First let me say this. I love superheroes. As a kid I always wanted to be one, and I love stories about people with special abilities using those abilities to make the world a better place. I loved the recent Marvel shared universe movies, and there have been some other good ones; but this entry isn't about those. This is why I quit comics. If you still love comics, you aren't dumb for doing so. As I said in my second post you should love your fandom and not be afraid of what other people think about it. This is about the problems that I see in the medium, and I'll grant that some of what I'm going to say is subjective as it is a matter of personal taste. Anyway with that out of the way let's get into the meat of things by talking about Marvel first.
Many people say that they like Marvel comics because the characters are more complex. They have problems and that makes them more relatable and I'm sorry but I have to disagree. See problems indicate something to overcome, and sometimes this is true; but most of the time what Marvel characters actually do is suffer. Time after time, tragedy after tragedy and they just soldier on because apparently that's just what they do. I'm not saying that a character should be happy all the time either because that's not good storytelling either, but having a constant string of terrible things happening all around you is also bad storytelling. Struggle is part of the journey, but its not the ONLY part of the journey. See if you keep your characters in a constant state of emotional pain to show how noble they are then you make a joke out of them, it ceases to be realistic because a person, any person, can only take so much before they lose it and break. It takes more to be complex than being put through the emotional wringer constantly.
Another big problem with the Marvel universe, again this goes back to their claims of "realism" is that the average human of the world is stupid. Mind numbingly, bone crunchingly stupid. Spiderman has been saving New York City for years, sometimes on a daily basis, and people hate him because apparently J. Jonah Jameson owns the only paper in the city. Cops hate him, people hate him and this despite everything he's done for the city. This is just not realistic. Some newspaper, some television news personality, heck some NATIONAL personality would support the guy by this point; but since this is Spiderman everything has to go against him even though it makes no sense.. At least at the start it made sense because he was an unknown factor, but by this point I think the cops and people of NYC would be telling Jameson to shut it. They'd see through him, because people learn. Heck if Captain America would just do an interview and tell people "hey don't worry Spiderman is good, I've worked with him and he's a friend" I think people would listen because he's Captain freakin' America; but nope never gonna happen, even though Cap and Spidey are friends, because Spiderman has to have it hard all the time, even when it makes no sense. Mutants are another issue I have with Marvel. I get that when X-Men first started it was an allegory about race. You couldn't tell those stories back then openly because of the Comic's Code Authority. So it makes sense that, back then, mutants were hated and had to fight for their rights, but see every civil rights struggle comes to an end because most everyday people start to change their minds about it as young people start to take over the system and start to vote for change; but this is Marvel where people are stupid, well more so, so the conflict is never resolved. Even though mutants heroes, and the X-Men in particular, have saved the world on numerous occasions the reaction they get from you average person is "Blarg you're a mutie I hates me some muties". It just doesn't make sense by this point to continue the allegory because, while there still some racists out there, they don't have power any more. Dr. King won, though he didn't live to see it. I know some people now see it as an allegory for being gay, and I don't know about that I just know how it started, it still stands to reason that by now people would be ok with mutants. They'd see that the majority just want to be left alone, just like them; but nope everyone's a screaming racist. See here's another issue where established heroes could help. Again we turn to Captain America, one of the most trusted heroes in the nation. He could do a nationally televised interview and talk about these things and at least some people would listen to him, because he's Captain America. What we have is no resolution and no world growth because someone at Marvel is afraid that they'll run out of some contrived, constant struggle nonsense to throw at the characters if the world starts to change for the better.
Then we come to, what was for me, the final straw from Marvel. The great jump the shark moment in the life of Spiderman, and I think many people will know where this is about to go. Yup the deal with Mephisto. Really? A deal with the devil? Marvel's arguably most moral character, up to this point, makes a deal with the devil to save Aunt May, who already told him she was ok with dying. This is where I decided Joe Quesada was a hack and that Marvel no longer had respect for their own source material. Spiderman refused to kill Carnage and a number of other villains who all came back and tried to kill him numerous times. He talked all the time about the greater good and doing what was right even when it was hard and then he makes the most selfish decision of his life by sacrificing, not just his marriage, but also the daughter he would have had. No. Just no. I still want to punch Quesada in the face over this because I think it destroyed any moral credibility the character had, it showed that he was just as selfish as anyone else. All his talk about nobility and the greater good, and keeping on in the face of tragedy was just that. Talk. Especially when they had already, apparently, killed Aunt May off in another storyline and he came through that fine. This was a story done to sell comics, it was a cheap marketing gimmick and I'll never buy another Marvel comic book over it again. As an aside the killing off of both Peter Parkers was also stupid, and no Superior Spiderman is not Peter Parker, he's Doc Oc with Peter's memories.
Then we come to DC comics, which has its own set of problems. One of which being the constant reboots of the DC universe. It gets confusing when you have to keep asking, ok what comics are cannon now? There's such a convoluted backlog of stories that are all over the place and characters that don't make much sense that the first reboot after Crisis on Infinite Earths was somewhat understandable, there was just too much material to keep track of and where it was connected to. Then it moved on to event, after event, after event and it just got too hard to keep track of what they were doing. It wasn't worth it to me to keep reading when they were just going to "shake things up" a few months later anyway. There is such a thing as too much change too quickly.
Another problem is the shock factor change that DC has a penchant for, and I think they do this when they run out of ideas for what to do with a character. I'm sorry having the Joker cut his own face off was stupid, and revealing that Batman had revealed his identity to the Joker early in his career was another jump the shark moment. Batman is NOT that abysmally stupid. He's the world's greatest detective for crying out loud. Killing off Catwoman was stupid because it was just a shock value choice. We all know she'll be back in one form or another, because death has no consequences in comics. No one ever stays dead in comics and because of this no fan takes character deaths in Marvel and DC seriously.
My other issue with DC is their penchant for wanting to "dirty up" superheroes. Ugh. Can we please get past this juvenile notion that everything has to be grim and gritty? This nonsense started in the nineties and it just won't go away. Not everyone needs to be an anti-hero, superheroes shouldn't be killing people and the genre does not need to be "dirtied up" any more than it already has been. It has been a trend for the past twenty years and I'm sick of it. There's a reason the Image characters all but disappeared.
Sigh. Look like I said I love superheroes its just depressing to see where the genre has gone. You see one world, Marvel, where everything is stagnant. The people of the world never change even though they have real world experience seeing heroes of all shapes and stripes saving people, yet they hate the people they hate because in Marvel the heroes have to suffer because it is easier to do that than come up with an actual complex plot line. Then you have DC, where things change all the time and people seem used to it on some level. Some other dude is dressed as Green Lantern? They just shrug and go about their day to day lives. Supers in that world are kind of innocuous and are even used in suicide missions by the government. I think the real problem though is that both worlds are kind of stagnant. I think that if the worlds has progressed in a semi-real time fashion then the companies would have been forced to come up with new heroes and villains and would have been forced to confront some of the issues that they've been avoiding for the past thirty odd years.
Every story has an ending and the stories we've been telling with these characters have been going on, in some cases, since the 1940's. There are only so many tales to be told before you resort to stupid contrivances and repeating yourself over and over again. Maybe, and this is hard for me to say, maybe it is time to close the book on some of these stories and create new characters to write about. Find new journey's to explore, or at least new one's to begin.
I agree with you on this. Part of the problem is the nature of the comic books themselves as well as the people who read them. The characters age very little and they get passed around to different writers who want to put their own thumbprint on things. If one writer wants to do character development and the next likes the character they way they were before you suddenly have a story that doesn't make sense.
ReplyDeleteAlso since comics come out 12 times a year, it's hard to do things in the long term. A story arc can take up 6 issues and (for example) 3 days in the comic book but that's half a year in the real world. Five years to us can be a few months in the comic yet comic book time advances too.
As much as I hate DC for rebooting, the concept has merit. It gives the chance to restart for a new audience. But it has problems. First is that it's never done right. They make this big deal about it. There's always some cosmic reason for the reboot. Then you anger the old fans for destroying their world and you don't really get enough new fans to replace them so you go back and try to appease the old fans again. In the end it turns out to be a big mess.
The worst thing is I don't see a way out of it. I can't tell Marvel/DC how to fix things because I don't think they can. The inherent nature of comics makes it impossible. They have to make a choice, do they want Archie where nothing changes and the characters are stuck in 20-whatever or do they want For Better For Worse and have time continue at the normal rate and just have the comics be the major events in a character's life.
I'd like to see the latter. I'd like to see them grow and age. They'd have to pass the mantle or name along to a new hero. They could even die (and yes really die and not "get better"). But I don't think the fans would go for it. Peter Parker IS Spider-man even though he's older than most of his readers. They tried to make someone else Spider-man and it did not end well. But that's what they have to do. Both the industry and the fans need to learn to let go and let life continue.
I really agree with you on this one.
ReplyDeleteWrote something on that myself last year, and several posts afterwards:
http://lonesomewriter.blogspot.de/2012/08/why-i-gave-up-on-mainstream-superhero.html
The problem these days is that these big companies own the intelectual property and want to "preserve" it because they can make money with it. That, sadly, let to the problem that nowadays all of these stories have become stail or when there's change the next writer/editor will undo it again. So what's the point of keep reading?