Death of the Hero
I’ve been avoiding going to the local comics shop because I always overspend when I go there, and money has been tight for the last few years. But last Sunday I needed some storage supplies so I broked down and made the trip. While I was there, I decided to pick up a few comics. I showed restraint for once in my life, limiting my haul to the latest issues of X-Factor and Wonder Man, and issues 4, 5, and 7 of Civil War.
X-Factor and Wonder Man were enjoyable, as I expected they would be. They were written by Peter David, and he never fails to deliver good stories.
Then I took a look at Civil War and…
(SFX: sound of record needle scraping across a vinyl album)
What… the $%*#… is THIS???
For the last few years I’ve been buying just a few comics per month from the spinner rack at the grocery store. I’ve not had my finger on the pulse of either the mainstream Marvel nor DC universes. I’ve been reading Civil War tie-ins but this was the first time I’d seen the main book.
This ain’t the Marvel Universe with which I grew up.
I know that change is necessary and inevitable. But that doesn’t mean that every change is good.
When I was a youngster, the one-dimensional square-jawed super-hero who was always brave and true had for the most part been swept by the wayside. And good riddance. Those characters were boring.
But the super-heroes who had taken their place were still, y’know, heroes. They strove for an ideal. They sometimes fell short, but the important thing is that they tried. These heroes had values. They stood for something more than just themselves.
That, moreso than anything, is why I’ve always loved super-heroes. They serve as a metaphor for the ideals we should all strive to attain.
Unfortunately today’s super-heroes are “super,” but not so heroic. They fight amongst themselves and are consumed with so much personal angst and outright narcissism that there isn’t much room for heroism in their hearts and souls.
Look, I don’t think all entertainment needs to be sweetness and nice. I think Battlestar Galactica is currently the best show on television, precisely because it doesn’t shrink away from the darker aspects of humanity. But not everything has to be so grim.
There’s room in the super-hero genre for all sorts of stories, including the grim and glum material like Civil War. But there’s also room for the optimistic tales that made Marvel and DC great back in the day. So where the hell is that stuff???
March 9th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
I don’t know how much Nickelodeon you watch, and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Fairly Oddparents. (You and Jeannie just having, you know, cats who aren’t generally known for being big Nick watchers.) Well, one of the running gags on that show is a comic book character named the Crimson Chin, ably voiced by Jay Leno. In one of the episodes, Timmy wishes for all the different Chins to come out of the book, including the mid-80’s one, who got cancelled for being too violent, and what do you expect from a guy in red tights with two bandoleros across his chest? It’s a funny episode.
Something to wonder about. Before September 11, 2001, the trend seemed to be “Let’s imitate Wolverine/Lobo/Dark Knight Returns since the closest thing most of our readers ever comes to a bad guy is the guy who won’t shut up in the movie theater!” You know, antiheroes, the ones we’d be if we had the guts to just claw/shoot/whatever. But now, when Actual Evil seems to be more prevalent in what is jokingly referred to as reality, are comics going back to the straight heroics? Is that what’s behind the whole Civil War thing? Kinda like what TSR did with the Forgotten Realms Avatar trilogy when 2nd Edition came out, everything’s close to what it was, but here are the new rules, and here’s an attempt to make it seem like we didn’t just make these changes, there has to be The Reason For It.
March 9th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
Civil War–awful stuff. The scene where some hack reporter berates Captain America for not using myspace…it’s almost a parody of bad writing.
Boy, remember when people were ready to kill Jim Shooter for his paln to reboot the Marvel Universe? Much of the current output–Peter David’s work being a notable exception–almost looks like the work of people who really want to hurt the company.
I’m a guy who LOVED Dark Night, Watchmen, Wolverine, etc etc. I know dark. This…is just unpleasent. Comics used to be escapeism, now you need something to help you escape from them. For me, that has pretty much been not reading them. Too bad.
March 9th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
As much as I liked Claremont’s X-Men in the ’80’s, Wolvie wasn’t why I read them. I’ve always been more a Cyclops/Hightcrawler/Colossus/Whatever-the-heck-Kitty Pryde’s-going-by-this-issue guy. I never read Dark Knight(wanted to, just never picked it up).
Now, the darker stuff has it’s place. (If it didn’t, I wouldn’t write it.) I mean, look at the origin of Cloak and Dagger, two of my favorites. But it’s possible to get too bogged down in your own continuity and in making a comic as realistic as possible. (Captain Oxymoron, reporting for duty!) I wonder if comics haven’t gotten so niche-fyed that the companies painted themselves into a corner.
March 9th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
BTW, speaking of heroes and antiheroes and such things, TrekWeb has some early pix of Topher Grace as Venom, in case anybody’s interested.
March 10th, 2007 at 1:44 am
The thing that made my must read/must follow list shrink to subatomic levels was the increasing number of comic book writers who seemed to believe that good writing = depression, angst, sorrow and hardships for the characters. Yeah, grounding heroes like Spidey in reality with some of the problems that we all faced in day to day life made them better and more accessible characters. No doubt about that. I even liked the infusion of the darker side into some of the characters and some of the comic books in the wake of Dark Knight and Watchmen. But once damned near every writer seemed to be trying to out “Miller” Miller… I just started losing interest in so many books out there.
There’s this thing called wish fulfillment. It was one of the things that was the leading factor in my and my friends finding superhero books to begin with. You wanted to be Captain America, Spider-Man, Falcon, Green Lantern, Flash and all these other guys that had these really cool powers and cooler lives. You talked with your friends about what superpower would be the coolest to have and what you would do with it. And, lets be honest, what ten year old guy out there didn’t think that all those cool powers, an awesome set of spandex working cloths and few extraordinary but less then REALLY dangerous villains to bash into the ground wouldn’t be fun, get you the hot girl and maybe tons of cash? Did anyone ever sit around and think that they wanted to be one of those guys so that they could be miserable and chronically depressed?
Sure, as I got older I found enjoyment in comic books, books and other entertainment where you had more complex and multidimensional characters. Even when the characters were dark and twisted. But I still enjoyed the wish fulfillment factor and the pure heroics in some comics and other forms of entertainment. But that seems to be disappearing. There seems to be less and less of it everyday in most media and comic books seem to abhor the concept more then most. Strangely, the only time I see something that resembles the idea of wish fulfillment or the heroic nature you’re speaking of is when the work is being aimed at younger readers or audiences. The idea that most people seem to hold is that a truly heroic character for children alone.
I don’t thank that’s right at all.
Thing is, we’re in the minority here. The more heroic (in the old fashioned sense) a character is these days, the shorter lived the series or character it seems. And, outside of Harry Potter, when was the last major $$$$ & crossover appeal character created that held anything like the tone or style of the slightly flawed, very human character that can still display a purely heroic stance when needed? The biggest characters making the biggest waves are extremely flawed and very much less then heroic. The majority of entertainment bucks are going to the badass who fits the anti-hero mold.
But, hey, even if they slowly take away the heroes that they would have us hand over our money to them for, we’ve still got shelves full of the ones we grew up on, quite a bit of individual creative talent to create our own things (even if it may only be for our own entertainment or the entertainment of the younger kids in the family) and the occasional old school hero that slips through the cracks and makes it mainstream for a while to enjoy.