Awaiting Words: Iconocentrism and Ideology in Post-9/11 American

Comic books

Antonio Fornet Vivancos

Abstract: This paper takes a look at a series of comic books released by Marvel Comics in the aftermath of the attacks against the

Twin Towers (NYC, September 11th 2001). Intended as a kind of tribute to be paid to all the victims, these comic books’ narrative

style typically privileges the use of “silent” images over that of dialogue and description. I argue that the preference for a decidedly

visual style is closely imbricated with the principles of a “visual culture” which is suddenly forced to contemplate so overwhelming a

visual event as the Al Qu'aida attacks. I also argue that the artists’ choice of style belies an underlying iconocentric current to the comic

books, and that such iconocentrism is crossed by the ideological desire to shape real-world events along the lines of comic book

stories.

Introduction. Platitudes & Paradoxes: Sound & Vision

Comic book characters do not speak – that goes without saying. However, there might be some reasons to say

so, as pointless platitudes can always be twisted into richer, if more obscure, paradoxes. The former is no

exception to the rule. Consider this: even if comic book characters do not speak – or rather, just because they

do not – readers will always be able to see them speaking. Readers, of course, cannot really listen to the

sounds while being “uttered” by the characters, but they may absolutely see those sequences of graphic

symbols (or letters) that stand for the “actual” sounds. Typically enclosed in speech balloons and boxes, what

the characters “say” is to be perceived by the readers just the way a picture is: visually.

So if the eye does the eye’s work and the ear’s, too, it is no wonder than comic books can be

described as a “language” that mostly relies on a “visual experience” (Eisner 1990: 9). The primacy of images

over words in comic books is not to be diminished by the fact that the medium makes joint use of both, since

words may well be regarded as a kind of image: either one that is made out of letters – and those are

anything if not “more abstract” images (Eisner 1990: 16) – or one that is static, rather than intended to

convey the illusion of motion (McCloud 1993: 8).

Images do play indeed so relevant a role in comic books that artists may totally dispose of words for

their stories: both Eisner (1990: 18) and McCloud (1993: 8) acknowledge this. It is, however, a descriptive

statement, not a prescriptive one. Artists are entitled to do so if they will, but they do not necessarily have to:

their works will not be technically improved by the fact that they are wordless. Nor will they be better, or

worse, in ethical terms, so to speak.

On the aftermath of the attack against the Twin Towers, a number of American comic book artists went on

to challenge that view. Intending to pay a tribute to the victims and those “real-world heroes” who helped

ease the former's pain and suffering, the artists came out with the assumption that banning text from their

comic books or dramatically reducing its presence might actually bring their works closer to the terrible

truths of that September day in 2001.

As a result, a number of comic books were released by Marvel Comics Ltd that concentrated on the

World Trade Centre attacks, and featured little or no text at all. I focus on three of these self-styled tributes –

namely A Moment Of Silence, Heroes, and The Amazing Spiderman Vol. 2 # 361 – to suggest a couple of theoretical

points:

(1) The artists’ preference for “establishing” their characters through images, not words, cannot be

quite properly understood outside the limits of the current over-proliferation of “visual events”

(Mirzoeff 1994: 3) generally known as visual culture.

(2) That preference may be described as a typically iconocentric move. Closely following Derrida, I term

iconocentrism that tendency to the determination of being and truth as an image. I likewise assume that

the artists' iconocentrism is in the last instance underlied by an ideological conviction that their art

can “wield material power in shaping history”(Lehren 1994: 13).

Point # 1 is explored in Section I of this study in American iconology2; there, individual comic books

are traced back to the more general framework of visual culture, and special emphasis is made on one of the

short stories contained in AMS – “Periphery”. Point # 2 is in its turn discussed in Section II.

I. Description Is Depiction: Lonely Screens and Lonely People

[The USA] are becoming a country of lonely screens

flickering in a holographic landscape.

Apter, “Visual Culture Questionnaire”, 26

In the months following the attacks, it is as if we are living

in the unique time between a traumatic event and its

symbolic impact.

Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 44

Clouds of dust and glass splinters filled the air of NYC after the September attacks. Among the dust and the

glass splinters there were questions too – “Is it going to happen again? What do I tell my children? Why did it

happen?” (TAS, 16). We see a troubled Spiderman struggling to find an answer to those questions; to his

shame, we see him failing to do so (Fig. 1).

Some of the artists who give life to “those colorful characters that possess fantastic powers” (AMS,

back cover) felt no less troubled and confused than their creations; hence, a desire to bridge the semiotic gap

left open by the attacks, and thus redeem an innermost sense of failure which springs from the fact that they

1Referred, heretofore, as AMS, Heroes, and TAS. See below for more details. 2I subscribe to W. J. T. Mitchell’s definition of Iconology as a “critical study of the icon” (Mitchell 1986: 2).

have spent a lifetime reveling in the creation of fictional characters that are notoriously inferior to the “real-

world heroes” of the day (medics, firefighters, police officers).

For years, comic books have given the world the opportunity to see brightly clad super heroes in action.

Mythical heroes with a mandate – to honor the heroic ideal ... On September 11th the world changed. We

found that real-world heroes went beyond the ideals of our imagination. Heroes ... without the benefit of super-

powers, armed only with their own solitary courage. (AMS, back cover)

But there is also the impression that an excessive importance has been attached to the very medium

that allows artists to voice their exercise in self-criticism.

When hell hit the World Trade Center, most of us stood around talking – making phone calls, writing e-mails

and, generally, filling in that hole in our bellies with meaningless chatter (Jemas, “Afterword” to AMS – my italics)

Fig. 1. TAS, 15 (Art by John Romita Jr., Words by Michael Straczynski)

Not only writing (écriture) is “meaningless”: so is talking (parole)3. Therefore, if honour is due to the

real-world heroes but words are not an honourable way to pay that tribute to them, other ways ought to be

explored: “It is ... fitting to tell the story of real heroes with nothing but depictions of their selfless deeds”

(Jemas, “Afterword” to AMS – my italics).

The choice of the term “depiction” is telling: to depict (Latin depingere) is “to represent, as a painting

or picture does” (The Oxford English Dictionary)4. The idea is to have as little recourse to text as possible in order

to stress that what is being depicted is both genuine and meaningful – even if “mythical” superheroes are

featured alongside their “real-world” counterparts. That is achieved through an approach to the attacks that

relies mostly on the visual. If text appears, which it does, it will be normally displaced to rather marginal

positions.

3See below, § II. 4As a contrast, “describe” (Latin describere) is “to copy off, transcribe, write down, write off,” but also “[to] sketch off in writing or painting”. The definition of “description” is nevertheless more restrictive: “to write down, set forth in writing or in written words,” or “to set forth in words, written or spoken, by reference to qualities, recognizable features or characteristic marks; to give a detailed or graphic account.” That is “the ordinary current sense. “To set it forth in delineation or pictorial representation; to represent, picture, portray” is described as an “archaic” use of the term – my italics.

Fig. 2. AMS, 29. Art by Avalon, John Romita Jr.& Norm Rapmund, Story by Kevin Smith.

In TAS, for instance, text effectively pervades all of its 22 pages, provided that it is confined to boxes

for stream of consciousness and authorial commentary rather than dialogue – with the effect that characters

are typically “silent”5. So are those featured in a majority of the 65 individual plates loosely assembled for

Heroes6.

But silence at its most extreme is to be found in AMS – a collection of four short, almost entirely

textless stories. In one of these (“Periphery”) a middle-class, suburban family with a habit of yelling out at

each other is presented so that readers come to think that home is truly where the hatred is, and that hatred

is voiced (Fig. 2, Fig. 3). The (in)communication surplus is, however, reflected by visual means only: we see

the characters screaming, but we just cannot listen to or read what they are screaming about. We know,

though, that dad works at the WTC, while mum takes care of the riotous kids: we see the three of them in the

car on their way to school, then at the schoolyard when they realize that the Twin Towers are burning in the

5Spiderman “speaks” but two times. 6This comic book presents a sum total of 36 plates that do not feature any text at all, against 24 other that do. The ratio can be substantially reduced to a tinier 41 vs. 19 if more stringent criteria are used, and the plates in which the presence of text is somehow schematic (respectively, numbers 8, 46, 54, 52, 58, and 62) are aligned with those where no text at all is featured.

Fig. 3. AMS, 30.

distance.

A frantic drive home follows that results in the family's rushing to the living-room, where a TV set

impassively broadcasts images of the catastrophe. Mum cries at the thought of her husband dead inside the

towers, but in a dramatic turn as unexpected as thoroughly predictable, dad comes out of the dark, and, for

once, the whole family is still, perfectly quiet as they hold each other in the presence of the TV set (Fig. 4).

That a TV screen presides over this scene of unity and reconciliation hardly seems to be a coincidence. Nor

is it that TAS spectacularly opens with a totally black page – what seems to be a TV screen that has suddenly

faded to black as a result of an event so terrible as to cause “regularly scheduled programs” to be

“interrupted” (Fig. 5)

Spiderman's later remark that it is “a world of Gameboys and VCR's” (TAS, 17) we are all living in,

adds up to the impression that the artists' choice of a narrative style relying heavily on the use of images is

determined by their belonging in a global network regulated by the gaze – a visual culture. According to

Mirzoeff’s useful account of the latter, a visual culture is one that is

Fig. 4. AMS, 36.

concerned with visual events in which information, meaning and / or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an

interface with visual technology. ... visual technology [stands for] any form of apparatus designed either to be

looked at or to enhance natural vision, from oil painting to television and the Internet” (Mirzoeff 1994: 3)

Visual culture thus appears to deal with some phenomena that comprise a relationship of the subject

to some means which range from the pre-photographic (“oil painting”), to the post-photographic (“television

and the Internet”). Out of the interaction with those means, the subject is said to gain something

(“information, meaning and or pleasure”). If the reference to “visual technologies” cuts across different

iconographic periods and techniques7, nevertheless, there is a sense that mankind is more concerned with

images these days than it might have been at any other time before. Hence, Mirzoeff’s statement that

This is visual culture. It is not just a part of your everyday life. It is your everyday life (Mirzoeff 1994: 3)

A little history would be required here. The concept of visual culture was first used to study those

“notions about vision [and] image-making devices [such as the camera obscura, the microscope, etc.]” (Alpers, “Visual

Culture Questionnaire”, 26) which were characteristic of a particular historical period – namely, the

Netherlands in the XVIIth Century:

What I propose to study then is not the history of Dutch art but the Dutch visual culture ... In Holland, the

visual culture was central to the life of the society (Alpers, The Art of Describing, xxv).

Note that visual culture’s role is here qualified as “central” to Dutch society; nevertheless, the latter

retains an independent existence (as well as a superior hierarchical status) and it is not to be by any means

equated to the former. This is not the case, though, with Mirzoeff’s and others’ use of the concept of visual

culture, which is now dealt with in an all-encompassing way, as a carrier of some fundamental truth about

our time – that images are currently the privileged source of meaning, information, etc.

We are witnesses, therefore, to the passage from a narrow use of the notion, to a broader one –

otherwise said, the passage from the description of the visual culture of a given social formation (narrow use)

to the description of a social formation as a visual culture (broad use).

Describing (read: depicting) our everyday life as one that relies on “Gameboys and VCR’S” is as

close to adhering to the concept of visual culture’s broad use as any superhero, or writer of superhero stories,

might ever get. In so doing, both the character and its creator effectively acknowledge, as Mirzoeff does, that

we have all become, willingly, or not, silent spectators of an unending, mesmerizing series of visual events,

7The term “iconographic” has been borrowed from Bernard Marbot’s work on the origins of photography (See Marbot, “Towards the discovery”, in A History of Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives, edited by Jean-Claude Lemagny and André Rouillé). I am using it here as to draw attention to the different techniques of image creation and/or reproduction that come to be associated to a particular age – on the grounds of their predominance in that period. Mirzoeff himself singles out three different “ages of the image” (traditional, dialectical, virtual) that can be roughly associated to – respectively – painting, photography and the cinema, and the digital media. This is not to say that iconographic techniques cannot overlap with each other – in spite of historical boundaries. For instance, oil painting is still to be found in our age of virtual images – though, of course, residually: painting is no more the predominant iconographic technique of the day.

the sum total of which now constitute our everyday life.

II. The Image Is the Truth: Awaiting Words

Were the terrorists that carried out the attacks against the WTC aware of the fact that modern Western

culture has “elected the visual to the ... status of being ... the primary medium for communication” (Jenks

1995: 2)? In a sense, they might have been: not for nothing did they choose iconic targets for their actions, and

probably scheduled the latter so that images of them could be broadcast to millions of Western living rooms

not so different from the one featured in “Periphery.”

Perhaps they did not, though; perhaps, they just took it for granted that a myriad of “image-making

devices” would be in place there, waiting for them, which is even more telling of the acuteness of their

perceptions. It is a tragic irony that comic book artists did not even glimpse the power of images as clearly as

terrorists did. Their profession of guilt is thus charged with religious overtones which fall somewhere between

heartfelt repentance and faux naivety:

‘Judge people by what they do, not by what they say.’ That's what I learned from my mother and father: that is

what I teach my children, but I did not truly know what that meant until this past September. ‘Establish your

characters through action, not through dialog and narration.’ That is what I preach to my comic book

colleagues, but I did not really know what that meant until I worked on Moment of Silence. (Jemas, “Afterword”

to AMS)

When an identical structure (that's what ... but I did not ...”) is used to make the connection between

home and the workplace more visible, something very much like a worldview is created. In this worldview,

what people – either real, or imagined – do, that is to say their actions, cannot lie. Words may well do so.

A dialectics of Movement against Stasis, of Truth against Falsity, then emerges that has the image

unadorned as superior to the word – as it is through the former that we have access to those things people do,

to their acts that are true in themselves. Therefore, one should not adorn what needs no polishing and speaks

for itself8 to the point, that it requires no speech or writing for that. This true rhetoric of iconocentrism thus

strikingly overextends Jacques Derrida's idea of logocentrism – but what is such a thing?

8Oddly enough, that does not seem to be the first time that such a view – or one that runs along much similar lines – arises within the limits of “American self-expression”, to use Perry Miller’s formula (Miller 1980: 13). Thus, a possible link might well exist between some of the stylistic choices made by the referred comic books' authors, and the early American Puritan writers' so-called “plain style.” The artists' iconocentrism somehow evokes the Puritans' emphasis on subjecting their language to the “the objective facts of creation” (Miller 1980: 29 – my italics), in the knowledge that “God's altar needs not our polishings” (The Bay Psalm Word Book [1639] cit. Miller 1980: 29); likewise, both depiction by virtue of meaningful images, as it were, and the plain style are haunted by the presence of an Other which simultaneously opens up, and closes, an entire symbolic field where the Real can be adequately appropriated and reworked. Visual culture is the other that haunts the minds of comic book artists; whilst it was the need to confront what – in their own words – was “an American wilderness” (Mather, Magnalia Christi Americani, or The Ecclesiastical History of New England, cit. Bercovitch 1975: 189), that prompted the Puritans to embrace a more “plain, repertorial” style (Lehren 1994: 30).

According to Derrida's De la Grammatologie (1967), Western Metaphysics has historically used the concept of

the logos (the “word”) as the major criterion for the determination of truth-value:

The history of metaphysics has always assigned the origin of truth in general to the logos (Derrida 1967: 11-12)9

The logos (the word) understood, of course, as the spoken word. As a result, speech (“phonè”,

“parole”) will be regarded as closer to truth and being than writing, which is tantamount to state that being

and truth are self-present in speech, whereas writing is but an outer emanation of the latter. What follows, is

– firstly – the expulsion of writing outside the domains of language:

Writing is alien to the inner system (Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, 44 cit. Derrida 1967: 51)

And secondly, the triumph of a “metaphysics of phonetic writing” (Derrida 1967: 11) that points

towards the repression of writing, and the determination of being as presence: (Derrida 1967: 24)

Iconocentrism goes even further: enthusiastically adhering to the repression of writing (“Establish

your characters through action, not through dialog and narration”), it also engages in the repression of

speech (“Judge people by what they do, not by what they say.”) That is why it can be stated that an

iconocentric metaphysics which is now unfolding points towards the determination of being and truth as an

image.

However, things may be more complicated. Deconstruction has shown how – in repressing writing –

logocentric metaphysics paradoxically reverts to a half-concealed idealization of the former:

Language is comparable to a system of signs that expresses ideas, therefore comparable to writing (Saussure,

Cours de linguistique générale, 44 cit. Derrida 1967: 51)

In Derrida's opinion, Saussure's remark tells the lie of logocentrism; in its turn, iconocentrism's lie is

told by the fact that the iconocentric doctrine can only be expressed by means of words – by the fact that the

most decidedly iconocentric comic book of the threefold set (AMS) is fronted by a foreword by NYC former

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, then closed by two different afterwords. More so, one of its story's success

(“Periphery”) depends on the reader's knowledge that dad works in the WTC – but access to that information

is gained through a text – one written over a drawing on the fridge's door:

My dad works in a big building in NY, King Kong climbed it but not when dad was working! (AMS, 29)

The tragedy of iconocentrism is that, for all of its mythologizing the image, it is always “awaiting

word,” as Spiderman remarks of those dead as a result of the attacks (TAS, 10).

9Unless otherwise indicated, all excerpts from Derrida’s De la Grammatologie and Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Générale reproduced heretofore are my translation.

With our costumes and our powers we are writ small by the true heroes ... Those who step into the darkness

without assurances of ever walking out again because there are others waiting in the dark Awaiting salvation

...Awaiting word ... Awaiting justice” (TAS, 10)

It would be a mistake, though, to pronounce the iconocentric rhetoric powerless; rather, one should

concentrate on the fact that it conceives of itself as a powerful statement – as a statement of power. Just take

TAS: there is a stark contrast between its initial page (a screen deprived of any image at all), and the comic

book's last. At that stage, the screen has been suddenly filled with “heroes”, both real-world and mythical

(Fig. 6) but equally silent.

All three comic books abound with such images of unity in silence. That not a word is uttered,

guarantees that all previous cultural, ratial, and class conflicts are cancelled. More importantly, it does

guarantee that we do not even learn – hear, or read – about what those conflicts were about, that we do not

learn “the violent experience of how, across the cultural divide, we share the same antagonism” (Žižek 2002:

66).

Iconocentrism then reveals itself as an ideology. In a world where only visual events will be ever

perceived by the public as genuinely meaningful, and real, the fundamentalist ideology needs truly shocking

images just in order to have a real effect upon the public's conscience. Conversely, “the ... hegemonic liberal

Fig. 8. Heroes, 60. Art by Phil Hester and Hi-Fi, Text by Jim Krueger

multiculturalist ideology” (Žižek 2002: 64) desperately needs to confront the spectacular, silent image of the

falling towers with some other ideological, iconic statements that are or would be equally powerful

The iconocentric comic books thus dispose of meaningless words so that multicultural liberalism may

shine through the clouds of semiotic dust as a pure, incontrovertible image of unity in complementary

difference. It does not matter whether that unity is as fictional as to draw both superheroes and “real” people

together in the same picture. For, if “in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a

camera obscura” (Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, 36), in the iconocentric ideology that so diligently

serves its liberal master, mankind and their relations appear disguised in “brighly clad” superheroes clothes.

Knowing, then that “words fail to describe what we feel”, but also that “pictures cannot capture what

we've experienced” – as one of the plates in Heroes pointedly states (Fig. 8) – it would be up to us, silent

spectators, to negotiate that twofold failure, use both images and words wisely, and perhaps strip the myth, as

well as the superheroes, naked.

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