What to Do with Comics and the Multiverse(s)

...Now that we've been teaching comics as literature for years now

I have been teaching comics, as a genre, for awhile now (time really does fly, like Superman). The first time was back when I was teaching high school, and I used Alan Moore’s Watchmen as a class text—this took effort, as these were the ages when you could only teach the books that were “in the book room” and of which the school had enough copies. Ah, the persistence of Huck Finn and Catcher in the Rye.

There really was something different about that time, as works like Watchmen, Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Dark Knight Returns, and of course Chris Claremont’s X-Men had drastically repositioned the entire ethos of those worlds towards a “seriousness” and darkness in ways that we not only still feel today, but I would argue we have pursued even further. An easy example would be Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, which is light on laughs and heavy on hurt; let’s just say there is no Prince on the soundtrack.

I certainly never imagined the full superhero takeover of screens both big and small—enabled by leaps in technology—with Marvel really changing the game in a way that leaves us with more superhero content than even the most gluttonous could consume, or want to consume for that matter, especially with all narratives from competing companies and studios converging on a singularity: the multiverse.

So this brings me to Miles Morales and the Spider-verse films. First, let me say I love even the very idea of Miles Morales, and Into the Spider-verse is, for my consumer buck, the best Marvel film of them all. And yes, I love what these films do for representation and everything else that our cultural sewers deride as “woke.” Let’s just say I’d much rather be awake than asleep.

Yet…and you knew this was coming…I am having a negative reaction to all things multiverse. Why? Because I find these plots unconsciously speaking to who we really are as a society: consumers who not only want things, but want them in every variety possible, on demand. Of course, that is an easy thing to say, and yes, there are executives in rooms who have nothing but merchandizing and spinoffs in mind. But I’m talking about something different here. There are three credited writers for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (also, why the hyphens?)—Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Dave Callaham—and they are out to tell a real and powerful story (as a sign of our techno era, the animation itself still receives the bulk of the praise) and they are darn good at it. I imagine that not only is plotting a multiverse difficult, but doing so in a way that an audience can follow and understand truly requires you to stick the landing. Good writing is hard.

I am convinced that these writers are focused entirely on telling their story, not the merchandizing opportunities at issue in the C-suite. Still, unconsciously, the on-screen result, the “good guy,” is a seemingly endless line of product in the form of spider-heroes (running counter to the narrative of, say, Brad Bird’s The Incredibles). All parts are not interchangeable, but simultaneously present—race, gender, species, cyborg, hex code, and VR option are yours for the taking. You want a hero who sits on the couch and eats Fritos while fighting crime full time via headset? Done. There’s a whole universe for just you. You want a later-stage pregnancy web slinger whose universe apparently has the same abysmal work leave policies as ours: done. You want a black-and-white universe in which to keep your neighborhood friendly? How about sepia tone? It’s yours. You can have all of these at once, including a universe without a Spider-man (a genius bit of writing), but even there the idea that you don’t have the product, the thing, is an evil nightmarish enough to require a sequel to resolve it. Not having something is the antagonist.

So, swinging back around to the title: how do you teach this in a class? As literature, narrative, or cultural artifact? These narratives are important enough, if even by their prevalence, to be subject to critique and analysis, as well as involving the pedagogy of creation—how does one best create or make such narratives? What I am trying to square in my mind is how the concept of the multiverse is an antonym for something else that’s pretty darn important: history. Why? Because any historian will tell you that history is, and has always been, a multiverse of perspective and narrative, yet you still have to evidentially make decisions about “what is” based on the current accumulation that is the “historical record.” In other words, it’s the beautiful paradox of a multiverse existing in the confines of a single world (which is why, in terms of comics, we used to have a wonderful series called “What If?” and science fiction has always been our literary counterfactual lifeblood).

My go to piece of literature, and a novel I love dearly, is William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner understood that history was not a linear timeline, but accumulated like a snowfall—little pieces here and there layering to make a whole with an undulating surface, its apparent uniformity an ephemeral deception. This is why we get Quentin and Shreve reconstructing a southern history in a northern dorm room, their conversations based on previous conversations, with no primary documents beyond the scrap of a single letter. It is mesmerizing and beautiful in the truth of its fiction. But in the end, there is one world and the heroism lies in reconstructing it as faithfully as possible, so that we can definitively say things like: the Holocaust happened, the American Civil War was fought over slavery, systemic racism is fact, and on and on.

But I can’t help thinking our post-truth era in American politics is the twisted underbelly of the multiverse rage—pick the one that suits you best, because you can. It is there for you to consume, down to the very last detail.

But this is a space to work through ideas and I’m just beginning to work through this one. All thoughts are welcome!