The Dual Self
At the simplest level a superhero is two different people because they have a secret self (the superhero). They live as an ordinary human being, and also as a crusader for justice who has special abilities.
In the eighties, like many aspects of superhero comics, this idea got upgraded. I don’t know where it first happened, but I noticed it in the Tim Burton Batman movies—the idea of Bruce Wayne and Batman being two different people had become more complex and psychological. It applied also to The Joker and Catwoman, but in somewhat different ways. Catwoman was like Batman, in that she became a different person when she put on the costume. The Joker was transformed when he fell into a big vat of green goo, and he was then permanently the Joker, a psychopathic maniac with a distorted face. I recall in one scene he put on face makeup to make it look flesh colored again so he could pretend to still be the man he had been before the accident. So being his former self, the normal human dude, was a performance, a fake.
And technically that’s also what it was when Batman became Bruce Wayne and when Catwoman put on her secretary outfit and became Selena Kyle again. They had all been fundamentally transformed into monsters (hey, it was a Tim Burton movie! Batman was just a good-guy monster). But there was a big deal made in the movies about their duality—each one was actually two different characters. In fact there was a lot of interplay (and foreplay) going on between Bruce Wayne and Selena Kyle where they both needed to change into their super-costumes and go fight (or perpetuate) some crime. And then, all costumed up, they'd also meet on rooftops and engage in some super-foreplay, not recognizing each other. Fun stuff.
This reflects the idea of a superhero as a fantasy where an ordinary person stuck in the drab world of social reality can have special abilities beyond the human. Some of them can fly, or have great strength and toughness, plus all manner of other weird abilities. But this idea has become so much more nuanced now in Daredevil and to a lesser extent in the other Netflix Marvel shows, that it forced me to think deeply into this strange paradigm. What I’m discovering in Netflix Daredevil is something different than I’ve seen previously. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been done, just that I haven’t seen it. So now allow me to present my thoughts on the various ways in which superheroes and supervillains (or supermonsters in some cases) show this duality—
Like everything in superhero comics, it was done very simplistically in the beginning—back in the early thirties when Superman first put on the red cape and threw a car at some crook. I used to watch a channel called Comic Book Historians, and they go into a lot of detail about the history of the characters and the stories. I used to wonder, if the Superhero comics were being made concurrent with the Golden Age of magazine illustration, why did they have such relatively poor art and low-grade storytelling? It turns out it’s because the comics (especially the superhero comics) were considered a sort of ghettoized art form. The good artists and writers were working for the magazines, so it was complete amateurs doing the comic book stuff. Meanwhile there were some excellent artists doing certain newpapar strips, like Hal Foster on Prince Valiant. But superhero comics were a subgenre unto themselves, and there would be no college-trained artists or writers in the field until somewhere in the Sixties, probably starting with Neal Adams. Until that point it was just a bunch of fans who had learned to draw or write on their own and hadn’t taken it to professional stadards. Even the great Jack Kirby started out as a total amateur in the thirties or forties and gradually got better, but he never had any formal training. If he did his work would have looked very different.
I’m not sure where or when professionalism arrived in comic book writing, but I noticed some seismic changes in the early Eighties, beginning with The Uncanny X Men, with Chris Clarement writing and John Byrne and Terry Austin drawing. The characters and storylines took a quantum leap forward. It started to happen on other titles too shortly after. One of the guys who stepped in and changed things was Frank Miller, who both pencilled and scripted much of his work, and who did a highly esteemed run on Daredevil in which he fundamentally reinvigorated what was at the time a failing series and revamped the characters. The Netflix show is based largely on his innovations (almost entirely, but with a lot of small changes thrown in). I have the entire run in the form of a slipcased set of trade paperbacks, but I haven’t read the whole thing. Hey, my interest in comics was mostly for the art. For the purposes of doing this writeup I have now read the first trade paperback in the set, called The Man Without Fear, and I’ve found some very interesting things.
I can’t seem to stop myself from going into the whole history rather than just talking about the dualistic characters. Maybe I need to extract some of this and make an intro? We’ll see. For now I’m just going to keep on. It’s often when I’m rambling like this that I stumble onto the best ideas.
It’s hard to pin down exactly who introduced what innovations, and from here on out I’ll stop trying. I will say right here though that the two biggest and best innovations Miller brought to the table were Film Noir and what I call The Spartan Code. As part of my preparation for this writeup I read an interview with Miller and his inker Klaus Jansen, and an article called Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, both of which are included in the Companion book in the Daredevil set.
Frank said one of the things that makes him different from most comic book creators is that many of them have little to no interest in anything outside of comics, but he lost interest in superhero comics for a long time. His big interests during that time included film noir, hardboiled detective fiction, crime fiction, police procedurals, and the Spartans. As for comics, he did keep reading some, but no superhero stuff. Instead it was some of the EC stuff (I forget what exactly, but it was along the lines of crime war and horror), and The Spirit by Will Eisner. All of these influences played heavily into what he would do in his comic book work.
Netflix Daredevil Analysis—The Dual Self
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