Conversation Stoppers in the Comic Book Shop - Talkin' About Magneto and Cyclops, and Generalized Critique of Marvel Comics

Over at Comics Should Be Good there was an review of Fantastic Four 1234. This bit isn't about the article, but the weird flame war that went on afterwards. Or weird to me, anyway. In the review, the author opines that Magneto and Doctor Doom are villain terrorists but that a number of comics fans will launch into apologia when confronted with their villainy. A flame war ensued when, of course, some of the fans did launch into their various apologia, hehe. This is predictable as clockwork.

But I found it interesting, given recent comic book history, that no one turned the apologia for especially Magneto on it's head. I expressed this for the first time at the local friendly comic book store here in downtown Santa Cruz when my friend Peter brought up, y'know, stuff like Iron Man vivisecting people and whether this editorial trend would continue (the answer from the comic store guy was "yes, it will continue indefinitely", which is likely true for the short to medium term).

I said this, "To me, the more interesting question is how is Cyclops going to confront Magneto when he appears doing villain thing. Now that Cyclops is running a black ops assassination squad and condoned the use of torture to get information, how can it be said that he has the moral authority to condemn Magneto's actions. Cyclops is at least as bad as Magneto, now, killing and torturing people who get in his way for the good of the mutant 'species'."

Silence followed. No one at the comic shop really knew how to answer that - and I suspect that the X-fans won't know how to answer it - but I found it really interesting that, so far, no one appears to be even asking the question. Like it's somehow irrelevant that Cyclops and Magneto are now behaving the same way, or if anything Cyclops is behaving much worse than Magneto.

Also at the comic shop, Peter asked about comics where the heroes were more heroic. The counter guy said, accurately, that Marvel is moving heroism over to their children's comics. Tho' he also said, "Tho' Whedon in Astonishing X-Men was trying to insert some old fashioned heroism into the book." And I said, "But now Ellis is writing it so that's fuckin' over." And there were weary and heavy-hearted nods.

And forgive me if I am rambling here, but I think that this editorial decision will be bad in the long term. I mean, first off, it's just not particularly sustainable, as shown in the recent Wolverine's where he was sent to kill Mystique. He doesn't. Why? Because it would be a very bad literary decision to kill a villain as interesting and storied as Mystique. So, despite Wolverine having her entirely at his mercy, nope, he just wounded her and left with a little sassy diatribe about how she had no friends and he did, neener. It just doesn't work for the genre if you kill off villains (and is one of the persistent problems in Punisher comics - there's no real way for him to do his gig and keep his enemies alive, so they get no histories and aren't particularly interesting). Second, it'll drive away the people who don't want to see the heroes act like villains. I number myself amongst that lot. For a while, a lot of readers - young men in particular - will jump on the bandwagon. But they don't have endurance.

Alternately, there's the Real Power of the DC Universe:



In addition to this picture being pure fucking class, it demonstrates some of the differences - the editorial differences - between DC and Marvel. Since the Infinite Crisis in the DCU, there have been editorial decisions that are pulling back from the black on black attitudes that have been growing in comics. They have also been promoting powerful female protagonists a lot more than Marvel.

The black on black grim and gritty attitude has come to almost entirely dominate Marvel's editorial decisions for most of their lines. When those people get tired of that black on black attitude, where will they go? It doesn't take a genius to figure it out.