“Lois Lane please put me in your plan
Yeah, Lois Lane you don't need no Superman
Come on downtown and stay with me tonight
I got a pocket full of kryptonite”
~ ‘Jimmy Olsen’s Blues’, by Barron/Comess/Schenkman/White
from the Spin Doctors album “Pocket Full Of Kryptonite”, 1991
If you tuned in last week, you’ll have read about some of my predilection for the storytelling medium of comic books. My love for the medium goes back to when I was a mere slip of a lad.
Of the ‘Big 2’, Marvel Comics and DC comics, I tended more towards Marvel (featuring characters such as Spiderman, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and The Avengers) than DC (home of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, and Aquaman). To me, a notable difference between the Marvel and DC stables of characters seem to be how much more ‘human’ the Marvel characters seemed to be; Superman was an alien, Batman a billionaire, Wonder Woman a warrior princess, whereas Spiderman was an orphaned, down-on-his-luck high-school student, The Hulk a victim of an accident, and the Fantastic Four a family. The X-Men serve as both a reflection of human bigotry and racism, and analogous of puberty.
Also, the nature of their alter-egos was often fundamentally different; Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman disguised themselves as Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne and Diana Prince. Their human faces are the characters disguising their true state. Peter Parker, on the other hand, disguises himself as the hero Spider-Man.
Comic books are not the exclusive purview of superheroes, of course. Comics have, and still do, portray stories in every conceivable genre, from science fiction, to romance, to westerns, to thrillers, to adventure stories, to drama, to fantasy, to war stories, and so on. It is perhaps strange that tales featuring super-heroes are the most common genre in modern comics in the western world. I cannot say with any kind of certainty why this is, although I do believe the super-hero genre (if, in fact, it is a genre) has the ability to cover a multitude of other genres simultaneously.
I have noticed increasingly in recent years that there is definitely an apparently obsessive maintenance of the status quo in especially the Big 2’s respective ‘universes’ of characters, and a reluctance to explore new paradigms. It is not new
Back in the golden years of comics, around the beginning of the 1960’s, Marvel in particular were creating and developing their characters from scratch. It was really a time of cutting edge creativity in the medium. The universe the comic pioneers of yesteryear created then became popular and, over time, the essential attributes of their stories and casts of characters in their various titles solidified to become what we know and love today. After that initial flurry of creation, it became the norm to revisit elements that were popular before, rather than creating new scenarios to be played out. Spiderman fought the Green Goblin and the comic sold well - so new comics where he fights the Green Goblin all over again came around frequently, maybe every few months. Fairly soon, Spiderman fighting one of maybe a dozen or so villains month in, month out, over endless years, was de rigeur. Nowadays, the Big 2 rarely introduce new characters, and even when they do, their readership seems to lament that the new villain is not as ‘good’ as the Green Goblin. New characters are rarely embraced and tend in most cases to fade into obscurity. Plots get rehashed, and the stories seem to rely on the illusion of change, rather than actual genuine character development.
Clearly the readership is as complicit in the recycling of this status quo due to their bitter and sometimes vitriolic (especially on the internet) attacks on any comic creator or company who dare to mess with characters they know and love and view with a sense of ownership. It’s been noted that some of the classic pioneering comic book stories of the first decades of modern comic books would never have been allowed to be written if the internet had existed in the time of their creation. Marvel Entertainment’s Chief Creative Officer and former Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada sometimes refers to the bluster that is rampant on various comic book related forums on the world wide web as the ‘interfret’.
Another element that has no doubt affected the unchanging nature of modern comics is that the initial creators had no template upon which to base their creations. They were inspired by classical literature, movies, and the world around them*. On the other hand, modern comic book writers often grew up reading comics, sometimes even belonging to the very rabid, continuity-obsessed readership that will in turn read their work. When they have the opportunity and become popular enough to have a platform of their own from which to create comic books, it seems that often their default position is to write their own version of the Spiderman/Green Goblin fight that has been done to death by dozens of writers before them. Comics, in many instances, have become a literary Ouroboros.
The alternate view is that perhaps superheroes have become a new form of mythology to the modern world, in a similar fashion as the various pantheons arose from ancient times, such as the Norse gods from the Vikings or the Olympians from the Ancient Greeks. Perhaps superheroes and their stories in the Big 2 universes are unchanging because of a resonance with mankind that requires them to remain relatively static in order to become a myth-defining phenomenon. Furthermore, perhaps the ‘interfret’ is a reflection of a type of worship.
Modern myths notwithstanding, I’ve drifted away from comics for the most part in recent years. I’ve found I can only read the same characters doing the same things and fighting the same villains in ever increasingly adolescent male fantasies so many times before it becomes clear that my ongoing support is merely encouraging the increasingly self-indulgent creators to re-tread old ground. I can’t muster the kind of manic passion that comic fandom often seems to demand. I’ve decided to be very selective in what I purchase and keep, and occasionally I go through my dozen-odd long-boxes of comics to see if there’s anything in there that may not be worth keeping long term. I’ve promised myself to be sure to keep only the very, very best of the many Spiderman/Green Goblin battles in my possession.
*The many superheroes that received their ‘powers’ due to various kinds of ‘radiation’ may very well have emerged from a fascination with, and fear of, the perceived nuclear threat observed during the Cold War.
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