I Have More Opinions About Comics

While I suspected I’d do at least one more “Opinions About Comics” post, I didn’t think I’d do it this soon. Mostly I was dissatisfied by the stuff I wrote in 2020 and didn’t edit (much), so this is sort of a redo.

Superheroes as Relics, Take Two

My paragraph and a sentence from last time essentially summarized the 1930s, reviewed Superman’s early history, then made a crack about fascism. First, I’d like to back up those claims:

• According to Wikipedia, at least, the villains Superman faced in the earliest stories were ordinary humans, such as gangsters, corrupt politicians, and violent husbands. (source) Later editors toned down the violence and realism, and introduced colorful villains like Ultra-Humanite and Lex Luthor.
• It doesn’t take a degree in history to know that Hitler rose to power because he tapped Germans’ resentment over their loss in World War I, exacerbated by a poor economy made worse by economic sanctions. Mussolini’s rise likewise relied on nationalistic sentiments exacerbated by a worldwide economic depression and national protests. (Japan’s eventual slide to fascism stemmed from more chronic problems, like an out of control military, envy of Western imperialism, and decades of propaganda.)
• The U.S. had its own brushes with fascism in the 1920s through 1940s, notably the pro-Nazi German American Bund. It can happen here.

So how does that make superheroes relics of the 1930s?

The original mission of superheroes was to fight crime. As we saw with Superman, an invulnerable alien beating up gangsters seemed one-sided and too violent. (Hell, a rich guy with gadgets beating up crooks seems like overkill.) So the threats got more grandiose: Superman began fighting mad scientists, Batman’s nemeses became outlandishly dressed serial killers, and the Silver Age Green Lantern became an interplanetary cop. Marvel’s villains, too, trended away from unfriendly neighborhood muggers toward invaders from space, armored megalomaniacs, and psychotic industrialists. Comic books drifted further and further from real world problems. (And when they try to be relevant a.k.a. “political” again, Internet neckbeards complain … sometimes rightly so *cough* Secret Empire *cough*.)

Which is fine. I’m the last person who should complain about escapism.

Still, American superhero comics seem somehow … adrift. Martial artists in Japanese manga still battle to see who’s strongest. Detectives in European and Japanese comics still solve crimes. Funny animals still do funny things. It’s only mainstream American costumed superbeings that have swung wildly from self-conscious deconstruction and nostalgic reconstruction, to emulation of other genres like science fiction and political thrillers, to endless and seemingly pointless battles with each other. (Not that I didn’t enjoy the recent Hickman era of X-Men.)

Maybe the genre is mutating (hah!) into something else. Still, the core idea of American superheros – extraordinary people putting on costumes to right wrongs – seems increasingly old-fashioned, silly, and irrelevant. And in the wrong hands the idea of a strong man fixing the world becomes not merely naive but dangerous.¹

So What DO You Like?

Past Favorites

Things I liked so much I bought them (or most of them) in dead tree form:

Harley Quinn by Amanda Conner & Jimmy Palmiotti

There have been Harley Quinn series before Conner & Palmiotti, writers that continued their series after they left, and series with the Clown Princess after that.² That era, however, created the most memorable version of Harley since Paul Dini and Bruce Timm first decided to give Joker a henchgirl. It’s the portrayal that influenced the second and better Suicide Squad movie and the HBO Harley Quinn series.

This version of Harley had dumped the Joker, for real this time. She was moving on with her life, even trying to do “good” … from her self-deluded, morally bankrupt perspective. (“This family never visits their elderly relative; I’ll kidnap them and lock them in my trunk. That’ll teach them!”) This was the Harley I personally wanted most to see, the one from the BTAS episode “Harley’s Holiday” where good intentions meet poor impulse control and very bad decisions

Harley’s post-Flashpoint makeover gave her bleached skin, dyed hair, and very skimpy outfits. Conner and Palmiotti enhanced her wardrobe, (eventually) re-dyed her hair, and made her bleached skin a metaphor for her separation from society: In an early story arc she got a real job as counselor at a nursing home, so every morning she put on “flesh-colored” body makeup and a wig. As for her simultaneous “psycho psychiatrist” portrayal in the Suicide Squad series … they mostly ignored it. Did this series take place after she somehow escaped? In a universe next door? Who cares?

Not every joke (or character or arc) worked. But it was a fun ride while it lasted, and like Gail Simone’s runs on both Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman the Connor & Palmiotti run ended on a high note. (And with characteristic fourth-wall breaking.)

Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson

The first series with the Pakistani superhero fangirl turned superhero is in many ways the best. Wilson created a multi-faceted character: a modern teen with a conservative Muslim family and non-Muslim friends, a hard-working Millennial up against a society (and a warped supervillain) that thinks all Millennials are useless slackers, a superhero figuring out the sometimes bizarre possibilities of her powers, and a young woman struggling with the world’s moral complexity. Despite not having been a teenager in mumble decades, I not only appreciate but applaud writers who can capture the excitement, frustration, and confusion of those years without clichés or smug adult judgements.

The supporting cast could have been stereotypes but weren’t: her father patriarchal but not unreasonable, her mother a lot more understanding than anyone could have expected, her non-Muslim not-quite-boyfriend patient but still a teenage boy, the stereotypical popular mean girl hiding secrets of her own. Even characters in otherwise badly thought out multi-series story arcs, e.g. Captain Marvel in Civil War II, ended up more relatable when G. Willow Wilson wrote them.

Other authors tried to write Kamala Khan. Some made her an upbeat Millennial know-it-all, most notably in Champions. Saladin Ahmed’s run (or what I read of it) busted her back down to a teen with traditional parents dodging curfew to save the world. I haven’t yet dared to watch the Disney Ms. Marvel series … not because they changed her powers, since some things work better in comics than in live action CGI, but because I’m afraid they missed the point of Kamala Khan.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl

Squirrel Girl started as a one-issue joke character in 1991. Dan Slott brought her back in the joke team Great Lakes Avengers, ofte to defeat Marvel’s toughest villains off-panel. She became Danielle Cage-Jones’s nanny in a run of The Avengers, but still remained mostly a joke.

Ryan North & Erica Henderson looked beyond the joke to create a character who was unironically enthusiastic yet clever. Which isn’t to say Squirrel Girl isn’t funny; unless you’re allergic to nerd humor it’s hard not to smile. But for all the character quirks and exaggeration she’s far from one note. She’s a college student majoring in not Criminal Justice but Computer Science, because she likes it. Her on-panel takedowns of major villains including Galactus involve some proportional powers of a squirrel but mostly figuring out what the villain wants and (where morally defensible) giving it to them. Moreover, she sees the limitations in simply jailing criminals, so she spends some of her free time helping criminals – even anthropomorphic hippos – find a productive niche in legitimate society. In the graphic novel Squirrel Girl Beats The Marvel Universe her evil but otherwise identical clone defeats all the other heroes by strategically defeating heroes whose gear she could steal then using that gear to defeat stronger heroes.

Erica Henderson caught some flack³ for her loose, cartoony style, but after a few pages the buck teeth and almost circular eyes actually work … especially when later issues reveal she’s surprisingly ripped. (Henderson can draw the stereotypical Marvel way, she just chose not to.) Her successor Derek Charm’s illustrations, ironically, didn’t charm me, and I think near the end of his run North was running out of steam. Still, with the exception of Al Ewing’s New Avengers (2015-2017) and U.S. Avengers from the same time period I don’t think any comic book has portrayed her as well.⁴

Valérian and Laureline

Forget the movie. This is the real deal.

This masterwork by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières starts as a simple time-travel story, but in the more than four decades of its publication (1967-2010) it also encompassed space opera, espionage, satire, gender politics, philosophy, theology, and finally a big metafictional time loop.

Valérian isn’t a simple square-jawed hero. Or rather, he is, except he’s a little too simple, and too lazy, to be the hero he thinks he is. While Laureline often finds herself as the damsel in distress, she’s also – despite being born in medieval France – the smarter and more resourceful of the pair. (She’s also a French woman; take that how you will.)

Changes in the series reflect both the growth of Christin and Mézières and the changing times around them. They faced one big problem in that in their earliest complete story they predicted a massive global flood in the 1980s. The 1980s may have felt comfortably far off in the 1960s and early 1970s, but when the 1980s rolled around, there was no global flood. The writer and artist found a solution: a parody of the Christian Trinity decided to change time itself, and in the process strand Valérian and Laureline from the future from which they came. For most of the rest of the series they worked odd jobs, encountered odd patrons, and generally struggled to make ends meet. Much like people in the 80s and beyond.

After the series officially ended, Christin and Mézières have been sporadically publishing a sort of victory lap, collected in two thin issues of side stories and retellings. These aren’t necessary. To any of my readers, though, I recommend digging up the collections that came out in the wake of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, or better yet the original bandes desinees where you can see the deceptively simple but evocative art as clearly as possible.

Honorable Mentions

Things I wish I had in dead tree form:

• Cataclysm & No Man’s Land arcs.

  This arc has inspired other Batman-related series from Gotham to Harley Quinn. It’s still a great, if long, pick-me-up when I start thinking my life is a disaster.

• Sandman, the complete series.

  The series that put Neil Gaiman on the (American) map. They’re still making spin-offs and sequels to it.

  I had the first issues as individual comics, and the rest of the series as collections, but then I sold them to empty out a storage unit. Now I want them back, in the deluxe set that I’ve seen in comic stores.