Gods, Animals, Humans: Dark Age Superheroes and the Unseating of the Subject
The Dark Age of Comic Books spans the period from 1980s to the present day and I have chosen Alan Moore’s Watchmen(1986, 1987) and Grant Morrison’s Animal Man (1988 – 1990) as emblematic of this period for a number of reasons. Dark Age Comics are characterized by a certain grimness and realism (with respect to comics of the previous Gold, Silver, and Bronze Ages), and this shift is indicated by many titles published in the 1986, chiefly Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (Voger 6). But Batman is not posthuman for reasons there is not enough space to discuss. As a contrast, Animal Man and Dr. Manhattan serve as great starting points for charting the Dark Age because of their originality as characters with respect to the origin of the so called comic age. An old supporting DC Comics hero, Animal Man sat on the sidelines for most of the twentieth century until the Dark Age started the trend of giving cursory characters their own fleshed out stories, in addition to creating new characters altogether. Dr. Manhattan’s artistic creation, then, can be explained by the same sort logic used to characterize Animal Man’s simultaneous presence at the forefront of this type of superhero (Voger 28-9). Ultimately, these new superheroes come to represent ideals that contrast with those of previous heroes in ways relating both to the problems they address and the ways in which they address those problems.
If previous Golden Age superhero figures, such as Captain America, Superman, or Wonder Woman, represent a certain faith in the eugenics project that characterized a reinforcement of humanism through human exceptionalism (Hack), then Dark Age superheroes can be characterized by a sort of pessimism with respect to the superhero project as humanist project. As Jack Harris highlights, “comic books reflect their times. They are both influential to, and influenced by the events of the day. As times darkened, so did heroes; so did their concerns, so did the methods of the resolutions to problems” (Voger 5). This shift in the politics of the superhero also indicates a specific shift in the superhero narrative and its engagement with a critical posthumanist discourse, one which
requires us to attend to that thing called ‘the human’ with greater specificity, greater attention to its embodiment, embeddedness, and materiality…to the material, embodied, and evolutionary nature of intelligence and cognition, in which language, for example, is no longer seen (as it is in philosophical humanism) as a well-nigh-magical property that ontologically separates Homo sapiens from every other living creature. (Wolfe 120)
Dark Age superheroes— I contend through the figures of Animal Man and Dr. Manhattan—reject the traditional formulations of the humanist subject embodied in superheroes of previous eras. Though it is difficult to inscribe all superheroes within a singular posthuman framework it is my hope that the current discussion will allow one to chart the engagement that comics have had with the posthumanist discourse using the origin of the Dark Age as either an origin or a terminus. Unlike previous incarnations of superheroes, Dark Age superheroes question themselves in ways then unheard of in the medium and the superhero can be seen to perform a sort of unraveling both physical and mental. Jeffery reminds us that “through the seventies, eighties and nineties…the superhuman body became increasingly breakable” (1), a fragility that connects to the waning humanist exceptionalism and the questions of the subject’s constitution.
To say that superheroes operate as a locus of biopower is vague at best, and let us not undermine the attempt to outline a critical posthumanism of the superhero. This discussion employs uses Michel Foucault’s definition of biopower which relates to (state) strategies “directed toward the performances of the body, with attention to the processes of life” (History 139). Though I hope to expand this definition as it relates to superheroes, Foucault’s definition offers a helpful launching point for a biopolitical outlining of the superhero. Superheroes are inscribed within, though nevertheless lie outside of, the state as they function in juridical and extra-juridical ways, an idea that saw dramatization beginning with Watchmen. To be clear, superhero narratives have always been narratives of power—from the ideologically charged Superman comics of the medium’s origin to the contemporary fascistic readings of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight. What separates superhero narratives from other theories of power grounded in structures is that they are also emblematic of what film theorist Linda William’s calls body genres. “Transformation is always corporeal; power is always written on the body” (Jeffery 7), in very real ways that relate to the biological bodies at play under the regimes of biopower. Thus, superheroes of the Bronze Age of Comics, which begins with Superman’s debut in 1938, possess origins that reflect the contemporaneous preoccupation with eugenics projects and a teleological human exceptionalism. Likewise, early Dark Age Comics reflect Cold War sentiment and fears of nuclear disaster and it is no coincidence that both of the figures analyzed in the current discussion see their origins in nuclear accidents.
Grant Morrison’s Animal Man takes its place among the Dark Age Comics with its presentation of “washed up” superhero Animal Man. As superhero, Animal Man has the ability to map animal attributes onto his own body for his own use. When birds are near, he can fly; when fish are near he can breathe underwater; when an earthworm is near he can regrow limbs. What separates Animal Man from other comics, both before it and contemporaneous with it, is Animal Man’s epiphanic understanding that he is to become superhero animal rights activist (an idea which to return). In fact, reading Animal Man it is difficult to rid oneself of the feeling that Morrison kept a copy of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) by his side during all of his writing. Reading outside of his comics reveals that animals figure largely in Morrison’s work: “If you look at human foibles from the animal point of view, you see the world slightly differently…I love animals, I love having their hair up my nose. A lot of what’s going on in the world today is a way of denying that connection, and the shit, and the smell and [chuckles] the assholes of animals” (Morrison). Even in his vulgarity, Morrison gestures towards a perspectival understanding of the animal that informs both the figure and narrative of Animal Man but also advocates for a sort of connection that seems tenuously relatable to Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto, which advocates an ethics and politics of “significant otherness” for dogs (but by way of them, other species).
Morrison employs Animal Man—as the locus of one superhero narrative taking place within a larger persistent universe—to dramatize issues of (bio)power. Prior to becoming animal rights activist, Animal Man has an experience in which a young fan asks for his autograph, only for the fan to realize: “Animal Man? Forget it. I thought you were Aquaman!” (Animal No. 2, 10). In the next scene Animal Mall broods on his rejection when Superman appears to “say hello” (Animal No. 2, 12). But Superman cannot stay: “I have an appointment in Pakistan in twenty minutes so I’ve got some time to kill” (Animal No. 2, 12). The exchange is peculiar and brief but the contrast between the two serves to frame Animal Man’s power, or lack thereof, in relation to others. As a hero he is often ridiculed in the face of symbols of power such as Superman and in a number of other places in the narrative baseline humans—a comic word separating the human and superman, human and posthuman—express shock at the nature of Animal Man’s powers when calling him to fight crime, finding his abilities unimpressive because of their contingency based function. As a hero he is situated on some vague plane in between baseline humans and the superhero ideals of previous years, still embodied by Superman. Superheroes like Aquaman and Superman are popularbecause they are powerful and unlike them Animal Man is not a popular hero, within diegetic and extra-diegetic contexts, and this is important for the political efficacy with which he questions a humanist biopower with his own application of biopower.
Now seems most opportune moment to pick apart Animal Man’s powers as they function in political relation to the superhero as biopolitical entity. Animal Man possesses a contingent relationship with the animals around him and, as mentioned before, he can only utilize certain abilities based on which animals are around him. Like many other Dark Age superheroes, Animal Man gains his powers from an exploding nuclear device—in this instance an alien space ship explodes as two so-called higher life-forms look on and question Animal Man’s own rationalization that the explosion was nuclear and not, as it was, an alien space ship crashing (Animal No. 39, 16). Nevertheless, this bestows the powers that allow him to gain the attributes of animals. What remains unclear throughout the entirety of the series is how Animal Man’s powers work and one might only speculate, as he often does, the bio-physiological processes that lend function to his power. What is clear, and more provocative, about Animal Man’s powers is the fact that they are, indeed, written on his body in very tangible ways that separate him from baseline humans. At certain points in the series, Animal Man is unable to use his powers an occurrence that manifests as psychological trauma and physical pain: “it felt like dying, I don’t know. It felt like I was in a cage and every animal in the world was outside yammering in at me” (Animal No. 9, 16).
As “superhuman,” the physicality of Animal Man’s powers thrusts him in a liminal space between the human and animal. But we must remain critically posthuman: Derrida reminds us that “whenever ‘one’ says ‘The Animal,’ each time a philosopher, or anyone else, says ‘The Animal’ in the singular and without further ado, claiming thus to designate every living thing that is held not to be human… he utters an asinanity” (The Animal 31). Perhaps, based on this idea, it might be better to call Animal ManAnimals Man, “the human zoo (Animal No. 1, 20)—though that lacks punch of Morrison’s choice. The physicality of Animal Man’s powers—his contingent ability to borrow animal attributes but also the physicality expressed in the results of that lack—gives him a connection with animals that allows, even forces him, to acknowledge animal(s) subjectivities. Through the series he comments on the conditions of animals from a superhero perspective that allows him to include them as saveable subjects. In this, he collapses distinctions between human and animal existence, between bios and zoë—human as rational animal on the one hand but as biological animal on the other. But how does Animal Man specifically, and the superhero more broadly, relate to ideas of the biopower and state regulation? The question of Animal Man’s biopolitics remains to be answered and requires an understanding of power and its relation to becoming subject.
In a later essay Foucault would make clear that the driving force of his preoccupation with “power” was “to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (Power 777). But that leaves much to be desired because of its focus on the ways in which human beings, but not all beings, becomes subjects. Also later in his career, Animal Man becomes superhero animal rights activist a shift that highlights the very real ways in which animals become subjects through processes of anthropological biopower—the narrative does not hesitate to place our hero in scenarios banal or provocative, so long as he saves animals from human biopower: from stopping hunters to thwarting, no doubt legal, animal testing. Morrison’s dramatization of animal subjects shows Animal Man’s questioning of what Giorgio Agamben calls the anthropological machine, which characterizes dominant humanist tendencies to separate human from animal through philosophical excision. The modern anthropological machine, Agamben writes, “functions by excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human” (37). Here Agamben is referring to the humanist exclusion of zoë, the life common to all biological beings, from articulations of the human as political animal, bios. Matthew Calarco nestles the biopolitics of the animal within the greater discourse of critical posthumanism with a historical question: “what does it mean to say that one comes to be a subject only in and through language and history?” (167). “If this element is taken away, the difference between man and animal vanishes, unless we imagine a nonspeaking man—Homo alalus, precisely—who would function as a bridge that passes from the animal to the human” (Agamben 36), though, I think, the superhero offers another way for radically thinking across this perceived gap.
In both his physical connection with and biopolitical advocacy of animals, Animal Man bridges a sort of space between sovereign subject and bestial animal that is still attempting to to be deconstructed in critical posthumanist discourse. ForAnimal Man, as for critical posthumanist discourse, the question of biopower and animals relates to ideas of sovereignty, a quality reserved for the subject. Elsewhere Derrida argues that speaking of sovereignty requires one to speak about “this type of animality or living being that is called the ‘beast’ or that is represented as bestiality, on the one hand, and on the other a sovereignty that is most often represented as human or divine, in truth anthropo-theological” (Beast 14). It is, of course, the bestial exclusion highlighted by Agamben that prevents the extension of sovereignty to animals, thus condoning the atrocities committed against animals for the advancement of humans. Perhaps it is no surprise Singer compares animal issues to other issues related to biopower, such as racism or genocide, and that Agamben compares the function of the anthropological machine to the historical figure of the Jew and a sort of exclusion that led to the Holocaust. Similarly, Animal Man questions the lack of sovereignty granted animals choosing to use his juridical and extra-juridical status as superhero to perform an intervention that rivals any modern protest of animal rights. Through his own application of superhero biopower, Animal Man is attempts to establish a new regulation of power based on the (becoming-subject) bodies involved but taken for granted. But Animal Man also saves people, which is pivotal for the place he occupies between human and animal. As superhero figure, Animal Man is no longer constrained to the humanist project that still dominates the motivations and symbolism of other heroes, such as Superman. Instead, the physical connection that Animal Man feels with animals lends him an advocacy that transcends infantilism of animals and shifts into a perspectival understanding of animal subjectivities and sovereignty. Under such a model of heroism, bios and zoë are collapsed—all subjects are political subjects and all subjects are worthy of being defended by a newly critical posthuman superhero.
At the other end of the fictive superhero spectrum being established is Alan Moore’s Dr. Manhattan, a character that predates Animal Man but one I have chosen to discuss last because of the way he is positioned in relation to other superheroes both within Watchmen and the greater fictive theory that characterize Dark Age superheroes. In fact, Dr. Manhattan is the only character in Watchmen that actually has any powers of which to speak. Less a superhero and more of a god his power allows him “to control atomic structure itself” (Moore No. 4, 13). With such an unorthodox power Dr. Manhattan seems to fit a definition of the posthuman that falls in line with N. Katherine Hayles view that “the emergence of the posthuman as an informational-material entity is paralleled and reinforced by a corresponding reinterpretation of the deep structures of the physical world” (11), an idea manifest in Dr. Manhattan’s enjoyment of a gold ring because “its atomic structure is a perfect grid, like a checker board” (Morrison No. 4, 11). Already, one sees the ways in which Dr. Manhattan loses his subjectivity in favor of an understanding of the world as it relates to atomic structure and physical substrate. While one could read Dr. Manhattan as posthuman through Hayles’ understanding of the “the posthuman view [that] privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than as an inevitability of life” (2), that is another view of posthuman. While similar, this reading of Dr. Manhattan focuses on what one could call the effects of Hayles’ view, though only had it happened to one man who was then ostracized because of radically different perception.
Like Animal Man, Dr. Manhattan sees his origin in a nuclear accident—a characteristic embodied in his character as reference to the Manhattan Project. But Manhattan also understands: “the name has been chosen for ominous association it will raise in America’s enemies. They’re shaping me into something gaudy and lethal” (Moore No. 4, 12). As superhero, Dr. Manhattan relates to the state in very real ways (still to be elaborated). As Jon Osterman, he mistakenly steps into an Intrinsic Field Test Chamber, an obscure device that only matters in its representation of nuclear power. After a mishap finds him locked in the chamber, we are to understand that Osterman is atomically rent into nothingness by “screaming atoms” (Moore, No. 4, 8). Afterwards, in an odd series of panels, the being that comes to be known as Dr. Manhattan is reconstituted minutely from the inside out one bodily system at a time. Sara Van Ness highlights the oddity with which Dr. Manhattan reconstructs his own reconstruction for readers:
Even though the words portray Dr. Manhattan’s subjective understanding of events that have dramatically affected his life, the tone of the narration is oddly absent and seemingly objective. He describes ‘a circulatory system’ and ‘a partially muscled skeleton’ with the indefinite article ‘a’ rather than the possessive pronoun ‘my,’ which would suggest that the body parts are his. Instead the article implies that this could be any circulatory system or skeleton, not even a particular one (i.e., the skeleton), let alone his own. (53)
One might say that Dr. Manhattan has a tendency to describe what he perceives as if he were a subject without subjectivity. This tendency toward embodied objectivity, of course, extends to the entirety of Manhattan’s being. After reassembling himself into Dr. Manhattan, Osterman slowly loses the subjectivity often used to characterize human life. Such seems to be the case when, in a decimated body strewn New York City, Dr. Manhattan focuses on the atomic conditions of the environment while Laurie Juspeczyk, his human companion, can only focus on the loss of life, the loss of human subjectivities. After pages, filled with only empty panels that seemingly emphasize the lack of subjectivity through the presence of death and destruction Dr. Manhattan’s words contrast starkly the way a baseline human, Juspeczyk, understands the scene: “not tachyons, surely…yes!...I’d almost forgotten the excitement of not knowing, the delights of uncertainty” (Moore No. 12, 7). Because of his tendency to perceive atomic structure, Dr. Manhattan forms a perceptual framework that reduces the significance of human subjectivity and displaces traditional ideas of humanist teleology as it relates to question of sovereign agency.
Dr. Manhattan’s perception of the atomic applies equal value to all physical entities as subjects, though one under the scrutiny of a sort of Foucauldian scientific regime. Scholars who have written specifically on Dr. Manhattan highlight the fact that he represents the cold, hard sciences. Thus Dr. Manhattan, Brent Fishbaugh writes, “would know himself and the world about him from a perspective far more alien than that of the most rabid quantum theorist. He would experience the paradoxes of reality at a quantum scale of existence: that all things can exist in two places at the same time, that certain particles [tachyons] can travel backwards through time and exhibit physical properties that are exactly the reverse of normal physical laws” (6). That he has “seen events so tiny and so fast they hardly can be said to have occurred at all” (Moore No. 12, 18), should, I think, cause one to question blind adherences to the clearly humanist projects informed by the role of human agency in the production and formation of history, projects Watchmen dramatizes: “just as you are a whole organic being, complete unto yourself, so are you also a part of a larger social organism consisting of the people around you, the people you work with, and ultimately the whole world” (Moore No. 8, 32).
Veidt, or Ozymandias, uses atrocity for the promotion and formation of a new history that diverges from the violent past that of the twentieth century and nuclear fears of the future Watchmen depicts. Though Dr. Manhattan himself does possess a subjectivity of his own it is one that amputates him from the larger humanist project at work in Veidt’s plan. As Matthew Wolf-Meyer notes, Ozymandias represents “the fulfillment of the genetic promise of humanity, achieved through a self-improvement course” (498). In this it becomes clear that the figure of Ozymandias himself is humanist and offers a critical contrast with Dr. Manhattan. Neither condoning nor condemning the conclusion, Dr. Manhattan leaves the galaxy to create life of his own: “this world’s smartest man means no more to me than does its smartest termite” (Moore No. 12, 8), something Animal Man might say but in a different tone and context. Though condescending, Dr. Manhattan offers a critical perspective from which to make the human an Other, for a being with a radically different perspective on the world into which one can only half-imagine. Finally, we begin to approach the question of Dr. Manhattan’s biopower, its relation to Animal Man’s biopower, and the overall unseating of the humanist subject that is enacted through applications of superhero biopower.
Like Animal Man, Dr. Manhattan gains newfound abilities which are clear in their origin, despite the fictiveness of an “intrinsic field,” but unclear in how they work. Physicist Jim Kakalios attempts to discern how Dr. Manhattan’s physiology functions, though he can only speculate: “so why is Dr. Manhattan blue? He might just be leaking electrons,” though anything else about how his power functions remains completely opaque (Harmon). What is further striking about Dr. Manhattan is his retention of the physiology common to all animals (to which category I include humans). Despite his god-like status and his adherence to laws of quantum physics, Manhattan’s possession of what we baseline humans might view as his biological systems relates to the bios and zoë of the superhero in that Manhattan retains the zoë that is common to all life, but also the bios that the Greeks would apply to their pantheon of gods, as living breathing things with political rationality. As god or superhero, Dr. Manhattan fails to lie outside of the traditional state-subject political designation. This much is clear in the ways the America employs Dr. Manhattan in the novel, from rapidly accelerating the course of science, singlehandedly winning the Vietnam War, to efficient crowd control; Dr. Manhattan is proof of the idea that “the superman exists and he’s American!” (Moore No. 4, 12). With this the biopower of Dr. Manhattan rests in the ways in which he is able, over the course of the narrative, to divest himself of human life in a way that flattens its significance with respect to other lives.
In a manner similar to Morrison’s Animal Man, Moore’s Watchmen employs Dr. Manhattan’s biopower to dramatize and explore the question of sovereignty. One could define Dr. Manhattan himself, as he is employed for state purposes, as a subject-formation tool himself, until he rejects such a doctrine and the greater subjectivities that are exalted by the humanist subtext of the narrative. The advancements in science that are made as result of Dr. Manhattan come to characterize the alternative America offered in Watchmen but we also see the ways in which he is employed as a coercive institution. In an alternative world, then, one could envision Dr. Manhattan as state-superhero employed for the maintenance of a biopolitical status-quo. It is, of course, this ideological leaning that causes Dr. Manhattan to grow weary with the issues grounded in ideologies, such as nationalism, that all seem similar when polarized against the objective quantum view of the world he possesses. What is even more important is that Moore’s graphic novel typifies the comic superhero narrative that directly questions the relationship between the superhero and the state—a trend that began with Watchmen and has since become the norm. Dr. Manhattan, as state-sanctioned hero, lies on one end of a spectrum, along with the Comedian, in the camp of heroes who operate based on governmental interest. Mervi Miettinen outlines the status of the superhero in relation to Agamben’s state of exception, which allows the sovereign powers to transcend the rule of law in favor of public interest. Superheroes, Miettinen writes, “as the state-approved powers are seen as failing, the superhero must step forward and take the executive power of the law” (283). What seems all the more provocative is that by the end of both Animal Man andWatchmen our heroes are left in a space of cynicism as regards who to protect, who is included in the political body that needs said protection.
On the one hand, Animal Man acknowledges an animal subjectivity that always was while, one the other, Dr. Manhattan questions a humanist subjectivity that polarizes itself too loosely with respect to all objects as physical entity. Because Animal Man and Dr. Manhattan subvert biopower through acknowledging animal subjectivity and attempting to subvert the anthropological machine, they occupy a critically posthuman perspective. Speaking more minutely, both heroes positioned side by side form a spectrum of fictive theory, a way of theorizing the Dark Age hero as questioning the limits of human sovereignty and subjectivity, and the inclusive-exclusive paradigm highlighted by Agamben. Animal Man subverts the normal human biopolitical order—as superhero he acknowledges animal subjectivities, including them in his own extra-juridical state of exception so that they are acknowledged as sovereign subjects alongside the humans that he saves as regularly. What is significant about Animal Man is the physical ways in which he acknowledges his own relationship to animals, offering baseline humans a path to that same thought. Dr. Manhattan, at the other end of this spectrum, offers a path for questioning human subjectivity by placing humans alongside all objects as atomic physical processes. Based on this model the human has no more value than other objects, let alone animals— and ideas of human agency, history, and teleology become preposterous to even consider: “in the end? Nothing ever ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends” (Moore No. 12, 27).
The fictive theory by which Jeffery characterizes superhero narratives offer an inroad into the posthuman by using the superhero as a philosophical tool for deconstructing the humanist subject. Thus the Dark Age superhero offers the capacity for theorizing the place of the human subject in the world but in a way that diverges from previous understandings of the superhero as representative of a humanist ideal related to an exaltation of that subject. Still, “inasmuch as humanism is founded on a separation of humanitas and animalitas within the human, no genuinely post-humanist politics can emerge without grappling with the logic and consequences of this division” (Calarco 166). Though anthropomorphic, superheroes present a way of theorizing the gap Agamben attempts to theorize across with a nonspeaking man. What can often make things unclear is that the superhero and posthuman are often employed as umbrella terms designate a range of activities and discourses—thus the current discussion highlights the specific trend of the superhero’s engagement with the posthuman as a discursive position. With that in mind, future articulations of the superhero as discursively posthuman should attempt to both narrow the categories as they relate to one another (which is no small task) but also articulate the philosophical possibilities for using superheroes as a tool for understanding ideas of power and sovereignty in productive ways that relate to subject formation writ large. What is clear is that critical posthumanism is a pair of tights heretofore unworn by the modern superhero, but one that presents possibilities for thinking across philosophical gaps of all sorts, leaping them in a single bound.
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