my neck a toothsome feeding ground.” This Batman makes explicit the subtext that (as Will Brooker has demonstrated) haunted the Dynamic Duo for decades: he molests his ward, who secretly enjoys it. Powell’s Tea (1998) includes a “song of Robin” that makes the Dark Knight dark indeed: “don’t be fooled by costumes,” Powell’s Robin says, “I am still an orphan I move through his house by stealth. Despite work by Ian Gregson, Jo Shapcott, and other British writers, most subsequent poems about superheroes are American. The same poem-still well known (as poems go) in Britain today-also announced the new plausibility of superheroes as subjects. well, I’ve turned the corner.Īrmitage’s poem announced its independence from any stuffy, paternally sanctioned poetic tradition, as Robin announced his independence from Batman, even while it embraced parts of that tradition-not just meter, but subgenre (dramatic monologue), and even Romantic inheritance: “Kid” is a late-Romantic poem of vocation, analogous in some ways to Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” and to Seamus Heaney’s “Digging.” “I’m the real boy wonder,” Robin concludes: the poem announced, with tongue not quite in cheek, Armitage’s own arrival in British letters, as a sort of boy wonder-brash, young, technically proficient, unignorable-a reputation Armitage did, in fact, gain. Armitage had been an English probation officer, trying to keep young toughs on the right track, and some of those young toughs turned up in his other work, but the kid in “Kid” was Robin, proclaiming his emancipation from Batman, and from his juvenile costume, in ostentatiously regular trochaic pentameter: One of the first such poems to get much attention was the title poem in Simon Armitage’s second collection, Kid (1992). By that time, comic book superheroes had already become, for more than one poet, appropriate subjects for serious poems. Something similar happened, a bit later, to the literary novel: Michael Chabon’s The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible, Tom DeHaven’s It’s Superman!, and Andrew Kaufman’s All My Friends Are Superheroes (all published since 1999) testify to a new legitimacy, not for comics as a medium, but for superheroes-the kind invented in and for comic books-as viable characters, in ambitious fiction made of words alone. As they play, the heroes increase not only their power in combat, but unlock animated emotes for use in the social game world zones.Sometime after 1985, something happened to make, or let, poets pay attention to comic book superheroes. They are able to choose a hero from their Squad to play in a number of games and activities. Players collect heroes to form their own Squad.
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