(Rich Tenorio)

Walk into a comic book convention, and you might be immediately tempted to walk back out. You’ll find yourself in a weird world, with people of all ages engaging in various types of indulgence. Often, this includes fantasies that heroes venerated on the page or in film are actually three-dimensional, tangible realities that they can encounter, or even become. To an outsider, this is silliness taken to the extreme. To an insider, this is serious freedom.

Last summer I went to one such convention, and as I walked around in bewilderment, my eyes finally settled on a young woman dressed from head to toe in a spandex body suit, tricked up to resemble the costume worn by Phoenix (a comic book character who once destroyed an entire universe). She had a gravely somber look on her face, which was appropriate, for Phoenix was about to meet her maker.

Chris Claremont, creator of the character Phoenix and a 30-year luminary in the comics business, was signing his work for awestruck fans. Phoenix was next in line. Claremont motioned for her to approach him, but she just stood there, shell-shocked. The absurdity was obvious — this girl wasn’t even born when Claremont was in his prime, and it’s a comic book, for heaven’s sake, and to top it all off, she’s dressed like an ice skater without the skates. In another sense, this was her moment of epiphany. Her world’s maker was bidding her to come, and such existential moments are hard to come by.

The phenomenon of this grave absurdity extends throughout the comic book universe, even to such comparatively local heroes like Gotham City-bound Batman. With the release of the first Batman film, the comic strip Foxtrot lampooned the seriousness with which comic book fans take their heroes: young Jason Fox and his friend, dressed in Batman costumes and hopped up on comic book trivia, were unwillingly chaperoned by Jason’s brother to the movie’s release. There, they criticized lapses in continuity and celebrated clever innovations in the Batman myth, all while the elder brother hid his head in shame. By the close of the film, however, the brother had been converted and had donned his own Batman costume, greeting Jason with the insanely geeky “Hail, Bat-Brother!”

A similar lunacy was on hand this summer as Batman Begins relaunched the character’s film franchise. Started in 1989 as a gothically quirky spectacle, the character was fueled by his comic book history and director Tim Burton’s imagination. Batman gradually evolved into a camp spectacle under the helm of replacement director Joel Schumacher, and with the release of 1997’s Batman and Robin the franchise was declared dead. Good riddance, said fans, until rumors began rippling that a new movie would feature Christian Bale as star, and Christopher Nolan as director. This film was rumored to bear a closer resemblance to the spooky suspense film Memento than to Rocky Horror Picture Show, and it would rival Fantastic Four, Star Wars 3, and Spider-Man 2 in box office receipts. This was to be the film to resuscitate the dead character. Upon closer inspection, however, it’s clear that Batman hasn’t been dead, but he’s simply been in the midst of yet another cycle — one that begins in dour seriousness, and ends (over and over again) in deliberate silliness.

Consider Batman’s origin: A boy witnesses the murder of his parents. In a vision, he finds his calling in fighting crime, using fear as his principal weapon. He plans to bring justice to a community overrun with corruption — what’s so funny about that? If you take the long view, the answer is… Plenty. This boy has become pudgy, corny, and ambiguously gay, at various points in his career. He has been joined by a Batgirl, a Boy Wonder, a Batmite and a butler. He has bottled Bat-Shark-Repellant and narrowly avoided being burned to death by a giant magnifying glass. How long can we tolerate such radical oscillation in one character, however iconic? How can we justify our long romance with such an unsettled enigma?

Putting the Goth in Gotham

Batman was the second major superhero to find a following in the comic book industry of the 1930s, providing a stark contrast to the bright, flashy optimism of his forebear, Superman. More influenced by film noir and crime novels than by science fiction, he found an immediate Depression-era audience. The early days of comic books met an undefined audience. Batman played to the middle, telling stories that appealed to soldiers, school children and traveling salesmen, and with Superman and other new entries he was soon selling millions of issues per month.

The primary audience was children, of course, and the publisher gambled that adding a child as a principal character would cement customer loyalty. Robin, orphaned by organized crime, came under Batman’s care and soon joined in his adventures. Though his origins were also tragic and dramatic, Robin’s presence gave Batman a fatherly dimension that furthered his shift to the mainstream. Over time, particularly after the war, Batman and Robin were domesticated.

Too close for comfort

The domestic allure of the 1950s is well-documented, providing a monetary channel for post-war affluence and a means of repatriation for soldiers returning home and women exiting the workforce. The American image of the day was security, propriety and general bliss, providing nary a reason to leave the house. The comic book audience was fragmented, with readers attracted to gritty crime stories pilloried by parents desperate to shield their children from harmful influences. Superhero comics settled on an audience of children, which meant that their stories — most notably stories of the Batman — became sillier and simpler, with villains serving more as pranksters than as menaces to society.

The sillier Batman became, the more seriously he was scrutinized. As the 1950s progressed, perceived threats to domestic tranquility became matters of grave public concern. When Frederick Wertham published his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, a damning polemic on the harmful effects of comic reading, he scandalized his audience by reporting that some of his adolescent male clients reported homosexual wish dreams based on Batman and Robin.

Comics producers tried to silence the gay reading of Batman. New characters were added, including Batwoman and Batgirl, to suggest heterosexual love interests for both Batman and Robin. Nevertheless, the Wertham revelation signaled the beginning of what might well have been Batman’s end — by 1965 the title was in grave danger of being canceled.

If you can’t beat ’em …

In 1966, however, ABC Television launched the Batman television show, airing twice weekly. Comic book sales surged to their highest levels, and Batman was revived. Rather than fight back against the stigma of silliness and subversion that had sunk the character so low, the television reveled in camp. Bizarre camera angles, outlandish colors and sets, ridiculous dilemmas, melodramatic language, and flamboyant acting made the show the centerpiece of pop television. The program won a devoted adult audience, with kids watching alongside the adults.

Interestingly enough, viewers who would have watched the show as children (myself included) recall not so much the silliness of the program as the sense of adventure that made each episode appointment television. Will Brooker, in his book Batman Unmasked, reflects on his childhood experience:

I didn’t think it was funny when Batman announced that he’d resisted King Tut’s hypnosis by reciting his times tables backwards; I thought it was pretty impressive. . . . As an adult watching the series for this research, I found Batman divinely funny: but I can still very much remember what it was like to idolize the Caped Crusader. (pp. 197-98)

Brooker highlights the phenomenon of the dual audience — adult viewers reveling in the self-mocking humor of the series, set alongside young viewers seeing the full flash and spectacle of a hero in action. The same show that salvaged Batman as a character by lampooning him for adults thus, simultaneously, built a fiercely loyal fan base of young children by showcasing the character’s life of adventure.

Return to the Dark Knight

The camp television show was cancelled after only a few seasons, ending Batman’s romance with the mainstream. In the meantime, the comic book industry had been changing dramatically. Now appealing more centrally to a college-age audience, writing was geared toward issues that interested that demographic. Comic books were telling stories of racial tension, Cold War scenarios, illicit drug use, and cavalier sexuality. Now-adult fans interacted more directly with comics producers than ever before, and the consensus was that Batman is a serious character — not silly. The post-television Batman parted ways with Robin and focused in hard on the crime plaguing Gotham City. Writers Gardner Fox and Denny O’Neil, among others, emphasized Batman as the world’s greatest detective, putting a lie to the TV series’ Batman-as-gadabout and fueling two decades of serious storytelling.

Of course, Batman never really shed his TV image during this time. The 1960s series continued in reruns with its dual-audience formula, and Saturday morning cartoons of various stripes reinforced the image of Batman as a folksy patriarch, complete with Robin and the occasional magic bug named Batmite. Young viewers still took comfort in Batman’s accessibility, and read adventure into the bright colors that characterized his television exploits. But with the retrenchment of the comic book community as a cloistered set of writers and artists, the character’s potential for somber storytelling was mined for all its worth.

Serious-Batman reached its apex with 1986’s The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller. Miller, who later would write the comics that eventually gave us another of this year’s blockbusters, Sin City, took his inspiration as much from the crime-novel genre as from Batman’s history and superhero conventions. Miller starts his fresh take on Batman by introducing us to Bruce Wayne toward the end of his life, as he struggles to retain his sanity, much less his relevance, in a world that has long since buried the Batman.

In his book How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, Geoff Klock highlights the “deliberate misreading” Miller applied to the comic icon: “Miller forces the world of Batman [in all its innate silliness] to make sense” (p. 29). Bruce Wayne has aged to a point never seen by any previous comics writer. Robin has been killed, at some point, but Batman has been pressed into another patriarchal role. This time, it’s by a girl who speaks a barely recognizable English, and who wishes to take up the mantle of the “boy wonder.” Batman’s enemies are portrayed as having intimate knowledge of his psyche, and prove, ultimately, to be closer to him than that other iconic hero of comics history, Superman. The world that died to Batman 10 years prior has become a scary, scary place, and the only humor that enters the story is infused with irony, cynicism and defiance. Batman is not only serious, he is deadly serious.

Deadly seriousness ruled the day in comic writing, however. Alan Moore, who scripted the simultaneous blockbuster The Watchmen as an utter deconstruction of the superhero mythos, wrote about the new gothic home crafted for Miller’s Batman:

Gotham City, a place which during the comic stories of the 1940s and 1950s seemed to be an extended urban playground stuffed with giant typewriters and other gargantuan props, becomes something much grimmer in Miller’s hands. A dark and unfriendly city in decay, populated by rabid and sociopathic streetgangs, it comes to resemble more closely the urban masses which may very well exist in our own uncomfortably near future. . . . The values of the world we see are no longer defined in the clear, bright, primary colors of the conventional comic book but in . . . more subtle and ambiguous tones.

The Dark Knight Returns was met with immediate critical acclaim and consumer enthusiasm, and the Batman film that would launch the new franchise three years later would capitalize on Miller’s brooding vision.

Overexposed

Four films and three Batmen later, the franchise had entirely abandoned Miller’s take on the world of Batman. Gone was the dark, foreboding cityscape; in its place were skateboard ramps, double-entendres and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The cryptic Bruce Wayne portrayed by actor Michael Keaton had devolved into a lovable, bumbling patriarch played by George Clooney. In the meantime, another wildly successful cartoon had entered syndication, and although this animated Batman had some edge to him — no pupils in his eyes and a gruff, utilitarian voice — he was surrounded by the pranksters and silly supporting cast that had characterized stories in the 1950s.

Meanwhile, the grittiness that had entered comic-book storytelling through Miller had diffused from Batman into other storylines, and what had been unique to Batman quickly came to characterize the industry. Specialty shops became lone sanctuaries for proponents of that industry, and comic book readers became laughing stocks in the eyes of the mainstream. The star-studded comedy Mystery Men lampooned not just Batman, but superheroes in general. More broadly, the film mocked the obsession that overtakes fans of superheroes. The capacity for mainstream popular culture to take superheroes seriously had reached its limit, and only fanatics were left to embrace the darker side of Batman and his peers.

Isolating serious readers of comic books in quarantine, however, ultimately incubated some profound storytelling opportunities, enabling a renaissance of the genre, and launching the cycle all over again.

If I don’t laugh I’ll cry

Today’s Batman, in film, on television, and in print, is typically dour, obsessive, efficient and generally unfriendly. He remains so focused on his mission — to combat crime and seek the welfare of his city — that he remains isolated even from those closest to him. He has, as such, become a bit of a laughing stock to other superheroes. Kevin Smith’s 2002 Green Arrow: Quiver features just one of many such interactions:

“With all due respect, Bats . . . anyone ever tell you you’re a weird guy?”
“You’re here to observe, Stephanie. Not to make observations.”
“I know, but c’mon—you find a friend who everyone thought was dead, and instead of throwing him a ‘welcome home’ party . . . or even a ‘Holy Moley! You’re alive!’ party … you knock him out, x-ray every bone in his body, and give him multiple cat-scans. Or do we call ‘em ‘bat-scans’ down here?”

Hyperseriousness in any situation, after all, is itself rather silly. And, in a sense, it’s a little sad as well. Teenaged Robin suffers from Batman’s seriousness as he’s forced to be an ever-vigilant soldier while his friends get to play at recess. Neil Gaiman, author of the acclaimed Sandman series, and no stranger to serious storytelling in the comic format, lamented the loss of Batman’s playfulness using the Riddler’s voice in 1995’s “When Is a Door”:

It was fun in the old days. … We hung out together, down at the “What A Way to Go-Go.” It was great! … You know what they call them now? Camp, kitsch, corny …  Well, I loved them — they were part of my childhood.

In response, the genre has expanded the principle of the dual audience to a triple audience. The young are courted through animation, merchandising and age-specific stories and formatting; the adult fanatics are honored with deliberate misreadings of characters in a variety of formats (such as Brian Augustyn’s Gotham by Gaslight, placing Batman in the historical context of Jack the Ripper); and the adult mainstream is guaranteed a laugh, with winks of self-referential humor and with storytelling that acknowledges the silliness of simply being human.

So, for example, the X-Men are represented in toy stores and on the Cartoon Network, they’re reconceived by postmodern storytelling juggernaut Joss Whedon, and they mock themselves in film with jokes about spandex and code names. Films that fail to acknowledge this triple reading, such as 2004’s The Punisher and 2005’s Elektra, are given negative reviews by fanatics and perform poorly at the box office.

Batman Begins offers psychological complexity to the adults, reverent treatment of characters to the fanboys, and lots of toys for the kids. Batman, more so than Superman or any other character, continues to cover the complete spectrum, from silly to serious, with astonishing effectiveness. Moviegoers feel no compunction laughing at the souped-up Batmobile mere moments after weeping for a traumatized young boy.

The fact of the matter is, stories about superheroes, much like stories about all of us, can hardly avoid a simultaneous mix of seriousness and silliness. Fundamentally, after all, stories about superheroes are merely supercharged stories about us. The agony these heroes feel over the wrongs done to them may, from an objective distance, be clearly overdone, but with a sympathetic viewing they can be seen as true expressions of how people struggle through whatever life they’ve been given. With a clear head, we can laugh at ourselves for the ways that we react to others, and yet, we can remove ourselves from our own lives for only so long before we have to deal again with the agony as we experience it. Our pain would be silly if it weren’t so sad.

Authors have clearer sight than their characters — they can see the absurdity and the agony all at once. Authors who have told the stories of Batman and his contemporaries have chosen to emphasize either silliness or seriousness, but virtually no Batman tragedy is told entirely without humor, and virtually no Batman comedy is told entirely without the subtle weight of pain. We can sympathize with Batman even as we’re tempted to laugh, because life itself is such a subtle mixture of tragedy and comedy that we don’t always know whether to laugh or cry. And there — somewhere between the tragedy and the comedy of it all — lies the truth.

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >
Purchase these books through Powells.com and a portion of the proceeds benefit InTheFray

Comic Book Character: Unleashing the Hero in Us All
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=1-0830832602-0

RESOURCES >

Fan-initiated community page
URL: http://www.darkknight.ca

Batman Begins official movie site
URL: http://www2.warnerbros.com/batmanbegins/index.html

Adam West, star of 1960s Batman television series
URL: http://www.adamwest.com

Fan-initiated chronicles of Batman, 1940s-1960s
URL: http://www.goldenagebatman.com

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“There is just something intriguing about a woman who looks like she could kill you.”
— Bryan Williams

Jennifer Garner walks funny. Watch Alias and you’ll see what I mean — one arm is raised in front of her, as if to stop what’s coming, and one arm is bent back, almost cocked. Her feet don’t quite criss-cross, as though she doesn’t want to be off-balance. She floats rather than walks, always one step away from a battle stance.

Jennifer Garner is the current head of state in Grrl World. She’s tough, gorgeous, sensitive and serious. She’ll do romantic comedy when she wants to, but mostly she just kicks butt in a variety of venues. She’s inherited the throne of the action chick with her successful turns in Alias, and will reign on the big screen in Elektra. She is a force to be reckoned with, and serves as the latest signpost in the journey of feminine heroics.

Tough old birds

There have always been women who have captured the imagination of their cultures, and many of them have done so by force. ‘Woman as warrior’ is not such an unfamiliar image that its history cannot be traced. In the West, we can look to the ancients for examples of women accustomed to the thrill of adventure or the terror of violence — witness Artemis the Greek goddess of the hunt, Deborah the judge of Israel, or Cleopatra the queen of Egypt. We can recall Joan of Arc, Catherine the Great, or even the iconic farm wife of the American westward expansion. These are women of strong backs and iron wills.

We have left room in our hearts for women of valor, but these visions can become caricatured. Some images persist: the noble, frail, civilized women who must be protected from the world outside, or the wild women from whom young men must guard their hearts. For much of history, woman of valor didn’t challenge, so much as mitigate, that cultural bias. Deborah was revered by Israel as its judge, yet she derided her warrior Barak for needing a woman to fight his battles. Rosie the Riveter served as a convenient icon for World War II America, when women were needed in industrial labor while men were at war, but she was quickly replaced by the Happy Homemaker once the war was won. In more recent history, however, strong women have lingered, as have their audiences. Since World War II, and more forcefully since the Civil Rights movement, women in heroics have moved from temporary positions to strong, silent partners, to principals in their own stories.

Wonder women and girly powers

Scholar Richard Reynolds characterizes the superhero as a modern mythology, complete with its own gods and goddesses. But these goddesses were slow in coming. It took an intentional act of creation on the part of psychotherapist William Moulton Marston for the first great superheroine, Wonder Woman, to come out swinging. The heroines that followed were either granted distinctly “feminine” powers, or were utterly derivative, with names and powers identical to, but muted from, their male counterparts.

• The “lasso of truth” bound Wonder Woman’s enemies, rendering them unable to fight and incapable of lying. The domination imagery has been widely commented on.
• While Batman and Robin would swim through a sea of villains, throwing punches as they went, Batgirl tended to sit above the fray, letting the bad guys come to her, then kicking them in the face with her high-heeled bat-boots.
• The Scarlet Witch didn’t fight physically; by controlling the laws of probability she changed the outcome of conflicts by changing her mind.
• The X-Men’s Marvel Girl was a telepath — another ability characterized by passivity rather than physical prowess.
• Susan Storm of the Fantastic Four took the name Invisible Girl (not yet, apparently, a woman, despite her marriage to team patriarch Mr. Fantastic). In battle she would simply fade from view.

Six steps behind

In spite of obvious gender inequalities inherent in the design of women characters, the commitment to an expanding female presence in comic books was a significant development. With the advent of Invisible Girl and the women who followed after her, the dynamics of comic book storytelling changed. Sexual politics, now far more sophisticated than the cat-and-mouse games of Superman and Lois Lane, were driving a storytelling format that had shifted from issue-specific epics (one issue tells one complete story) to a serial format (plots and characters developing over years and even decades). Women had found their niche in the genre, as they were finding their niche on television and in song.

Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie told the stories of women with exceptional abilities living out an idyllic existence from week to week. Women sang about the joys and challenges of romance in chart-topping hits like He’s So Fine and It’s My Party (I Can Cry If I Want To). While women were enjoying prominent roles in a variety of mediums, their worldview was highly restricted. Male characters (such as Superman, Captain Kirk, and Marshall Dillon) were often driven by the call of adventure, while female characters were still motivated largely by romance and domestic tranquility.

While the far-reaching implications of the Civil Rights movement prompted discussions about equality as a practical rather than cerebral issue, the job market was also being forced further open to women. By the late 1970s Nancy Drew and Charlie’s Angels were on television as (relatively) independent heroes, and the comic book hero Dazzler, disco singer with mutant powers, celebrated the power of women to define heroism for themselves: “World savin’ ain’t my style . . . I prefer singin’ my heart out to an audience that really digs me,” said “Dazzler” in Comic Book Encyclopedia.

The good, the bad, and the beautiful

Moral ambiguity ruled the day in the 1980s — or so it would seem. Marvel Girl had grown in power, sacrificed herself on behalf of the X-Men, and was reborn as the Phoenix. A sympathetic hero, she was driven insane by her newfound power and destroyed an entire universe. The beloved Jean Grey had gone bad and had to be punished, but at her trial she once again sacrificed herself to save her friends. Whether hero or villain, she was dead.

Catwoman, with a longer history than Jean Grey, gained prominence as well. Always acknowledged as a villain, but with a clear hold on Batman’s affections, Catwoman played a role in the landmark Dark Knight Returns, a story of Batman ten years after his retirement, and in Batman: Year One, the first year of Bruce Wayne’s crime fighting career.

Much later, in the 1980s, the character of Catwoman was played with supreme sensibility by Michelle Pfeiffer in the second film of the Batman franchise. Sexy and sympathetic, Pfeiffer’s Catwoman stole the show. Blurring the lines between good and bad, Pfeiffer saw the villain “as a positive role model if you look at her metaphorically. She’s about empowerment, a character coming into her own,” Suzan Colón wrote in Catwoman: The Life and Times of a Feline Fatale.

Into the midst of these longstanding characters came a new woman with a nebulous history: Elektra Natchios was an intriguing romantic interest for fan favorite Daredevil. She appeared out of nowhere and prompted a mild revisionist retelling of Daredevil’s history — a college love of Matt Murdock, she witnessed her father’s killing and lashed out at Matt: “I used to love the world. . . . You’re a part of that world. And you love it. You let it hurt you and you love it all the more. I’m not that strong, ” she said in Elektra Saga. Her innocence lost, Elektra channels her rage into a job as an assassin. Even after dying (more than once), Elektra remained a popular character who would ultimately make the jump to film — not simply as a foil for the male hero, but as the center of a storyteller’s universe.

Girl power remixed

Elektra opened the floodgates for strong, independent women in heroic roles. In the comics, characters like Witchblade carved out their own niche audiences, and writer Anne Nocenti took a turn crafting Daredevil, taking up where Elektra’s creator left off,  introducing her own complex character, Typhoid Mary, whose split personality made her sympathetic one moment, psychotic the next.

On television, women were becoming the focal point for action. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a cult favorite that rested the fate of the world on a teenage girl’s shoulders. With its commitment to ensemble heroics and relationship development, Buffy and its spinoff series Angel turned convention on its ear. Whereas “legitimate knowing in Western patriarchal cultures has for centuries situated the ideal knower as an autonomous individual,” and in particular “strong female heroes have been represented as isolated from other women socially,” Sharon Ross wrote in “Tough Enough,” in Action Chicks. Here we saw men and women fighting side by side with a young woman — a child, really — leading them.

Alongside Buffy were others — shows like La Femme Nikita, Xena: Warrior Princess, Witchblade, Dark Angel, Birds of Prey — each showcasing the particular strengths and challenges of women in heroic roles. Even children’s programming got in on the act with The Power-Puff Girls and Totally Spies. While many such series featured a man in prominent leadership over the principal characters, the women remained the heroes, and the drama involved watching them come to terms with their emerging power and womanhood.

Alias, Elektra

That brings us to Alias, the most recent entry in grrl power television. Alias follows Sydney Bristow, a young woman working alongside a man, and under the authority of her father and a father figure, until she realizes that the spy agency she works for is an enemy of the American government. She turns herself in to the CIA and begins to work as a double agent. In the process, she is given another male mentor, her “handler.” The show develops from there as Sydney and her viewers have to make sense of unbelievable plot twists from minute to minute while Sydney avoids being killed or revealing her secret mission.

Jennifer Garner brought a youthful naiveté to the role of Sydney, striking a difficult balance between supreme competence and a sense of being in over her head. As the series develops, we see Sydney seize and effectively wield power, not just physically, but bureaucratically: she makes the systems work for her.

In this sense, Alias reflects a common theme in female heroics, particularly for the young: our hero is as much becoming as she is overcoming. The most recent wave of women characters has brought this insight into heroism, where it has often been lacking. Rather than hacking away at villains until there are no more villains to hack away at, “feminine” heroes are “flexible with how they approach the events with which they become involved. They learn to listen before they speak, converse before they act,’ according to Sharon Ross. This shift offers a corrective to the negative agenda of the conventional epic (putting an end to clear and present danger) by pursuing a positive agenda: the peace and prosperity of the whole community.

This pursuit finds its way into the Elektra film as well. In the 2003 film Daredevil, Jennifer Garner plays Elektra, a character who bears a striking resemblance to Sydney Bristow. In the 2005 sequel, Elektra, Garner reprises the titular role. Here, we no longer find the young, naïve girl struggling to get by. Elektra is hardened, old-souled and is almost mythically ruthless until she meets a girl who is at the first step in the same journey. Elektra, having left behind her own “handler,” Stick, becomes the handler for her protégé while fighting to protect the girl’s life. In the process, Elektra fulfills a prophecy that leads to a final peace after centuries of conflict.

Naturally, she also learns a lot about herself. Garner told Wizard magazine that Elektra “does not enjoy this journey back to well-being at all. She doesn’t see the good in it. Nor does she see any good in herself.” The good becomes evident, however, in the maternal looks she gives her student, in her reconciliation with Stick, in the vindication of her mother’s death, and in her own happy ending as she walks off into the sunset.

Former villain and never-ending warrior, Elektra breaks new ground for women of valor. She has left behind the protection of men while maintaining a close relationship with them — she has no handler, only men who wish her well. She makes peace with who she is: as a woman and a warrior. In playing the role, Garner herself felt “like a great combination of a fighter and a girl.” While the film is unlikely to break box office records, the impact of Elektra will linger long, leaving young women and men with a vision of heroism that moves beyond simple opposition to evil by adding the promotion of good. Elektra is a hero, plain and simple, in the fight for her own humanity — just as all of us, male and female, are called to be.

STORY INDEX

RESOURCES >

Dave A. Zimmerman’s blog Strangely Dim
URL: http://ivpress.gospelcom.net/campus/sd/

A Tale of Two Superheroes: Spider-Man, the Punisher & the Ethics of Power
URL: http://www.bustedhalo.com/archive/2004_18pop_culture.htm

Elektra Artwork Gallery
URL: http://www.wordsandpictures.org/Elektra/maingallery.html

BOOKS >
Purchase these books through Powells.com and a portion of the proceeds benefit InTheFray

Comic Book Character
By David A. Zimmerman. Published by InterVarsity Press. 2004.
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0830832602

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