Reading Comics #121 "Why They Can't Have Nice Things"

Another reason I keep picking on Mark Waid's Daredevil is because no matter what the fans enjoying the run say about it, how it has contradicted most of what you know about the character's legacy, it's still going to play into that legacy.  In that sense, Waid is doing what he does, working to a point, a long-term story.  He did this in his Flash, building for several years toward the introduction of the Speed Force concept that came to dominate Waid's legacy with that character.  His Irredeemable was one long arc, too.

But as far as I can tell, this lighter, less tragic version of Matt Murdock he's doing now seems to be headed in the same everything-collapses-spectacularly! arc that Frank Miller, Brian Michael Bendis, and I don't even care to speculate how many more have done.  Because Matt Murdock, basically, is another Marvel character who can't have nice things.

And I just don't understand that.  Marvel's claim to fame was that it identified, in the 1960s boom, the truly lasting connection with readers that had existed in other forms previously, but shaped a whole landscape of heroes who were easy to identify with, who were defined by their human struggles more than their superhuman battles.  Clearly they resonate as much today as they ever have, finally inheriting the cinematic throne from its competition in DC.  Any Marvel character can be featured in a movie now.  Even a raccoon!
We're constantly told that if we work hard enough we can get what we want.  We're an overall positive society, even if it seems otherwise sometimes.  Perhaps one of the reasons it sometimes seems negative or cynical is that we're so often confronted with figures who seem incapable of embracing that positive aspect.  It gives comfort to those who struggle, though.  That's the whole Marvel approach right there.  In comics, characters are by definition stuck in a kind of stagnation.  If they developed, they would become irrelevant in a few years, and for businesses who love to make money out of known commodities, that would be a bad thing.  Batman gets over his obsessive need to avenge his parents.  Superman achieves world peace.  Spider-Man loses his angst.

Spider-Man and angst.  Daredevil and his persecution complex.  The X-Men and their...persecution complex.  The Inhumans and...their persecution complex.  Actually, come to think of it, Spider-Man and his persecution complex!  And then you have Captain America, totally alienated from his own time.  (There's a whole argument that the '60s Marvel boom was actually about the company talking about superheroes far more than anything else, but that's not where I'm going today.)  One way or another, where many have chosen to believe the company was talking about its teenage readers, that's not really what you hear these days.  Bryan Singer's movies talked a lot more about the LGBT community than teenagers.  Magneto's origins became crafted around the Holocaust.  The other classic X-Men analogy is the civil rights movement.

But that's some fairly lofty talk I'm not sure the comics have ever really gone after.  I mean, there are comics about Magneto's Holocaust past.  But I think it's a lot more Marvel playing to the pessimists in its audience, the people who sort of understood that superheroes weren't just superheroes anymore, but people who were constantly fighting an uphill battle, but over time, I think, it became much easier not simply to portray that so much as a bunch of people who seem to have every imaginable gift but, well, can't have nice things.  And after a while, it becomes a little old.  I wonder if fans will ever notice that.  Marvel has a way of steamrolling criticism.  It's populism that's a completely different beast than the fanaticism that greeted earlier generations of superheroes, the ones that created the enduring appeal of Superman and Batman, still the only reliable commodities DC has.  Marvel now has a whole cinematic universe, not because any one character approaches either one of them, but because as a whole they keep sending the same message.

We can't have nice things.

Instead of tackling the problem, it's usually much easier just to dodge it.  If you think about any of Marvel's characters too long, they just don't make any sense.  The mutants of the X-Men are really no different from any other superheroes, except they happen...to be born with superpowers.  Apparently if you're given them that makes you acceptable, but if you're born with them, you're not special, you're a freak.  This kind of message would never have been possible, say, at the height of the baseball craze, decades earlier.  Babe Ruth was not a freak.  He was so beloved that losing him put the Red Sox into an imagined curse for nearly ninety years.  Lou Gehrig was so beloved there's a disease that was named after him.  Long after people finally forget about his retirement speech, Lou Gehrig's Disease will still be called that, the way we have Tourette syndrome named after some dude no one remembers.

I mean, if you're given special powers in the real world, people put asterisks next to your achievements.

I mean, it makes sense in completely different context, but the X-Men persecution complex is usually presented as a given in the comics, just the way Daredevil's is, or the fact that J. Jonah Jameson is fanatically opposed to Spider-Man, even in a shared universe filled with superheroes.

Dan Slott's Spider-Man finally gave Peter Parker a bunch of shiny nice things.  Spider-Man writers in general have been as fanatical as Jameson in keeping Aunt May alive, to the point where it seemed like a viable alternative to retaining Peter's marriage to Mary Jane.  I understood the logic of ending the marriage.  Some of the best Spider-Man comics ever were written after that.  And we got Slott's Spider-Man because of it, which on the whole has been some of the most focused material ever, warts and all.

But, of course, he took it all away (although it's coming back) with the Doctor Spider-Man arc (what I call the body swap with Otto Octavius).  And so easily, just as easily as how the marriage ended.  When Superman died and was replaced by four wannabes, everyone kind of knew the real deal wasn't among them.  When Batman was temporarily crippled, people kind of figured the maniac who replaced him for a moment wasn't the real deal.  Apparently no one has noticed that Spider-Man hasn't been Spider-Man for a while.

It's because as far as Marvel is concerned, it just makes more sense to keep everyone miserable.  Not conflicted, or confronted with challenges, but outright miserable.  Everything goes wrong.  For a brief moment, things are okay, but then they're thrown into disarray again.  This isn't Hal Jordan, multi-time Green Lantern, having a habitual problem with authority (something that's a leftover from the time just before the Marvel Age).  This is the message that no matter what you do, you're never going to get it right.  Even when you succeed, you fail.

It's a hopelessly depressing model.  And as such, it's convinced a lot of people to like it quite a bit, because misery loves company.  Like I said, depressing.  I've always been a DC guy.  I was originally a Spider-Man guy.  Then I went back and had another look at his predecessor, Robin.  The original reader surrogate.  Robin has been a number of Boy Wonders (and even one or two Girl Wonders).  In the mainstream comics, Spider-Man has always been one guy.  (So, thanks for that, Bendis.  Miles Morales would make an excellent transplant to 616.)  With that mask, he could be anyone.  Shouldn't that be the point of a mask like that?

And Marvel is equally fanatical about never rethinking its model.  Famously, it never reboots.  I mean, at this point its continuity has become far more convoluted and impenetrable than anything DC ever did, but because it's popular there are still lots of readers.  But lose its popularity and I think it becomes an absolute necessity.  Does Marvel at that point maintain its stance?  Or does it finally rethink?  And then, I wonder, will people really think it will have lost something?