Yup, it’s time for another dissatisfaction post. I got loads of issues with popular culture, and here comes the latest diatribe of destructoid doom! I’ve been out of the comics field for a while, when I gave up my comic box a ways back and decided I’d run out of patience with the endless storylines that never resolved, or the stupid inconsistencies that never made sense. The hero business gets mighty boring after a couple of years of waiting for things to happen that matter.

Graphic novels have allowed me to explore new avenues of coolness, and the independent comics out there, both in print and on the web, have kept the faith. There’s things out there that feed me. I should be happy. I’ll probably never buy DC or Marvel again though, and I look back at the old days of The Uncanny X-men, Alpha Flight, and Teen Titans with a fondness I know in my bones I’ll never know again. It’s like a right of passage for adolescents. One day, the power fantasies stop being fun, and the lack of fun overrides your faith in what the heroes mean to you.

I’m an apostate, then, in the comic sense of the word. I can still be marketed to. It’s called “the maturation of the industry”. Titles are darker and edgier now, to compete with the rich competition of Manga, and independent trade paperbacks. But last year, with the advent of the television show Heroes, something came to the surface that started to bother me. Good show, but I think there’s a fundamental flaw in hero comic books that has never been addressed, or if it has I’ve never run into it. I’m not sure exactly, that it can be addressed.

What I see a dearth of in comic books, particularly the mainstream ones, is the now familiar self-defeating cycle of, origin of hero, establishment of hero as righter of wrongs (or “doer of what they are supposed to do”), appearance of villain(s) to challenge hero, big dude fight to see who the big dog is, generic victory, return to “establishment” or “appearance” phase, repeat as long as sales are good. If sales are poor, instead of “victory”, hero gets rousing defeat and indefinite retirement until they can be retconned back into action to see if they are saleable again.

Funk dat! Get a new cycle, fool!

See, today’s mainstream heroes are commercial property. They can never resolve a story; they can only embody qualities dependent upon who is telling the most current version of their tale. The hero reaches a certain point, at which they never go anywhere but around the same carousel.

Look at Spider Man. K bought the complete spider man comic series (something like 400+ issues) on CD-ROM a few years back, and I managed to wander through it a little. This was during the time of the surge in popularity with Ultimate Spider Man and the Spider Man movies. What struck me was how the long-term spider-man saga in the comics was a never-ending cycle marked by certain points where an “idea”, like the black suit or the marriage of Mary Jane and Peter Parker, took hold as official changes. Meanwhile, the Ultimate Spider Man comics (a “re-invention” of the series for a modern day), and to a certain degree, the movies embodied a shocking revelation to me: You could tell the entire story of spider man (as it has been developed) very quickly because of this cycle.

In other words, the “story” of Spider Man has been in reality just one long narrative without end, in a way not dissimilar to many Dungeons and Dragons games where your Level 36 Fighter keeps going from one fight fest to the next because there’s nothing to do but fight more monsters and level up. In order for it to be a story, there has to be a resolution, an endgame. But that’s not possible because it’s an “intellectual property” that must provide “increasing profitability”.

Well, Spider Man has been around long enough now where the gig is up. The story has been told in all ways that count. You can try and “reboot” or “scorched earth” the character, but the problem is, you still tell the entire story in 11 volumes or less. You can tell the entire story in three movies and you are done, finished. That’s all there is. Talk about depressing! We’ve finally come to a point where the comic book characters have been with us long enough to cross three generations, long enough for a major paradigm shift.

If that leads to a gradual telling and retelling of the major heroes, so that Spider Man becomes a version of a modern day story akin to Gilgamesh, I’m cool with that. These stories are done, so it’s time to see what’s cooking on the pot now, in terms of what is fresh. Because that’s what I’m most interested in. I see it as a sign that something else is coming to the boil. This preoccupation with “realism” in what is really a psychic, non-real fact of inner existence means there is a need to move the hero into a different realm of development. I’m not sure fandom wants or can handle it, but I think it is happening already in the dark corners of the internets. At least I see the signs that perhaps we are ready to take another look at the hero, and our need for the still vulgar and underestimated comic book

See, the hero always appears in response to a need in society. Something is wrong, someone who can make the wrong right appears. The wrong is righted. That’s the hero’s journey in a nutshell. Departure, Initiation, Return. So if “realism” is the goal, then isn’t the next step to take the villain out of the picture by identifying what he/she/it signifies? Or to put it another way, if comics are an escapist power fantasy, why not depict the hero resolving the problem and kicking rear end?

Or to make it more clear, you will never see Superman putting a stop to the war crimes in Guantanamo, Batman defending lawfully protesting activists in New York City from police brutality, or Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four making testimony before congress on global warming. They can never be shown fighting even aliases of those kinds of problems, because it’s too controversial. They only ever fight, in dramatic fashion, some goofball named Galactus or Lex Luthor who represents a “generic threat” in terms of “every hero has their opposite”, thus Heroes are neutralized. It’s a means of neutering the heroic impulse and keeping the art form from reaching its creative, natural expression.

There’s a problem in that these kinds of heroes stand for a process in the psyche, and so how much you can take them out of their natural element and place them into more concrete realizations is problematic. The means of expression, even in a “democratic” society as ours are limited to narrow bands of discussion. But I think if comic book heroes are to mean something now, they have to start exploring the next step of creative evolution and start fighting the REAL “super” villains. An ordinary person by themselves can only do so much against centers of concentrated power, such as a sociopathic corporation. It requires a “super” human to appear and with the mask of unconscious identity fight crime where it really exists.

There are scenes in comic books where this threatens to make an appearance. I’m thinking of a scene from a particular story in The Defenders, where they are fighting a group of anti-African American extremists called The Sons of the Serpent. The SotS are ordinary humans with a funny common costume and some high tech weapons like ray guns. They are able to get the drop on The Defenders because of this high-tech advantage, and numbers. The ordinary boyfriend of Valkyrie springs forward as they are making a street demonstration and about to burn Valkyrie on an upside down cross.

The man’s heroism inspires the ordinary people on the street who are watching this show of violence. One guy says he’s got no love for black people, but you don’t burn them because you don’t like them. If that ordinary guy can do it, so can they. Time to take back the city for regular people! A riot ensues, and the onlookers overwhelm the SotS members, forcing them to flee.

During the melee, The Defenders regain the upper hand and regroup. One of the leaders of The Defenders, Nighthawk, discovers that the source of his vast wealth has been funding the SotS without his knowledge, and he freaks. It’s a rather poignant scene, complicated by a later scene that I’m not sure is a cop-out or a real statement on hate across all lines of people. But the point I take from this storyline is that heroes are supposed to inspire regular people to make changes. The hero is worthless if they do all the work all the time. They bring back that gold which is necessary for regular people to make a change in their own lives. Because it’s the public that matters, not the privileged world of heroes and villains fighting on their turf for supremacy. That smacks of aristocracy and elitism, not the power within every person to contribute to the group’s real benefit.

I’m not sure if the time has come, but the current iteration of comic book heroes has run its course. It is way past time to spawn or die, and I don’t think DC or Marvel can pull it off. If it happens, it will happen in the independent fields out there, in the wilderness of the Internets. Do it. The public needs to be inspired, because they have lost their way, and they shiver in fear because they don’t know what can be done now, in this darkest moment of greatest danger and greatest potential.

03/31/2012 Edit: Oops, the Defender’s name was Nighthawk, not Yellowjacket!