Something that stuck with me once I’d finished the issue…was the way in which the Marvel Universe these days is all about fear…right now, any sense of wonder or awe has been replaced by a sense of terror and threat: We have Atlantis launching sleeper cell terrorist attacks, we have the Inhumans declaring war on humanity and wanting to take over the world, we have mutantkind facing extinction and infighting, America becoming a police state because superheroes might accidentally blow up a school full of kids, and by the way, your best friend or anyone you know might be an alien invader undercover. There’s an incredible and depressing lack of openness to “the other” in Marvel’s books, these days; nothing is seen as new or different or unusual in a good sense, because everything that isn’t “us” is a threat (as opposed to even being a potential threat). …There used to be a time where it was awesome (in both senses of the world) that there was a race of superhumans living on the moon, instead of it being another band of people who want to kill us….Is it really post-9/11, post-Afghanistan invasion and post-Iraq civil war insularism informing what the Marvel writers are coming up with, or something else? And, either way, is there any way that optimism and, well, good fun could come back to these characters again?
–Graeme McMillan, “Where Have All the Good Times Gone: Graeme gets Silent, 6/27,” Savage Critic(s)
I don’t know that this is so much inherent in modern-day Marvel as it is part and parcel of the overall lack of optimistic science fiction, at least in terms of the sci-fi that reaches the mainstream. And Paul Pope recently told me he’s reading Ray Kurzweil these days, so maybe things are changing.
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