Peter Coogan, The Superhero Renaissance and The Superhero Genre

(In Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre)

In this book, Coogan sets out to pay some much needed attention to the genre of superhero fiction, in film and comic books. Unfortunately, it's riddled with all the wrong kinds of rhetoric (including the claim that it is concerned only with "pure" aesthetics [EDIT: intended to write "poetics"], and not culture, as though that is even possible, let alone desirable*), interspersed by all-too-few genuine insights.

The problem here is that Coogan makes far too many broad, sweeping, arbitrary statements which reek of just-plain fandom rather than a happy unison of fandom and scholarship. For example, the notion that campy superhero texts always fail is ridiculous - obviously the 1960s Batman TV show was wildly successful. This kind of selective argument just doesn't fly so far as I'm concerned.

Worse still, Coogan seems to think that there is some kind of absolute, "true" version of every superhero that all superhero texts aspire towards. Again, typical fanboy rhetoric that just doesn't hold up in this context. Suggesting that Ang Lee's Hulk is not a superhero movie because it is a betrayal of the heroic origins of the character and is evidence of a failed vision rather than a true superhero film is patently absurd. A more accurate statement would be that Coogan's book is a betrayal of contemporary thinking on superheroes and genre, and that is evidence of a failed vision.

One potentially useful idea that Coogan puts forward is the concept of "resonant tropes" that link the many different versions of superheroes together - big things like costumes and powers, but also little things like Bruce Wayne's mother's pearls or Uncle Ben's advice to Peter Parker. These repeated and familiar but also unstable conventions are the linkages which connect franchise texts to one another, and could be an interesting way of articulating my idea of reintroduction.

Although not Coogan's concept, a quotation from Thomas Schatz also got me thinking: genre as privileged story form, that becomes formally recognized by society through repetition. Naturally, the same formulation could easily be applied to franchises on a smaller scale. Recognizable "brand-name" franchises become privileged as reliable and familiar story forms.

At the end of the day, Coogan's occasional good ideas are subjected to the archaic notion of genre as a fixed construct with a predictable, consistent pattern of evolution - precisely the notion that Altman, Neale and other have tried to debunk.

*Adimittedly, I've been known to rely on the same schtick in the past, but it really is useless.