In a recent interview withVariety, Ben Affleck shared some thoughts about his time playing Batman for Zack Snyder, and the superhero movie genre in general. Recalling the criticisms leveled at the dark tone of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Affleck observed, “It seems to be an ongoing question, and I don’t know the answer: Do you go all the way to a hard-R rating like Joker? Or do it like Marvel, which does something broad, unless you’re talking about Deadpool & Wolverine?” He continued, “There seems to be more tension between ‘Are we doing the grown-up version or the one that’s open to kids?'”
Leaving aside the actual variety of DC Studio’s offerings over the past few years, Affleck raises a good point. Are superheroes for kids? Or can they tell stories for adults? It’s such a good question, in fact, that people have been asking it since the birth of the comic book industry… and no one has come up with a good answer yet.
Judging by the cover of 1938’s Action Comics #1, one could argue that superheroes were invented to appeal to kids. That cover introduced Superman, the world’s first superhero, as pure power fantasy, dressed in blue and red togs and smashing a car over his head, while a scared bystander runs away. Even the story by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster seems to teach a simple moral lesson. Bully Butch thinks he can push around Clark Kent and Lois Lanebecause he’s stronger, and it takes Superman and his superior strength to put him in his place.
Throughout that issue and most of the issues that follow, Superman does the same thing, leaping over buildings and outrunning locomotives to tell powerful people to make better decisions. However, the specific details in the story spoke to issues more complicated and adult than one would expect. Superman’s first enemies weren’t just tough guys who wanted to duke it out with him; they were governors sentencing innocent men to the electric chair, or landlords who let their tenants live in squalor. Superman’s feats of strength were less power for the sake of power and more fantasies to imagine simple solutions to real problems.
That tension only intensified when America entered World War II. Comic books became a hit among GIs, thanks to the fact that they were cheap, easy-to-read, and easy to transport. Superheroes followed suit, going to war with their audience, either defending the home front from saboteurs attacking our factories or battling super villains like Red Skull and Captain Nazi, who weren’t that different from Hitler and Mussolini.
Yet, as crucial as adult readers were to the origins of the genre, soldiers put superhero comics so firmly behind them when they returned from the front that the larger public forgot they existed. Even to this day, people talk about superhero comics as if they were originally created just for kids, and that adult readers are immature deviants, clinging to a genre they should have long outgrown. Or, they talk about more mature comics as something new that creators such as Alan Moore and Frank Miller brought to medium, creating a split that wasn’t there before.
To be sure, the loss of a military readership meant that superheroes became sillier in the 1950s, with Batman and Superman more likely to battle alien invaders than economic inequality. But until the moral panic caused by psychologist Frederic Wertham’s 1954 book The Seduction of the Innocent, adults regularly read sci-fi, horror, and even romance comic books. The mind-bending stories that Jack Kirbyand Steve Ditko made for Stan Lee at Marvel only drew those audiences back to superheroes, setting the stage for the moral complexity of the Bronze Age.
Such moral complexity happened within the genre’s established tropes. For example, the 1988 Batman storyline A Death in the Family, by Jim Starlin and Jim Aparo, does indeed add stakes by having the Joker murder Robin. But it also involves the Joker becoming Iran’s delegate to the United Nations under Ayatollah Khomeini. And, of course, the entire story is built around a gimmick in which readers called a 900-number to vote on Robin’s fate.
Silly? Absolutely. Immeshed in current politics and themes? Undeniably.
Stories like A Death in the Family draw attention to an uncomfortable truth about superhero comics, that the line between childish and adult isn’t nearly as clear as we assume. Affleck’s own work in Batman v Superman illustrates the point. He may play a man driven to action after a 9/11-like incident, but the movie doesn’t have anything to say about the nature of terrorism, vigilantism, or the role of leaders in responding to a crisis. Lex Luthor may babble about theodicy, wondering why a good and all-powerful god would allow bad things to happen, but his observations sound less like Erasmus and more like a thirteen-year-old internet edgelord.
So what is the answer? There is none. Superheroes are inherently silly. They are about people in bright costumes with fantastic powers who punch people in the face. But they come from a place of real conflict and real concern. Adults concern themselves with questions of power as much as anyone else, and if superheroes are the medium through which they ask those questions, then so be it. Such has been the case for as long as comics have been around, entertaining children and giving adults space to think about big questions, with no easy answers.
