Rereading Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme: 3. S/S

Maybe – or maybe it’s just me – looking at the loading of all these layers across a couple of pages has put you in mind of Barthes’ S/Z. It has, hasn’t it! Go on, you can admit it!

Barthes, in S/Z, devises a series of codes that underpin the interpretation – the act of reading itself – of Balzac’s “Sarrasine.” Some of them transfer easily enough onto the different layers of text we talked about in the previous post: for the narrative action, Barthes gives us the proairetic code. The associations called to mind by the text are mapped by the semic code. The cultural knowledge we share with the text is described by the cultural code – and so on. (And this cultural code is something I would like to discuss in a future post – in part because there are so many assumptions the text seems to make that I don’t share, but also because I think reading it as a cold war artefact helps us understand it better.)

But for now, I’d like to invoke a code that only applies to certain comics being written in the 80s. I’ll call it the Ghost Code for now, because I’m not yet quite sure if it is a property of the text or not. This code structures our reading when we deal with a text that seems to press at the boudaries of what superhero comics in the 80s could do, without any desire to blow apart, dissolve or transcend those limits (in the way Alan Moore would do, for example).

One of the things that makes Squadron Supreme compelling is that it is, in one way, an attempt to write the very last superhero story. What other endgame for the genre other than the creation of utopia on earth? If great power confers great responsibility – well, have we got some responsibilities for you! So this would be a proper twilight of the idols, the final world-saving act in the Squadron’s lifetime of world-saving. It is apocalyptic, because it is the end – the genre can go no further – and because it reveals something we already knew, the profound truth of these atomic women and men in their dazzling outlandish garb. We always knew this was their destiny.

Or so it might be – if Gru was not committed to thrills in the Mighty Marvel Manner, because you demanded it, true believer. The ghost code is what marks our reading when a story like Squadron Supreme seems about to transcend itself, when the narrative is on the verge of demanding a different treatment, different narrative choices and a different form. Those moments where the narrative seems on the verge of such novelty that it must surely be about to become – who knows? Watchmen? V for Vendetta? From Hell? Moments where the narrative demands that the four colour funny book changes into something very different, renews itself, reinvents itself, becomes a new form – and then refuses to cross that line. But the reader knows that the line is there, is close – and this itself produces a moment of immense pleasure. The ghost code is still a pleasure code.