The "Americanness" of the Superhero: A Few Thoughts

As any decent history of the superhero will tell you--not just the superhero in a broad sense going back to Gilgamesh but the comic book-based superhero tradition defined by Superman, the concept of the superhero has not been exclusively American, nor without its popularity outside the United States. (Indeed, just consider how much Marvel owes to the international markets, with these providing 69 percent of the nearly $3 billion gross of Avengers: Endgame.)

Still, it is common for observers to remark the idea of the superhero--the costumed, public persona-possessing comic book superhero--as having struck a particular chord in the United States, to somehow appeal more widely and deeply here than in many other places. I can think of at least two reasons for that, both suggested by my reading of Umberto Eco's essay "The Myth of Superman" (which I previously discussed here):

1. In the aforementioned essay Umberto Eco treated Superman as a myth--while noting that this myth differs from other myth in being a myth of the present-day rather than the past. The idea of a present-day myth seems to me to befit a country that, as the clichés have had it, has always been less preoccupied with the past than other countries, and more preoccupied with the present and future.

2. The attraction of the superhero is for many a sort of vicarious grandiose compensation for the mediocrity, inferiority, frustration that characterize the lot of most in this world, for many reasons. Of course, the desire for such compensation is universal, but again, in a society so atomized, individualistic, unequal, restless, insecure; so saturated with aspirationalism and thwarted aspirationalism and blame and self-blame of the thwarted for what they suffer; and offering so little else to hope for, ever fixing their eyes ever on individual "success," ever encouraging identification with such success and those who have it in that way that C. Wright Mills wrote about in White Collar; the desire, and the superhero as a way of gratifying it, seems likely to be the stronger. Indeed, if it is really the case that poor Americans see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," this is probably an easier sell--habituating people to the thought that they are exemplary in some way temporarily unrecognized by others, as if the real them is some more glamorous self behind the mundane surface and its unenviable treatment by others, or that the transformation of their situation is somehow always very close at hand, that they are ever just a radioactive spider bite away from greatness.*

* In light of inflation we should probably revise that to "temporarily embarrassed billionaires." I put the reader on notice that that is the form I will use from here on out.