Document Type
Review
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Comic books have a tradition of ignoring history, both personal and cultural. Umberto Eco's essay on Superman noted that, despite having had numerous adventures, Superman did not accumulate a personal history. As Orion Ussner Kidder explains in a review of Eco's article,
The second, and far complex, feature of the Superman cycle is related to his narrative immortality. Superman does not "consume himself," [. . . ] which means that his actions do not consume time, he "accomplishes a given job [. . . and] at this point the story ends. [. . .] If [the story] took Superman up again at the point where he left off, he would have taken a step toward death" [. . . ] His immortality, in the comics, comes with an inability to actually progress as a character.
He cannot be allowed to, for example, clearly enunciate and recall all of his adventures because doing so would imply that he'd had specific experiences that could be documented and numbered; experiences that have a finite number at all would ruin the illusion. Within this timelessness and deathlessness, Eco locates what I've taken to calling the "neverwhen" of American superhero stories, and he describes as "the illusion of a continuous present."
When Marvel Comics introduced its superhero line in the 1960s, it broke the "neverwhen" trend and had the characters make casual references to, and become involved in, contemporary trends. Now, forty years later, Marvel tries to ignore that Spider-man used to mention Ed Sullivan and that the Thing and the Human Torch met the Beatles in the band's mophead prime.
Repository Citation
Pyle, Christian L.. "Review of Justice League: The New Frontier." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–3. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss2/10