A couple of weeks ago I posted a series of discussions about the way in which super-hero comics tend to be structured around homosocial desire and the closet. You can read the whole series here.
Just to resummarize quickly: the basic argument is that a character like Superman is a male power fantasy. That fits in with Freud and the Oedipal conflict. Clark Kent can be seen as the “child” who imagines himself supplanting the Father/lawgiver/god. You can also take this one step away from Freud and argue (via the theories of Eve Sedgwick) that what we’re talking about here is not, or not solely, an internal psychological desire, but rather a cultural/social formulation. Men turn away from femininity in order to identify with patriarchal power; or, to see it another way, to be patriarchal requires the denigration or hiding of weakness. That’s the closet; Clark Kent is living a lie, pretending to be powerful in order to be powerful, when his truth is actually a weak, wimpy child. And, again, the closet is powered by male-male desires and fantasies, making it homoerotic (though, as I argue at some length, it’s actually a straight person’s homoerotic fantasy — we’re talking about how straight men bond or interact with the patriarchy in particular, and arguing that that interaction is structured by ideas about, and within, gayness.)
Okay, so that’s basically where we left things. In the last few posts, I was mostly interested in pointing out similarities in the way this basic blueprint was used across different kinds of comics, from Superman and Batman through Spider-Man and Hulk and on to the work of folks like Chris Ware and Dave Sim. But, of course, there are differences too from case to case, and it’s interesting to look at some of those, and how they work.
So first, I’ve been thinking a little about the differences between some of the early heroes of the 30s and 40s and the later iconic Marvel heroes. Generally, I think, the argument is that Marvel heroes were different because they were more realistic; they faced everyday problems, made mistakes and so forth.
I wonder how true that is exactly, though. The fact is, none of the Marvel characters are all that realistic. Peter has girl troubles, sure, and he gets bullied — but Clark Kent had girl troubles, and he got bullied too. And Peter’s a genius inventor. And he’s drawn to look like he’s 40 even though he’s only like — what? 16?
Anyway, the point is, I don’t think the change had all that much to do with verisimilitude. We’re still in the world of preposterous fantasy, after all, with cosmic rays and gamma rays and super strength and defeating your enemies by punching them in the face. The difference, it seems to me, has more to do with anxiety. The Oedipal split is always somewhat agonized and anxious; the superfather for Freud is also the super-castrating ogre. And in those early Superman stories, Clark is despised and castrated; there’s a definite feeling of loathing.
However, the loathing is in these directed mostly towards the castrated, not the castrator. The problem, the thing to be ridiculed, is powerlessness, not power.
Over time, though, the faith in that image of absolute power started to waver. In the 50s and 60s there was a lot of more-or-less playful experimentation with the idea of superman as evil father. Thus, the aptly (and Freudianly) named Superman is a Dick website.
Here’s a particularly apropos picture:
I don’t know that I can really add anything to that.
Of course, the stories here always resolved by showing that Superman was acting for everyone’s good; he may have looked like the evil father, but he’s still really the good father; patriarchy is still to be trusted, power is still great, and all the boys still want that super dick.
Marvel’s innovation was not that it gave us stories that were different in kind from Superman’s kid, Jimmy Olsen. Rather, the difference was that it was able to take exactly this story and treat it as tragedy rather than farce. The problems most Marvel super-heroes face is precisely that of the superdick. That is, they aren’t beset by normal, everyday problems — they’re beset by the Thing — the monster phallus itself. Peter Parker’s mega-problems (the death of his uncle in particular) stem from being Spider-Man; which is why, when he loses his powers, he’s acutely relieved. The early Marvel comics loved to portray super-powers as a crippling curse, a disaster. The Hulk is maybe the purest example; the uber-masculine ogre who hates and wants to destroy his weaker self. You couldn’t really come up with a more lurid Oedipal castration fantasy.
The Marvel stories, then, are about mistrust of patriarchal authority; they insistently question whether the great gay bargain — exchanging individual weakness for patriarchal strength at the cost of always hiding your weakness — is really worth it. In this, they’re not unlike exploitation films, which are from roughly the same time period and which were also obsessed, in various ways, with authority and changing ideas about masculinity and femininity.
But where exploitation films could, and did, revel in the perverse pleasures of fucking with authority, Marvel comics never (for various reasons) went there. As with Superman as Superdick, the stories always ultimately ended up affirming the worth of power as power. Peter Parker is relieved to lose his powers…but then his Aunt and girlfriend are captured, and he realizes how much he Needs to Be a Man and grasp the superdick in order to save them. And even though he’s an ogre, The Hulk, somehow, always ends up being a force for good (and eventually became childlike himself, neatly undercutting the evil-ogre-father aspect of the character, which was much more prominent in the first issues.) Moreover, Stan was hardly above indulging in some Superman style superdickery himself; Professor X and other father figures are always running the X-Men through this or that idiotic test for their own good. “Yes, my X-Men, I gutted Ice Man and used his bloody remains to lubricate the gears of my Cerebro computer, then let you think he was dead for weeks. But! The experience has made you stronger as a team! And Cerebro is working really well now! And besides, before I brutally murdered him, I created a perfect robot duplicate, whose powers work better and who doesn’t engage in annoying pranks. Say hello to you new teammate: Ice-Bot!”
Having just written that super-hero parody, I have to say…it’s interesting how much super-hero parody revolves around superdickery. Chris Ware’s Superman, for example, is essentially a brutal sadist destroying everyone who contradicts him; Johnny Ryan has a superman/god character who works in a similar way. And then there’s Kate Beaton’s bad-ass Wonder Woman. And a lot of the humor in Mini-Marvels is based on the kid heroes behaving like megaomaniacal uber-fathers (Reed Richards cheerfully sending the Hulk off into space for example.) And, of course, that’s the whole point of Marvel Zombies too, with the heroes turned into evil ogres and at last wholeheartedly embracing their inner superdickery.
In fact, the genius of the early Marvel comics is not that they undercut (as it were) the superdick, but rather that they reconsecrate it by more fully acknowledging its dickishness. Males (and especially adolescent males, the ones reading these comics) are always ambivalent about sadism and patriarchal power, both because the sadism and patriarchal power is likely as not to be directed against them (“go to your room!” go off to war!”) and because, you know, who wants to be always about to become the ogre raping and murdering their own loved ones? That very guilt and fear, however, function as a lever and a spur. Peter Parker kills his father….and his life is thereafter defined by the guilt that demands he himself become a monster/father to take Uncle Ben’s place. The Hulk, in his later incarnations, is not just the destructive phallus, but the wounded child as destructive phallus; the fantasy, both terrifying and fascinating, is to become the ogre-father while still an infant, eternally both torturing oneself and satisfyingly wreaking instant vengeance, on oneself and others, for the torture. Marvel figured out that you don’t need to deny the anxiety and guilt attendant upon the power fantasy; rather, you can harness them to make the green monster grow.
So a couple more comments about this.
— I think that, as others have pointed out, power fantasies (or superdickery) is really central to the super-hero genre. And I think that what that means in part is that the super-hero genre is — not always, or everywhere, but quite centrally nonetheless — sadistic. It’s about identifying with power — either for good, or for ill. It’s about being the beneficent god or the evil ogre father, or both at once. To the extent that you do identify with weakness, it’s generally as a prelude to releasing your inner hulk, or going out to websling, or whatever.
—This is a big part of why superheroics and horror (as opposed to goth) don’t mix especially well. You can certainly have gore in something like Blackest Night, because gore and violence fit perfectly well with sadism; you can be the ravening ogre father chomping on bones, hooray! And, yes, sadism does have a place in horror too — thus torture-porn — and to that extent it does make some sense to think of Blackest Night or Marvel Zombies as some kind of horror crossover. But the central mode of horror really is not sadism; it’s masochism. It’s about being the devoured child, not the devouring father — in horror, while you may cheer for the ogre at various points, you never actually are the ogre; you’re the victim, which is where the fear comes from. The whole point of Shivers or the Thing or the Living Dead movies is that the characters are consumed; they are destroyed, and then eaten up or filled up by the Other (which is pretty explicitly the phallus, in Shivers and the Thing, especially.)
But super-hero comics never do that; even when the super-heroes are evil, they have a recognizable personality, and are the stars with which you (more or less) identify. The two genres, super-heroes and horror, are simply diametrically opposed; they are committed to opposite goals. Super-hero comics are fun because they empower; horror is fun because it disempowers. You can’t do both at once. (Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing is an exception that tests the rule, perhaps…I found the Swamp Thing vampire story at least fairly scary. But Moore accomplished that by keeping Swamp Thing himself off screen for most of the story while various civilians are terrorized and slaughtered. When Swamp Thing did show up to do battle with a giant frog/lizard/vampire thing, the horror quickly dissipated.)
—Masochism is central to the way that exploitation films, such as horror, express their distrust of the status quo. Not that horror films are actually revolutionary, per se, or that I Spit on Your Grave is going to overthrow the patriarchy or anything. But, effectual or not, a film like Last House on the Left really expresses a visceral distaste for patriarchal authority. It sneers at good dads and bad dads alike, and at the war they perpetrated, and at the whole concept of justice and truth. And again, it does this through masochism — through identifying with victims and getting pleasure/excitement/terror through fantasies of disempowerment rather than through fantasies of empowerment.
Super-hero comics on the other hand, have a lot of trouble making that kind of perverse identification with the disempowered. This is the case even with parodies like Marvel Zombies or Ted Rall’s Fantabulaman or even Chris Ware’s Superman/Jimmy Corrigan strips, where there’s generally a kind of contempt for Jimmy’s weakness which echoes the distaste for Clark Kent or Peter Parker. In all these parodies, the focus is largely on the evil father doing the ogrish evil; the victims are much less personified or even visualized. Even if you have your tongue in your cheek while admiring the superdick, you’re still kind of admiring the superdick.
Grant Morrison’s mainstream work provides an even clearer example. In his Justice League and X-Men runs, he often has his villains launch fairly damning critiques of the heroes as egotistical, self-satisfied, godlike assholes. But then he always kind of takes it back; the heroes waltz on and show that they’re noble and good and they save the world and you’re supposed to be all enthusiastic, I guess. Obviously, Morrison identifies with the critique to some extent, but there isn’t any way in a super-hero comic to let it have the last word, or to have it be the point (as it is, to some extent at least, in the Invisibles.)
Another example is Greg Rucka’s Hiketeia. Rucka puts a certain amount of effort into making the story masochistic. The cover features Wonder Woman stepping on Batman’s head, and the plot is a rape-revenge, in which a young girl slaughters her sister’s killers, taking the knife to patriarchal notions of justice and fairness. Men get beat down by storng women. However…in the first place, this is a Wonder Woman comic, and a lot of the emotional oomph comes from watching her beat the tar out of Batman — you identify with her, which is sadistic rather than masochistic. Secondly, the story ends up being not about the girl and her revenge at all, but instead about the tragic rift that the girl’s rape-revenge creates between Wonder Woman and Batman; a rift the girl, rather inexplicably, sacrifices herself to heal. It’s like she hears all the genre rules yelling at her that she’s supposed to be the one getting castrated, not doing the castrating, and she finally acquiesces — perhaps just because she can’t stand being written by Greg Rucka any longer.
Again, Watchmen is perhaps an exception of sorts here, where the role of all-powerful father is both questioned and in various ways deflated. But it took Moore a number of false starts before he got there (Miracleman and V for Vendetta try to mount an anti-establishment critique via super-hero, but ultimately, I’d argue, end up defeated by the genre conventions.)
The point here isn’t that stories supporting status quo are necessarily bad. Dark Knight is pretty unabashed in its worship of the superdick, and it’s great. And, as the Dark Knight kind of suggests, the status quo has numerous benefits (stable currency and revolutionaries not stringing up me and mine from flagpoles = good.) It is interesting, though, the extent to which the superhero genre’s bias towards and fascination with the superdick makes it difficult for authors to tell certain kinds of stories (horror, anti-status-quo) even when they’re clearly trying to do so.
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Well, that was about twice as long as I thought it would be. I still want to discuss the question of whether Wonder Woman can be the superdick…but I think we’ll have to leave that for another day.
Peter Parker's mega-problems (the death of his uncle in particular) stem from being Spider-Man
Uncle Ben dies because Peter isn't Spider-Man, though. He isn't Spider-Man at the moment when it matters.
Uncle Ben dies because, probably for the first time in his life, Peter Parker is, and is thinking solely of, Peter Montmorency Parker.
(Benjamin, yes. Montmorency, funnier.)
See, the thing is, there IS no Spider-Man. There is only another suit of clothes. Sure, Peter Parker is different when he is out in the world swinging on webs and fighting guys like Evil Peter Doctor Octopud (a typo I love). But who ISN'T a different person around different people?
Peter Parker's problems stem from his being Peter Parker, with all the concomitant human weakness that implies. Peter can't commit to Cissy Ironwood/Science/Mortgage because he knows he couldn't live with himself if he broke That Promise (which he makes to himself, of course rather than Uncle Ben). But he can't commit to being Spider-Man Forever because he knows that to do so would be utterly futile. For one thing, he'd have to quit being Peter Parker!
Peter Parker is forever torn between being the man he wants to be and the man he has made of himself. Who isn't?
(Ringo Starr?)
(I wish I had more time to blather on about this. Probably for the best that I don't)
//Oo/\
In the narrative, Peter is Spider-Man at the moment it counts; he's wearing the costume. It's because he's being the father (getting bills paid, being a superdick) that he doesn't stop the robber. Thus, it's being the uberfather/ogre that causes Ben's death, thus requiring Peter to take Ben's place (which is what he wanted to do in the first place.)
"Peter Parker is forever torn between being the man he wants to be and the man he has made of himself."
I'm arguing that men are torn, but that it's a function in a lot of ways of contingent patriarchal expectations, not of existential dilemmas per se.
"See, the thing is, there IS no Spider-Man."
There's no Peter Parker either! They're both made up.
"(I wish I had more time to blather on about this. Probably for the best that I don't')"
Well, it's always nice for me at least to have someone take the time to read and comment, whether briefly or at length. So thanks!
I'm not sure I agree with your points about horror, or at least I don't think they work across the board.
I think in pretty much any horror that has an active, vaguely human-like antagonist – Say, the Shining, Nightmare on Elm Street, or Godzilla as opposed to the Mist or the Haunting of Hill House…
The audience, generally, identifies both with the killer and with the victim.
And the earliest Marvel superhero books… there's a lot of horror there. Tonally, they feel creepy and eerie and off. Spider-man, especially the Ditko Spider-man, looks CREEPY.
The Thing is a big 'ol ravening monster. Looks like he could snap and eat you at a moments notice.
This is an explicit plot point in Iron Man, where IM actually things "Wow. I'm scaring the SHIT out of these people. I need to make my armor more friendly-lookin'."
Not only were they dicks, they were SCARY lookin' dicks. You can identify with the power fantasy's sure, but you also kind of identify with their victims.
(Again. Early Iron Man. Very FIRST Iron Man story, actually. It ends up being told from the villains point of view as he tries to hold off this unknown, scary looking, metal THING that's apparently come to kill him. Our POV character isn't Iron Man, but his victim.)
And this all went away fairly quickly, of course. Ditko quits and he's replaced by John Romita and everyone looks like they just stepped out of a shampoo commercial.
But certainly the EARLIEST Marvel books were as much horror as superhero.
(Which I grant you is tough to pull off. But I miss it.)
The Spider-Man books were certainly shot through with anxiety, but it's hard for me to see them as actually scary or frightening in the way that actual horror tries to be. I haven't read those first Iron Man books, so I can't comment there, though.
Slasher films are definitely interesting. I think it's true that you root for the killer at many points, and there's affection for him/it. On the other hand, the character is fairly clearly not meant to be heroic, and often doesn't even have a distinguishable personality per se. And of course, you always end up rooting for the victim in the end.
It's an interesting comparison to me in part because in a lot of ways superheroes and horror are obviously working with a lot of the same anxieties and themes. I think they kind of come at it from opposite directions, though, and while they can cross, they don't seem to be able to blend very well. (An interesting exception might be Friday the 13th part 7, which has a kind of super-hero character — though significantly she's a young girl very much out of her depth…with daddy issues, natch. And, what the hell, my Friday the 13th essay is here.)
I guess the bottom line for super heroes and horror is it's a comparison I'm still thinking about rather than one I've entirely thought through.
Two thoughts:
First, in Superman's defense, it is a really hideous coat. Jimmy *should* be punished for his bad taste.
Second, your comments about the inability of superheroes to function as anti-status quo figures reminds me of how left wing revolutions often play out in reality. The revolutionaries overthrow the Tsar, or the Shah, or the latest petty dictator, but then they immediately recreate the oppressive state apparatus, and it's invariably patriarchal in nature.
Most revolutionaries probably have some genuine utopian ideals, but the type of men (and they're almost always men) who are willing to use violence to overthrow the state are also the type of men who desire power for its own sake, and they exercise power in an essentially violent, patriarchal way.
I would argue that superhero stories where the heroes are cast in anti-establishment roles fail in the same way that most revolutions fail: rather than reject authority through violence and fear they embrace it, and in so doing they undermine whatever utopianism they allegedly espouse (and maybe you were already thinking of all this, in which case forgive my ramblings).
I was thinking a little along those lines. It's hard to figure out a way not to grab the superdick and use it to thwack people (or maybe that wasn't the best metaphor. At all. Let's start over.)
Ahem. Yes, I was kind of thinking of about that. I think the best example of that in comics is V for Vendetta, which is supposedly about hating fascism but end up romanticizing an essentially fascist character (who uses torture on innocent people essentially because he feels like it.)
"Grant Morrison's mainstream work provides an even clearer example. In his Justice League and X-Men runs, he often has his villains launch fairly damning critiques of the heroes as egotistical, self-satisfied, godlike assholes."
I didn't get this from Morrison's X-men at all. If anything, they are criticized by Emma Frost for being too much like bleeding heart liberals.
They are certainly anti-establishment heroes.
And, among our main characters, there really isn't much of an authoritarian edge at all. When Emma sees the teenagers up to no good, her attitude is somewhere along the lines of "Oh, you wacky kids with your drugs and your supervillany!"
Its pretty abrasive for me to switch to a different writer's take and see the X-men acting like authority figures, yelling at kids for being late to school or whatever, I don't think Morrison's characters ever did that (been a while since I read it though).
It's stated that Xaviers is a school where the students establish the rules. This was really something simply alluded to, Morrison doesn't develop it, but there's this education reform/ utopian society theme.
(I was discussing this with someone recently, and apparently there might be as scene or two of the X-men killing villians without taking them prisoner, possibly to send a message, I don't even recall these and I think its a pretty minor, flash over substance sort of plot element)
None of Morrison's X-men seem to be particularly motivated to be authority figures, either. Xavier steps down, and so does Cyclops before the last issue. Emma seems to enjoy her students, but not particularly care what choices they make.
Morrison does take pot shots at superheroes in his run though. He reveals their lives are repetitive, pointless, and stupid due to the microscopic bacterial lifeform manipulating them.
There's a line "The supermen fight and die and return in a meaningless shadowplay because we make them do it." There's usually always an anti-superhero zinger with Morrison.
"Obviously, Morrison identifies with the critique to some extent, but there isn't any way in a super-hero comic to let it have the last word, or to have it be the point (as it is, to some extent at least, in the Invisibles.)"
One more point, Xavier states he's as out of touch with the kids these days as Magneto, and steps down. The X-men close up shop, with Cyclops convinced to reopen the school, reluctantly, due to the two women in his life. (And possibly because Jean burned away the bacteria which is the root of all evil and conflict in the world, though this is ambiguous) I just don't see this patriarchal theme with X-men.
I guess it depends a bit on whether you feel like liberal do-gooders are somehow not the establishment (or a part of it.)
The Xavier character in Watchmen is Adrian Veidt. I think that ends up being a much more complicated and potentially anti-establishment stance. Morrison's X-Men are basically beneficent philosopher-kings; powerful but entirely trustworthy in their power, to the extent that they're willing to step down at a moment's notice. I don't know…I just don't find it very convincing as a particularly thoughtful effort to confront the problems of power (which isn't to say it's a bad comic; I don't think Morrison much cared about making an anti-establishment critique either way. Mostly he's just having a good time, which is reasonable enough. I enjoyed the X-Men run.)
What always struck me as weird about the Hulk was that whenever he saw Betty, he turned back into Banner. Seeing his girlfriend made him lose his hard-on. She was the anti-tumescent. But in your construct, it makes more sense. To be in love is to be vulnerable. So if he truly loves Betty, Banner must give up the superdick.
While I think there's plenty of sadism involved in enjoying horror, which got mentioned above, I think your point still holds. Superheroes are about having power. Horror is about power being taken away and claimed by a force you neither control nor understand. In many horror stories, such as the HP Lovecraft ones, characters are punished for being superdicks. Individuals that crave too much power get punished.
And I think I'm coming round to your take on Ware. We are supposed to think Jimmy Corrigan and Rusty are pitiful. They long for power and can't get it and that makes them sad little men (Freudian overtones intentional). Ware doesn't show that maybe not wanting power is preferable in some way. The characters are tortured by their lack and that's that.
Going back to Wonder Woman, it seems like Marston was trying to create a comic that made young men masochists. He wanted us men to like being tied up by strong women. So is Marston an exception to the rule? In real life, I'm not sure how successful he was. I more often hear about Wonder Woman from women who found her inspirational; she was a power figure for women (the superyoni?). The only men I've heard discuss Wonder Woman are gay men who realized the depths of their sexuality when they saw Linda Carter spin around and realized that they wanted to be dressed like her.
Hey Nick. I'm going to write a post about Marston and WW in this context I hope…but yes, I think Marston's an exception in certain ways, at least.
H.P. Lovecraft is an interesting and weird counterexample. Lovecraft's monsters are often notably not masculine. There's a vision in horror of the superdick as moldering wound which you don't get very much in superhero comics. It's like if Superman were an amorphous ichor. The two concepts (man and ichor) aren't completely distinct, since a materialist cosmology is a materialist cosmology. But still…there is something different and not entirely reconcilable going on there.
Isn't the point of the Invisibles more that good power and bad power are not different at all…that the revolutionaries and the establishment are essentially the same (thus all the double, triple, quadruple agents–Sir Miles as the original "Invisible" etc.)–
The only "real" revolution in Invisibles (and throughout Morrison I think) is the mental one–how we can change our own life through our imagination, etc.
This kind of Romanticism is also a retreat from real political engagement—as it was for the "original" Romantics (Wordsworth, Shelley, et. al. who get namechecked in that Arcadia run)
So…Invisibles may be better about not reasserting patriarchal authority (since it's not really a superhero comic), but it's still kind of reactionary…if only unconsciously.
I don't need to really make any great claims for Invisibles as a revolutionary text, I guess…but it does make efforts to not have everything be about the patriarchy/superdick in a way that I don't usually see Morrison do in his superhero work.
"Isn't the point of the Invisibles more that good power and bad power are not different at all…that the revolutionaries and the establishment are essentially the same (thus all the double, triple, quadruple agents–Sir Miles as the original "Invisible" etc.)–"
Morrison does love to mix his metaphors at times, but yeah, the villians in the Invisibles are ultimately, though they may not know it, in the service of good. The heroes fight them, and get spiritually stronger by beating them.
There's certainly eastern influence, where there's less of a concept of a seperate good and evil. I just finished reading the abridged version of the Chinese fairy tail Journey to the West- where Buddhist pilgrims, on a journey to ultimately attain buddhahood, have all sorts of swash buckling adventures fighting demons and monsters along the way.
When they reach the end, it turns out Buddha calculated they needed to face 81 challenges before they could reach salvation, and they'd only faced 80, so one more is arranged by Buddha's heavenly court.
Its implied many times throughout the story that Buddha/ Buddhavista are behind many of the trials the pilgrims face along the way, both causing the conflict and helping them through it.
The Pilgrims have all committed sinful acts in the past or in a past life, and through these trials they have their karma purified.
Obviously Morrison was thinking of some of these themes, with his Buddha character (Dane, wasn't it?) and the villains who torture people to cleanse their Karma, and the villains not realizing that they work for the heroes.
Or the heroes who don't realize that they work for the villains…
"Or the heroes who don't realize that they work for the villains…"
Were there heroes who don't realize they work for the villains? I guess there was a character who was brainwashed, and they had to break her programming? Mainly it struck me that the good guys were the ones really in charge in the story, which is why they are able to kill the villains without really trying in the end (Dane devours the demon, King Mob shoots the archon in the final issue as an afterthought)
I mainly remember the devil guy (who I think was a good guy, tree of knowledge= Promethean blessing of knowledge to humanity= good devil, Superman's scientist friend in All Star Superman is also a "good devil" figure, ) who was ordering around some of the bad guys, because the true powers could take both sides. (Which I think is consistent with the Buddhist thing, where a Buddivista can take the form of a demon to create a trial for the pilgrims to overcome, but its really for the service of good, compassionate ends)
It seemed to me that the true power in the Invisibles was on the side of good… especially as you see all the heroes inevitably winning through the help of their divine selves.
I haven't read the book in a while, but it seemed kind of like Morrison's thing in New X-men in the end, where Sublime is this ultimate evil creature who's been ruling the world since the beginning of time, this overpowering devil, and then Jean, this divine manifestation, is like "Did you really think you could truly hurt me?" and we see that the real power in the universe is the noble Phoenix protectors. (There's no "Dark Phoenix" in Morrison's run)
I think there's at least some uncertainty; if good and evil are the same, it starts to not make as much sense to say "the evil works for the good" since they're all basically the same thing….
I haven't read New X-Men in a long time. The thing about the Invisibles is that there are so many double and triple agents that telling "good" from "bad" is kind of tricky imo. In the end, though, it's all a "game" that Dane (or we) is/are playing in order to "free his mind". It's not so much about good vs. evil (to my mind) as it is about "enlightenment" through mind/imagination. Buddha, I think, is not a "force" for a "side"–rather Buddhism is a way to find one's "true self"–to transcend base desires–and to achieve "Arcadia"/Utopia within… The whole Invisibles series is like a big videogame to allow that to happen (cast off false consciousness, blah blah)–so it doesn't fit (or tries not to fit, anyway) into these good vs. evil categories. It succeeds better than some of his other stuff (imo), because it is less wedded to pre-set good/evil forms (like superheroes). Animal Man is even better…He achieves "Enlightenment" of a sort too, realizes he is just in a "game" and so therefore can step out of it into a new perspective (except he can't really step out of it of course–but these games are more about the reader than they are about the characters).
I don't know that Animal Man ever exactly escapes the good/evil dichotomy though — he's still the hero after all.
Or maybe it does on thinking about it a little more. It definitely does weird things with super-hero tropes. Still easily my favorite Grant Morrison series, I think…
"Animal Man is even better…He achieves "Enlightenment" of a sort too, realizes he is just in a "game" and so therefore can step out of it into a new perspective."
I didn't really get that from Animal Man. He's manipulated by Morrison from beginning to end, and never really achieves anything remotely like free will. Morrison just writes in the script that Animal Man meets him, so Animal Man meets him by walking through a door, but I didn't get the sense that Animal Man earned it.
It's Morrison who gives him his family back and owns the final scene.
7 Soldiers might be a more empowering version of the theme, where Zatanna leaves the comic page and defeats the "evil writer" figure responsible for creating the villains, but she still goes back to doing the old comic hero thing afterward.
BTW Noah, are you reading Morrison's Batman and Robin? A lot of clearly intentionally "gay" stuff in the most recent arc, #4-6. Almost surprising what Morrison's been able to get away with.
I think he's making fun of the Batman franchise, but that subtext is lost of 99% of the audience.
I haven't been following it; I'm kind of curious but not enough to actually go out and get the thing….
Noah,
You can read mine in February or whatever. So far, it's kind of underwhelming. Well…I think it's clear that Morrison manipulates Buddy and that some of it is arbitrary. At the same time, there's a commentary there on how we are all manipulated to some degree…how we "allow" things to happen to us…how we go along with socially prescribed notions of morality, etc…and Buddy gets put through his paces not just for our amusement (and Morrison's) but to bring him to some kind of revelation of this predicament. In this sense, losing his wife is as important as "meeting the God" who does it to him. Morrison makes a comment on the "powers-that-be" by making himself that power and then allowing Buddy come face-to-face with it (rather than just being manipulated without awareness of it). None of this works, exactly, since Buddy is just Morrison's creation…which is why it is more significant for the reader to see himself or herself in Buddy's shoes, I think.
In general terms, Animal Man just works better as a streamlined coherent story. The 7 Soldiers plot just ends up too convoluted and confusing to have the same impact.
Peter Parker now,especially in the animated cartoons and Ultimate is a total asshole.The Things a going what 40 year bi polar nutcase.I no longer give a crap about Marvel and all hype.Let Dysney destroy em further.