 Okay, good afternoon and welcome to the Office for the Advancement of Research's second book talk for the fall semester. This talk is featuring Nikki Phillips and Stacy Strobel's 2013 book, Comic Book Crime, Truth, Justice, and the American Way. And we will be featuring also Discussant from the Philosophy Department, James DiGiovanna. Comic Book Crime is an analysis of approximately 200 comic books sold from 2002 to 2010. And it also draws on several years of the author's immersion in comic book fan culture. And it explores some of the themes and plots popular comics feature in a post-911 context. The OAR sponsors two book talks every semester and we will have two more in the spring. So for those who are interested, we do send out regular communications about these. So please keep yourselves informed about what's coming next. Just to introduce quickly our authors and Discussant, immediately to my right is Stacy Strobel. Stacy is an associate professor here at John Jay in the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration. She is the 2009 winner of the British Journal of Criminology's Red Zinowitz Memorial Prize for her work on the criminalization of domestic workers in Bahrain. Her areas of specialization are women in policing in the Arabian Gulf, multi-ethnic policing in Eastern Europe, and comic book portrayals of crime in the United States. Earlier in her career, she worked as a U.S. probation officer and a crime journalist. Dr. Strobel completed her doctorate in criminal justice here at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and received her MA in criminal justice here at John Jay as well and her BA in Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. So we are proud, of course, to claim Stacy as an alum as well as a faculty member and our next author is an alum as well, Nikki Phillips, associate professor in the Sociology and Criminology Department at St. Francis College. Professor Phillips' research looks at comic book villains to crime on television news and it also focuses on a wide range of media portrayals of crime and justice. Professor Phillips co-founded CRIMcast, a virtual resource devoted to critical conversations about criminology and criminal justice issues. The site's blog posts, Twitter feeds, podcasts, and other content provide an overview of trends, research, commentary, and events of interest to criminal justice practitioners, academics, and the general public. She's also the director of the Center for Crime and Popular Culture. Earlier in her career, Professor Phillips worked as a police officer and aircraft rescue firefighter at Metro Nashville Airport Authority. And finally, our discussant for today is James DiGiovanna, an assistant professor here in our philosophy department. His philosophical writings include Dr. Manhattan, I presume, in Watchmen and Philosophy. Is it right to make a robin in Batman and Philosophy and You're Not the Person I Knew? Eclecticism and Context in Continuity of Identity. In Appraisal, the Journal for the Society of Post-Critical and Personality Studies. His fiction has appeared in Slipstream City, Sport Press, Blue Moon Review, and 20x18. He was an assistant editor at Marvel Comics from 1988 to 1990 and was the multiple award winner film critic for the Tucson Weekly from 1998 to 2011. Just so you know, today we will be starting with a presentation from the authors, which will follow some discussion led by our discussant, Professor DiGiovanna. And finally, we'll end with an opportunity for the audience to ask questions and for the authors to respond to those questions. And last but not least, for those who are interested, the book itself is, sorry about that, available for sale at the table just outside the door to your left. Thanks for coming. Thank you so much for coming. Nikki and I are delighted to be presenting this here in our home base of John Jay College. We'd like to thank Dan Stagemann and the OAR for inviting us to give this talk. And also the folks at the school Barnes and Noble Bookstore, Jovi Codrington in particular, for helping us set up the book stand that's just out here. So we thank you. Like all good comic book characters, Nikki and I have an origin story or at least an origin story of how we started this research. We were both doctoral students here at the Graduate Center. That's housed here at John Jay. And while we were students, we worked for Dr. Maria Volpe and Dispute Resolution Consortium, and we shared an office together research. We were her research assistants. And one day, we both saw each other's bags. And in both of our bags were floppy comic books. And we sort of had that moment of, you read those? We were both sort of on the download because when you're in graduate school, sometimes you're trying to make sure that you appear so intellectually sophisticated to have been there in the first place. The idea that one would read comic books maybe didn't fit into that pattern. Although, things have changed. And there's been a resurgence of folks willing to stand by their graphic literature. So we decided that we had our other research ideas and our dissertations around topics totally different. But we decided that criminal justice and criminology was lacking a really serious interrogation, if you will, of comic books. Which was necessary because comic books overwhelmingly have themes of crime and justice. And so we took up this side project which became more of a side project at times. And eventually ten years later, and it's been about ten years since our original moment of conception, there's a book. So these things can happen and they can happen here at John Jay. So it's a very cool story. So the goals for our book, not only just to give comic books the attention they deserve from the criminal justice world and criminologist. We also wanted to discuss the dominant ideological orientations that one would take if you took comic books seriously as cultural artifacts. And also to engage with the fans and how they read these books. And how that may affect or influence their attitudes about crime and justice. So we are drawing very specifically on a theoretical orientation known as cultural criminology which is most often associated with Jackie Young who's here at John Jay and also Jeff Ferrell and Keith Hayward. And this is a form of criminology that's taking a step back from the dominant frame here in the United States of being sort of obsessed with quantitative methods and big data sets. And saying if we don't understand the cultural frame of what's happening in crime and justice then we're not getting a complete understanding. And so we're taking that very, very seriously. And so we went to comic books with this notion that we could look at these as a virtual imagined community which had policy messages. So we don't think that people necessarily read them as policy, and we hope policy makers don't read them for policy purposes. Maybe they do. But what if you did? What would you make of the comic book world and what would the lessons be for justice? How justice should be served, how it is carried out, and so on. We want to put out there that these cultural scripts that we find them important to shaping attitudes and maybe reflecting attitudes. We are not of the school of thought that thinks that these comic books directly influence behavior. So we're not in the discourse of you read a comic book, it's very violent, and then you go out and slug somebody. We're not saying that. We are speaking more about attitudes than we are behavior. So the methods were alluded to in the introduction. This is a textual analysis, but in this case a textual and graphic analysis of 200 popular titles post 9-11 from 2002 to 2010. What's very important to what we're going to talk about today that we read the most popular comic books. So this is not necessarily the comic books that we were reading when we became fans. In fact, we actually read a lot more of the less popular stuff than the popular stuff. But we said, well, what does the average person reading the most popular comic books in this contemporary landscape? What kinds of crime and justice plots are they exposed to? What kinds of crime and justice policies are they exposed to? So we did this through this popular approach. We just want to emphasize that we're going to make a lot of generalizations, but we're making generalizations from the stuff that sells. And there's a lot of great stuff that doesn't sell. And it's awesome, but it doesn't sell. So we're being populists when we look at this. And we also did this through immersing ourselves in fan culture so that earlier slide in the beginning was some cosplay, some costume play at a Comic-Con just last month here in New York. We did focus groups with fans. And we really were interested in finding out how people read crime and justice, who enjoy this medium. This is really a post-911 story in a lot of ways, not just because of the time period, but we articulate in chapter three. We won't be talking about this today, but in chapter three in the book, we put forth the notion that the primary crimes that are being played out in comic books now have shifted towards terrorism and giant global politicals, national security type of plots. Historically, comic books have been in the realm of violent street crime, organized crime, government corruption, think of Gotham and its city managers and police and so on. There's definitely a response to our war on terror that you can see in these books and we do talk about that. We also talk about this moment of criminal crisis. So comic books have a formula, at least the most popular ones that sell pretty much follow a certain basic arc that there are ways of manipulating it a bit. But the idea is that there's a criminal crisis and it's very dire. And it's a big emergency. And so think of Gotham, dark crime, rats, sewers, subways, graveyards, gargoyles, horrible things are going on. Who can you trust? The mayor is involved. There could be aliens swooping down from all sorts of mayhem and you're in a moment of criminal and in many cases even sort of beyond criminal crisis. And because of that moment of severe crisis, you have this sort of utopian yearning for something better. And it's often framed, it's very interesting because as we have here in this beautiful slide of Gotham with the Batman hovering over, looking at a decaying city that he hopes to better. It's also a nostalgia for, and this is gonna become very important to what we have to say later in the presentation, but it becomes a nostalgia for an imagined past and an imagined community in the United States, which may or may not have ever existed. And what we're going to argue here is that this is very much a utopian fictional space, but it's a utopian fictional space for a very, for a particular imagining of the United States. That is suburban, is white, is crime free, okay. It does not have the vice and grime that we associate with Gotham. People read comics because they're fun, splashy graphics, heroes, villains, violence, beautiful artwork, mostly good writing, not always. But they also get this package, whether they mean to or not, whether they want it or not, of heroes who are often vigilantes acting outside the law because things are so bad. Fighting for crime, saving the world, what we're obsessed with with comic books is heroes who have the will to act in this criminal apocalyptic crisis that we find ourselves in. They engage in a path to justice which suggests cultural notions of who is the violent and vigilante crime fighter. So one of the main themes that we're gonna talk about today comes from chapter six of our book, which has to do with who are these heroes? Okay, particularly the heroes that are the best selling characters that are heroic, Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, etc. And how do these heroes meet out violence to achieve justice or decide not to use violence perhaps? And so in essence, we're drawing on some of Jack Young's work in terms of scripts about vocabularies of motives. So who is appropriate to be violent with and when? And we really see this as a discourse of difference. We're making a big claim here and saying that we find that, and this is the stuff that sells, that this is an overwhelmingly still in the contemporary age, a heterosexual white male world, okay? That though there are some exceptions, we find that in terms of what sells that we are still in terms of the comic book culture focused on white men and that heroes of color, women heroes, of the gay sexual orientation, they all get a different treatment in the mainstream comics than perhaps our white heroes do. And so a couple of quick examples, recently in the past ten years in the Civil War, excuse me, the final crisis series from DC Comics, Black Goliath, a very famous black superhero. He had been resurrected, didn't been in comics in a while. He gets resurrected and killed off pretty much immediately, caused a lot of fan fire, so if you're familiar with the critiques of horror movies, where the black character is soon to die, well unfortunately you still see some of that effect here in comic books even today. Similarly in the Marvel Universe, you have Freedom Beast who had a very similar short run during the same time period. So we want to say here at the outset that the reason we're harping on this, you might say, well yeah, you can always do a race and sexual orientation and gender analysis of anything. What we're saying here is that comic books have gone uninterrogated in a way that movies and films and television and other mediums have not. And you can get away with racial stereotypes, female stereotypes and other stereotypes in this medium that you can't get away with in others. And so we're trying to sort of unearth why that is. Is it just because it's a small subculture? True that it is a very small subculture, but it's also the inspiration for our top selling blockbuster movies. So you can't argue that it's so insular that it doesn't matter. And so I'm going to turn it over to Nikki to give you some more details on the hero's journey and how heroes of color are portrayed and women heroes in comic books. Is that better? Good. Okay, thanks. So one of the things that we do in the book is we structure it in a particular way that follows a common narrative arc. And so I'll talk a little bit about that. There is a point of crisis that occurs in these mainstream books that is generally apocalyptic in nature. It's a threat to the social order. The citizens look for a savior. They look for a hero. They look for someone to save them. There is a path to justice that this hero embarks on. Will to action and articulation of the need for justice. There is a deliberation, a weighing of decisions that are made. And we'll talk a little bit about that in terms of a concept we call death worthiness. And there is an enforcement or execution of their plan. And then there are certain policy implications that we argue sort of flow from these narratives. So what I'm going to talk about a little bit is the backdrop of the action and how the action plays out, the style in which this occurs and what it means in terms of conceptions about retributive justice. So the relationship to the rule of law in these books is really one of unease. So what we see in these stories a lot of times is that there is a threat to the social order, but it is too great for ordinary law enforcement responses. The villain is too strong, the threat is apocalyptic. It's too much for ordinary law enforcement, ordinary agencies to control. So there is a need for a hero to step in. The backdrop though is one of ineffectiveness, often times, ineffectiveness and corruption. So the existing system, either they're not strong enough, they're incapable, or they're ineffective, a lot of times they will be portrayed as sort of bumbling stooches, kind of police officers are eating donuts or things like that. Reading the newspaper when the action unfolds behind them, things like that. So they may be inept, ineffective, or there might be the presence of corruption or brutality. This is just one example from Wolverine, The Brotherhood. This is an ATF agent interrogating a suspect. And at other times, the villains simply take control of the system. They control the police, they control the courts, they control the correctional system. And this could be something like Norman Osborn in Dark Avengers when he was sort of taking the helm and taking control of the system in a bad way. So there is this backdrop that sets up the dichotomy between good versus evil. And it is in this context that the heroes articulate the need for justice. And they operate outside the law. So the justification for operating outside the law then occurs within this ineffectiveness and corruption. So this path to justice then is enacted in various ways. There's no single way and there's no one way. And this is what is most interesting for people, the fans they told us, that they're very invested and interested in the path to justice. This is where we see most clearly crime control ideology at odds with due process. So the heroes frequently brush aside concerns for due process on their path to justice. Their crime control measures are almost always extreme and violate the law. Because the crisis is so great, it sort of mirrors the discourse that we had in the run up to the Iraq war when President Bush at the time said, we're facing a new kind of evil. Do you guys remember the speeches when he was saying it's a new kind of evil? The threat is so great, the old ways don't work anymore. This is something that plays out over and over in these books. The threat, it's just too great, it's too new, it's too different. So it requires a new kind of justice, which is extra legal. We found that the fans were intensely engaged in this path to justice. And frequently there are discussions and debates around the stories were about how far the hero would actually go in meeting out justice. And basically this sort of revolved around this notion of what we call death worthiness, which is basically a determination of whether or not the villain should be killed in the path to justice. And sometimes the determinations were quite, it was a lot of dialogue, a lot of back and forth about whether or not killing is appropriate and in what context. So this plays out a lot in the books. And the fans themselves find this debate a sort of transgressive pleasure for themselves because they're working out these moral issues in the books. But as a way of thinking through their own moral boundaries and what they think is appropriate in real life or not and under what circumstances. And they really do talk about this a lot. And they find a lot of interest in engaging with other people to talk about these kinds of issues. But since most books are not disruptive of the status quo, a common theme is really just a tease, right? So it's not whether or not the hero actually kills. It's that determination that's interesting to people and how that plays out. So the process of making those determinations is what we call death worthiness. The outcome is what we call apocalyptic incapacitation. So basically what we found most frequently is that rather than killing or enacting a very strict notion of retributive justice, the hero stops short of retribution. They incapacitate, but they don't kill. So we call this apocalyptic incapacitation. And it serves as really basically a revolving door, which is why we chose that image of Joker coming out of Arkham Asylum. Like many of these institutions are revolving doors for these villains. They live to fight another day, continuity is preserved in the books. And so apocalyptic incapacitation then is a common policy message that we found in these stories. How it plays out is what we refer to as the retributive tease. It is incapacitation, but within the veneer of retribution. It is very emotionally satisfying. It feels like retribution, but it is not. It doesn't go that far. It's incapacitating. So this is just one example, but there are many examples. This is Daredevil. He is battling a villain. He is severing all the nerves in the villain's arms and legs to incapacitate. And he's very explicit about his no kill policy. I don't kill. I'm never going to kill. But what the reader gets is this very satisfying, very violent, very graphic, hyper-violent style of art that is, again, serves as a sort of transgressive pleasure for the readers. For many fans, though, what is heroic about these heroes is that they actually don't kill. So even though there are some heroes that do kill and there are certain exceptions, by and large, there's a no kill policy. And the fans very much appreciate that. For example, one of our focus group participants said of Spider-Man, quote, even though Spider-Man beats the mess out of the Green Goblin, he didn't kill him. So that speaks a lot to his character and what lines he's not willing to cross. So there is sort of an embrace of this retributive tease that we see play out in these books. While fans revel in this emotional delight of vengeance, most clearly expressed their admiration for heroes who are unwilling to kill, however, there is basically no limit to the amount of violence, physical damage short of killing that can occur. And that is very much appreciated. This justice, though, primarily belongs to white male straight crime fighters. And I'll just say a few of our findings about gender and sexual orientation. We have three broad findings. And we're not suggesting that what we say is anything particularly groundbreaking or new about gender and sexual orientation or that it's never been interrogated before, but that we do want to emphasize that these remain present in contemporary comic books. First is even though there was a loosening of the comics code, which was basically a self-imposed code by the publishers that restricted how crime, violence, and sexuality was presented in the books, even though that's been loosened, there is still a very heavily paternalistic undercurrent running through many of the books. It's very much a white male patriarchal world. Two, there is still a stigma attached to reading female-centric comics. Even people would tell us that they do read those sometimes. They don't really read them in public. They don't really read them on the train. They get some resistance even from their friends about female-centric titles. So there is some cultural, that we felt was an indicator that there's some cultural resistance accepting female superheroes on the same terms as male superheroes. And thirdly, gay characters like female characters tend to be marginalized. Although, there has been some effort to integrate those types of characters more recently into the mainstream. But there's a history and documentation of ways in which female and gay characters often meet sort of grisly and untimely ends, which you had mentioned before. Basically, through our analysis of gender and sexual orientation, we look at how readers interpret these relatively narrow constructions of who and what type of person is heroic. And we find that these are, books really are cultural artifacts that contribute to this cultural construction of hegemonic masculinities. And this we can think of as masculinities that are hierarchical, right? So for example, as masculinity expressed by violence, rather than peacemaking is privileged, a masculinity that being gay is subordinate to heterosexuality and that the physical sense of being male is performed through, for example, sex appeal, toughness, muscular, stature, and so forth. And we find that these comic books reinforce these hegemonic masculinities in a number of ways. Women and children are frequently in peril. They need rescuing by the male superheroes. And even the female superheroes are frequently portrayed as needing the protection of their fellow male superheroes. Or they need to be at home fulfilling some sort of domestic duty. So we do see that too. There's hypermasculinity in the books. Often this is through body images that exude strength and power at times with exaggerated proportions and so forth. This is cable protecting one of the last mutant babies. And men are expected to do crime fighting in a way, in a gendered way that privileges heterosexuality. There's a lot of anti-gay banter sometimes, between these characters, which sort of reinforces heterosexuality. And then thirdly, women must fight crime in ways that embrace a notion of emphasized femininity, which is basically a compliance with more traditional gender roles. Domesticity, childcare, nurturance, that sort of thing. And in this context, there's a lot of hypersexualization of the female characters. And this occurred even in the late 80s and into the 1990s. The artistic style was exaggerated proportions of the female skimpy outfits and so forth. That you've probably seen a lot of examples of those. We also see a hypersexualization as well as empowerment in the female characters. So you will get this emphasized femininity where the female heroes can wear their high heels, they can shop, they can date, and they can fight crime all at the same time. You can go to the next. It is when though that women who violate the traditional gender norms, those then are potentially marginalized. So for example, women romantically linked to other women might be portrayed as manlike, violent, mentally ill or psychopathic. And this is just one example. This is from Punisher Warzone, The Return of Manucci. This is a character named Molly. She's a lieutenant and her sexual orientation is central to the plot. And she talks about her years of working for the police force. She suffered a lot of misogyny while on the force and she's now bitter. She's resentful. She's downright psychopathic in the story. And though she's a gay competent officer, she's also violent and abusive toward other people. Her violence in the story is one means of negotiating her sexual orientation. She fights in bars. She is dominant over her girlfriend, controls her girlfriend's relationships. And all of this negotiation of her sexual orientation is never far removed from her objectification as a female. And we just wanna show one scene. In this series of panels, Molly is partnering with the Punisher in a mafia. This is a showdown with the mafia. And she catches fire and to save her, he has to remove her clothes. And then there's this bra and panty showdown. And the final panel of the showdown, which we don't have a shot of, but there's a panel where it's the newspaper headline after this mafia showdown occurs and it says, lethal weapons, sexy lesbian lieutenant and Punisher team up carnage on the headline of the paper. So what we suggest then, and this is just one example, but it's a good one, but there are others. We do find space for these characters that are marginalized. There is a space for the gay crime fighter, but it's firmly within the hegemonic masculinity. And we suggest that the concept of who can be heroic is tied to these hierarchical notions, but it is negotiated over time. So there is effort to integrate gay characters and other marginalized characters, but not without resistance though. So we thought we'd also read a passage from the book that gets a little bit more to the potential marginalization of heroes of color. So in August, 2011, Marvel Comics introduced Miles Morales to the Ultimates universe. And the Ultimates universe is an alternate universe of Marvel, so it doesn't destroy the continuity of the regular Marvel universe for those who are worried, okay? The controversy surrounding the character was not due to the notion that a new Spider-Man would be populating the Ultimates universe, but rather to Morales' ethnic heritage, half Latino, half African-American. When USA Today ran a story about the character, the site received impassioned comments from readers, ranging from cheers, this is a good thing, to cheers. Why does everything have to be politically correct? Well, that nails it, Spidey's dead to me. These comments demonstrate that culturally, we have not passed into a post-racial environment where race ethnicity no longer matters in our conceptions of who may be considered heroic. Instead, there continues to remain resistance around heroes of difference. This is especially true with regard to characters facing double marginality, those that are racial ethnic minorities and gay and or female. These prejudiced sentiments are fueled by popular political pundits, such as Glenn Beck, who commented on the introduction of Morales on his Glenn Beck radio program. After declaring that he does not care one bit about the race ethnicity of this character, Beck revealed that his single concern is that the introduction of Morales was the result of a nefarious plot by first lady Michelle Obama to change the traditions of this country. Through this bizarre conspiracy theory, Beck reveals that he has threatened, he has demonstrated that changes in the identities of superheroes are no less than attacks on conservative American values. This is one reason we, as well as a majority of our focus group participants, feel it is so vitally important to increase the representation of minorities within the pages of mainstream comic books. The promise of an America as a just place for all its inhabitants starts with its popular mainstream imaginations. While the past decade or so has opened up possibilities for heroes of difference, there remains a tendency for comic book characters race and sexual orientation to reflect those of their creators, primarily straight white males. This is significant because our findings suggest that readers are eager for their beloved fictional heroes to represent them in their diversity. As it stands, the industry lags behind in providing fully dimensional heroes of diversity. Until that happens, the question of whether gay, black or female heroes are quote believable or quote relatable will continue to be posed. Alternatively, the lack of diversity could make these books more comfortable. So here we get a little controversial, more comfortable for readers who remain in privileged positions within white hegemony and patriarchy. At one point in the review of various discussion boards and podcasts, we sensed that some male fans might be more socially comfortable around hypothetical aliens and zombies than around females, particularly quote strong females. On the other hand, we found a strong representation of male fans of color suggesting that racial and ethnic inclusiveness may be less important for men in a genre that celebrates traditional notions of masculinity. Readers may be attracted to comic books precisely for the conservative ideological content from retribution to white hegemony. The apocalyptic incapacitation that is violently enacted, for example, acts as a transgressive voyeuristic pleasure in which readers may explore getting tougher on crime than perhaps their off-page selves would find reasonable. So we will end there with that food for thought. And we turn the stage over to Professor Dijavana to discuss.