What’s often called “The Silver Age” of superhero comics started as a scarred survivor of Frederic Wertham’s crusade against comics (mostly aimed at other genres, though Wertham had a thing about Batman and Robin’s sexuality). The voluntary Comics Code Authority adopted to fend off the moral panic put some fairly tight story-telling constraints on superheroes but also very much reinforced the presumption that only children—really only boys—were reading those comics. It’s a familiar history: in other countries, sequential art remained open to other publics and other genres. In the US, into the late 1960s and early 1970s, the assumption was that only boys read superhero comics, and that they should stop reading them once they got old enough. That’s why I found myself sneaking comics into my home for a time, because my mother decided I ought to stop buying them.
By the mid-1970s, there were a handful of established characters at either company who were married. At Marvel, the only major superheroes who were married were Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman of the Fantastic Four, whose characters are very nearly defined by being married—though it’s been a dynamic, shifting marriage in many respects. At DC, though, the Silver Age left a significant number of legacy marriages where the relationship just sort of sat there as part of the character’s status quo, most notably, Barry Allen’s Flash, who was married to Iris West in 1966, seven years after the character was introduced.
The Silver Age Barry Allen is one of those characters that modern comics storytelling has rejected entirely, and it’s easy to see why. He was a white police scientist who lived in the suburbs, had caring parents, a journalist girlfriend, and no particular personality quirks or issues. He had one of the most interesting groups of enemies and a visually interesting power, but there wasn’t much going on otherwise. He had the usual hang-ups about revealing his identity to his romantic partner, and he didn’t even do so when he got married, which seems to be taking it a bit far. Iris, who took Barry’s surname to become Iris Allen, found out anyway because Barry talks in his sleep. (She told him that she knew on their first wedding anniversary.)
In 1966, DC’s writers really did not know how to tell stories about a married couple where marriage provided some form of narrative inspiration or ongoing character development. Television sitcoms made some standard “married plots” available that were relatively chaste and safe for kids (though Laura Petrie’s capri pants and the couple’s repartee on The Dick Van Dyke Show hinted that there might be more to marriage than burning the roast chicken when the boss is coming over for dinner) but none of those seemed terribly well fit to Silver Age DC’s storytelling. Barry and Iris didn’t have a child, so that whole domain of stories were out. Iris was just a civilian, and even though she was a journalist, she didn’t have Lois Lane’s propensity for getting into trouble. There were the requisite “Iris is in danger!” and “My enemy might find out I’m married!” stories but that played out fast.
With unmarried male and female superheroes, there was generally the opportunity to introduce a new love interest or at least to create a bit of romantic tension. Superman’s ties to Lois Lane were already a bit weird in the Silver Age, but he also had other LL-initialed potential love interests (Lana Lang, Lori Lemaris). Batman picked up new girlfriends now and again, but no one expected them to stick. Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor were an established item but he was stuck in the same space of permanent non-possibility as Lois Lane. Married superheroes who were both superpowered like Hawkman and Hawkgirl offered all the standard narratives of any superhero team-up. Even the other married DC couple with one civilian member, Ralph and Sue Dibny, adventured together (often very clearly basing their interactions on the Thin Man films).
So as the Silver Age norms receded and it became a more general expectation that superheroes should have more complicated personal stories, Barry Allen’s Flash presented a problem—and that problem was clearly seen as one reason his title was low-selling. In the late 1970s, the writer Cary Bates started trying to inject some kind of dynamism into his marriage, and then, in 1979, decided to move on to having the Allens decide to try to have a child right before Iris Allen was murdered (the murderer’s identity was the basis of another year’s worth of stories after that, but it was the Reverse-Flash). That led in turn to introducing Barry to a young psychic woman named Melanie, eventually starting a new relationship with a woman named Fiona Webb who turned out to be a former witness against a gangster whose memory had been hypnotically erased whom Barry was going to marry that got interrupted by an attempt to murder her and then by her subsequent nervous breakdown. Not to worry, though: Iris West was actually still alive and living in the 30th Century and Barry had a brief chance to reunite with his wife by moving to the 30th Century shortly before he died in the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Not to worry, he eventually came back to life and…ok. Comics.
Anyway, it was interesting to re-read a brief story in Adventure Comics #462 from 1979 where you can see the laborious attempt to move the Allens from being blandly Ozzie-and-Harriet marrieds whose inner life was presumed to be of little interest to preteen boys to something more dynamic. It is, shall we say, an awkward story.
No, Iris isn’t the she-demon. But the story does take off from Barry thinking about the rough patch their marriage is going through and then thinking that maybe he’s seeing Iris having an affair.
Fortunately, he’s the Flash. Not only can he keep up with Iris and her mysterious male friend, he can vibrate so fast while doing it that he’s invisible. (I know, I know, but whether it’s 1979 or 2021, neither DC nor Marvel really want to tell those kinds of stories about superhero relationships.)
I do like Barry’s semi-metafictional I can’t believe this is happening to ME!!, which almost underlines the “I used to have a completely stable 1960s-era suburban marriage in a rigorously kid-friendly medium and now suddenly I’m trapped in a story where my wife is having an extramarital affair” story hook.
Well, not to worry, despite the fact that Dr. Forrest has just referenced the fact that he and Iris used to date and Iris has just made her ongoing irritation with Barry evident. What’s interesting here is that it shows how genres and their histories compress or constrain decisions to open new avenues for characters and stories. If you want to give Barry and Iris Allen a more complicated inner life (before fridging her entirely to try and give Barry a more interesting life overall), in 1979 you can’t do that by introducing sexual problems. You probably can’t do that by introducing money problems. Barry’s still supposed to be a heroic figure, so you can’t make him a sexist asshole or make him ragingly self-absorbed or even just insensitive.
So what can you do? Make Iris resentful of the time her husband is spending as a policeman (that’s the official story she can share with others) but which is really about the time he’s spending as The Flash. And that is the channel that superhero comics and a ton of popular culture went down in the 1970s: wives who resent their professional husbands for not being home enough and who are restlessly looking for something to fill their day. Especially if they don’t have kids. Which, no matter how it’s done, is basically “Women are bitches who don’t appreciate that their husband has to save the fucking universe.”
The story keeps coming back to the suggestion that maybe Iris IS about to start an affair. But not to worry, he’s just working on astral projection, like comicbook scientists do. Barry goes home, but then suddenly he sees an image of Iris in front of him begging for help. He runs to the lab, where he’s surprisingly chill about seeing Iris unconscious in a bed and the explanation from Dr. Forrest that he hypnotized her into sleeping. Oh, astral projection, great. But then (surprise!) the experiment goes awry and Dr. Forrest explains in alarm that Iris’ astral body is being drawn rapidly away into a netherworld and he can’t stop it.
Barry vibrates to see Iris’ “silver cord” and follows her into an unearthly realm where Iris has been captured by the she-demon of the title, who intends to take over Iris’ body and let her soul drift away.
Nothing metaphorical is happening here, move along.
Still, nothing like saving your wife’s astral body and having a moment of telepathic connection as you come back to the real world as a form of superheroic marriage counseling. Affordable and effective.
Sad trombone noise.
This is after Iris wakes up in a bed in a lab after being hypnotized into unconsciousness by a former boyfriend whose prior sexual aggression she doesn’t remember fondly and it’s late at night and she doesn’t remember anything at all about what happened during the “experiment”.
That’s the thing: you can really see how much this is adult men writing to an audience that they still think is male and relatively young. There is zero chance that they can tell this from the perspective of an Iris Allen who is either actually flirting with the idea of the affair or an Iris Allen who is actually as alarmed as many women would be in this situation, even if they weren’t especially hoping for a husband to intervene. This is also Iris Allen who knows her husband is a superhero who has fought demons, ghosts, monsters, telepathic gorillas, guys who can go into the dimension on the other side of mirrors, and aliens, so you’d think there’s a chance that she’d ask him “hey so what happened, why are you here?” or trust him when he says, “I saved you from an astral demon”.
They’ve got a dictate to make the Allens have a more dynamic life and this is the only thing the writers and editors can think of: Iris is a bitch and Barry is hen-pecked and sheepish about the fact that he had to run off and save people from a fire rather than keep spying on his wife and we’ll call that “communication problems”. The sad thing is that it’s largely a rut that conventional superhero comics never got out of even as it became possible to tell more sophisticated kinds of stories about these characters. Want to trouble a male superhero’s relationship? The default is often still, “You never spend enough time with me and I get so worried about you out there saving the universe.” Want to trouble a female superhero’s relationship? Usually you just make the boyfriend turn out to be a villain or an alien or he has to move away in order to become the Secretary-General of the United Nations or something equally important.
(For anybody who’s interested, here’s an interview with writer Cary Bates where he explains what they were working up to with these Flash stories.)
I think this does reinforce my long held belief that comics and soaps share some common qualities -- one of which is they often turn to extreme and sometimes ill-thought out (or flat out offensive) storylines to move characters forward. (e.g. Luke and Laura on GH; Marlena's possession on Days).