). Thus, according to Hutcheon, postmodernism "knows it cannot escape implication in the economic (late capitalist) and ideological (liberal humanist) dominants of its time. There is no outside. All it can do is question from within" (Poetics xiii) . This quotation is from A Poetics of Postmodernism, in which she proposes historiographie metafiction as, effectively, a discreet form of what she later calls complicit critique. To put that the other way around, she expands historiographie metafiction out to a more general sense of complicit critique. Historiographie metafiction "depends upon and draws its power from that which it contests" (120) just like complicit critique. It is "bound up [...] with its own complicity with power and domination," and it "acknowledges that it cannot escape implication in that which it nevertheless still wants to analyze" (4). I argue that Revisionist comics are historiographically metafictional. They "both install and then blur the line between fiction and history" (Hutcheon, Poetics 113). They are "narratives distinguished by their frames" (109) - historical frames, stylistic frames, generic frames, cultural/national frames - "which historiographie metafiction first establishes and then crosses" (110). They must construct the discourse which they then deconstruct. They are published by the mainstream industry and use mainstream genres to critique that industry and those genres. They are complicit critiques but critiques nonetheless. One of their primary targets is Dark Age violent verisimilitude.

Early Revisionist comics counteracted both the neverwhen and the wide-eyed credulity of the Silver Age by introducing historical detail and moral doubt as well as highlighting the traditionally cloaked violence of the superhero; thus, Revisionist comics were generally regarded as introducing realism to the genre, although I will problematize that perception shortly. In so doing, they accidentally inspired the Dark Age. As Lance Parkin puts it, "many of Moore's imitators took realism to mean an adolescent preoccupation with bodily fluids and swear words" (13), a sentiment with which Matthew Pustz agrees (129). Gore and swearing, as well as heightened levels of sexuality, angst, and amorality, became part of a new set of narrative conventions that signified "realism" in American superhero comics. That is not to say that comics suddenly resembled reality more than they had previously but rather to say that they created a new verisimilitude based in violence. I use the word "verisimilitude," here, not as a synonym for "realism" but rather in Tzvetan Todorov's sense from The Poetics of Prose: "we speak of a work's verisimilitude insofar as the work tries to convince us it conforms to reality and not to its own laws. In other words, verisimilitude is the mask which is assumed by the laws of the text and which we are meant to take for a relation to reality" (83). Verisimilitude is the appealing and convincing sense of reality that audiences derive from familiar generic conventions; thus, "there are as many verisimilitudes as there are genres" (83), and every mode, genre, and subgenre is, in effect, a verisimilitude as well. Dark Age comics constructed a verisimilitude in which violence signified reality, not necessarily one that bore a greater resemblance to reality .4 Revisionist comics often seek to expose the difference between reality and verisimilitude, much as they seek to expose the neverwhen.

Supreme and Planetary counteract the Dark Age by returning to the wonder and fantasy of the Silver Age but also by retaining the awareness of history that the Silver Age largely exorcised. In the process, these Revisionist comics historicize both of the other subtypes of comics by revealing how embedded they are in the literary development of the superhero. Parkin once again sums up the tactic nicely, asserting that Moore's comics "embrace the absurdities of their own internal logic, rather than trying to rationalize them" (56), a description that applies quite well to most Revisionist comics, not just Moore's. Rather than trying to retcon those absurdities out of existence, as the Dark Age comics often did out of embarrassment, Revisionist comics focus on them as vital parts of the narrative. Indeed, the larger argument of Supreme and Planetary is that American comics ought to embrace their history, display it proudly, know it thoroughly, and even document it for posterity. However, the Silver Age invented retcon to begin with, and the Dark Age merely used it to erase the Silver Age. To break that cycle, Supreme and Planetary do not resurrect the Silver Age unproblematically, and herein lies their genuinely Revisionist drive; they instead demonstrate a self-conscious and problematic version of the Silver Age, one that is always mindful of its own tendency towards retcon and the neverwhen. These two series thus demonstrate a chain of influence from unproblematized, ahistorical comics (Silver Age and Dark Age) to problematized, historicized comics (Revisionist).

This progression is not ideological, of course. American comics constantly backslide into the neverwhen because the illusion of stability creates a reliably saleable product; however, Revisionist comics demonstrate that exploding that illusion is also highly saleable. The industry is, of course, profit-driven, so it does not care which strategy it pursues so long as the strategy is profitable, although ascribing no artistic sensitivity to the executives and editors, let alone the writers and artists, would also be inaccurate. The result of the profit drive has been a cycle of fixing comic -book narratives using retcon and then exploding them using Revisionist techniques, primarily self-reflexivity. From Mythologies, Roland Barthes's theory of semiotic myth as "depoliticized speech" (143; italics in original) goes some distance towards explaining this cycle. His myths assert their significance every time we look at them; thus, he implies, we can demystify those myths only intermittently: "it does not matter if one is later allowed to see through the myth, its action is assumed to be stronger than the rational explanations which may later belie it" (130). We can apply rationality to semiotic myths and thus demystify them, but they reassert their mythological nature every time we look at them. According to this model, the pull towards the neverwhen would be continual while the push to historicize would be continuous. The first wave of Revisionist comics pushes back against the neverwhen of the seventies and eighties, but also accidentally inspires the Dark Age of the nineties against which a second wave of Revisionist comics once again pushes in the late nineties. Supreme and Planetary are two such pushes back. Supreme simultaneously critiques Dark Age superficiality and historicizes Silver Age naivety, and Planetary depicts the cluster of influences that gave rise to it and continues to shape it, from pulp science fiction to Hong Kong action films.

Supreme

What Supreme lacks in subtlety it makes up for in sheer, on-the-nose accuracy. From practically the first panel, it launches into a highly self-reflexive analysis of the superhero as a generic type that developed over the course of decades. It parodies the Dark Age obsession with violence and angst in several instances, but it spends the bulk of the narrative exploring the newly created history of "Supreme," a history that Moore invents and fills with analogues of Superman and his supporting cast as well as pastiches of identifiable writing, drawing, and storytelling styles from comic -book history. The argument of the series is that there is something dynamic and just plain fun about the superhero figure if it sheds the pretensions it picked up in the 1990s and historicizes itself. The hero and his setting become acceptable fantasies because the audience acknowledges them as fantastic instead of pretending that they can be realistic. Supreme leaves the audience with a toy entity, something that can do useful play for them without embarrassment because they know where that toy came from and why it was built in a particular way. Moore's run on the series displays this historicizing critique and aims that critique at both the neverwhen and violent verisimilitude. Two examples serve to demonstrate the phenomenon: one addresses retcon and the neverwhen, and the other parodies the Dark Age and Revisionist comics themselves.

Normally, when a new writer takes over a pre-existing comic book, there is a break in the narrative flow, previous story lines are wrapped up to make way for a new writer's plans, and the first issue might involve a few cheeky, sidelong references to opening a new chapter in the hero's life. Supreme #41 takes this cheekiness one large step further by making the title character explicitly aware that he is merely the most recent incarnation in a series of characters to possess the same basic persona (41:4-21), that he did not exist previous to that comic book, and that his back-story has yet to be written (41:15); therefore, his memories resurface only as he experiences flashbacks because that is when those past experiences are invented (e.g., 42:4-11). Each issue contains multiple visual homages to recognizable comic -book drawing styles: for example, the regular panels and relatively simple line-drawings of the thirties and forties (42:10; see fig. 1) or the caricature and burlesque of EC's early Mad Comics (44:20; see fig. 2), and then back to the grim-faced, hyper-masculine Dark Age style (#43 front cover; see fig. 3).

The explicitly anti-neverwhen/anti-retcon element of Moore's first issue (#41) is "the Supremacy," a Valhalla for former Suprêmes who have been retconned out of existence (41:4), a process that they explicitly call "revision" (41:14), even if they do not fully understand what that means (41:19). Instead of covering up the change in the writing staff, which is the result of time passing in an industrial-entertainment product, Supreme emphatically gestures towards that change. Matthew Jones's "Reflexivity in Comic Art" calls this process démystification (271), not to be confused with Barthes's démystification. Jones's démystification makes the practical realities of creating comics part of the story and thus denaturalizes that process. Speaking with The Jack Kirby Collector, Moore describes the traditional development of the American superhero: "Characters pass from one creator to another and it just depends which phase of the character you happen to be familiar with" ("Supreme Writer" 30). There is no one, true version of any superhero and Supreme reflects that fact of American comics. Instead of simply winking out of existence, then, the characters who have been "revised" still exist in a part of the narrative universe. Retcon happens in Supreme, but it happens explicitly, which both creates and ruins the effect, just as Hutcheon contends that historiographic metafiction must do. The Supremacy thus stands for the nostalgic memories, and indeed the comic books, of an audience that does not forget events, characters, and settings just because the publishers throw them down the memory hole. Publishers simply do not have that power. The neverwhen cannot form under such circumstances because Supreme's use of metacomic gestures turns it down to a playful, honest version of retcon that does the job of a literary toy. It is still amusing, but it cannot control the minds of the audience. Thus, the series retains Silver Age playfulness but rejects the ideological manipulation of the neverwhen, itself an individual instance of something like Barthean myth or the Jamesonian reduction to the present. A very simple, narrative device - self-reflexivity - banishes both at a stroke. The banishment is not permanent, going by Barthes's model of myth, but it is effective, even if only for a moment.

Supreme's rejection of violent verisimilitude comes in a similarly explicit gesture. The series includes a caricatured Dark Age comic -book writer of the 1990s named Billy Friday. His plans for Omniman - who is yet another analogue for Superman; the frames go at least four layers deep in Supreme - are exaggerated versions of the kinds of "pretentious comics [and] miserable comics" ("Alan") that Moore and his contemporaries inadvertently inspired. A fake splash-page of Omniman depicts him ripping out his own heart and calling it a "final statement that juxtaposes art, mysticism, and absurdism!" (43:1; see fig. 4)·5 This characterization is extremely self-effacing. Moore himself is infamous for combining exactly these elements - popular art and mysticism - in Swamp Thing and Miracleman,6 the earliest, identifiably Revisionist comics to be published in America. Friday casually says he will "snuff Omniman and all the crap supporting characters from the sixties in one issue!" (43:2), and is in the process of planning "Omni-dog's rape-ordeal in #247" (43:2) and "resurrecting Omniman as a Hezbollah extremist" (43:2). Omniman comics display the contemporary, American comic -book industry's willingness to erase the Silver Age and replace it with pretentious writing and violence for the sake of shock value. The comic book within the comic book thus constitutes Moore's commentary on Dark Age comics of the 1990s as well as his own comics of the 1980s.

As Friday's dialogue indicates - he uses "crap" as an adjective rather than "crappy" - he is also a cliché British comic -book writer. Moore and many of his Revisionist contemporaries were imported to American comics from Britain: Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Rick Veitch, Warren Ellis, Brian Bollard, Dave McKeon, and many others. To further parody this British cohort of Revisionist comics creators, Friday undergoes an accidental mutation in which his own limbs are "branching and becoming more complex and elaborate by the instant!" (45:16). Supreme explains that "he's a British comic-book writer. His reaction may be pre-disposed by occupational factors" (45:17). These lines characterize Moore's own comics as both needlessly complicated and, once again, laughably pretentious. Meanwhile, Friday is largely concerned with how much his comic book's sales will go up if he incorporates his mutation into the story (45:17). He even gives himself a superhero name: "Billy Friday - Elaborate Lad!" (45:16). This commentary is not subtle, and it is aimed directly at Moore himself, along with writers like Morrison or Gaiman who are infamous for creating extremely complex narrative structures that relate several distinct story threads at once and tangle them all up with each other. Friday's body stands for the worst pretensions of Moore's own writing. Supreme locates those pretensions within a particular moment in the American comic -book industry when a cohort of British writers were imported into it after Moore's Swamp Thing proved to be extremely profitable.

Patricia Waugh describes certain extreme versions of metafiction as creating a "prisonhouse of language" that the texts themselves either delight or despair in (53). Supreme clearly delights in metafiction as a way of indulging nostalgia, free from guilt or embarrassment. Metacomic devices tame the conceptually manipulative elements of the source material - the neverwhen, the reduction to the present, the false universale of the superhero - as well as making a playful mockery of those comics that have far too little depth to support their own gravitas and attempt to make up for it with violence as a spurious signifier of "realism."

Planetary

Planetary is a sprawling, ostensibly scholarly, survey of literary and cinematic influences on American comics from Victorian adventure novels, to pulp supermen of the 1930s, to Chinese wuxia films, and of course the industry's own publishing history. Through its interwoven plots, its characterizations, and its visual pastiches, it in effect argues that the comics community - artists and audiences alike - should embrace the sheer strangeness of the Silver Age but do so mindfully, problematizing its historical and social dimensions, thereby historicizing it and turning it into "a perception of the present as history," to use Jameson's language again (Postmodernism 284), while also perceiving the present as a product of history. Planetary exploits the audience's nostalgia for the superhero, but it also seeks to complicate, problematize, and historicize that nostalgia. It exposes the neverwhen, Jameson's reduction to the present, through Hutcheon's complicit critique. This combination of historicization, critique, high-concept fantasy, and nostalgia creates Planetary's useful play. Although it is highly unlikely that Ellis set out consciously to reproduce these specific cultural and literary theories, he does explain his own intentions, and they bear out those theories: "Planetary is less a superhero book than it is a book about the superhero sub-genre [...]. That's because there was a time where most superhero comics seemed to be about superhero comics, but only in the most superficial ways. I wanted to do something that actually [...] exposed it's [sic] roots and showed it's [sic] branches" ("Profile"). While the series is complicit in the trend that Ellis identifies, it also seeks to critique it. Ellis's metaphor describes placing the superhero in its historical position rather than effacing that history, which superhero comics have traditionally done via retcon. Planetary thus displays, in Ellis's own words, "why millions of people were interested in that stuff in the first place... and what's been lost" ("Warren"). The series stands in direct opposition to the practice of retconning older comics out of existence and preserving the neverwhen, which acknowledges neither past nor future.7

Planetary does not allow the audience to wallow in unthinking nostalgia for the Silver Age of American superheroes, as some comics of the 2000s have unfortunately done, but instead insists upon an almost scholarly awareness of its dubious morality and historical contingencies; the characters in Planetary imply that awareness by self-identifying as "archaeologists of the impossible" (Planetary 1, front cover). For example, the series' analysis of literary/cinematic history unabashedly depicts the racist-imperialist presumptions behind pulp adventure characters like Tarzan and Fu Manchu through analogue characters, in this case "Lord Blackstock" and "Hark." Ellis specifically conceives of these analogues not as timeless archetypes, but very specific stereotypes:

I don't want to "exonerate" these characters from their pasts, or even exonerate those who created them. It's easy to say, well, it was a different time back then, of course they were racist. Or that, yeah, these archetypes exist in every culture. But while Tarzan is the "feral child" legend writ large, Fu Manchu is not the "evil genius". He is specifically the Evil Chinee. And that's something to be explored from many angles. ("Warren")

These sorts of historically informed analogues and genre homages are in fact the main attraction of Planetary, initially far more so than the plot. The first issue alone, "AU Over the World," contains analogues of five pulp sf supermen and the six DC Comics superheroes who comprise the original Justice League of America. An exhaustive list of the allusions and homages in Planetary* s cast of characters, its plots and subplots, and its artwork would fill many pages, but they have a common element. They historicize the superhero's literary and cinematic origins rather than naturalizing them.

Cassaday's art deserves particular attention for its ability to articulate the historical influences on the modern superhero comic book, but that art is always steeped in the sense of wonder that pervades the series as a whole. His extremely flexible narrative constructions constantly invoke the visual style of the media allusion of any given issue. The cover of issue 3, "Dead Gunfighters," mimics an early-nineties movie poster. Issue 11, "Cold World," captures the pop-art feel of Steranko's Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Most striking, issue 16, "Hark," painstakingly replicates the movement and pacing of wuxia films, the high-fantasy martial arts subgenre that started in China's pulp novel tradition and was later translated into both film and indigenous comics. In the 1990s, several Hong Kong filmmakers revived the style after a decade of hard-hitting action, among them Tsui Hark. The title of the issue, "Hark," references not just the content of wuxia films but also the filmmakers themselves, and thus it draws on the audience's knowledge of the film industry. "Hark," in Planetary, is the name of a family of powerful Chinese anti-heroes. Wuxia cinema uses wires to grant their performers the ability to leap in long, graceful arcs and perform extremely complex fight choreography. Cassaday's panels replicate the movement that is typical of wire fighting. The visual allusion is that specific.

In a page from "Hark" (16:8; see fig. 5), Cassaday uses what Scott McCloud calls "moment-to-moment transitions" (Understanding 70:1-4), in which "a single action [is] portrayed in a series of moments" (Making 16:2) and "requires very little closure" (Understanding 70:1). Moment-to-moment transitions logically imply very little time, and require relatively little cognition on the part of the viewer. Thus, panel 1 and panel 2 appear to be only a fraction of a second apart. The thin, horizontal gutters also imply very little time elapsing between the panels, an effect that Thierry Groensteen calls the "rhythmic function" of the frame: the ability of the size, shape, and placement of frames to create a sense of narrative time (45-46). Cassaday uses spatial relations between panels to replicate the kinetic dynamism of a wuxia-style fight scene. He also draws flowing costumes that imply the specific kind of movement that wire work achieves. The effect is particularly elegant in panel 3; a single image implies a kind of motion, spinning, that comics traditionally have to depict over the course of several moment-to-moment transitions. The fighting in this issue is decidedly not historically accurate kung fu. Instead, it is constructed to resemble wuxia as a cinematic aesthetic. That Cassaday uses the simple device of fluttering costumes to achieve the aforementioned spinning effect only strengthens the aesthetic connection because such costuming is traditional in that film genre. "Hark" represents just one of dozens of examples of Cassaday going out of his way to integrate other visual and narrative styles into his own and thus immerse the reader in the allusions that make up the bulk of the series. As the generic or formal allusions shift, so too does the visual presentation.

The loving attention to detail in Planetary reflects the thesis of the series; American comics must recognize their influences, primarily pulp novels and film, in order to know themselves and their peculiar position in the history of American popular entertainment. Mainstream comics must also recognize that their influences are themselves historically contingent, that they too influence and are influenced by culture. Once comics undergo that process of self-knowledge, they can then shed the spurious timelessness of the neverwhen. They suddenly exist within history. Influences on the superhero do not simply appear randomly or in the service of plot in Planetary. In fact, quite the opposite, the plot is contrived to showcase a set of historically located literary influences and thus construct a genealogy of American comic books.

One issue in particular prominently displays its drive to situate itself in history. Linking directly to the British influence on American comics in the 1980s, issue 7, "To Be in England, In the Summertime," once again displays Cassaday's remarkable talent for visual homage. The issue performs an all-encompassing commentary on British-made comics of the 1980s and sports a cover that references the mixed-media imagery that Dave McKean created for Sandman. Its digitally altered photography, layered construction, and image/text combinations all quite directly quote McKean's surrealistic renderings (#7 front cover; see fig. 6), which to the knowledgeable fan signals a specific stylistic tone as well as a historical moment in American comics. The issue depicts the funeral of a British mystic named Jack Carter, an analogue of John Constan tine whom Moore created as a "'blue collar' magician [...]. Constantine was an English working-class lad, and proved very popular, graduating to his own title, Hellblazer, in 1987" (Parkin 35). The character has been written or drawn by most of the British Revisionist creators (e.g., Alan Moore, Jon Totleben, Rick Veitch, Dave McKean, Mark Buckingham, Charles Vess, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, et al.). In Planetary #7, Carter (i.e., Constantine) stands for the entire British contribution to American comics in the 1980s.

Analogues of other characters who were created or, more often, revised by British writers and artists attend Carter's funeral. Over the course of four pages (7:5-8), Cassaday renders a crowd of characters, all perfectly recognizable as versions of Revisionist comics characters: Dream and Death (Sandman, Gaiman and McKean), the Swamp Thing (Swamp Thing, Moore, Totleben, and Veitch) , Animal Man (Grant Morrison) , and the list goes on. With one exception, these characters are not much more than meticulously rendered arrows that point directly at their originals, as opposed to richer, more complex analogues, like Carter, who contain within them a critique of some kind. One of the Pfonetary agents comments that these British-created characters look "faintly ridiculous" (7:8), but another explains their harlequin appearance in terms of British political history, specifically the "genuinely mad" (7:7) leadership of Margaret Thatcher8: "She wanted concentration camps for AIDS victims, wanted to eradicate homosexuality even as an abstract concept, made poor people choose between eating and keeping their vote... /// ... ran the most shameless vote-grabbing scheme in fifty years... / England was a scary place. No wonder it produced scary culture" (7:7) .9 "To Be in England, In the Summertime" explains British-created comics of the eighties as a specific result of repressive conservative politics. Implicitly, then, the fear of atomic power produced fantasies of giant mutated monsters that destroy Tokyo (as in issue 2, "Island") , and the anti- Asian xenophobia of the thirties in America produced characters like Fu Manchu (the analogue anti-hero "Hark" in issue 5, "The Good Doctor"). Planetary presents, here, not just one historical analysis, but also an example of historiography at work.

Even more pointedly, however, "To Be in England, In the Summertime" depicts a parody of Moore's Revisionist analogue of Miracleman. No one ever names the character except to call him a "traditionalist," but he is recognizably analogous to Miracleman by virtue of his costume's red and blue design and a few other signature details. However, this analogue version of Miracleman has unkempt stubble and a baggy costume that is covered in stains implicitly left behind by bodily fluids (see fig. 7) . Cassaday's art marks him as a fallen, degraded, Dark Age hero. Similarly, he refers to "getting [his] powers from a transcendent scientist-mentor" (7:18), which was Marvelman's origin back in the 1950s, but he also describes discovering his "real" origin, a hyper-sexualized version of Moore's retcon of the character: "I didn't want to find out that [...] I was grown from the DNA of Aryan super-athletes and Hitler's personal sex midgets! [...] // I liked my life! There was nothing wrong with me! / I wasn't hip, I wasn't trendy, I wasn't edgy, and you know what? / That was okay! Il [...] - If you didn't want me, you should have just bloody ignored me!" (7:18).

On the page following this rant, Jack Carter, who in fact faked his death to draw out the Miracleman analogue, kills him with a shotgun blast to the stomach (7:19). Through a series of moment-to-moment panel transitions in which Carter changes his coat, reveals a familiar set of tattoos on his torso, and lights a cigarette, he transforms into Spider Jerusalem, the star of Ellis and Robertson's Transmetropolitan (see fig. 8). In Geoff Klock's words, this sequence "exposes the road of influence between the two characters by hinting that they are one and the same" (160), with Spider as an sf version of Constantine. It demonstrates that we cannot, in the fallen hero's words, just bloody ignore our own histories, even the histories of our most fantastic fictions, and "we" in this case includes scholars, fans, and creators alike. "To Be in England, In the Summertime" thus re -presents the cynical spirit of British-created comics of the eighties, the extreme Dark Age comics that followed, the attempt to retcon them out of existence, the necessity to remember them warts and all, and finally the inevitable fact that we have no choice but to move forward. In order to know where we are going, we have to maintain an awareness of where we have been. Historicizing the present, Jameson's commandment, requires that we pay attention to the past as well as the future. Planetary does so in stark contrast with a literary tradition - the mainstream American comic book - that has typically gone out of its way to ignore both history and futurity in favor of an ever -shifting, spuriously eternal present.

These revisions of the Dark Age are one part of a larger pattern in mainstream American comics. Put briefly, the industry turned to an increasingly violent verisimilitude in the 1980s, partly in response to the squeaky-clean Silver Age and partly in an attempt to replicate the decade's greatest economic successes, specifically Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. This Dark Age violence often indicates an embarrassed revulsion at the Silver Age itself, and it often employs retroactive continuity to write Silver Age comics out of existence. This act ironically perpetuates one of the Silver Age's defining elements: the neverwhen, the illusion of ahistorical fixity that is achieved through constant, incremental change. In the 1990s, several Revisionist creators react to these Dark Age retcons by reviving the Silver Age with all of its absurdity attached as well as an extra layer of historical awareness that problematizes the neverwhen and shows how the superhero genre is a product of a specific historical development and thus neither natural nor eternal.

Supreme and Planetary are, of course, only two examples of a much larger trend in American comics, the Revisionist mode, but they model the useful play that is extremely common within that mode. They expose and denaturalize the ideologies that have been propagated via popular culture. As Barthes, Hutcheon, and many others have argued, the process of exposing naturalization automatically denaturalizes, and placing ahistorical ideologies into a cultural/historical context automatically re-historicizes them. Jameson argues that this process is impossible by nature within the sphere of popular entertainment, but Barthes illustrates a clear methodological approach to démystification. Hutcheon, in turn, argues that critique is not just possible within contemporary popular discourse but also that complicity is an inherent element of it. Supreme and Planetary demonstrate quite clearly that such critiques have been critiquing, historicizing, and denaturalizing for quite some time. The Revisionist mode has become one of the dominant discourses of American superhero comics, a genre so entrenched in normative ideology that it has become cliché. Comics such as Supreme and Planetary have been engaged in an active dialogue with normativity since at least the early 1980s. Revisionist comics therefore demonstrate how our most fanciful, popular entertain might contain strategies of denaturalization that are tactically effective and genuinely playful, all at once.

Notes

1. Within comics scholarship, the "ages" model of American comic -book history is quite contentious. For an extremely articulate critique of that model, see Woo. He contends that the terms are inherently antithetical to academic rigor and that comics scholars should abandon them altogether. I argue, however, that the terms are objectively in use in American mainstream comics, the community that consumes superhero stories, so we critics have a responsibility to study how they work and what they mean within that community. However, Woo's larger point is undeniable. Outside of the small world of superheroes, the terms "Golden Age," "Silver Age," and "Dark Age" are useless.

2. "Retcon" can be both noun and verb, so it is perfectly coherent to refer to "a retcon," or to a narrative event having been "retconned."

3. I have written elsewhere about the neverwhen, first in "Show and Tell" and later in my dissertation, Telling Stories about Storytelling.

4. I have made this argument in fuller terms in my dissertation.

5. In order to conform to MLA formatting requirements, I have altered these quotations. The original lettering was rendered in all capitals, the common practice in American comics, but I have rendered them in capital and lowercase according to standard English. The original lettering also places important or significant words in boldface, but I have rendered those boldface words in italics instead. This change is somewhat misleading because comic-book boldface does not signify the same shift in register that italics do. The quotations in this article are thus interpretations of the original dialogue, not quite direct quotations. Comics are an inherently visual form, even in their rendering of text, so no purely textual form is capable of quoting them transparently.

6. Miracleman was published in the US in 1985, but it had been published beginning two years previously in the UK under the title Marvelman. They changed the name for legal reasons.

7. Another, contemporary reaction to the Dark Age is worth mentioning for contrast and to acknowledge that the Revisionist reincarnation of the Silver Age was by no means the only solution to the Dark Age. Earnest rejections of the Dark Age without irony and with only implied self-reflexivity were also popular. For example, Astro City (Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson) is an anthology series that juxtaposes slice-of-life stories of superheroes' lives with the perspectives of normal people living in a superhero world. Marvels (Busiek and Alex Ross) retells the history of the Marvel universe from the perspective of a photojournalist who was also a superhero fan as a child. Finally, Kingdom Come (Mark Waid and Ross) posits a dystopian future in which Dark Age superhumans ignore their generic duty to either perform good deeds or menace society directly, and instead merely fight among themselves. All three of these books reject Dark Age superheroes but ultimately embrace a model of sincere heroism rather than the fantastic version of historiographie metafiction that Supreme and Planetary perform.

8. Planetary never mentions Thatcher by name, but the conflation of historical details makes abundantly clear whom these characters are talking about.

9. I use slash marks to indicate breaks between balloons, panels, and pages using one, two, and three slash marks, respectively. These breaks are part of the rhythm of the dialogue, and they indicate how much time/space that dialogue takes up in the comic-book narrative.

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Author affiliation:

ORION USSNER KIDDER was born in a small hippie cabin on Vancouver Island, and if he concentrates, he can still taste the smoked salmon that he teethed on. He attended Simon Fraser University studying fantasy/sf, theatre, and early-modern/medieval literature; completed a master's at Queen's at Kingston, where he started writing on comics; and, finally, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on metacomics at the University of Alberta. He currently lives and teaches in Vancouver, BC where there is lots of smoked salmon.