If there’s one thing that I’ve noticed lately as far as internet discussions go, it’s that everyone wants to throw in their two cents in about the dark side of comic books – the side that revolves around the darkest emotions and events. Of course, this is spawned by the actions taken in certain comic books such as the now infamous Justice League: Rise Of Arsenal #3, in which the hero who had spent years overcoming a dark past dropped back into old habits to a ridiculous extent as he hugged the equally infamous dead rotting cat. The question then becomes: when is darker story telling imagery appropriate, and when do we cross the line into gratuitous and largely inappropriate scenes?
For this discussion, I’d really like to focus my arguments towards the big two, and even more specifically I’d like to discuss ONLY superhero comics. The reason for this is that with the other publishers, their comics are more streamlined with intent for stories, so if there is a dark and violent story then that’s usually part of the on-going series. For example, some arguments I may make in this argument could be applied to the Boys, which is published on Dynamite, but the purpose of the Boys is to push it’s story telling to the extreme with it’s often times grotesque imagery and situations. The same could be said for limited and on-going series on Image or Dark Horse, where the intent is usually made clear from the beginning.
Granted, there are some cases in which the big two will release a comic with the explicit intent of it being over the top and gratuitous in it’s violence (see: PunisherMAX), but there is a huge difference between a comic that should be general reader friendly and a comic that states it’s parental advisory with it’s title and covers. The difference also comes when you have a company publishing comics within a larger universe, and they just can’t seem to reach a comfortable balance. Follow behind the cut for a look at the extreme side of our favorite superhero stories.
If there’s one thing I hear from people a lot, it’s that they aren’t really a fan of the “dark veil” that’s been pulled over comic books with the intent to sell more adult comic books to more adult readers. A lot of people pine for the simpler days of heroics, and hate the amount of retcons that are pulled in to make a story more edgy. Both Marvel and DC are equally culpable of this trend, as sometimes we will meet a female character who appears to be strong and resilient, but at some point a writer will introduce a dark past that involves rape or something inappropriate along those lines. In fact, one story that a lot of people look at as an example of this is Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis. In this comic, it is revealed that the villain Doctor Light is actually a complete psychopath who had his mind erased by several members of the Justice League because he used to be a rapist and had raped one of the Leaguer’s wives in a raid of the Watchtower. This was met with mixed reactions as some people thought that this kind of edgy story telling was intriguing and others thought that it was regressive.
That’s not what I want to discuss though. What I want to focus on is when is something done to try and further a character’s growth, and when does something just feel gratuitous – especially in the realm of super heroes.
The world in which super heroes in the Marvel and DC universes live in is a very interesting one. It’s a place where anyone can put on a costume and fight for either the good of mankind or just for themselves. It’s also one in which tragedy is generally glossed over in lieu of character building, and this is something that has been done recently on both sides. In DC, Star City has been absolutely destroyed by the villain Prometheus, and in Marvel both Chicago and Oklahoma have recently seen both tragic loss as well as excessive property damage. However, it is not often that we really focus on the loss of life so much as we focus on the characters that we buy for their weekly stories.
Continued belowSo how are the two tragedies being handled?
Well, on the Marvel side of things, we see the brighter side of what heroes can do. Immediately following the fallout of Siege, we have seen our heroes band together to pick up their mess in Oklahoma, and in Avengers #1 we see various heroes rebuilding the destroyed stadium and paying their respects.
On the DC side of things, Star City has been left to fester and rot, and instead of focusing on the fact that hundreds upon thousands of people have died, we singularly focus on the death of one little girl as her father is driven to the point of madness. Meanwhile, the damage done in Star City is generally ignored until the whole area becomes a giant forest in the shape of a star, which is now being patrolled by the dark and moody Green Arrow.
While my language in each example can obviously show a bit of my editorial bias, it’s through this that I really want to exemplify my point. While both companies have of course had examples of dark and gratuitous storytelling, DC is really holding the market for it right now. Rise Of Arsenal has really been the Epic Fall/Fail Of Arsenal as each week the story get’s even more depressing and harder to read, both on an emotional level and from someone that appreciates good storytelling and fiction. It’s so incredibly hard to want to pick up an issue when all that’s going to happen is the reader is assaulted with “edgy” imagery and ridiculous scenes with the hope that it will capture some sort of emotional resonance with us and make us care about the character. However, all that happens is we become distanced from someone we should care for.
Now, no one is pretending that Brightest Day and the Heroic Age both equate to sunshine and lollipops. Far from it. We have all known that, while this is supposedly a return to lighter storytelling for both companies, it will still have it’s dark shadows and alleys lurking with the villainous element. That’s fine. In fact, just reading stories about superheroes stopping muggers while they work on their personal growth would probably get boring after two or so arcs. We need that opposition, and we need that sense of disarray that a supervillain brings. However, what does in fact get to me is books like Rise Of Arsenal, where it seems like the people behind the team realized that movies like Saw and Hostel have done well for that genre and now we need to move this idea of “torture porn” into comic books. This is literally all that the comic is – the glorification of humiliation and degredation of a once noble character for the amusement of the reader. I would argue that most modern superhero comics should be about redemption, about the never ending battle of good and evil, and about the difficult position that these brave men and women put themselves in to protect normal people like us. Things like rape and drugs should not have become so common place of a way to go for writers looking for cheap emotional attacks.
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I don’t want it to seem like I’m harping on DC here, as much as I am appauled by the sequence with cat (and believe me, not much really grinds my gears when it comes to insane sequences in comics – from women in fridges to the death of minor(ity) characters, I’m not usually phased). Marvel is certainly guilty of their own Rise Of Arsenal storyline, such as with Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum. Both these books featured excessive violence with the intent to simply shock the reader, excessively hyper-sexualized characterization and storytelling as well as a good few moments of gratuitous torture porn. None of it seemed to really fit in with the overall Ultimate story up until that point, and all of it was rather obscene and lauded by critics and fans. Granted – Ultimatum took place in an alternate universe that doesn’t effect the larger Marvel Universe or the Heroic Age in the way that Brightest Day/Rise And Fall effect DC’s Universe, but bad storytelling is bad storytelling no matter what universe it is in.
Now, there are two further examples by both companies in which the emotional torture of a character is rather common place: Batman and Daredevil. These two characters exemplify characters who are consistently put through emotional gauntlets. In recent history, the real Batman – Bruce Wayne – was run to the ground throughout Batman RIP as his true “father” returned (there are still those who don’t actually believe that Dr Hurt is Thomas Wayne, but rather this is part of his torment plan on Bruce Wayne) and Batman was quite literally driven insane. This was right after Batman had spent a year away from the DC Universe trying to exorcise his demons and become more of a well rounded character and less of a tormented nut job, but he of course reverted right back to this in the different stories written by multiple different writers – all of whom believe that the core of the character revolves around the death of his parents and his crusade created by it (see – Batman: Arkham Asylum, in which you literally have to walk through the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents in a drug induced attack by the Scarecrow). Daredevil is the same way. Since his title’s relaunch in 1998, Kevin Smith killed his wife, Bendis ruined his life, and Brubaker and Diggle have put him along a path that has set him up to be the Marvel Universe’s next big villain. He, in absolutely no way, has it easy – at least not in the sense that the other heroes of the Marvel U have.
Here is the core difference between your average Batman and Daredevil story versus that of these torture porn stories as I’ve referred to them – aside from the fact that both Batman and Daredevil have existed at the front of their respective universes which have allowed audiences who don’t even READ comics to create attachments to them, the stories given to them (as dark as they may be) are good. While this obviously isn’t and can’t always be the case, when we see Bruce or Matt running a gauntlet, it is often times actually endearing to see what this character is put through. Instead of simple and cheap thrills, the writers use what works and has worked about these characters to write good stories in similar veins to that which has worked well before. You don’t find a lot of cases of Daredevil hugging dead cats in alleyways, or Batman standing and watching his beloved be eaten for two pages. No – you get characters who are put through situations which they can appropriately rise from with the confidence that they will be a better hero by the end of it.
It is possible to feature a story that teeters along a dark tightrope. In fact, for any good writer, such a balancing act should be fairly basic. If you don’t primarily operate along a series of cheap thrills and emotional gut punches, you’re bound to get a good tale. However, relying on shock pages and disturbing imagery to fuel your story as well as sell your title is basically everything that is wrong about modern comics. I’m a huge supporter of the fact that comics today are just as good as they were yesterday and the decades before that. This is not an opinion – it is a fact. There are great writers out there telling fantastic stories from every camp and every universe. The problem, however, is that a lot of people get so charged up about the bad ones that they sometimes, or purposefully, forget about all the good, and this often and largely comes from the fact that a bad comic will sell just as much if not better than a good one. Joe Quesada said (and I will never forget) that you vote with your dollar, and he’s right. We are responsible for the monsters that we see in comic books. It doesn’t matter how much anyone rages on the internet. In fact, if a writer of any given comic (even the ones I attack) reads this or any article that I write and becomes aware of my dissenting opinion, I do not expect him to immediately listen to me and my thoughts that I am right because there are still plenty of people buying the comic book and saying otherwise. As Justice League: Cry For Justice came out, I found a lot of that story quite entertaining and I knew that at the time I was the only one. Granted, what has come out of it is incredibly horrible, but that is just as much my fault as anyone else’s because of the support I gave to JL:CFJ at the time – and I don’t (unlike many people) expect the companies or the writers to change their plans just because I’m unhappy. They don’t owe me anything.
However, what I would do instead is simply appeal to reason here. There will always be dissenters with any given medium or story. I am unsure of any modern examples of storytelling in any media that is universally loved. However, when there is such a strong chorus within the fanbase waiting for a positive resolution, then ignoring it by keeping up the same tired and true methods of decidedly bad storytelling is offensive in it’s very nature. We as comic book fans are such a unique set of individuals because we will stick with comic books we don’t even like just because we have an attachment to a character, or a writer’s previous work, or an artist, or even if we just want to know what the heck is going on and don’t want to miss a thing. As much as Joey Q is right that we vote with our dollar, the question I would ultimately pose to the companies at the end of this is – Well, do we want to create lots of bad content that sells, or do we want to focus on a smaller amount of great content that will also sell and ultimately improve general stigmas that people have?
Besides, at this rate it’s only so long before we find a dead female minority kitten chopped up and stuffed in a fridge to help fuel yet another heroes dissent into madness, right?
