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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: November 7, 2003 at 2:07 am by Eve Tushnet

2003-11-07T02:07:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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YOU WOULDN’T KNOW A GREAT COMIC IF IT BIT YOU ON YOUR ARCHETYPE. So… superheroes.

Something specific has to hook me in to a superhero comic. I’m kind of like this with all literature (it’s why I have such lurid and whacked-out tastes), but a lot more so with superhero comics. Here’s my (very personal) rundown of what does and doesn’t work for me in superhero stuff, in alphabetical order. Note that this is also your “concept vs. execution” post.

The Avengers. I don’t get them. This column attempts to give me a sense of what their point is. So far no dice. What are they avenging? What makes them cooler than other team books? What are their characteristic themes, the things they do that other concepts couldn’t? So yeah, haven’t read one yet, don’t get it.

Batman. Idea: fine, I guess. Nice costume. Creepy. But the temptation to hit up the abused children and the insane assailants is just too tempting. I’ve read maybe five Batman stories, and Batman Meets Houdini (if that was the name?) is the only one that did anything at all for me. (The others: Arkham Asylum [pretty but vacant], Gotham by Gaslight, the one with the killer monks, and I think there’s one I’m forgetting.) There’s just too much angst. And yes, I realize how that sounds coming from an X-fan.

Daredevil. When I was in college, I spent a year running the campus conservative/libertarian monthly. Like all good campus right-wing maniacs, we got our money from the Institute for Satanic Individuals.

But my year, our publication schedule somehow came detached from our funding schedule. We never had enough cash to cover expenses. ISI always came through in the end, but man, there were some hairy moments. So I ended up writing checks for the paper out of my personal bank account–and then, when my own balance groaned and threatened overdraft, I’d have to pay my rent out of the newly-replenished Yale Free Press account. I lost money on this deal, but it totally must have looked like I was embezzling.

Anyway, that’s pretty much how I think of Matt Murdock. Constantly shuffling between incompatible lives–never able to make his emotional and spiritual accounts balance. (I guess Born Again is when he finally gets audited….) He’s Murdock until he can’t take that anymore, then he’s Daredevil until that becomes too hairy and he switches back. The movie captured this tension nicely.

The guy’s my second-favorite superhero character ever. Catholic womanizer; vigilante lawyer; highly competent walking train wreck; devil costume in the confessional. Blind justice; pure symbol. I just eat this stuff up with a spoon. It hits me where I live.

And I love that his beat is so small. His love of Hell’s Kitchen reminds me strongly of my love of this little District of Chaos, the city beyond the Nation’s Capital, D.C. the hometown not Washington the dateline.

So yeah, Daredevil. Great stuff.

The Hulk. I’ve already noted that I identify with the big green guy. I’ve got a vicious temper, for reals. But I’m actually totally uninterested in stories about the Hulk. I want him as part of my mental furniture, like Cinderella or Peter Pan or the Selfish Giant. But he’s more impressive as an archetypal, monumental, and motionless symbol than as a character in an ongoing series. (The “Hulk” movie did nothing to disabuse me of this belief that the Hulk does best when he isn’t yoked to a plot.)

Spider-Man. The basic concept (“with great power comes pretentious captions”) is strong. The beautiful “Teen Boat” contrast (“All the angst of being a teen–all the thrills of being a boat!”) is sweet. Unqualified Offerings captures the point of Spider-Man brilliantly.

Why don’t I care?

I don’t know. Part of it is that Spider-Man, like the Hulk, works best as a motionless character. Take him out of suspension and you get the continuity problems UO details in the link above.

Part of it is that Spider-Man is kind of a generic teen, and I need something more screwed-up. There’s nothing insane, distinctive, Mark of Cain-like about Spider-Man. He’s just an archetype of growing up. Fair ‘nough, but not really my thing; I need some whiskey in my coffee, and some barbed wire in my whiskey.

Superman. I see the point of him, maybe. I guess we need a symbol of purity and strength. But that don’t mean I gotta like him.

The X-Men. Oy ye yoy. Now we get to the most severe disjunction between a) concept, b) inherent but unnoticed strengths of concept, and c) execution.

a) The concept of the X-Men sucks. Let’s just get that out of the way at the beginning. At brunch last Sunday, UO pointed out, “Yeah, it says it’s a comic about prejudice, but it’s really a comic about its [I can’t remember if he said ‘readers” or ‘characters”!] persecution complexes.” And there is much wisdom in this statement! (Here’s an interesting piece on the problems with reading “X-Men” as a comic about racial prejudice. I don’t know that I agree with all of it, but it’s a fun ride.)

So yeah–if you try too hard to read “X-Men” as an anti-racist comic, you will find it boring, despairing (have the X-Men changed anything in the past however-many-Marvel-years they’ve had??), and alternately irrelevant and creepy.

So don’t! There are other ways to look at “X-Men.”

b) First, it’s the most realistic look at team dynamics I’ve read in any medium. “X-Men” replicates the personal and political dramas of my college debating society, a.k.a. The Freaks Who Changed My Life, perfectly.

If you read “X-Men” as a book about leadership, you won’t be disappointed–and leadership is something I could think about all day. It’s an endlessly fascinating topic to me, since I was pretty much forced into a leadership role I wasn’t suited for, and had to figure out how to make it mine. I think I did. I’ve seen my debating society hijack a lot of lives, and so I’ll read anything that helps me understand how it exists and how its particular brand of alienated, intense, political personal leadership works. “X-Men” resonated.

“X-Men” gets at the sense that teams don’t solely form out of personal affinities. Teams are also political–the sphere of the unchosen. Comics101 points out, “no one wanted to be an X-Man.” They’ve got the Mark of Cain; they’re the Catholic Church of superheroes, they’ll take anybody. I just got New X-Men #5: Assault on Weapon Plus, and was struck by the fact that although I strongly sympathized with Emma Frost throughout, I also totally knew why Sage was fed up with her and her dramas. I recognized that feeling from my life with the Party of the Right: People come into conflict even when there’s no “bad guy.” They come into conflict because they have clashing personalities, clashing perspectives, and clashing partial views of the truth. The team creates its own drama.

c) Second, there’re just some really good characters lurking in there. I like the concept of Rogue (“Stop me before I kiss again”) better than the execution, and the reverse for Emma “I’ve become the perfect Faberge killing machine for a reason… and that reason is surely not to wave the flag for X-Liberalism” Frost. I love how the grandiloquence and constant third-person references of the ’60s Noble Beast can be seen as Henry McCoy’s attempt to build a personal identity through sheer willpower–a feat he’s still trying to accomplish in New X-Men. The X-Men have seen more than their share of stupid crap (a dragon???? Dracula?!?!) but they have also had more than their share of strong, archetypal characters.

More on that when I write my whole “Why I Like Grant Morrison But Not Chris Claremont” thing. Assuming I do like Grant Morrison by the end of his X-run, of course….

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