Willy Liangco graduated from the UP College of Medicine this year and is presently "a lost soul, prowling around unsuspecting hospitals." In his spare time he likes to watch everything on TV, read books and comic books, and write short fiction. He is currently "losing his mind trying to understand the 70-year continuity of DC Comics." Willy became a doctor because of his inspiration, Agent Scully. He blogs at mulderandscully.blog-city.com
The fondest memories of my childhood have superheroes flying around the pages of yellowish, slowly disintegrating paper, wearing bright costumes and even brighter smiles, fighting crime in the quaint ‘60s – Batman inspired by the camp of Adam West, Wonder Woman in her star-spangled shorts romancing an American war pilot, Superman turning the earth against its axis along with Supergirl, Beppo the Super Monkey, Krypto the Super Dog, Streaky the Super Cat, and Comet the Super Horse.
I was an ‘80s child displaced by decades, reading my father’s wonderfully jovial childhood comics while oblivious to the then ongoing grim-and-gritty direction of the Dark Knight Returns variety the comic book industry was taking. And with the ‘60s comic books came my father’s endless back stories, placing me in the context of what it was like – when a bunch of comic books could be bought by a 10-year-old kid across the street for a peso or two; when he wouldn’t care whether they get creased or dog-eared; and when, after a hard day’s work in their market hardware store he would line up the comic books he would reward himself with. Let those friends go to the movies, fool with the girls, play in the town plaza – Batman, Robin, and Bat-Mite were better company.
My father wouldn’t romanticize the era – the ’60s were stressful and his youth had its share of filth, but for the 12 minutes that it would take him to read one issue of Adventure Comics or Blackhawk, he was shut off from the real world. And that was the idea. Youthful escapism has always been the selling point of entertainment, and my father reveled in escaping. I know I did. I remember being eight years old, coming home from school, crying after the school bully had smeared saliva on my head. I remember being marooned in our sweltering house in the nine-hour-a-day-brownout summer of 1993, wet and bored. I remember my cat being run down on the street, viscera scattered all over. Stapled with the unpleasant memory is always the comic book, keeping the neuroses at bay.
And in what fun a manner was neurosis kept at arm’s length. We had one comfortable room in our house called The Batcave, where boxes of comic books from the late ‘50s to the late ‘70s were waiting for us. After school my brother, my sister, and I would each get our own pile. I would go for The World’s Finest featuring Superman and Batman. My sister would scamper for the very few Wonder Woman. My brother preferred Superboy. No one would touch Weird Western Tales and War Stories. Those published during the ‘60s were our favorite – the era is called the Silver Age of Comic Books, but it might as well be the Golden Age.
The adventures of Superman and the Justice League were simple, short, and fun. Rarely were there long and sprawling epic battles requiring Superman to save the universe. Instead, we have Lois Lane forever trying in vain to prove that Clark Kent and Superman are one and the same, and Supergirl trying to discover how a sorority girl is cheating in an exam. An issue would have two or three complete, satiating stories in it, and you would flip the last page with sheer contentment. There was no lesson intended to be gained or new insight intended to be developed – there was only fun at its purest, most sacred, most orgasmic form.
And then we grew up. And we gathered the years, shelved the experiences both pleasant and smarting, bathed in disillusionment. Adolescence was painful, putting petty childhood difficulties to shame. And don’t even start on adulthood. I finished college with the university idealism intact, went straight to medicine and, in terms of psychological well-being, spiraled directly down to hell. My childhood officially ended for me when I was an intern, when I saw firsthand that decisions and non-decisions lead to actual, literal death. When I saw firsthand that people can not only be annoying, bad, nasty, or unfair – they can be genuinely, honest-to-goodness, downright evil, too. When I discovered that money actually matters, and that the absence of it causes, again, death. These are belated, belated, belated discoveries, and do they suck.
The transition itself was a dark phase for me, and the 2004 DC Comics mini-series Identity Crisis reflects this darkness, this change, this unwanted, inevitable maturity. Identity Crisis is a seven-part mini-series written by novelist Brad Meltzer and deftly illustrated by Rags Morales, recently compiled into a graphic novel. The series features the most prominent members of the Justice League dealing with the murder mystery of Elongated Man’s wife Sue Dibny and the discovery that she was raped years ago by the villain Dr. Light. In fear that the other loved ones would be put in danger, The Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Black Canary, Zatanna, Green Arrow, and The Atom decide to totally alter the personality of Dr. Light using Zatanna’s magical powers – perform a psychic lobotomy, if you will, without the knowledge of the other members.
Rape, murder, mind-wiping, secrets among The World’s Greatest Superheroes, fully fleshed-out human relationships. This, definitely, is not my father’s comic book, and I enjoyed every sordid minute of it. I have read a lot of excellent superhero comics that deal with mature themes, but in terms of laying out the humanity of the heroes by showing their frailties and their follies; in terms of taking the bits of crushed idealism and crushing them further; in terms of showing the contrast of what the heroes once were and what they are now. Identity Crisis is an achievement. The wide grins, the All-American heroics, the love among friends – they are still all here, but they serve only to deceive and obfuscate. What once was genuine is now sinister, for if the bubbly, heroic, fishnet-stockings-wearing Zatanna can press her fingernails on your temples, destroy everything you know, totally alter your persona, who is left to trust? In one of the most seminal moments of the series, Batman walks in on Zatanna performing her psychic lobotomy, and he is enraged at the violation. It becomes hero against hero, and in the moment that requires her to weigh in friendship and exigency, Zatanna, who utters her magical spells backwards, chooses to say, "Namtab, Pots! Tegrof!"
All of a sudden the heroes are not acting so heroic. They are, in fact, acting the way we would. If a nefarious villain with the power to create nuclear blasts discovers my secret identity and threatens to kill my parents, and if all I need to say is "Tegrof!", why not do it? Taking it a step further, if I can totally transmogrify him from an evil genius who murders wholesale into a harmless buffoon, will it not be a great service to mankind? Yet underneath is the real question – is it my decision to make? After years of reading books I finally have a true moral dilemma in front of me, and I feel my conscience getting skewered, twisted, and pulled.
Unlike in my father’s comic books, things are no longer distinct. I’m no longer sure if I want the heroes to succeed. The villains are still reprehensible, but I am no longer certain if they deserve their comeuppance. Hawkman, the Atom, and Zatanna are still fighting crime, but I’m beginning to question if their methods are ideal. Heck, I am not even sure what the ideal is anymore. And even if I am, I don’t know if adhering to it is worth the self-sacrifice. This confusion, the ambiguity of things, the presence of grays, apparently, comes with growing up. And, once again, it sucks.
As the heroes inch their way to solving the murder mystery, dramatic and superheroic highlights abound, and they can make the geekiest fanboy and the most cynical non-comicbook reader cheer, cry, and froth in the mouth. Among the most memorable ones include the battle between Deathstroke and the League, the explosion of Firestorm, the flashbacks in the satellite, and the presence in Sue Dibny’s brain of those… things, which is the key to the murder mystery. My favorite, however, is the death of Robin Tim Drake’s father. As Batman enfolds a distraught Robin, the caption reads: "Batman and Robin. Orphans." In a book that is all about the relationship of a superhero and his loved ones – mother and daughter, father and son, husband and wife – Batman and Robin are held together neither by blood nor even friendship, but by loneliness. And it is, for now, enough. As it turns out the murder mystery and the mindwipes are but devices to magnify the necessity of human relationship, for as a result of the murders the heroes rush to their loved ones and express love like they haven’t before. At the prospect of losing something we begin not only to recognize its value, but to actually create more value for it as well.
These days, it is my father who goes to my room to read my comic books. He always asks me what the latest superhero buzz is. And I tell him: Sue Dibny has just been raped and killed. Batman is more paranoid than usual. Batgirl is paralyzed from the waist down after being shot by the Joker years ago. This hero is dead, this hero is now a villain, this heroine is now a lesbian – and we would laugh uncomfortably. The comic book world is getting darker and more ambiguous. It is, to a certain extent, reflecting real life more than ever – ironic, in a world where a man called Aquaman can talk to fish.
I miss the clear-cut stories of the ‘60s, when Superman was good and Luthor was evil, period. But along with the stories I do have to grow up, and the literature that is Identity Crisis shows that now is the time. Moving forward can be painful, but what can you do. We have to read the glossy, as yet un-creased pages instead of the yellow, disintegrating ones. We have to rush and plummet and face things, and get slapped by realities most wicked and inspiring.