Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman”

Eco’s essay “The Myth of Superman”: Superman is both a mythological figure, outside of time, and a novelistic figure, subject to causality. This paradox causes a breakdown in time within the story of Superman, which is solved, Eco argues, thus:

The stories develop in a kind of oneiric climate — of which the reader is not aware at all — where what has happened before and what has happened after appear extremely hazy. The narrator picks up the strand of the event again and again, as if he had forgotten to say something and wanted to add details to what had already been said.

This “oneiric climate” is, he argues, keeps us always in the present, outside of cause and effect:

Superman comes off as a myth only if the reader loses control of the temporal relationships and renounces the need to reason on their basis… Since the myth is not isolated exemplarily in a dimension of eternity, but, in order to be assimilated, must enter into the flux of the story in question, this same story is refuted as flux and seen instead as an immobile present.

But Eco’s oneiric world of comics has changed in the years since this essay was written. The evolutionary tightening of continuity — the growing coherence and causality of comics universe storylines, beginning in and in reaction to the Marvel Universe in the 60s, and skyrocketing with the rarefication of a versed ‘elite’ reader community due to the rise of the direct comics market — complicated those hazy ‘oneiric’ moments. With an increasing causality came an increasing need to maintain the mythic timelessness by force, and thus we start getting textual “crises” and “zero hours.”