Amazing Fantasies: Trauma,

Affect, and Superheroes

Philip Sandifer

C omics scholarship, as a whole, has focused primarily on graphic novels—self-

contained narratives with distinct beginnings and endings. This focus has not
been to the exclusion of superhero comics, but even there the focus has large-
ly been on titles like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, works that exist in a sort of
narrative isolation from the monthly comic books published by Marvel and DC. These
monthly comics are markedly different from graphic novels in their structure and form, due
to their extended serialization over decades and multiple generations of readers in a form
that is, excepting soap operas, almost unique in American narrative fiction.This super-long
form requires a structure of retelling, where past stories are repeated and rewritten, neces-
sitating both a sense of memory and, by extension, of repression. This dynamic of memo-
ry and repression, in superhero comics, is best understood in terms of its organization
around the superhero’s origin story—generally the most frequently retold of stories. These
origin stories are, almost without exception, marked with incidents of trauma: the murder
of Spider-Man’s uncle, the death of Batman’s parents, the destruction of Superman’s home
planet, etc.Thus, the monthly superhero comic requires a distinctly different model than the
novel; it is best understood as a complex network of obsession and repression organized
around traumatic incidents, requiring a model that is based not on traditional narrative arcs,
but on psychological structures of memory and repetition that stem from the origin trauma,
but end up entangled in and confronted by a network of problematic remnants that consti-
tute the serialized superhero narrative.

This line of thought will lead to stark contrasts with what past work there is on superheroes.
That work has largely accepted without substantial question two premises, both of which it
is my intention to unseat: first, that superhero comics provide a coherent single narrative,
and second, that they are power fantasies. This second assumption becomes particularly
and jarringly problematic when applied to explicitly political superhero stories, such as the
wave of comics that came out after 9/11. By rethinking this basic assumption about the ide-
ological standpoint of superhero comics, particularly in terms of trauma narratives, we can
come to a better understanding of the structure of superhero comics and of the political ide-
ologies and views of identity and citizenship they espouse.

English Language Notes 46.2 Fall / Winter 2008

176 English Language Notes 46.2 Fall / Winter 2008

To understand the ideological structures of superhero comics it is first necessary to under-

stand properly the peculiar narrative structure they employ.This will require addressing the
first premise—the assumption of continuity. By this, I mean the assumption that superhero
comics form a sort of continual narrative where everything that has appeared prior to a
given issue of a comic coming out has actually happened diegetically prior to the events of
the issue.1 This assumption of continuity is observed both empirically, as with Robert
Reynolds’s claim that it “forms the most crucial aspect of enjoyment for the committed
fans,”2 and in terms of the narrative itself, as with Matthew Pustz’s equation of “knowledge
of previous stories within the comic’s universe or narrative sequence” with the idea of
comics literacy.3 The one major tonic to this assumption comes from Umberto Eco, who
argues that in Superman comics “what has happened before and what has happened after
appears extremely hazy. The narrator picks up the strand of the event again and again as if
he has forgotten to say something and wanted to add details to what has already been
said.”4

My objection is not to the observation that notions of continuity are in play in superhero
comics. Quite the contrary, some notion of continuity is a necessary consequence of the
serialized nature of superhero comics, where each issue must resolve (or move towards res-
olution on) various plot threads from the previous issue, and end with a cliff-hanger for the
next issue to pick up. Each individual story, therefore, is endlessly cluttered with the rem-
nants of previous stories, and resists resolution such that it becomes a remnant for future
stories.This sort of continuity also gets at part of the difference between superhero comics
and graphic novels, in that superhero comics exist perpetually, as a sort of continual pres-
ence in the world, as opposed to the discrete art objects that graphic novels become. As a
result, superhero comics are, through the practical institution of fandom, integrated into the
social life of their readers in a fundamental sense. They thus require a particular model of
identity from their readers—a savvy and knowledgeable fan. As a practical and economic
consequence, superhero comics are inevitably required to work to define and maintain
these fannish identities, creating a particular sort of reader.

As important as knowledge of continuity may be, the existence of a coherent continuity is

far from supported by the texts themselves. Consider that Marvel has a policy in place stat-
ing that the events of Amazing Fantasy #15 took place ten years ago, regardless of when the
story is being written. That is to say that, in 1985, Peter Parker became Spider-Man in 1975,
and that today he became Spider-Man in 1998.This fact can’t be completely reconciled with
an approach that treats the past stories of comic books as a linear narrative, especially when
one considers things like the fact that there have been more than ten different stories in
which it has been Christmas in Spider-Man comics.The situation is no clearer in DC comics,
which has substantially rewritten continuity on multiple occasions, most notably in Crisis
on Infinite Earths.

This makes sense, however, if one shifts away from treating the past stories of a character
as a linear narrative. Instead, we must treat the past stories as an accumulated memory of
 Philip Sandifer 177

the character. And just like we cannot reasonably expect our own memories to function as
linear narratives from birth to the present, we ought to recognize that the memory of a
comics character functions similarly—it moves cyclically, returning endlessly to particular
moments, revising them, and, at times, forgetting them, whether accidentally or willfully.
One example of this can be found in Amazing Spider-Man #479, when Aunt May confronts
Peter Parker about the fact that she knows he’s Spider-Man.5 Part of this revelation means
telling Aunt May about why he is Spider-Man, namely that he blames himself for the death
of Uncle Ben. In the course of the conversation it’s revealed that Aunt May has equal claim
to being responsible for his death, because she had a fight with him and caused him to
storm out of the house to take a walk, on which he was shot and killed. Nowhere in the pre-
vious forty years of Spider-Man issues was this suggested. It was never a part of the mem-
ory of either Spider-Man or Aunt May until this issue, despite the fact that the event
happened during the events of Amazing Fantasy #15—Spider-Man’s first appearance, pub-
lished over forty years earlier. Furthermore, this revision carries with it an act of amnesia,
as every instance in the intervening forty years when Aunt May acted in a manner inconsis-
tent with someone carrying that guilt is erased.

The central question, then, is what events are generally remembered. That is to say, what
is the operative past of a superhero at any given moment? The answer is that, at a given
moment, the operative past of a superhero is an accumulation of trauma. The most obvi-
ous of these traumas is the trauma of the origin story, which is typically the primary moti-
vation for why the character dresses up in spandex and fights crime. The origin story is
always the most told and retold story within a superhero narrative. For instance, in
Amazing Spider-Man #479, Spider-Man’s origin story is retold in the course of the conver-
sation with Aunt May. Only eight issues earlier, however, it was told again in an effort to
introduce a long-term mystery about the nature of Spider-Man’s powers. In fact, in the
eight issues before issue #479, the origin story was retold five separate times—sometimes
in the main text of the story, sometimes in an introductory box on the first page, where it
sits as part of the paratext of the issue in a strange and semi-present state.6 What is partic-
ularly striking about these introductory boxes is that they do not even directly relate to the
plot of the issue as such.They are simply references to the trauma that occur without direct
motivation: a rote trauma; a ritual re-enactment of the traumatic event. They are what
Slavoj Žižek refers to as the “‘empty’ symbolic gesture” that a traumatized subject uses to
“mark repeatedly the trauma as such in its very ‘impossibility.’”7 The emptiness, in this
case, stems from the essential contentlessness of the box—the box does not contribute
any new information to anyone with even a little experience with the character. It is not
meant to be read and to provide meaning, but rather to serve as a marker in the overall
signifying structure of the comic for the origin that is the subject of an obsessional repeti-
tion.This empty obsession (of which the box is only one symptom) is a fundamental struc-
tural element of the superhero narrative.

But the initial origin trauma is far from the only one normally operative in the formulation
of superhero identity. Spider-Man, for instance, in addition to frequently referencing the
178 English Language Notes 46.2 Fall / Winter 2008

trauma of his uncle’s death, also regularly references the death of Gwen Stacy, which in turn
contains the earlier trauma of the death of Gwen Stacy’s father in Amazing Spider-Man #90,
as well as Spider-Man’s subsequent fight with the Green Goblin after he killed Gwen Stacy,
a fight which ended in the Green Goblin’s death. Similarly, Batman comics frequently make
reference to the death of JasonTodd, who took on the role of Robin, and to the crippling of
Barbara Gordon, who was at one point Batgirl. The original issues these events happened
in are widely considered classics, continually remaining in print in some form, and acquire
a status second only to the origin stories, referenced through similarly empty and symbolic
repetitions.

Other events that could be traumatic are actively forgotten. For instance, from Amazing
Spider-Man #363 through #388, a storyline ran in which it appeared that Peter Parker’s par-
ents were in fact alive—it turned out that they were in fact killer robots made to look like his
parents. At first glance, this storyline seemed ripe for addition to the stable of frequently-
marked traumas. After all, it’s certainly traumatic to have Spider-Man fight and eventually
kill the people he has spent the past twenty-five issues thinking of as his parents. Beyond
that, the plot drew on the memory of past trauma: the death of his parents when he was a
child. But this trauma never really stuck around, and hasn’t been referenced in some time.
Similar ignored stories—often ones that were heavily marketed as major stories at the time
they were released—exist for other major superheroes.These stories are in one sense trou-
bling for long-term serialization. In financial terms, it is necessary to tell stories constantly—
a necessity that ties in well with the obsessional need to revisit and retell the essentially
ineffable traumatic origin. But, of course, these stories neither remove the indelible rem-
nants of the origin nor fully clear themselves away, requiring a continuing and active act of
forgetting that, being deliberate and conscious, does not fully remove them, but rather
leaves them as remnants that constantly haunt the ongoing narrative.

What separates the traumas that are remembered (Gwen Stacy) from the ones that are for-
gotten (Spider-Man’s parents)? The stories that are remembered and become part of the
cycle of repetition and marking of trauma all mirror the origin trauma in some fashion. All
of the important and recurring Spider-Man traumas, for example, revolve around Spider-
Man’s failure to save someone’s life and guilt over that. All of Batman’s revolve around
anger at some external force for an act of violence—whether the killer of his parents or the
Joker.8 Thus these sources of additional obsessional repetitions are themselves obsession-
al repetitions of the origin trauma.They do not resolve the origin trauma, but rather repeat
it so perfectly that they themselves become irresolvable traumas—at once repetitions of the
origin and new origin points unto themselves.

The repetitions that form the day-to-day business of superhero comics, however, do not
function purely (or even primarily) as traumas in and of themselves. They must be under-
stood as symbolic gestures, every bit as empty as the caption box that reiterates Spider-
Man’s origin. The narrative of the superhero comic, taken on the broad level, is a
pathological structure of repetition. Its narrative logic is that of the flashback, which Cathy
 Philip Sandifer 179

Caruth describes as “a history that literally has no place, neither in the past, in which it was
not fully experienced, nor in the present, in which its precise images are not fully under-
stood.”9 Everything in the superhero story stems from the origin, but this point of origin
does not remain in the historicized past—it returns in a constant repetition, leaving its rem-
nants scattered through the present, reducing the present to a symptomatic repetition of a
past that it cannot fully supercede.

The histories that can be chosen are of a limited set. Superhero narratives may be post-
traumatic, but these traumas are consistently kept separate from any politics of identity.
Jenny Edkins speaks of the political effects of trauma in terms of the alienation of the trau-
matized subject from the social order, noting the tension that arises when “the only words
[the traumatized] have are the words of the very political community that is the source of
their suffering.”10 Superhero comics actively shirk this aspect of trauma by offering traumas
that could not possibly have any political consequences. Although I have focused primari-
ly on traumas whose psychical residues closely mirror familiar trauma narratives—the
bereavement narratives of Spider-Man and Batman—this is not the norm for superheroes.
Most are a strangely fantastic trauma: a burst of gamma radiation (The Hulk), being bathed
in electrically charged chemicals (The Flash), or being trapped in a cave by space aliens
(Thor).

It is perhaps more to the point to note what superhero origins are not. No superhero has an
origin along the lines of “He was a prisoner in a concentration camp when a freak Nazi
experiment turned him into a superhero,”11 or “She was an AIDS patient who underwent an
experimental drug treatment.” In fact, these stories would probably be deeply disturbing
failures, seen as trivializing the Holocaust or AIDS. In the rare occasions where the traumas
do appear to have political resonances, such as the Hulk’s echoing of atomic testing, the
political aspects of this become largely erased or ignored.The Hulk may be linked to a rhet-
oric of nuclear testing and nuclear war, but he does not visit Bikini Atoll or Hiroshima. Even
the most striking example—Iron Man’s origin being situated in Vietnam in 1963—has been
steadily rolled back over the last forty-five years to where the Vietnam origins of the charac-
ter largely do not come up at all, and indeed, in the recent film, were moved to Afghanistan
without particular rancor or change to the character.12 And these pseudo-political traumas
are already exceptions—by and large, the traumas that make up superhero stories are not
ones that tie into questions of political identity.

It is important not to understate the perversity of this tendency—a perversity best illustrat-
ed by the seemingly obvious exception, Marvel Comics’ X-Men franchise. Classically, the X-
Men are employed as metaphors for race and racism, with the benevolent Charles Xavier
representing Martin Luther King Jr., while their main villain, Magneto, represents Malcolm
X. But this explanation just doesn’t wash when compared to the actual debut story. None
of the subtleties of the debate between Xavier and Magneto that have since accumulated in
the comic are present at the origin—initially, Magneto is a standard villain bent on destroy-
ing the world. Furthermore, the origin traumas of the X-Men all involve strange powers
180 English Language Notes 46.2 Fall / Winter 2008

manifesting suddenly during puberty—something that suggests a much closer kinship with
sexuality than race, which tends to make itself known somewhat earlier than puberty. But
to explicitly code characters as gay or lesbian would be impossible in 1963. And by the time
it had become acceptable to have a gay character in a comic it had become impossible for
different reasons, since, as Ann Cvetkovich has noted, the consideration of AIDS as a glob-
al trauma is necessarily situated with regards to “its close ties to homosexuality and forms
of sexuality constructed as deviant or perverse.”13 Thus an origin trauma based around
imagery of sexual orientation would have been far too political to use.

The degree to which the X-Men comics actively turn away from the queer subtexts that are
so obviously present in their origin is clearly illustrated in the Legacy Virus storyline. The
Legacy Virus—an incurable virus that struck and killed mutants only—should by all rational
measures have been an analogue for AIDS. But the endpoint of the storyline featured an all-
but-magical cure that relied on the self-sacrifice of Colossus, who gave his life in memory
of his little sister who had died of the virus. Thus instead of an engagement with AIDS and
the queer cultures its traumatic legacy is bound up in, the Legacy Virus storyline retreats to
the ideology of what Lee Edelman deems reproductive futurism—the drive to base political
action in the “privileged form of the Child,” who is inevitably an innocent like Colossus’s
beautiful blue-eyed, blonde-haired sister, and “to imagine each moment as pregnant with
the Child of our Imaginary identifications.”14 Any possibility of a queer political engagement
is not only erased but wholly foreclosed here, becoming a subtext that is not just ignored,
but actively sublimated whenever possible, lending a different and altogether more trou-
bling sort of traumatic remnant to the narrative.

The strangely apolitical nature of the trauma itself and of its repetitions does not mean that
superhero comics are wholly apolitical. Quite the contrary, superheroes are saturated with
what Edkins identifies as the compulsion to “bear witness” to a “contingency of the social
order.”15 How else can we read the drive to go forth and correct the criminal failings of the
social order except in terms of a desire to testify to a heightened awareness of its failures,
albeit through a testimony of excessive violence rather than a more traditional post-
traumatic narrative? And thus we see a rhetoric of social justice throughout comics:
Superman has long been fighting for “truth, justice, and the American way,” and Captain
America is constantly used as a means of discussing political issues. As I noted earlier, the
long serialization of superhero comics makes some political engagement inevitable,
because superhero comics are always present and thus always inexorably bound into the
social fabric in a way that graphic novels, being more fully historicizable, are not.

But this political engagement is profoundly vacuous, in that it is built out of the empty sym-
bolic markings of a trauma devoid of a meaningful social consciousness from which it could
possibly serve as a radical break.The superhero narrative provides a vector of engagement,
possessing a direction (the superhero’s action is always waged into, if not against, a norma-
tive social order) and magnitude (the weight of the traumatic memory), but no point of
origin.The only available point of origin—the diegetic origin story—becomes not a founda-
 Philip Sandifer 181

tional master signifier from which understanding can flow, but rather an erased marker—
an empty site that must be obsessively revisited in a fruitless quest for some stable center
from which to build.Thus the obsessional retelling of the events of Amazing Fantasy #15 in
the paratextual summary box in every Spider-Man comic does not serve a narratological
purpose but rather a pathological one. It is an obsessive and unthinking restaging of the ori-
gin trauma that is necessary not to inform the reader (who almost certainly already knows
Spider-Man’s origin story) but to rehearse and restage an incident so extensively that the
ritualized nature of its invocation pre-empts its actual ability to serve as an origin point for
the subsequent narrative.

In this regard, the engagement falls squarely in the realm of affect theory as employed by
Sylvan Tomkins and Donald Nathanson. In this view, affect is a sort of innate and even pri-
mal process. The process is so fundamental that it precedes emotions, which, as Martha
Nussbaum argues “are forms of judgment.”16 Affect, in Tomkins and Nathanson’s concep-
tion, is worked with through processes with names like “affect-processing,”17 or “affective
regulation”18—with imbalance and mental illness being caused by a failure to adequately
regulate this primal force. I am not the first person to attempt to apply affect theory to super-
heroes. In fact, Donald Nathanson looks directly at the genre, talking about metamorphos-
ing superheroes such as Shazam and the Incredible Hulk to suggest that the trans-
formations they undergo offer a liberating way of handling affect. This seems to me to
ignore a fundamental aspect of these stories, most particularly that of the Incredible Hulk,
which is that the affect in these narratives is anything but regulated. When Bruce Banner
becomes angry and thus transforms into the Hulk, it is not an instance of Banner liberating
himself from his anger-rage affect. Rather, it is an instance of enslavement to anger—a con-
tinual recitation of a process that sends Banner into destructive rage after destructive rage.
Indeed, the Hulk offers the greatest possible extreme of uncontrolled affect: he turns into an
unstoppable monster and destroys entire cities.

This sort of primal affect echoes Žižek’s memorable description of the Lacanian Real: “the
pulsing of the pre-symbolic substance in all its abhorrent vitality.”19 The superhero, by offer-
ing this affect in a radically boundless form, offers a vision of the Real that sits in direct con-
trast to the Symbolically ordered world. This schism is represented directly in many of the
comics as the superheroes fly high above the cities they protect, or, at the very least, swing
amongst the rooftops. They thus occupy a space that literally transcends the socially
ordered spaces they protect, inaccessible to the people below who can only grasp futilely
at the signifier of what they see: “It’s a bird! It’s a plane!”

There is a problem here. However separate superheroes may be from the social order, one
of the basic tropes of the genre is the secret identity as a normal human being.These secret
identities are quite grounded in the Symbolic social order that the Real superhero identity
lies outside of. Yet, this is only a problem if one makes the erroneous assumption that the
secret identity is the “real” person, and the superhero identity is an extension of that. In
reality, the opposite is true. People would still buy Spider-Man comics if someone other than
182 English Language Notes 46.2 Fall / Winter 2008

Peter Parker were Spider-Man, but would be unlikely to if the comics focused entirely on
Peter Parker, and had no superhero action. But even beyond this, the rhetoric of superhero
primacy appears on a textual level as well. For example, in Robin #125—another story deal-
ing with an exposed secret identity—Batman is talking with one of his allies, Nightwing.
Nightwing notes that “Sooner or later, Bruce Wayne will be exposed as the Batman,” to
which Batman responds “I’ve built a number of alternate civilian identities we can each step
into, on ten minutes notice. Bruce Wayne is disposable—a regrettable casualty in the war
that goes on. Batman is the only identity that matters.”20 The distinction is crucial. Bruce
Wayne is Batman only incidentally; it is Batman who has a secret identity.

We are thus led to recognize two competing truths in superhero comics.The first is the nar-
rative truth of the origin story—that the secret identity existed, something traumatic hap-
pened, and they became their new identity as a superhero. The second is the traumatic
truth—that the superhero identity exists, and that any construction of the secret “prior”
identity is being made from within a post-traumatic state. This echoes Susan J. Brison’s
claim that “survivors of trauma frequently remark that they are not the same people they
were before they were traumatized.”21 Because the organizing pathology of the superhero
comic is that of a post-traumatic identity, we are obliged to read any claim to a “prior” iden-
tity as a construct of that post-traumatic identity.That is to say that from a perspective situ-
ated outside of the marking narrative of trauma, it is not accurate to say that Peter Parker
became Spider-Man, but rather that Spider-Man created Peter Parker to have become him.

This runs contrary to the widespread assumption that superhero narrative is a power fan-
tasy. This assumption dates back to the anti-comics rhetoric of the 1950s, best captured in
the work of Gershon Legman and the more famous Frederic Wertham. Their criticisms of
comics hinge on the claim that that the superhero narrative is a power fantasy where, as
Legman puts it, the reader “is no helpless victim, as he is in life. While he reads, he is the
hero.”22 A similar note is offered by Umberto Eco, who notes that “any accountant in any
American city secretly feeds the hope that one day, from the slough of his actual personal-
ity, a superman can spring forth who is capable of redeeming years of mediocre exis-
tence.”23 Even Scott McCloud, who mostly dismisses Wertham completely, accuses the
dominant superhero genre of being little more than “adolescent power fantasies.”24 The
assumption of superheroes as power fantasies is similarly visible in popular culture rheto-
ric of superhero comics, most particularly in the set of assumptions that is implicitly made
about their appeal to teenage boys even as that segment of the readership shrinks and
declines.

The most convincing and thorough account of power fantasies in superhero comics comes
from Jeffrey Brown’s Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, andTheir Fans, which is based
on thorough research and interviews with fans of the aborted Milestone Comics line. In
Brown’s account, it is often the social markings of the secret identity that matters in identi-
fying with characters: he evokes Eco’s archetypal case of a reader who “identifies with the
downtrodden, mild-mannered, Clark Kent side of the characters and fantasizes about
 Philip Sandifer 183

becoming a Superman.”25 It would be ludicrous, given Brown’s convincing empirical

evidence, to suggest that this process of identification does not occur at all. Still, Brown
seems to me to overplay his hand in treating this response as the norm. What Brown fails
to remark upon is that the two comics fans he interviews who most clearly identify with the
comics characters are his youngest interviewees—nine and ten, respectively. He does not
note that the older readers he interviews perform a very different engagement with the
comics they read: one based on an exhaustive knowledge of the source material that by its
nature mirrors the repetitive structures of the trauma narrative and that seems much savvi-
er and more engaged than a power fantasy.

This is what I earlier identified as the fannish identity. This identity is still determined and
constructed by the comics themselves, but it is a much savvier and nuanced identity than
simply identifying with a fictional character.This fannish engagement still carries with it the
possibility of fantasy about the fictional world, but it is important to understand what place
in the scheme the reader is allowed occupy. To take pleasure in the structure of the super-
hero narrative is fundamentally to take pleasure in our own exile from the machinery of
political engagement. The position we, as socially constituted subjects, occupy is the posi-
tion explicitly rejected by the affective consciousness of the superhero, who merely pos-
sesses a social identity (Spider-Man has a secret life) instead of embodying one (Peter
Parker is Spider-Man). Since this social order is at once an excised back-formation and the
site of the affective superhero’s violent testimony to his traumatic consciousness, our posi-
tion in the structure is a position that is always the object instead of the subject of action.
The degree to which this position is actively constituted as a knowledgeable yet fundamen-
tally passive consumer has shifted over history with certain developments in comic book
marketing, but I would suggest that the feasibility of creating the modern day comic fan as
an audience stems in a large degree from the way in which superhero comics engender
pleasure through a fantasy of being protected.

An example: early Superman comics did not, as contemporary Superman comics tend to,
involve Superman fighting some alien or all-powerful enemy. Instead, the villains of early
Superman comics were social figures—corrupt landlords, crooked cops, and the like. The
stereotypical reading of this is that Superman is the projected fantasy of two young Jewish
boys writing in the 1930s, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, who created a figure who would
pound on all of the social evils they were experiencing but couldn’t do anything about.This
does, at least at first blush, appear to be a power fantasy—Siegel and Schuster create
Superman to do what they can’t. But a look at the actual comics suggests that Siegel and
Schuster’s presumed desires are largely non-coincidental with Superman’s.

Consider the two-page 1943 Superman story “What If Superman Ended the War.” In this
comic, Siegel and Schuster offer a story of how World War II would have ended in a world
where Superman exists.26 Were Superman an embodiment of Siegel and Schuster’s desire
as such, we would imagine that we would see an act of violence against Hitler. Legman,
after all, describes the law in superheroes thusly: “no trial is necessary, no stupid policemen
184 English Language Notes 46.2 Fall / Winter 2008

hog all the fun. Fists crashing into faces become the court of highest appeal.”27 But that’s
not what we see in this comic.That is not to say that Superman ends the war through any-
thing other than brute force. Indeed, he starts by breaching the Nazi barricades so that the
French soldiers can invade, twisting the artillery canons into knots so they can’t fire. He
tears the top off of the barricades, knocks some airplanes out of the sky, and punches out a
few guards until he can confront Hitler.

But at this key moment, when we would expect fists to crash into faces, we get something
entirely different. Superman actively declines to “land a strictly non-Aryan sock” on Hitler’s
jaw (Color Plate 14).Thus, in the climactic moment, Superman eschews the obvious power
fantasy. Instead, he takes Hitler to judgment at the League of Nations, where his primary
crime is “unprovoked aggression against defenseless countries.” At the comic’s heart is not
a moment of Superman carrying out the violent fantasies of his authors. Instead, Superman
is an embodiment of an external desire—an attempt to craft a desired Other that will pro-
vide protection and clarity to the powerless self. He provides a fantasy of what the Other
would have to be for our powerless selves to be safe.

A superficially opposite use of Superman can be found in the 9/11 memorial volume pub-
lished by DC. The volume opens with a two page story called “Unreal.” This story begins
with Superman describing his powers: “I can defy the laws of gravity. I can ignore the prin-
ciples of physics . . .”28 But then, on the second page we begin to zoom away from the page
pictured on the first page as Superman bemoans that “the one thing I can not do . . . is break
free from the fictional pages where I live and breathe . . . become real during times of cri-
sis . . . and right the wrongs of an unjust world.” As we zoom out from the first page, we
learn that it is from a comic being read by a young boy being pulled out of the burning
wreckage of the World Trade Center by a firefighter. As the boy is rescued, Superman
muses, from the page, that the world is “fortunately protected by heroes of its own” as he
appears to turn from the page and give a salute to the firefighter, now carrying an American
flag, as he goes rushing back into the building.29

By all appearances, this is quite the opposite of “What if Superman Won the War.” Instead
of entering into the catastrophe and fixing it, Superman is explicitly rendered as powerless.
An even more decisive rejection of the possibility of Superman’s agency is offered by Dan
Jurgens and Alan Davis’s four-page story “If Only . . .” The story begins with narration from
a reporter telling about how “the JLA barely got all the people out of the World Trade Center,
seconds before the buildings were attacked by terrorists! Now, the JLA is rebuilding the
towers.” Not only rebuilding, we quickly learn, but rebuilding ten times taller, and out of
“special hypersuperincredostrongonium!The strongest metal ever!”30 But as the story goes
on, it acknowledges the basic flaw in this narrative. On the third page Alan Davis’s tradition-
al superhero art gives way to the sketchy crayon drawings of a child. Finally, on the fourth
page, we learn that the story we’ve been reading is nothing more than a child’s story he’s
drawing for his father who is trapped in the city. As his mother looks at his story while the
TV offers the banal platitude that “there is no easy solution, no way to wipe away what hap-
 Philip Sandifer 185

pened. Only the hope that as days go by . . . there will come a better tomorrow,” she pulls
her child to the breast of her NYPD sweat shirt and tells him to “finish your story, sweetie.
Dad will love reading it.”31

While both of these stories foreclose the possibility of superheroes directly intervening in
9/11, they also both do so in a particular way. Both of them end with the transference of the
authority of the superhero to a real-world civic authority. In the case of “Unreal,” Super-
man’s salute from the page to the real firefighter who has mysteriously acquired an
American flag shows him to be the real hero. And in “If Only,” the child is comforted not only
by the warm embrace of what Lee Edelman calls reproductive futurism, but also by the New
York Police Department. As Alex has Wonder Woman saying, “you can never have too many
heroes.”32 It is difficult, reading these stories, not to think of the weird sublimation of sexu-
ality in the Legacy Virus story. In both cases the central and unspeakable problem—queer
sexuality in the X-Men comics, the incompatibility of superheroes and terrorist attacks in the
9/11 comics—is conspicuously brought up almost entirely so that it can be sublimated.
There seems to be no reason even to broach the subject except to repress it and give it the
peculiarly haunting speech of the deliberately forgotten remnant.

Again, were this a power fantasy, we would expect to see, in any of these cases, the super-
heroes actually rebuilding the towers, going and attacking the terrorists, or, most obvious-
ly, stopping the planes from hitting the towers in the first place. After all, Superman
grabbing airplanes out of the sky is a standard trope.33 But instead they serve primarily as
the imprimatur through which the civic order gains its authority. In other words, if you
can’t submit to Superman, submit to your local police. But, crucially, these 9/11 stories are
still very much fantasies. They are not merely parables about submitting to civic authority,
but also fantasies about the civic order having the imprimatur not of the actual state but
of the fictionalized superhero. This might seem superficially unhelpful as an actual civic
engagement. After all, it would take a spectacularly un-savvy reader to submit to civic
authority because of the say-so of a fictional character. But this is exactly the sort of ideo-
logical fantasy Žižek describes, noting that these fantasies work because the subject of the
fantasy overlooks the fact that it “is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their
reality, their real social activity.They know very well how things really are, but still they are
doing it as if they did not know.”34 Thus even though the 9/11 stories and pin-ups are mawk-
ish and banal, and thus easily and cynically dismissed, as Žižek notes, “cynical reason, with
all its ironic detachment, leaves untouched the fundamental level of ideological fantasy.”35
This gets to the heart of the superhero’s appeal—it is satisfying to fantasize about submis-
sion to a creature of boundless affect precisely because that submission is so obvious that
its pleasures are safe.There is no harm in the mawkish and sentimental fantasies of super-
hero comics written in response to 9/11, and that is precisely why they are so damningly
effective.

The best example of these ideological fantasies in response to 9/11 comes in Amazing
Spider-Man #477, written by J. Michael Straczynski. As with DC’s tribute to 9/11, the story fea-
186 English Language Notes 46.2 Fall / Winter 2008

tures neither Spider-Man nor any other hero stopping the planes. But unlike stories in DC’s
collection, it does not take as part of its premise the unreality of Spider-Man. On the fourth
page, in fact, Spider-Man faces the natural question one would ask a superhero on 9/11:
“Where were you?! How could you let this happen?” Spider-Man stands in stunned silence,
while the narrator, who alternates between being Spider-Man and being an omniscient
commentator, begins with a self-defense: “How do you say we didn’t know? We couldn’t
know. We couldn’t imagine.” But then, strikingly, the comic turns and offers a measure of
comfort. “We are here now,” the narration says. “You cannot see us for the dust, but we are
here. You cannot hear us for the cries, but we are here.” The accompanying pictures show
three superheroes—Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Cyclops—aiding in rescue operations. And
indeed, two of them—Cyclops and Wolverine—are made to blend in with their surround-
ings. They are not in spandex, and their costumes are those of the civil servants.

Thus Straczynski is able to have his cake and eat it too. He is able to make the (all but oblig-
atory) turn towards praising the civic order in the wake of 9/11. But he is also able to do so
without explicitly disclaiming the potency of the superhero narrative he is working with. In
Straczynski’s story superheroes exist, and yet they still, in the face of 9/11, do little more than
lend their voices to a larger national fantasy. It is important to note that despite the banal
sentimentality of the issue, it carries genuine emotional punch. Part of this comes from the
deftness with which Straczynski handles the frission between superheroes and an event like
9/11, and part of it comes because Straczynski is genuinely good at soaring rhetoric. The
result is a fantasy, delivered with troubling eloquence, of both nationalistic and humanitar-
ian pride. The issue closes with narration, now clearly a voice other than just Spider-Man’s,
saying, “They knocked down two tall towers. Graft now their echo onto your spine. Become
girders and glass, stone and steel, so that when the world sees you, it sees them. And stand
tall. Stand tall. Stand tall.” The final “stand tall” is accompanied by an image of the civil ser-
vants and soldiers, lined up in front of a familiar roster of Marvel heroes and an American
flag, on which the credits for the comic are printed.

All of these examples offer ethical structures that mirror Lauren Berlant’s notion of infantile
citizenship, where the comfort of the national body in the abstract becomes the only possi-
ble source of “resolution, happiness, and peace” for a traumatized subject.36 For Berlant,
this national body is a profoundly empty one, lacking the actual engagements, struggles,
and vicissitudes of meaningful political engagement. But the submission to the traumatized
affect of superheroes carries the notion of infantile citizenship a step further. Where Berlant’s
vision of the national body is one that rejects personal trauma, demanding its own role as
the proper site of traumatic recovery, the superhero narrative allows for personal trauma,
and allows personal trauma a place in the political order. This place, however, is a poison
pill. Edkins observes that the fundamental failure of traumatic witnessing is that “the hor-
rors survivors testify to are too terrible,” noting that “the testimony of survivors can chal-
lenge structures of power and authority.”37 By simultaneously rendering the traumatic
witnessing to the realm of affect and granting it the masculine and violent force of the
 Philip Sandifer 187

superhero, it renders the traumatic witnessing at once toothless and all-powerful. A firmly
situated and delineated place in the larger social context is exactly what traumatic narra-
tives by their nature defy in their insistence on littering any social context they enter with
the irreducible remnants of what they cannot fully express. Thus to allow personal trauma
an officially sanctioned position subservient to an authority that is at once allied with the
state and with a boundless affective power is to kill it via acceptance. In this schema, trau-
matized narrative can speak freely, and with great effect, just so long as it promises not to
say anything.

This, then, seems the final fantasy of superhero comics—the successful defeat of the haunt-
ing remnants of their own continuity. On the one hand, this can be seen explicitly in stories
like DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis where questions of past continuity are
explicitly dealt with in an explicit attempt to “clean up” continuity.The most striking exam-
ple of this fantasy, however, comes in the 2003 Superman miniseries Day of Doom.38 This
miniseries marked the ten-year anniversary of the Death of Superman event by following
reporterTy Duffy as he writes a tenth anniversary story on the event for the Daily Planet.The
writer of the miniseries, Dan Jurgens, was one of the primary architects of the original
event, both writing and illustrating the actual Death of Superman issue. But its artist is Bill
Sienkiewicz, an artist known for dark, abstract depictions, and best known for Frank Miller’s
groundbreaking Elektra: Assassin graphic novel. The result is that as characters retell their
recollections of the Death of Superman, Jurgens’s own panels are redrawn by Sienkiewicz,
creating dark, abstracted markings of the original traumatic event (Figures 1 and 2).

Dan Jurgens’s iconic image from the “Death of Superman” particularly recasts the event as
a sketchy and abstracted traumatic memory. Yet as Duffy astutely points out when his edi-
tor, Perry White, gives him the assignment, “Superman is alive. He didn’t die!” Why, then,
the traumatic markings? After all, ten years after the Death of Superman story, all indica-
tions were that it was business as usual in Superman comics. But Perry White gives the
answer: “Superman’s death traumatized this city.” Perry then takes Duffy to the hall, where
the newspaper front pages from Superman’s death hangs, calling them a memorial to a day
when “an entire city had a knife plunged into its heart,” and embarking on a testimony to
his own experience of this apparent national trauma that is as striking as it is bizarre. All the
same, this seems to show a momentary lapse in the hard wall of detached affect that the
superhero narrative spins around its traumas—a lapse that even seems to include Clark
Kent, who, when told that Duffy is assigned to the story, turns his head away, and, shroud-
ed in shadow, asks “Why can’t he ever leave that in the past . . .”

As the story winds on, we discover just how wide-ranging the trauma is, with even the skep-
ticalTy Duffy turning out to be touched by it, as we discover that his bipolar father commit-
ted suicide upon hearing of Superman’s death.Thus Superman’s death not only becomes a
national trauma but the archetype of personal trauma, as Duffy embarks on a standard
telling of his traumatized childhood (“I always sensed there was something not quite right
with my father, but as a kid I couldn’t or maybe didn’t want to understand what it meant”).
188 English Language Notes 46.2 Fall / Winter 2008

Figure 1. From Justice League of America #69, by Dan Jurgens, © 1993 DC Comics.
 Philip Sandifer 189

Figure 2. From Day of Doom #2, by Dan Jurgens and Bill Sienkiewicz, © 2003 DC Comics.

Suddenly, then, all the excised traumatized subjectivities reassert themselves, both in the
personal psyche and the political, until even Superman becomes struck by the aggregate of
trauma surrounding his death and is reduced to sitting in a chair in the dark, stunned that
he “never knew how bad it got. Never took the time to comprehend what happened.”
(Though this reduction, unsurprisingly, is done as Clark, not Superman.) His meditations are
interrupted by the emergence of a powerful villain fittingly called the Remnant.

The Remnant, as he describes himself, is “the drifting wind that hears the moans of the for-
gotten” whose traumas and tragedies were overshadowed by Superman’s death. He seeks
 190 English Language Notes 46.2 Fall / Winter 2008

to avenge them, revealing Superman to be not a symbol of life and hope, but as “the loom-
ing death of us all.” In doing so, he provides a fleeting glimpse of an actual path of opposi-
tion to the Žižekian ideological fantasies—the obviously silly beliefs and practices that are
no less effective for their absurdity. Duffy’s cynicism and skepticism are clearly insufficient
to the task of combating them—what is really going to be needed is to embody the trau-
matic remnants in a good old-fashioned super-villain. We are thus treated to the absurd
spectacle of Superman actually punching at the traumatic remnants that haunt his narra-
tive. So, the Remnant is ultimately intangible, and ends up vanishing into thin air having
been thoroughly reduced to exactly the sort of banal obviousness that he, momentarily,
seemed like an alternative to.

Unsurprisingly, the Remnant does not make further appearances in Superman comics. But
after he vanishes, we are offered a truly stunning resolution to the issues he raised, as
Superman asks Duffy “Is the world a better place without me,” asks if, without him, you get
fewer traumas like his death, or more traumas like the ones he stops.The message is clear:
you can renounce your claims to a traumatized identity in favor of the political agency
offered by Superman’s hollow affective fisticuffs, or you can keep your identities, but be ren-
dered mute and powerless in the face of unstoppable and life-threatening forces (which
include the very remnants that constitute the traumatized identity you are invited to for-
sake). The latter choice, of course, is the choice of trauma itself, rendering the choice noth-
ing more than a choice between powerless safety or powerless trauma. And while
Superman invites Duffy as he departs to “be a good reporter” by asking “the tough ques-
tions,” the questions are, in the end, relegated to a familiar place—the world of social
engagement that lies below Superman as he flies up, up, and away, far from where he could
ever be forced to listen to an answer.

Philip Sandifer
University of Florida

NOTES
1 This sense of continuity, it should be noted, is not limited to single titles either. Both Marvel and DC

have this sort of continuity going across their lines, so events that took place 30 years ago in The
Avengers are, ostensibly, diegetically relevant to events that take place now in The Uncanny X-Men.This
assumption stands in contrast to superhero work like Watchmen, which takes place in its own self-
contained universe, and is thus of a fundamentally different form than the superhero works it is com-
menting upon.
2 Robert Jurgens, Superheroes: A Modern Mythology (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1992) 38.
3Matthew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997)
110.
4 Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman,” Diacritics 2.1 (1972): 17.
5J. Michael Straczynski and John Romita, Jr. III, Amazing Spider-Man #471–479 (New York: Marvel
Comics, 2001).
 Philip Sandifer 191

6 Spider-Man is hardly the only character whose origin story is constantly retold. Indeed, the classic trau-
matic superhero origin—Batman’s—is retold at least as often as Spider-Man’s. It’s told so frequently that,
at one point, editor Dennis O’Neil found it necessary to write a version where he “made it a dream
and made the characters snowmen” and then ban retellings of the origin for a year because it was being
overdone. See “Notes from the Batcave: An Interview with Dennis O’Neil,” The Many Lives of the
Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media, eds. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio
(New York: Routledge, 1991).
7Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (New York:
Verso, 2002) 272.
8 Even the less personal and well-defined origin traumas tend to set the pattern for future stories. The

Fantastic Four tend to find themselves facing weird science fiction threats that match their space-faring
origin trauma. Iron Man is always bound up in the military-industrial complex that led to the near-fatal
injury that initially drove him into his suit of armor.
9 Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) 153.
10 Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003) 8.
11The obvious counter-example here is, of course, Magneto, who is introduced in the first X-Men film
through precisely this sort of narrative, where his powers manifest in a concentration camp. This scene
does not serve to explain the origins of his powers, which are genetic, but rather the origins of his polit-
ical beliefs about his powers. More to the point, there is something weirdly aberrant about Magneto’s
origin, which may explain his strangely liminal status within the X-Men narrative.
12 The other major Vietnam-era superhero, The Punisher, provides a rare move in the other direction—
originally his primary origin trauma was the death of his family, which drove him to become The
Punisher. His Vietnam War experience served mostly to provide a plausible explanation for why he was
such an efficient killer. In the late ’90s The Punisher largely moved away from mainstream Marvel con-
tinuity and was cut loose to tell stories that more resemble graphic novels. In one of these, Born, writ-
ten by Garth Ennis, The Punisher’s origin story was retold such that his primary trauma became his
experience in Vietnam, and the death of his family became nothing more than a trigger that awakened
the largely repressed Punisher who had already been born in Vietnam. Since The Punisher was re-
integrated into Marvel Continuity, this origin has been ignored, and he has returned to his classic and
more apolitical version.
13 AnnCvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings:Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke
UP, 2003) 13.
14Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke UP, 2004).
15 Trauma and the Memory of Politics 5.
16Martha Nussbaum, “Emotions as Judgments of Value and Importance,” in Thinking about Feeling:
Contemporary Philosophers on Emotion, Robert C. Solomon, ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) 185.
17 Donald Nathanson, ed., Knowing Feeling: Affect, Script, and Psychotherapy (New York: Norton, 1996)

198.
18 Knowing Feeling 237
19Slavoj Žižek, The Žižek Reader, Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright, eds. (Malden: Blackwell
Publishing, 1999) 19.
20 Bill Willingham and Francisco Rodriguez De La Fuente, Ill, Robin #125 (New York: DC Comics, 2004).
21 Susan J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002) 38.
22Gershon Legman, “Psychopathology of the Comics,” Neurotica 1.3 (1948): 11.
23 “The Myth of Superman” 16.
24 Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics (New York: Perrenial, 2000) 11.
 192 English Language Notes 46.2 Fall / Winter 2008

25Jeffrey A. Brown, Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans (Jackson: UP of Mississippi,
2001) 113.
26 The story is reprinted in The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told (New York: DC Comics, 1987).
27 “Psychopathology of the Comics” 15.
28 9-11: September 11th 2001 Volume 2 (New York: DC Comics, 2002) 15.
29 9-11 16.
30 9-11 148.
31 9-11 152.
32 9-11 151.
33 Indeed,in Brian Singer’s Superman Returns Superman announces his return to the world with an air-
plane rescue—an act that is both a symbolic tie back to the previous Superman film series (in which
Superman’s public introduction is also rescuing Lois Lane from an aviation accident) and as an implicit
bracketing of 9/11 within the two franchises. In Singer’s vision, airplanes out of control are easily pre-
ventable if you only let Superman into your heart.
34 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989) 32.
35 The Sublime Object of Ideology 30.
36Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship
(Durham: Duke UP, 1997) 33.
37 Trauma and the Memory of Politics 5.
38 Dan Jurgens and Bill Sienkiewicz, Superman: Day of Doom #1-4 (New York: DC Comics, 2003).