The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics

In issue ten of All Star Superman ¹ the titular hero attempts to discover what a world without Superman would look like by creating a miniature universe, complete with a miniature Earth whose development he can observe from the outside. In the glimpses of this alternate Earth afforded the reader, we move swiftly from early humankind to the Renaissance thinker Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola delivering his 1486 “Oration on the Dignity of Man”, in which he stated that instead of yielding sovereignty to gods and angels we should instead “become like them”, and, “if we but will it, surpass even imagination’s greatest paragons”. Later in this Earth’s history we see the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche writing by candlelight, “behold! I teach you the superman”. This is swiftly followed by a glimpse of the studio of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel (though both off-panel) at the moment they create the first comic book superhero: Superman himself.

A book such as this ought to begin with a neat definition of “posthumanism”. However, it would be misleading to suggest that posthumanism is a neatly bounded category. Roden,¹ for instance, sees two distinct posthumanisms that he terms the “speculative” and the “critical”, which Simon² formulates as “critical” and “popular” posthumanism. This axis of critical and speculative/popular posthumanism roughly corresponds to the discursive realms this book will refer to as Post/Humanism and Transhumanism. The terrain of critical Post/Humanism may briefly be mapped by three modalities of posthumanist thought identified by Castree and Nash.³ Firstly, the, “posthuman as an incipient historical condition … [secondly] a set of ontological theses about the human that never was and never will be… [and thirdly] as a ‘both/and’ form of deconstructive reading”.⁴ The posthuman can be seen as either an “object of analysis” or as an “analytical-theoretical position”.⁵ Braun,⁶ McCracken⁷ and Panelli⁸ each offer further definitions and formulations. Indeed, if it were desirable to make any claims for what exactly Post/Humanism “is” or “does” then it would almost certainly hinge upon just such a blurring of categorical boundaries, whether between the natural and the artificial, the human and the machinic, fact and fiction, or critical theory and superhero comics. In fact, the boundary between critical Post/Humanism and popular/speculative Transhumanism remains inherently fuzzy. Nevertheless, this book will use Transhumanism to refer to the philosophy of human enhancement through technology. This deliberate pursuit of technological evolution would involve inviting technology into our bodies, resulting in Transhuman beings. The offspring of Transhumanity would eventually result in fully Post-Human beings; that is, humans so fully integrated with technology so as to be no longer recognisable as human. Though this may sound similar to Post/Humanism, Transhumanism’s use of the figure of the posthuman is distinguished by a markedly Enlightenment form of Humanism, premised on rationality and faith in progress. For the purposes of this book “Transhumanism” will also to refer to those techno-scientific practices that have been carried out in reality.

In his study of comic book readers, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers,¹ Matthew J. Pustz describes comic book culture as being possessed of its own distinctive knowledges, practices and language; its own canons and special form of literacy. In this sense, building upon the ideas introduced in the last chapter, comic book culture can be considered as a rhizome formation, emerging from the interactions between a multiplicity of reader-assemblages, comic book-assemblages, creator-assemblages, corporate-assemblages and critical-assemblages. The following chapter introduces this concept in more detail, illustrating it with specific examples from comic book culture. In particular, this chapter demonstrates how many of the recurring debates within the critical study of superheroes can best be reconfigured through the use of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome and assemblages. This is highlighted in three main ways. Firstly, how the rhizome can be used as a model of comic book continuity; secondly, how a “rhizo-analysis” moves the analysis of comics away from the binary of criticism/legitimation; and thirdly (and related to the second point), how the rhizome allows us to reconceptualise the relationship between readers and texts. In doing so, this chapter lays the groundwork for the more detailed investigation of the posthuman body in superhero comic books (and its readers) that will follow.

Section Two of this book presents a cultural history of the posthuman body in superhero comics. The book presents three types of posthuman body which I have dubbed the Perfect Body, the Cosmic Body and the Military-Industrial Body. This typology marks a new, and one would hope useful, contribution to our current understanding of the posthuman body. Because there are multiple entryways into the rhizome of the posthuman body it is worth highlighting that the categories of Perfect, Cosmic and Military-Industrial bodies, though of heuristic value, are necessarily contingent and overlapping. The question is not just what each of these bodies IS but what they can DO. What the cultural histories presented here aim to highlight is how these assemblages develop more fully according to wider trends in the discourse of posthumanity.

The Perfect Body of the Golden Age laid out the template for the iconography of the comic book Superhuman while also manifesting contemporaneously in the material-scientific proto-Transhumanist practices of eugenics, and in the nascent Post/Humanist idea of the “New Man”, a pseudo-Nietzschean Modernist vision that, in its most extreme form, was articulated and practiced in Hitler’s vision of a “master race”. The next surge of popular interest in superheroes came to be known as the Silver Age of Comics. This period also saw the emergence of a new posthuman form that this book dubs the Cosmic Body. The aspects that “define” the Cosmic Body, like the use of magic, occult tinges, and evolutionary mysticism, were already apparent in the Golden Age. Characters like The Spectre, and Dr. Occult (both, incidentally, from Superman creator Jerry Siegel) gained their powers from metaphysical rather than scientific forces. As will be discussed below, all superheroes display aspects of the Cosmic Body to some extent, in as much as the science presented in them is, “at most only superficially plausible, often less so, and the prevailing mood is mystical rather than rational”.¹ But the corporeal concerns of the Golden Age meant that, as a rule, and in terms of sheer popularity and sales, the Perfect Body was emphasised over the Cosmic Body. As with the previous chapter, the Cosmic Body emerged from a very particular socio-historic discourse of the posthuman, not simply limited to the realm of the Superhuman but also discernible within Post/Humanism and Transhumanism.

The previous chapters have shown how the Golden Age of Comics was influenced by (and influenced in turn) visions of the posthuman in the form of what was ironically christened the Perfect Body, while the Silver Age was marked instead by a preponderance of Cosmic Bodies. With this in mind, the current chapter journeys through the assemblage this book is calling the Military-Industrial Body. From Captain America’s origin as a military super-soldier through Haraway’s cyborg, the posthuman body has often, if not always, been seen as the “offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism”.¹ Both militarism and capitalism can be said to inscribe themselves upon the body. Indeed, as Gray has pointed out, the “‘incontestable reality of the body’ is still the fundamental ground of war even in these postmodern times…war is based on human bodies killing and dying, yet technology has rendered human bodies in war incredibly vulnerable even as it has integrated them into cyborgian (human-machine) weapon systems”.² In the USA especially it appears to be the case that interest in converging technologies (or Transhumanist technologies) is largely driven by military and defence needs.³ Increasingly, however, military and industrial interests are merging. In order to elaborate further it is first necessary to define what is meant by “military-industrial”.

The preceding chapters presented three different forms of the posthuman body in roughly chronological order, suggesting that the posthuman body is best conceptualised as a rhizomatic assemblage whose functions are determined only by what other assemblages it can be plugged into. So it was that the Perfect Body was able to impact on bodies by way of eugenics-based sterilisation programmes and, more recently, the search for real-world super-soldier technologies has drawn upon the comic book Superhuman as a source of inspiration. Rather than a fixed and stable category, the posthuman body is a fluid, patchwork figure, emerging from the interplay of a variety of forces and intensities—social, scientific, political, artistic, and so on, and composed of heterogeneous elements that also play roles in other configurations. The relations between these parts are contingent, not necessary, so that parts can be extracted from one assemblage and plugged into another. These heterogeneous elements are not all the same; assemblages can be comprised of bodies, physical objects and events as well as semiotic elements. Within the rhizome there can be no hierarchical privileging of the “real” over the “symbolic” or macro sociological structures over micro sociological interactions. Hence, this book has argued that the three most easily identifiable realms of the posthuman body incorporate philosophy (in the form of Post/Humanism), fictional representations (in the form of Superhumanism) and actual material, technical practices (referred to here, broadly, as Transhumanism).

The following chapters comprise the final section of this book and present original findings from interviews conducted with readers. Having contextualised the historical development of the posthuman body, it is now possible to consider what sense readers make of these narratives and how they might shape their understanding of human enhancement. The importance of such a project lies in explicating the various models of posthumanity available and known to the public. Interviewing comic book readers in this way provided the opportunity to test and counter the literature presented in previous chapters, which focused on questions of bodily representation in superhero comics. Some of the theoretical and methodological shortcomings of these varied approaches have already been discussed, but it is worth reiterating that even the best of these works rarely turned to actual readers when formulating their conclusions. Maigret puts it best: the shortcoming of such studies is not that they are able to identify the existence of stereotypes, nor their analyses of the ideological consequences of such stereotypes; it is their method. As Maigret says, “it is the object itself that the keys for understanding by readers have been located, while its reception and all the factors contributing to the production of the content have been overlooked”.¹

The previous chapter addressed the question, “What sense do readers of superhero comics make of the posthuman body?” and focused on the discursive realm of the Superhuman. As has been highlighted throughout this book however, the posthuman body is formed of an assemblage of overlapping discursive realms. Any understanding of how readers make sense of the posthuman body must also then consider these other domains. The current chapter focuses on the discursive realms of Transhumanism and Post/Humanism by illustrating how readers responded to the idea of human enhancement in the real world, and the role that superhero comics played in this understanding.

While the previous chapters addressed readers’ views on the Superhuman, Transhuman and Post/Human in turn, this penultimate chapter develops the notion of the reader-text relationship in Post/Humanist terms as a Deleuzo-Guattarian “assemblage”. Section One described how theories of audience-text relations frequently hinged on a binary opposition between audience and text. Later authors argued that this model’s dichotomy was simplistic and that the comics industry, for example, should instead be seen as engaging in a dialogic encounter with readers. Brown suggests that this is a sympathetic relationship rather than “a struggle for power and meaning”.¹ For Barker, there is a “symbiotic relationship” between producers of formulaic narratives (such as superhero comics) and their consumers: “A symbiote is an organism which lives in a relationship of mutual dependence with another. Although it is possible to study it separately, any full account of its structure and its behaviour depends upon studying it as an organism-in-relation”.² This book proposes reframing Barker’s organic metaphor of the symbiote in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms as an assemblage. While the metaphor of the symbiote presents producer and consumer as a mostly harmonious whole, when considered as assemblage, the relationship between these two parts is itself constantly forming new assemblages: reader AND text AND creator AND history AND science AND so on. This chapter would like to go some way to articulating this concept more thoroughly.

This book began with two questions. Firstly, what role did the comic book superhero play in the history of posthumanism? Secondly, how did comic book readers relate to these depictions of the posthuman body? Recognising that the figure of the posthuman body was far from fixed and bounded, this book has instead presented the posthuman body as a rhizomatic assemblage, an emergent property formed by the overlapping realms of fictional Superhumanism, the techno-scientific practices of Transhumanism and the critical-theoretical philosophy of Post/Humanism. These categories were connected rhizomatically to one another within the assemblage of the posthuman body. As such, any analyses of changes within one component were related to changes in the others, altering each of these realms’ potential to transform other human (and non-human) bodies. As this book nears its end it becomes possible to reformulate the understanding of the posthuman body and restate why we should concern ourselves with it at all. While not necessarily sharing Fukuyama’s bio-conservatism, we may broadly support his observation that the conceptualisation of the human throughout history has had, and will continue to have, “great political consequences”.¹ As this book has demonstrated, this is also true of the posthuman. This is not a matter of ideology however. It is not that representations of the posthuman body, in whatever discursive realm, mask or obfuscate a “true”, “natural” human body. Nor is it to argue that there is a single desirable or true form of posthuman body.