Planet Hulk and World War Hulk

I just got done reading the Planet Hulk and World War Hulk storyline. And . . . well, I've got some comments on it and the nature of heroism and villainy in Marvel comics.

First, in Planet Hulk - or at least in the Illuminati stuff that preceded it - Doctor Strange, Mister Fantastic, Iron Man and Black Bolt decide to take the Hulk and shoot him into outer space. The only person who objects is Namor.

OK, let's make this clear. None of these people had the right to do this. They kidnapped the Hulk. That's just the plain truth. Was he a danger? Oh, sure, some of the time, definitely. He also did a number of good things, too, and much of the bad he did was done under a variety of duress.

I believe the point they were trying to raise was . . . how do you handle power when the government can't do it. That's sort of the subtext of all superhero comics. The legal authorities can't handle things so superheroes, generally unaffiliated with the government, fill the gap. Y'know, the military can't handle Magneto so the X-Men come in and do that, or whatever.

However, traditionally, superheroes were very reactive and employed a minimum amount of force to handle the situation (and place the well-being of civilians above everything else). They don't do pre-emptive strikes. They went to great lengths not to kill anyone. They took extraordinary care to avoid civilian casualties. What I would say the traditionally accepted justification for this is the authorities would regard seeking out fights as vigilantism - but a citizen is allowed to act to save themselves and others in a crisis situation. Going out and finding Norman Osborn and beating him up before he does something wrong is vigilantism. Preventing him from blowing up the Thanksgiving Day Parade is just being a good citizen.

So, Fantastic, Black Bolt, Iron Man and Dr. Strange violated that precept. Furthermore, I mean, if you're gonna do something like that . . . the Hulk? Most of of the time, y'know, the Hulk is hitting the right person or acting in self-defense. We're not talking the Red Skull, here, but a nice guy in a horrible situation. What they did was kidnapping.

But it wasn't just kidnapping. To trick Bruce Banner - a very clever person - into being shot into space, they misappropriated an android of Nick Fury. I . . . I mean, uh, SHIELD is this big, important para-military organization in the MU. They impersonated an officer, they almost certainly broke a dozen security clearance issues, they misappropriated SHIELD resources - just this really big laundry list of security violations. The kind of stuff that would get a person prison time.

Or to break it down in a different way, what would be the reaction of heroes if Doctor Doom reprogrammed an android of Nick Fury in order to kidnap the Hulk and shoot him into outer space?

Or to break it down even further: Marvel decided to turn Strange, Black Bolt, Tony Stark and Reed Richards into villains. They violated a whole raft of laws to kidnap Bruce Banner and they shot him into space.

Then it goes wrong. I mean, not even blaming those four for what happened to the Hulk on Sakaar, it goes wrong and the Hulk comes back and destroys Manhattan in World War Hulk because he's pissed off at being shot into space.

Oh, sure, he doesn't kill anyone. He does kidnap people, torture them (obedience disks?!) and destroy a major American city in the process. Yeah, they were bad guys, but two wrongs don't make a right. STILL. We all know this.

So, they also decide that the Hulk needs to be a villain, too.

I wish people actually read this journal because I'd really like an answer to why Marvel seems bound and determined to turn virtually every "hero" in their universe into a villain? I mean, you've got Cyclops ordering torture and murder, you've got Professor X having been revealed to be doing cruel mental manipulation for decades - I mean, stuff like making Scott and Alex Summers forget that they had another brother kind of horrible mental rape (and, again, not even to someone it could be argued "deserved" it like, y'know, Sabertooth or Mystique, but doing it to hide the fact Xavier was responsible for their deaths). You've got "heroes" kidnapping people and shooting them into space, or putting people in indefinite lock-up in extradimensional prisons. I mean, is there a single major hero out there, as Marvel hero, who hasn't done things that simply can't be justified as being "heroic"? And why have they decided to turn so many of their marquee characters into bad guys? I'm not getting it.

Hancock movie review

Me and the li'l lady and a friend of ours saw Hancock the other day. We were somewhat amused by it. In particular, we liked Will Smith as the cranky, bumbling superhero whose antics were both benevolent and often incompetent. Critiques of the quality of the movie, otherwise, is a fairly weak script and incoherent plot plus mediocre effects. The upshot? If you like Will Smith, see it. If you don't, don't. Since I like Will Smith, I kinna liked the movie.

To me, though, what was really interesting is the PR man who turns Hancock's life around. I was getting a very It's a Wonderful Life feeling from it. In It's a Wonderful Life, one of the subtexts is that bankers do good in a community. Bankers are these benevolent people and crap like - the movie is functionally an advertisement for the banking industry. In a similar fashion, the PR protagonist of Hancock is this committed guy who wants to save the world by convincing corporations to do good deeds. I sort of threw up in my mouth about that. I mean, of all the impossible things I found that the most impossible. A superhero that can fly, bounce bullets off his face and move with incredible speed? That's downright realistic compared to an advertising guy trying to save the world through corporate benevolence! To me, that's the worst part of the movie - how it kisses the ass of corporate America and the praise for the ad industry.

Sophisticated Badness

I was reading the Jog's critique of the end of the Ennis run on The Punisher. I can't really talk about Ennis' work on The Punisher because I don't particularly like either the writer or the character, but in the course of the review the character brought up Grant Morrison with great praise. The same critic also critiqued one of Morrison's Batman comics, again quite glowingly. The upshot is that Morrison does all these really cool things, or so the Jog says, and that is perhaps true - but at the end of the day I seem to be dissatisfied with Morrison's work. It took me a long time to figure out, but I finally did, and it's true not only of Morrison, I feel, but a number of comic book writers nowadays - they're bad in a more sophisticated way.

In particular, Morrison will have all these big ideas and concepts and the miss out on a lot of really basic things. So when people argue about whether "he made the Beast gay" or whatever, they never think to ask, "Why on earth have the X-Men accepted into the highest positions of authority a petty, vain and vindictive mass murderer like Emma Frost?!" So while people are going on about how Morrison was trying to make a point about the plight of people who are discriminated in society without the support mechanisms of gay people, I'm sitting back boggling how he put a mass murderer in charge of a bunch of children. Which is literally criminally stupid. Or the way that, y'know, relationships born in adultery are corrupted from the get-go. Stuff like that.

I feel roughly the same way about, say, Warren Ellis. In my opinion, he totally trashed the Thunderbolts - which had hitherto been a campy book about a fairly sophisticated subject, itself: how do people who know only how to do bad get redemption? They suck at it. Even when they are honestly seeking it, they suck at it. Which is a fairly intelligent social commentary relevant in a society which imprisons more people than China - even prisoners who might legitimately wish to change their ways are stuck with all the natural responses and knowledge and behavior that make it nearly impossible for even the most honest amongst them to reform. Yes, yes, the book had a lot of camp, but the point was significant and meaningful.

Ellis' run, however, is nasty people doing horrible things to each other. And then you find Ellis' Internet cult saying it's "realistic". Which is a stupid argument in comics where people have superpowers - wouldn't real realism, y'know, confine itself to the actually possible? - but also stupid because nothing like what happened in the Thunderbolts happens in life. Or, at least, I can't think of a government run program that transforms the most hardened criminals in our society into slaves of the government to hunt down other hardened violent criminals being run by an insane mass murderer. So, it's not realistic. It's so far from realistic that you can't see earth from where it's at.

Which is the problem for me. Not that it's not realistic, but that it's stupid. A government run program that transforms the most hardened criminals in our society into slaves of the government to hunt down other hardened violent criminals being run by an insane mass murderer. That's what Ellis' Thunderbolts are. And it has these profound implications. For instance, it implies that the US government is the kind of government that is okay with law enforcement agencies being run by insane mass murderers. Tony Stark is behind it, too, so he's also okay with an insane mass murderer running a government law enforcement program. It means that Tony Stark and the US government are too blindingly stupid to notice when this insane mass murderer goes on killing sprees and murders fifteen government agents or so evil they don't care. It means that these people are legally responsible for the actions of Norman fucking Osborn! I mean, for me, that's the story. The story isn't how much of a whore Moonstone is or whatever. The story is the profound and multifaceted corruption that would be necessary for Tony Stark's SHIELD and the US government to legally sanction Norman Osborn with law enforcement powers that he immediately abuses.

It's bad. Very bad. Stupid, even. But bad in a more sophisticated way than you'd find in comics from, say, the 50s. Bad in a way that acknowledges that these characters might have a few marbles loose (but always in a heavy handed way - far more interesting to me than Batman's potential insanity is, say, Reed Richards' psychological abuse and neglect of his wife and children), but then ignores even the most basic rules of internal logic and verisimilitude.

And I find myself surprised by it all, though I suppose that I shouldn't be. Comic book fans are desperately seeking approval for their medium (and, generally, these days finding it), and the sophisticated pose of comic book writers since, say, Frank Miller helps them get this respectability. This sophistication provides for many insecure comic book fans, who have some guilt over their fantasies about superheroes, social validity. I don't even mind that. What I mind is that this sophistication gets in the way of what I feel are basic storytelling skills. Worse, by it's very nature, sophistication encourages us to think about the stories - what do the writers mean? And when they do that, when guys like Morrison and Ellis do that, I find myself going, "That's a nice point, Grant, but you realize that the story falls apart?"

I believe that this is allowed to endure because of a certain elision that many fans are expert at saying that the senseless is the greatest form of sense. Not just comics fans but pretty much everywhere amongst fans (and especially amongst anime fans). What they do is work very hard to make sense from the senseless. If it doesn't make sense what they'll do is pretend it does make sense (and is, indeed, quite significant), and then criticize anyone who doesn't agree it makes sense by saying that they don't "get it".

(I also personally hate that, and it's wrong. I will look them in the eye and say, "I got Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit. I get Bergman's The Seventh Seal. No, really, I get it. I just think it's dumb." And then they shut up because none of them have the faintest idea of who Hegel is but they think they should or something. Sometimes I also ask them to explain it, and we can talk about that, but that's generally pretty bad for them.)

What I get is that the pose of sophistication in comic books is eroding basic coherent storytelling with internal logic and verisimilitude. And I wish people would start to say this basic and easy to understand fact!

Stalingrad the Movie

We just got done watching Stalingrad, a German movie about German Wehrmacht soldiers fighting in, sorta obviously, Stalingrad.

It was pretty heavy. We've had it for a couple of weeks now and didn't watch it because, y'know, it's a two and a half hour long movie that we knew would be relentlessly cheerless. And, over all, that's precisely what we got. It is the story of a crack unit of German fighting men who are sent to the bloodiest battle in human history, and on the losing side, at that. The movie had performances that ranged from the pretty good to outstanding, great cinematography, score and, of course, a deeply compelling source.

Pretty clearly, the point of the film was the relentless futility and stupidity of war. The battle scenes focused far less on the heroism of characters and a bit more on the psychological collapse of people put into that kind of meat grinding.

This is in some contradistinction to, say, something like Saving Private Ryan, a movie I couldn't really enjoy without being able to say why. Saving Private Ryan, despite the supposed realism of the battle scenes, has very little in the way to say about the psychological collapse of those who fight wars. The characters are all brave and heroic, and even at the end when Tom Hanks' character dies it's bravely (tho' I thought it came off more inane than brave) firing his pistol at a tank in some pathetic last desperate act of defiance. (I, personally, might have thought to get out of the tank's way, but I guess I'm silly like that.)

Stalingrad has brave people in it, but the battle scenes are far more about the multifaceted psychological harm that happens. Some of the scenes verge on the harrowing, but not necessarily the ones where peoples limbs or blown off or whatever. I mean, we've seen that kind of stuff since Platoon, right? One of the scenes with a group of desperate and hardened soldiers dealing with a bound Russian woman had a great deal of emotional impact, because of the casual assumption of brutality acceptable by soldiers in that situation - they just assume they're going to gang rape her in order of rank, and the psychological convolutions of the lieutenant, then the highest rank officer, when first trying to psyche himself up to rape her and then deciding not to do it was intense. And then, well, it's Stalingrad, so you've got to have people dying in the snow - the scene was both poignant and intensely beautiful. (Also, reminds me why I'm so happy to live in California. Yay mild winters!)

The movie's biggest flaw was . . . the lieutenant of this unit of soliders, and several of the people under his command, would confront German officers who were more traditionally Nazi, pompous, murderous and glory hounds. While absent the context of Nazi German's genocide against the Russian people - around thirty million Russians were killed, most of this civilians - I understand that the movie was trying to build sympathy for the characters. And it is certainly true that the people in the German Army, most of them, weren't genocidal monsters, but confused people living in a tyrannical regime that had mastered the arts or propaganda. But the context of the German invasion of Russia can't easily be ignored. So sometimes when the protagonists stand up to their brutal high ranking officers it comes off as being an apologia for the rank-and-file German soldier.

Mind you, I understand I say that in the context of American movies doing the same thing. I mentioned Platoon, earlier. Isn't Platoon an attempt to exonerate the rank-and-file American soldiery of the atrocities committed in Southeast Asia? I think clearly so. It shows the "average" American soldier as someone caught up in events outside of their control, doing atrocities under duress from their superiors. It ignores that each and ever drafted soldier was considered a legal and moral adult. So I can't hold that against Stalingrad too much, right?

Overall, I liked the movie a great deal. All of my favorite war movies - Apocalpyse Now, Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket - are about the stupidity and futility of war, and Stalingrad fits into that pack pretty darn well. It's a grim story, but a very good movie.

Let's Humiliate People - Iron Man and the Mighty Avengers

I just came across this little gem of an image in The Mighty Avengers #11 and spoilers ahead. Seriously, at this point I think I'm keeping reading just because I'm morbidly curious. It's like seeing a car wreck on the side of the road. But here's the picture:



The story arc, concluding here, is that . . . the Mighty Avengers think Doctor Doom did something bad and they go to Latveria to confront him. Despite the fact he didn't do it, and as far as I can tell he didn't even condone it, his refusal to bow down to Tony Stark prompts a fight. Doom was winning until, having written themselves into a corner, they have the Sentry do his deus ex machina act. I mean, I hope everyone who reads The Mighty Avengers gets it that the Sentry is this total deus ex machina, right? An excuse to have sudden inexplicable victories without having to provide a shred of basic justification? Whenever the writers want the story to end they say, "Oh, the Sentry kicks their ass." Mega-weak, but whatever.

What really gets me about this is that the Sentry just doesn't kick Doom's ass. He humiliates Doom by tearing off his mask, showing the Avengers, who react in a horrified way to Doom's disfigurement. And then Iron Man uses that opportunity to belittle his defeated opponent.

Is this really what people want to see? Heroes degrading their enemies? Shaming and humiliating them, and then bragging about their victories?

I mean, to top it all off, Doctor Doom didn't do it! But several months after this comic was written, that hasn't been addressed. I know that the wheels of comic books can move slowly and maybe it will be addressed that the Mighty Avengers total lack of anything resembling detective work resulted in them invading a sovereign nation, beating up an innocent man (or, at least, innocent of what they charged him with) and then humiliating this disfigured man.

And as far as I can tell, no one really has a problem with this. It baffles me.

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.