Another month, another tedious kerfuffle about whether or not superhero stories are inherently bad/childish/stupid. I gotta tell you, for all that superhero-bashers decry the genre’s tendency to lapse into rote, repetitive predictability–well, I guess you can see where I’m going with this.
The lastest debate centers around Christopher Butcher, who (as I discussed the other day) is really pissed off that writers like Brian Bendis have eschewed ostensibly more personal work to play in the big spandex sandbox. As backup, he links to a Millarworld messboard post approvingly cited by Graeme McMillan. The post argues that superheroes are inherently non-adult, that any attempts to create some sort of “adult take on superheroes” are doomed to failure, that the books heralded as the “adult takes on superheroes” (The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen) are in fact about “about the impossibility of treating these iconic characters as “adult” and having them continue to behave in the way we have come to expect,” etc. The poster seems to find the the Big Two’s big guns the most offensive in this regard:
the mainstream characters – the archetypes and the bit-part players that surround them – simply cannot be written as adult characters with out appearing utterly ridiculous to all concerned.
In this way his prejudices dovetail neatly with Chris Butcher’s, who’s drawn that same distinction between corporate superheroes and creator-owned ones.
Can anyone tell me why? Seriously, I want to know. Of course the odds are against you if you want to do some serious life-changing work in a flagship title–it takes someone with the talent and clout of Frank Miller or Brian Bendis or Grant Morrison to convince the suits that allowing them to really fuck around with some of the company’s toys might make the remaining toys work better. But it can be done, and it is done, all the time. Again, what is this mystery difference in quality between Powers and Bendis’s Marvel work, or The Filth and New X-Men, that folks like Chris & Tim O’Neil treat like an article of faith? Creator-owned superpeople are better because they’re creator owned. QED. If there’s more to it than that, I’d love to have it explained to me.
Steven Berg is all over this particular beat, offering a hilarious takedown of Chris’s assertions. How, he asks, is what Bendis is doing with Daredevil or Morrison doing with Cyclops any different than what Moore is doing with Mina freaking Harker? Taking it a bit further, how is it different from Street Angel or Powers or Hellboy or The Filth or any of the other creator-owned superhero concepts that Chris, Tim and others fawn all over? The answer: It isn’t, and moreover I would submit that only people immersed in fanboy culture, who subsequently want to differentiate themselves from fanboy culture, would suggest that there’s any difference at all. I think we’ll all admit that people working in the corporate-trademark field have an uphill battle ahead of them, in terms of dealing with a bureaucracy that wants to preserve the illusion of change without dealing with the actual ramifications of change, that people working on their own characters don’t face–but good work is good work, plain and simple. Your individual mileage may vary, but it seems safe to say that people like Brian Bendis have successfully waged that battle. Why in God’s name would the fact that someone else owns the trademark make the story any less good?
What makes this particular iteration of the superhero debate so weird is the inconsistency of the opposing position. In one breath (in many, actually), Chris will go out of his way to lambaste corporate superheroes and superheroes generally; in the next he’ll go apeshit for a superhero comic, and even a corporate superhero comic, Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier! The flip-flopping is egregious, and in my opinion can only be explained by the desire to gratuitously differentiate oneself from fanboys, and, perhaps, a fairly straightforward hard-on for Marvel.
(And what is it about The New Frontier that drives otherwise sensible reviewers into flights of rhetorical ecstasy? Listen, the art is obviously gorgeous, and two issues in may be too early to draw a conclusion, but so far this just seems like unreconstructed Marvels-style icon worship at its most cloyingly nostalgic, with the added “bonus” of incorporating the impenetrable continuity wonking of (the otherwise superior Alex Ross book of note) Kingdom Come. Honestly, folks, I am a huge freaking geek, and I don’t know who half these goddamn characters are. The fact that the book is drawn by the inheritor of the Bruce Timm mantle can really only get you so far.)
David Fiore, as you might expect, has more reasons why this latest anti-superhero argument is missing the formally inventive, narratively compelling, philosophically fascinating superhero forest for the “people don’t wear funny costumes” trees. Read his piece, read Steven’s, mentally tag on a “‘Nuff said,” and I think this round is over.