Contemporary Myths and the Mass Media
According to some researchers, the characters of illustrated comic strips represent a contemporary version of mythological or folkloric heroes. These images embody the ideal of some segment of society. The stereotyped characters whose adventures are followed by thousands of attentive readers or television viewers can generate significant reactions that translate into avalanches of letters expressing complaints, emotions, or opinions regarding the lives of fictional characters.
Superman is a paradigmatic example in this regard. He possesses a double identity: he comes from a vanished planet and, as a result of a catastrophe, was endowed with prodigious powers. Yet he lives on Earth under the modest appearance of a timid journalist: Clark Kent. He is the disguise of a humiliated man behind whom there is a hero of unlimited powers—a mythic theme that is quite frequent.
It could be interpreted, as some authors suggest, that Superman satisfies the secret longings of modern man who, knowing himself to be limited and perhaps frustrated, dreams of an exceptional identity that will one day reveal him as a hero.
The Structure of Myth and the Civilization of the Novel
"Once the undeniable mythological connotation of the character has been established, it will be necessary to identify the narrative structures through which the 'myth' is offered to the public on a daily or weekly basis. There is, in fact, a fundamental difference between a figure such as Superman and the traditional figures of heroes from classical mythology, Norse mythology, or the revealed religions.
The traditional religious image was that of a character of divine or human origin who, in the image, remained fixed in his eternal characteristics and in an irreversible vicissitude. The possibility was not excluded that behind the character there existed, in addition to a set of characteristics, a history; but this history was already defined by a determined development, and it constituted the physiognomy of the character in a definitive form." Eco, Apocalípticos e integrados.
Indeed, Eco argues that a Greek statue could well represent Hercules or a scene from his labours, but in any case Hercules was seen as someone who had had a history upon which the divinity of his figure depended. The story was something that had already happened. Every sacred mythological image could have a narrative structure, but this structure is closed and irreversible. In a different way, the characters of the mass media emerge from the civilization of the novel.
The Romantic tradition corresponds to a narrative in which the reader's principal interest is based on the unpredictable; the creativity of the plot is the central attraction of the story. Events have not occurred before the narration but are expected to occur during it.
"In the era in which it was born, the coup de théâtre of Oedipus, who discovers his guilt after the revelation of Tiresias, 'works' on the audience not because it plunges an audience ignorant of the myth into surprise, but because the mechanism of the 'fable,' according to Aristotelian rules, has once again succeeded in making the vicissitudes shareable, leading the spectators to identify with the situation and with the character. On the other hand (...) when Poe's detective discovers the culprit of the double murder in the Rue Morgue (...) we witness a dramatic effect whose unpredictability forms part of the invention and assumes aesthetic value within the context of a new narrative poetics." Eco, op. cit.
This new dimension, Eco adds, comes at the price of a devaluation of the mythic value of the character. Whereas the mythological character must embody a universal law insofar as he must be to some degree predictable, the novelistic character must be as ordinary as any one of us, and unpredictable events must also befall him, as they do any one of us.
"The mythological character of comics finds himself today in this singular situation: he must be an archetype, the sum and compendium of certain collective aspirations, and therefore must be immobilized in an emblematic fixity that makes him easily recognizable (and this is what occurs with the figure of Superman); but by virtue of being marketed within the framework of 'novelistic' production for a public that consumes 'novels,' he must be subjected to a development that is characteristic (...) of the novelistic character."Eco, op. cit.