In Defence of Comic Books - My Response to Bill Maher

Being a Grown-Up
    Last week I read about the death of legendary comic-book writer Stan Lee and, like millions of people across the world, felt we’d lost a great writer.  Stan Lee was the creator of The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Fantastic Four, Black Panther and many other comic book characters including his most iconic creations: The X-Men and Spider-Man.   Lee was a talented and inventive storyteller but also a really witty and cheerful guy who everyone seemed to love.  Who doesn't cheer at a Stan Lee cameo in a Marvel movie??
    I was therefore puzzled earlier this morning to read the satirist and political commentator Bill Maher’s take on Lee's death.  You can read his brief blog in full here but the gist is that Bill Maher doesn’t understand what the fuss is about.  He doesn’t see why people are mourning the death of Stan Lee because, as he sees it, comic books aren’t important.
    Some choice quotes include "America is in mourning. Deep, deep mourning for a man who inspired millions to, I don’t know, watch a movie, I guess," "comics are for kids, and when you grow up you move on to big-boy books without the pictures," and perhaps the most dramatic: "I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to suggest that Donald Trump could only get elected in a country that thinks comic books are important."
    He seems really quite angry about people reading comic books and uses Lee’s death to attack the whole of America because he thinks adults reading comic books is a form of arrested development.  His belief that growing up means reading books without pictures seems a little odd to me, however.  What’s wrong with looking at pictures?  Novels are a legitimate art form...pictures are a legitimate art form.  Why does combining words with images suddenly make the story-telling childish?  I personally define being an adult as more to do with recognising other people's right to form their own opinions and tastes while taking responsibility for your own actions...not just "reading books without pictures".
    I mean, just to point out the obvious here: Bill Maher stars in a TV show.  He knows that’s made from lots of pictures played fast, right?  I mean, he knows his very own medium of communication involves little-to-no reading?
    Maher is correct that at one point comic books were aimed at children, but there was also a time when television was assumed to be for illiterate commoners and no dignified person would own a television set, but art forms are allowed to change with time.  Comic books started out for kids but they aren’t so exclusive anymore.  The same way some books are written for grown-ups, some comic books are too.  I think Maher just isn’t very widely read.
    Although if it’s the subject matter he objects to e.g. science fiction and superheroes, then that seems a little curmudgeonly.  Does he know people like to have fun at the cinema or that sometimes adults like to read books for fun?  Actually, I think he must know that, since he filmed a scene for Iron Man 3…a comic book movie based on Stan Lee’s characters.

Bill Maher doing a grown-up movie

Books For Smart People
    I’m an adult and I’ve read plenty of great literature.  I’ve read the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, Austen, Twain, Melville, Eliot, Hemingway, Orwell, Ishiguro etc. but I’m also a fan of comic book writers like Alan Moore, Frank Miller, John Wagner and Stan Lee.  I distinctly remember having a copy of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy sitting next to Judge Dredd: Total War on my bedside table at one point.  Just because I read comic books doesn't mean I can't also appreciate "classics".
    In fact, every Christmas I tend to read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the comic book Batman Noel one after the other in the same day. I enjoy the escapist entertainment and haunting artwork of one and the linguistic brilliance and sentimental wit of the other.  I'm also in the process of writing a book on quantum mechanics due for publication this Summer...I would like to think reading comic books clearly hasn't dulled my critical faculties or stunted my intellectual growth.
    I mean, I agree that you should grow out of childish stories as you get older, but these days there are lots of sophisticated comic books written for adults.  Take Maus by Art Spiegleman, a comic book about the Holocaust which won a Pulitzer prize.  That book made my skin crawl with horror and made me tear up with emotion.  I have also read Schindler’s Ark (the book on which Schindler’s List was based) and found it equally moving.  Is one of them a more adult form of art because it doesn’t contain pictures?  Can't they both be powerful and thought provoking pieces of literature?
    Comic books today have evolved beyond Dennis the Menace and Stan Lee was central to that deveopment because he was one of the first writers to introduce adult issues to his stories.  Before him, every comic book character was a 2D square-jawed hero who saved some damsel in distress from a moustache-twiddling "foreigner".  Lee began creating characters with emotional complexity.  
    His comic books dealt with issues like racism, sexism, drug abuse and political corruption.  He wrote comic books in which women were central characters with complicated emotional lives rather than foils for male heroes to save, and Lee fought hard to include black characters in his works without stereotyping them.  Yes, Stan Lee’s early comic books were written for children, but as the children grew up, so did his writing.
    But, let’s say Maher was right for a moment and that comic books are for children.  In what way does this make them unimportant?  Stan Lee was, according to Maher, an author of children’s literature.  Do we no longer celebrate children's literature in the Maher-niverse?
    I’m wondering if Bill Maher will be as equally disparaging when JK Rowling dies?  Or if he thought it was ridiculous when people got sad over the death of Dr Seuss or Beatrix Potter? I think Stan Lee was plenty important to our society, unless Maher is going to claim children reading isn't important?
    Stan Lee made a lot of kids happy and millions of people have fond memories of reading his stories.  By contrast, Maher's job is making caustic remarks about politicians behind a desk.  That's his role in society.  It's an important one of course, satire is crucial to an informed democracy, but is it more noble a profession than getting young people reading?  I don't think so.
    Besides, Stan Lee did something even more important for pop culture, which I am going to elucidate on now (because you might be wondering why I’m writing about comic books on a Science blog)…he made scientists the good guys.

I wasn't kidding

The Evil Genius
    Typically in movies, comic books and pulp-fiction novels of the day, scientists were depicted as the villains, without fail.  We were always the maniacs who reached too far and accidentally unleashed a deadly plague on the Earth or brought space-vampires from Mars down to eat our livers.  Stan Lee made scientists heroes of his stories instead, and showed how they used their intelligence to outwit common criminals.  He made scientists look awesome!
    Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four, got his powers on a scientific expedition.  T’Challa, The Black Panther was a diplomat and scientist.  Charles Xavier from X-men was a biologist and anthropologist who lectured at Oxford.  Bruce Banner was a nuclear physicist.  Tony Stark was an engineer.  Peter Parker was a high school physics student.  Hank Pym was a particle physicist...I could go on.
    Stan Lee respected the importance of getting kids interested in Science and I would argue that along with Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek) he did more to raise the profile of fictional scientists than anyone else in popular culture. 
    Stan Lee also used scientifically legitimate devices to get stories going and showed his heroes using science to defeat bad guys.  Sometimes Lee’s physics wasn’t quite right (he wasn't a scientist after all) but oftentimes it was gosh-darned impressive.  There’s a Spider-Man story where Electro uses his electrical powers to generate induced magnetic fields inside an iron beam and scale a building to escape via Lenz's law.  Lee is teaching children about electromagnetic fields here.  Rather than having mega-ray death-lasers controlled by evil gnomes, Lee would often ground his fanciful stories with real scientific terminology and make geeks look like heroes for a change.

Friendly neighbourhood scientist

How I Use Comic Books
    As a physics teacher, what you’re usually doing is teaching kids a quick equation or law, which can sometimes be quite dry, especially for an hour.  The best thing to do (the really important thing to do) therefore is show how physics relates to the real world.  But most text-books do this in a very plain fashion.
    Physics textbooks are a world of perfectly spherical balls rolling down frictionless surfaces and John and Jane calculating the mass of a pulley given the acceleration of a cube as it is pulled upwards etc. etc.  How many young people do you think are going to get fired up about physics because of that?  Not many.  But if you can push physical laws to their extremes by relating them to sci-fi stories, you can get debates going.  You can get people to use the equations in a novel way and see how they really work in outrageous scenarios.  Here are some examples of how I have used comic books and comic book movies in my lessons:
    There’s an iconic Spider-Man story where Peter Parker tries to save Gwen Stacy falling off the golden gate bridge, but his webbing catches her and brings her to a halt too fast, potentially snapping her neck.  Peter Parker then has to live with the guilt of maybe killing his girlfriend because he didn’t take into account changes in momentum (yeah, a kid’s story…sure).  I use this comic book scene with my A-level students to calculate the forces involved and answer the question of whether Parker really kills Gwen or not.  It’s a great way of teaching concepts like forces, elasticity and gravitational energy.
    There’s a scene in The Avengers where Hulk stops a crashing alien spacecraft with his fist.  I show this clip and contrast it with the scene in Superman Returns where Kal-El catches an airplane and we use Newtonian mechanics to determine which one of these characters is more powerful.
    In my lesson on velocity, we use panels from comic books to see who would win in a race between The Flash, Superman and Quicksilver.  I’ve used scenes from Ant-Man to talk about quantum mechanics and how object sizes are determined by inter-particle forces.  I use clips from X-Men 2 to illustrate how electromagnetism works and a scene from Spider-Man 2 to teach nuclear physics.
    I’ve used clips from The Dark Knight Rises to calculate the radius of an explosion outside Gotham city.  I’ve used panels from Aquaman to teach the behaviour of waves.  I’ve taught lessons on radioactivity using Spider-Man, The Hulk, Daredevil, Reed Richards and The Phoenix (who all got their powers from radioactivity).
    Even if the kids don’t really care about comic books, they can at least tell I’m trying to have a bit of fun with the topic and show how physics can be applied to novel situations.  So I say thank you to Stan Lee and all the other comic book writers and comic-book movie makers who give me so many cool and over the top moments to showcase to my students and get them thinking.
    I’m not saying a person’s literary diet should consist solely of comic books.  But let me put it this way: if you want to teach a 12 year old about Newton’s second law, which do you think is going to get them more engaged - making them read an excerpt from Principia Mathematica or showing them the scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker flips an articulated lorry in mid-air using helicopter cables?
    Comic books tell stories.  They do it with words and pictures.  Some are written for children, some are written for adults.  The artwork is often remarkably detailed and the dialogue often snappy.  Stan Lee was a key figure in developing an art form and getting real science into his stories, as well as depicting scientists as good guys.  I think that’s pretty important Mr Maher and frankly I think Stan Lee rocked.

Excelsior!

Image Credits
Stan Lee Reading: ibtimes
Bill Maher in Iron Man Three: YouTube
Spider-Man: Variety
Stan Lee Rocks: Bleedingcool