Fandoms, Multimodality, And The Transformation Of The 'comic Book'

212 Pages·2016·2.2 MB·English

Wayne State University
Wayne State University Dissertations
1-1-2015
Turning Te Page: Fandoms, Multimodality, And
Te Transformation Of Te 'comic Book'
Superhero
Mathew Alan Cicci
Wayne State University,
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Recommended Citation
Cicci, Mathew Alan, "Turning Te Page: Fandoms, Multimodality, And Te Transformation Of Te 'comic Book' Superhero" (2015).
Wayne State University Dissertations. Paper 1331.
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TURNING THE PAGE: FANDOMS, MULTIMODALITY, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE “COMIC
BOOK” SUPERHERO

by
MATTHEW ALAN CICCI
DISSERTATION
Submitted to the Graduate School
of Wayne State University,
Detroit, Michigan
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
2015
MAJOR: ENGLISH (Film & Media Studies)
Approved By:
____________________________________________
Advisor Date
____________________________________________
____________________________________________
____________________________________________
____________________________________________
DEDICATION
I would like to dedicate this work to my wife, Lily, and my three children, Maya, Eli, and Samuel.
Without my wife’s ceaseless support, patience, and love, I would have been unable to complete this
work in a timely manner. And, without the unquantifiable joy my children bring me, I am positive the
more difficult parts of writing this dissertation would have been infinitely more challenging.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank all of my committee members—Dr. Jeff Pruchnic, Dr. Steven Shaviro, and
Dr. Suzanne Scott—for their time and willingness to be a part of this project. However, I would like to
offer a special thanks to my advisor on this project, Dr. Chera Kee. Dr. Kee went above and beyond in
this capacity. More than a just a mentor or an editor, Dr. Kee was passionate about the project and
brought a wealth of information, questions, and challenges to the dissertation that strengthened not
only the writing but the writer, as well. Her feedback was invaluable to the project, but so to was her
insight into professionalization, my work’s relationship to other fields, and her overall enthusiasm. It is
an understatement to say she helped mold this particularly absent-minded graduate student into
someone confident and prepared for his impending appointment. For all this and more, I am truly,
deeply appreciative.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...ii
Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….iii
List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………........vi
Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...................1
Chapter One “Reel Comics: How Films Borrow From Comics and How Comics are Becoming Films …….17
The Business of Superheroes ………………………………………………………………………………………………….…20
Superhero Films as Serials, Superhero Comics as Widescreen Television Series ……………………….27
The Effects of a Filmic Superhero Comic ……………………………………………………………………………………38
Chapter Two “Marvel Team-Up: Hawkeye, Loki, and the Innate Resistance of the Female Superhero
Comic Fan………………………………………………………………………………………………….………………………………………….56

The Masculine Coding of Superhero Comics ……………………………………………………………………………..64
The Hawkeye Initiative: A Direct Challenge to Superhero Fandom & Industry …………………………..73
Loki & the MCU: An Indirect Subversion of Superhero Patriarchy ……………………………………………..84
Female Superhero Fandoms: Now and in the Future…………………………………………………………………97
Chapter Three “Flame [War] On! The Superhero Genre’s Invocation of Race to Address Adaptation
Anxiety.……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….105

Contextualizing Racebending, Canon, and Contemporary Adaptation Theory.………………………..109
The Superhero Fan Racial Discourse: Troubling & Not Really About Race.……………………………….125
The Small Step of Racebending.………………………………………………………………………………………………148
Chapter Four “Uncanny Fandom: Media Spreadability and the Reframing of the Superhero Comic
Fan”.……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………155

Becoming Anti-Fan.…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………162
From Comic Reader to Just About Anyone: How Everyone Became a Superhero Fan ………………166
The Evolving Superhero Fandom……………………………………………………………………………………………..179
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..189
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References…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..192
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………204
Autobiographical Statement………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..205

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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1.1: Final Page of Infinity #1 (Cheung, 2013)……………………………………………………………………………….29
Figure 1.2 End Credit Scene Avengers (2012)…………………………………………………………………………………………29
Figure 1.3 Panel as Action, Time, and Space (Romita, Amazing Spider-Man #88, 1970)…………………………41
Figure 1.4 The Fourth Wall (Bolland, Animal Man #5, 1988)………………………………………………………………….49
Figure 2.1 Black Widow Then (Land, Black Widow Deadly Origins #1, 2009)……….…………………………………59
Figure 2.2 Black Widow Now (Noto, Promotional Art, 2014)………………………………………………………………….59
Figure 2.3 New 52 Catwoman (March, Catwoman #1, 2011)…………………………………………………………………67
Figure 2.4 THI Example: Horn’s 2003 White Queen, Koldioxid 2013 Hawkeye……………………………………….76
Figure 2.5 New 52 Starfire (Rocafort, Red Hood and the Outlaws, 2011)……………………………………………….78
Figure 2.6 Guillory’s Manfire (2012)……………………………………………………………………….................................78
Figure 2.7 Stills from Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) & Thor (2011)…………………………….………86
Figure 2.8 Sample Loki’s Army-produced Images…………………………………………………………………………………..90
Figure 2.9 Sample Thorki……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….90
Figure 2.10 Marvel Now Loki (Garbett, Loki: Agent of Asgard #1, 2014)………………………………………………..95
Figure 2.11 New Loki v Old Loki (Garbett, Loki: Agent of Asgard #12, 2015)……………………………………..…..95
Figure 3.1 What’s Wrong With This Picture? (BOCA, Martin, 1982)……………………………………………………..137
Figure 4.1 Taking a Bow at SDCC 2014…………………………………………………………………………………………………156
Figure 4.2 Doc Ock Cosplay………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….184
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INTRODUCTION
“From day one, one of the superhero’s greatest powers was to be able to leap across different media
channels in a single bound.” – Henry Jenkins (“Multiplicity” 304)
Henry Jenkins, a well-regarded media and fan scholar, isn’t wrong, but one should probably add
that superpower has definitely strengthened over time. Today superheroes are more ubiquitous and
prevalent than they’ve ever been before. Take Spider-Man, for example: while he has long been a
commercially viable, and thus fairly visible intellectual property, he can now be found mugging on the
front of increasingly geek-chic apparel, protecting iPhones as a decal or skin, and popping up on any
number of internet forums as the central character of a popular meme; he is immediately accessible to
the growing number of casual gamers thanks to the wildly successful tablet game Spider-Man Unlimited
(a game with over ten million downloads), and, most visibly, he has consistently swung across your local
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cinema’s theater screen over the past fifteen years thanks to five summer blockbuster films.
Spidey’s prominence is not a sole, character-specific incident. Nor, as Jenkins contends, is his,
and other superheroes’, multimedia success particularly surprising. Both Marvel and DC, the top two
publishers of comic books, have long looked to turn their four-color pages into technicolored movies,
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cartoons, and televisions shows. In fact, comic books’ inspiration of animated or live-action material is
quite staggering. These two publishers alone have inspired over 130 live-action films or serial films
starting with 1941’s Superman and culminating with, to date, a slate of films scheduled out to 2020.
Throw in an additional 46 (and counting) feature-length animated films, starting with 1993’s Batman:
Mask of the Phantasm, and another 127 television series (42 live-action, 85 animated), and the comic
industries’ relationship to the film and television industries becomes much clearer.

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Not only has the character headlined multiple films, his recent inclusion in Marvel’s slate of upcoming films
suggest he will be onscreen at least that often in the next fifteen years.
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Marvel Entertainment is an asset owned by the Walt Disney Corporati on. DC Comics, Inc. is the publishing unit of
DC Entertainment, a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner .
2

According to historian Sean Howe, this multimedia output is a natural result of these companies
longstanding attraction with moving their characters onto the silver screen. In his thorough history of
Marvel Comics, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Howe chronicles Marvel front-man Stan Lee’s
unyielding interest in film; Lee spent much of the ‘60s and ‘70s in Hollywood hobnobbing with directors,
like Alain Resnais, and executives while pitching scripts for popular Marvel properties like the Silver
Surfer. Despite a number of poorly-produced and poorly-conceived projects, Lee kept pursuing movies
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and television. As Howe put it, “Stan Lee wanted nothing more than to change Marvel’s Hollywood
fortunes, to get out of publishing, to get his vision of Marvel on television” (3725, emphasis mine). Of
course, focusing on how badly Lee wanted to get his heroes out of comics and into people’s living rooms
undermines how capable superheroes had been at doing just that since their inception. Superman made
his debut in Action Comics #1 in 1938. Within in two years, The Adventures of Superman radio program
began an 11-year run. Within 10 years, a serialized film, Superman, depicted his origins story and early
exploits. And, only 14 years after his original appearance in the comics, actor George Reeves portrayed
the character in the television show, Adventures of Superman. Batman (1939) and Captain America
(1941) are also early examples of comic characters spreading to other mediums rapidly; both characters
headlined their own film adaptation within 10 years of initial publication. Superheroes, no matter how
tied to the comic book page they may have seemed, have always been pushed into other media.
All of this confirms Jenkins claim above. This history of adaptation often gets obscured as the
recent blockbuster success of the superhero film genre engenders a sense of novelty or newness—we’ve
never seen superheroes like this! This claim can be forgiven, despite the legacy of adaptations, because
so much is different about today’s superhero adaptations. We haven’t seen non-comic versions of
superheroes garner such widespread media attention or sustained commercial success. We haven’t
seen the genre so fully preoccupy Hollywood execs’ thoughts, inform new fans, and present in such

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Most notable flops? Dr. Strange (1978), a made-for-TV film that has been hidden away and the unreleased Roger
Corman Fantastic Four that is so notoriously bad it’s warranted a forthcoming documentary entitled Doomed!
3

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force across multiple outlets simultaneously. Just totaling the nu mbers above, since 1941 there have
been 303 filmic adaptations of DC or Marvel comics. But an overwhelming number of those adaptations,
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some 207 (68%), have screened since 1998. In other words, the first 50 years of the superhero genre
saw less than one h undred adaptations; the preceding 22 years, counting forward to 2020, have seen
and will see over two hundred . Superhero films’ contemporary dominance of the box office has been so
overwhelming, and the pace of superhero films’ releases so rapid, that the filmic image of the superhero
is becoming omnipresent across media, not just in comic books. Looking at the Marvel Cinematic
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Universe alone there have been eleven films. These films have grossed over $8.5 billion worldwide;
eleven more films are slated t o run between 2015 and 2019. And, these eye - popping numbers only
reference Marvel, not their primary competitor, DC, and their slate of very successful Superman and
Batman franchises. Nor does it include the other similar films released such as Scott Pilgrim vs. The
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World (2010) or Watchmen (2009), which are also based on superhero comic book stories.
Such a boom in the ubiquity of these characters has, not surprisingly, sparked a surge in
scholarship – the films are analyzed, the characters’ races, genders, or political positions are increasingly
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addressed, and the field of comic studies itself is in process of codifying itself. And, thus I too feel
compelled to address this rapid, commercially successful, and seemingly sustained explosion of
superheroes out of comics and into, primarily, the filmic. While my concern, and thus this dissertation,
inevitably tackles notions of how we can read these adapted stories and characters critically, I am most
deeply invested in the root issue I see unfolding, the uni que element that makes this era of adaptation
unlike any before it —the success of superhero adaptations is fundamentally unhinging the superhero

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As evidenced, respectively, by the 2014 Sony leak memos, rash of film-driven fandoms, and promotional pushes.
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1998 is the beginning of the contem porary superhero film era. That summer’s release, Blade, signaled Marvel’s
first, sustained adaptation to film. Every year but two since then has seen at least one Marvel adaptation.
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The Marvel Cinematic Universe refers to the slate of Marvel Studio pro duced films since Iron Man (2008).
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Data regarding the amount of adaptations and their financial success is largely culled from the online databases
of comichron.com and boxofficemojo.com
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The clearest examples of this is Angela Ndalianis’s article “Why Comics Studies?” which offers historical and
artistic validations, but also notes “It only took a hundred or so years, but the medium is finally coming into its
own. Its public prominence has been felt most overtly in the adaptation of comics to films…” (114).