Spandex vs. Leather: Why Both Sides of the Debate About Superheroes Are Wrong

by Kirk Boxleitner

My name is Kirk Boxleitner, and I love classic, old-school, bright-and-shiny, silly spandex-suited, Silver Age-style superheroes.

However, if the comic book industry is meant not only to survive, but also to thrive and grow and evolve and move onward and upward, thus living up to Stan Lee’s signature credo of "Excelsior!" (which roughly translates to "ever higher" in Latin), then as much as it pains me to say it, the readership of this medium is going to have to cut down drastically on the percentage, if not the number, of patrons who share my tastes.

That having been said, I remain incredulous to the notion, often espoused by the emerging faction of self-described "anti-spandex" advocates within the greater body of the medium’s preexisting market, that the solution to the dilemma of how to attract a larger audience for the industry’s good works lies in phasing out the very concept of the superhero altogether.

Putting aside the current trend toward overtly comic book-based movies entirely - not the least of which was a certain $400-plus million-grossing summer action film that became the fifth highest-grossing motion picture of all time not too terribly long ago - I would still argue that one of the greatest ironies of the comic book industry, versus the rest of the entertainment media, is the fact that superhero comic books are increasingly being produced by people who seem neither to care for nor understand the genre, and yet, at the exact same time, every other form of storytelling is turning more and more into a showcase for characters who are superheroes in everything but name only.

Over a decade ago, critics snarked at Bruce Willis in the first Die Hard film for playing a role that was so improbably invulnerable that they accused the character of being "a comic book superhero without a costume," but nowadays, such a common sense-defying ability to withstand bullets and bombs and shrapnel and car crashes and all the like has come to represent the bare-minimum par-for-the-course standard even for such unconvincingly neophyte tough-guy action-hero wannabes as Will Smith and Martin Lawrence in the Bad Boys franchise of films.

Substitute the words "wizard" and "magic" with the words "mutant" and "powers", and Harry Potter stands revealed for who and what he truly is - a would-be student of Professor Xavier, who just so happens to be attending Hogwarts instead, presumably because the X-Men’s current curriculum in the comic books is too fixated upon the extramarital affairs between its instructors and the hallucinogenic visions of its outgoing author to do anything so picayune as cater more to the tastes of an all-ages audience.

Likewise, anyone who honestly doesn’t believe that Joss Whedon’s Buffy: The Vampire Slayer wasn’t just a supernatural channeling of Chris Claremont’s run on Marvel’s merry mutant titles, especially given the fact that Whedon himself went so far out of his way to offer his due props to Claremont that he devoted an entire season of the show to recreating the Dark Phoenix arc, is simply being willfully ignorant.

I’m a huge old-school superhero enthusiast, but even I have begun to harbor somewhat mixed feeling about the implications of the degree to which the superhero genre seems to be overtaking all other forms of storytelling in the mass media, because make no mistake, no matter how much many of the creators and companies in the comic book industry seem to be embarrassed by the fact that they’re doing superhero stories, and no matter how much they seem to be trying to shy away from telling those same sorts of stories, it doesn’t take much more than a cursory glance of virtually every other entertainment medium to realize that superheroes are apparently what the audience wants, even if they themselves don’t quite recognize it.

They want superheroes, and I’d even go so far as to assert that they want superheroes with just as much intricately constructed and intimidatingly confusing continuity as the most die-hard Pre-Crisis DC Universe fanboy might desire, as I’d argue that anyone who’s spent any length of time tracking the countless cross-hatching plotlines of the assorted Dragonball series on Cartoon Network can readily attest to.

They just don’t seem to want our superheroes, for the most part. Now, I’m sure that the "anti-spandex" crowd would hold this up as proof of their talking points, and argue in favor of doing away with the more "traditional" template of costumed crime-fighters in the name of allegedly "giving the people what they really want," but not surprisingly, I see this thing evolving along a different path than these people do.

With a handful of notable exceptions, I’d say that a lot of these folks tend to believe that the onus is upon comic book superheroes to become less about spandex, and more reflective of what they consider to be "real-life".

I, on the other hand, am more of a Stephen Jay Gould mind on this matter. That is to say, I believe that the two extremes - in this case, primary-colored spandex and grim-and-gritty "reality" - will eventually blend together into a convergence point somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, as Gould posited was the case in the development of ... well, virtually everything in existence, really, from the relative skill levels of baseball players to the contrasting points of view in political debates.

So, as much of an admittedly Silver Age-supporting space cadet as I may well occasionally be, I don’t see the genre (or sub-genre, if you prefer) of superheroes ever reverting entirely to the supposedly pristine ideal of "the good old days" of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, nor would I want it to, since that would kind of imply bringing back a lot of the less-than-positive traditions that tend to come as part of a package deal with the restoration of any previous era, especially when this includes the marginalization of female and non-Caucasian characters.

However, I don’t ever see superheroes going all the way over to the over side of The Matrix, either, as many of the more vocal proponents of the "anti-spandex" crew have infrequently suggested that they should, especially given the fact that The Matrix managed to immolate the majority of its own most devoted proponents in the course of its second and third installments, and as such, I suspect that we’ll be seeing one heck of a lot less black leather in our superhumanly powerful action heroes in the years to come, if only because the corporations that purvey our collective entertainments don’t hesitate to distance themselves from anything that they perceive as financial failures.

More importantly, though, is the reality that most of the newer breed of superheroes-in-everything-but-name are not nearly so drab or realistically rendered as I suspect a number of pundits out there might presume them to be.

After all, while it’s true that Buffy and her gang of "Scoobies" derive much of their dramatic frisson from being extraordinary individuals whose lack of "costumes" denotes their existence in a world that, supernatural elements aside, is meant to be practically indistinguishable from our own, there’s an entire generation of kids out there, if not more than one, that’s been growing up on a steady diet of characters whose increasingly iconic status within our emerging popular culture owes a great deal to their blindingly obvious and blatantly outlandish outward appearances. Goku and Gohan from Dragonball, Asuka and Rei from Evangelion, the Knight Sabers from Bubblegum Crisis, Ash and Pikachu from Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Gundam, and Kinnikuman ... they’re all anime, all wildly popular among audiences ranging from very young boys and girls on up, all saddled with deceptively elaborate and potentially off-putting backstories, almost all clad in instantly recognizable outfits so absurdly colorful and impractically cumbersome that they could scare even the most Lee-and-Liefeld-overdrawn X-Man from the Image ’90s, and thus far, almost every single one of them is managing to sustain a significant percentage of their fanbase, even as those same grade school-aged children age into adolescence.

Go ahead and make that Dragonball live-action movie, without giving Vegeta his signature head of inimitably artichoke-spiked hair, and you’ll hear an earful about it from endless successions of boys and girls, and even many young men and women, all across the country, as legions of totally normal, non-fanboyish kids transform into the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons right in front of your eyes.

They may not want capes or cowls any more than the "anti-spandex" cadre does, but they do expect any possible adaptation of their favorite characters to include Yu-Gi-Oh’s star-shaped and magenta-and-blonde-streaked coif, the proper attribution of Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee’s powers in Pokemon, an almost encyclopedically exacting level of conformity to the already established continuity of Buu in Dragonball, and of course, it goes without saying that they will absolutely savage and denounce any portrayal of Priss and Linna in Bubblegum Crisis that they deem not to be completely within the bounds of "in character".

As such, the way I see it, there are only three real differences between the fans of "traditional" superhero comic books and the fans of the superhero-in-everything-but-name anime and manga, to wit:

1) The anime and manga fans have already pledged their loyalty and devotion to a different set of characters than those that appear in the cartoons and comic books favored by "traditional" superhero fans;

2) According to all accounts, the fandom for the superheroes-in-everything-but-name that appear in this anime and manga is made up of equal parts male and female members, which is a far cry from the almost wholly testosterone-driven market for "traditional" superhero comic books and cartoons;

And 3) unlike the marketplace for "traditional" superhero comic books and cartoons, which various and sundry circumstances have reduced to a mere niche market of its former scope and glory, catering mostly to an ever-aging target audience, the industry for the superhero-in-everything-but-name genre of anime and manga is not only managing to hold onto a clear-cut majority of its preexisting consumer base, but is also continually replenishing its ranks with ever-newer and ever-younger readers and viewers.

Other than these three factors, I would go so far as to assert that darned near every other characteristic which the "anti-spandex" gang probably find most objectionable about the more ardent devotees of the "traditional" superhero comic books and cartoons - i.e. the obsessive consumption of anything and everything even remotely related to their favorite characters, to the near-total exclusion of any other characters, stories, or genres that exist outside these narrow avenues of pursuit, and the quasi-fundamentalist insistence upon an absolutely slavish adherence to the status quo iterations of the traditions, histories, and depictions of those same characters - are not only mirrored, but magnified among the fanbase for the superheroes-in-everything-but-name brand of anime and manga.

The "anti-spandex" band sees this as a move toward comic books finally telling more of the sort of stories that they would prefer to see.

I see it as simply substituting one set of fanboys for another ... except that this new set of fanboys (and girls) is much larger than the old set of fanboys whom they’re replacing, and moreover, unlike the increasingly dwindling ranks of the old set of fanboys, this new set of fanboys (and girls) seems to have developed the perfect means of never going extinct.

So, if you number yourself as being among the "anti-spandex" bunch, then I guess the question you should be asking yourself is, which tribe of superhero fanboys represents the lesser of two evils to you?

As for myself, so long as I can continue to get steady, straight hits of my classic, old-school, bright-and-shiny, silly spandex-suited, Silver Age-style superheroes, I will welcome these freakishly wide-eyed, laughably hairstyled pocket monster trainers, gigantic robot-suited soldiers, interplanetary professional wrestlers, and childlike wielders of impossibly superhuman powers with open arms