* There are a few interesting responses to my review of Robert Kirkman’s Invincible the other day. First up, in the comments, Tim O’Neil points out that many of the book’s virtues are shared (and pre-dated) by Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon–an excellent point that I thought of a few times while writing my review. In reply I point out that Savage Dragon is, according to Kirkman, a direct influence on Invincible.
* Next, Tom Spurgeon notes that a big reason the book clicks with fans is because of the unique spin it puts on traditional, familiar superhero tropes. That’s something I didn’t get into in my review, to its detriment–obviously that’s a huge part of the appeal, right from the book’s original “what’s it like to be the son of Superman?” high concept. In my defense, when I praised the book’s emphasis on ideas and storylines over attempts to create iconic moments, it was precisely the book’s ability to riff on hoary old superhero business in unexpected ways that I was thinking of–again, the way it’s zigged rather than zagged in terms of its treatment of its universe’s Krypton analogue, or how it’s dealt with antagonists like alien invaders or “archnemeses,” are the kinds of things it places front and center rather than crafting the perfect Invincible moment.
* Finally, here’s something I meant to include in my original review but forgot. A third big o’ blogging that informed my re-read was Curt Purcell’s pair of posts about the fallacies of “superhero deconstructionism” and “logical conclusions.” (My responses at the time are here and here.) Curt’s argument is that there’s nothing “logical” or “conclusive” in such stories as we generally understand those terms: Books like Watchmen, Squadron Supreme, and Brat Pack (to use the titles he and I mentioned back then) take the superhero unusually far in a particular direction, but there’s nothing inherent in the the genre that compelled that direction or the distance those books travelled down it. Curt uses the difference in the demeanor and conduct of Watchmen‘s godlike superbeing Dr. Manhattan and Squadron Supreme‘s godlike superbeing Hyperion as a pretty rock-solid case in point.
Though he never comes out and says it (and he can correct me if I’m wrong here) I believe Curt was trying to point out that there’s nothing about superhero stories that necessitates a less constrained, more “real world” treatment of the genre to wind up in the nightmarish territory that most deconstructionist superhero books explore–that the varyingly dystopian tone of Watchmen, Squadron Supreme, Rick Veitch’s ’80s books, Warren Ellis’s ’90s and ’00s books, even Frank Miller’s comparatively upbeat The Dark Knight Returns is a choice, not a revelation of something always present within the genre’s every example if we’d but had the courage to look.
I would agree, and I’d point to books like Invincible and Savage Dragon as counterexamples to those other titles. I don’t think anyone who’s read them would argue that those series are “deconstructionist” superhero books by any stretch of the imagination–they positively revel in traditional superheroics. However, they take them further than traditional, generally corporate-controlled, non-creator-owned books do. Alien invasions have lasting consequences, superhero battles greatly impact the lives and quality of life of the civilian population, the ramifications of supercrime and superlaw-enforcement are given freer reign to play out–all within the context of of story worlds that are neither dystopian nor utopian, but rather are recognizably related to the DC and Marvel Universes though far more volatile. This gets back to a point I made in that earlier discussion: stories that purport to be the “logical conclusion” of superhero comics may fail as regards the genre overall, but would almost certainly succeed if they were to take place within the big corporate superhero shared universes in that they break so many of those universes’ unwritten rules regarding the ramifications of the existence and actions of superpowered beings. Neither Savage Dragon nor Invincible would work in a shared-universe context either, since they break many of the same rules…but they also demonstrate that breaking those rules doesn’t necessarily take you into the realm of superhero-bred or superhero-led dystopia.
You got my point exactly right, Sean. I have to say, though, The Boys has really thrown my antagonism for “deconstructive” superhero comics for a loop. It’s forced me to reexamine everything I’ve previously thought about both straight-up superhero comics and stuff like Watchmen. This post reminds me I should get to work writing all that up. I certainly look forward to continuing this dialogue!