Why we need comics we can care about

Tom Brevoort, who is Marvel’s Senior VP of Publishing, recently spoke about the fundamental difference between the DC universe and the Marvel universe. As he sees it, the former takes an optimistic view of the world, the latter a pessimistic one. “Even something like Dark Knight Returns, which is gritty as hell, is at its heart about a heroic ideal, a larger-than-life figure who rises up to champion the city in its time of need.”

I’m not sure about this assertion – though, to be fair to Mr Brevoort, he’s a very smart guy and he did open with the caveat that it was too big a subject to talk about in one short post. As a kid, I turned to Marvel, not for pessimism, but for a more believable idea of what a hero was. I could see that Peter Parker’s heroism cost him more than Clark Kent’s ever did. He was a bigger hero. I didn’t need Aunt May to die to prove that, I just needed to believe that Peter was afraid she would.

In the Lee-Kirby-Ditko era, Marvel stood out because the stories took a deeper, more nuanced view of what it meant to be a hero. The regular guy behind the mask had problems like the rest of us. Courage had a cost. The Marvel universe was a dramatic canvas of love, secrets, misunderstandings, shame, emotional dilemmas. I’m not sure I’d call that universe pessimistic, just indifferent to human affairs. Marvel heroes didn’t get any helping hands from the storytellers.

Are today’s comics (and I’m not specifically thinking of Marvel) rooted in pessimism? Maybe. I don’t really follow superhero comics much, but I see that where once the most extreme stakes for the heroes were life and death, now they’re more often things like disfigurement and brain damage. Action has often been replaced with brutality, personal problems with politics, characterization with a stance on thinly disguised current issues.

Dilemmas in many of today’s comic books are no longer emotional but intellectual. Mutants, that’s like racism, right? And superhero registration, that’s the war on terror. Yeah, we all get it. My blank look is boredom, not confusion.

As I said, I’m not talking about just Marvel here. Comics are a shrinking market and yet the superheroes of the Silver Age are entertaining bigger audiences than ever before. The movies are watched by seventy million people while the comic books’ readership has dwindled to a diehard band of collectors and fanboys. Why is that?

Bambos Georgiou talks on his blog about some of the things that may have gone wrong with the comics market. You would think, after all, that comics as a medium should appeal to both book readers and moviegoers. That’s a pretty wide demographic. The problem is not in the medium but in the content. And we need to qualify that by adding that it’s specifically the US and UK that is facing this problem.

It isn’t a question of whether today’s comics are darker – look how dark Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies are. Comics are strangling themselves to death because most people don’t care a jot about the impersonal and somewhat abstract themes in these stories. Fanboys love that stuff but, thing is, fanboys are not really typical. And in a desperate attempt to inject the missing emotion, writers too often turn to sadism and plot complexity, delivering story punchlines that, if they arouse any emotion, deliver disgust and dismay rather than thrills.

Remember, I'm not saying all comic books are doing this. We still have some great ones that are about the people at the heart of the story. But overall it's a trend that has bedevilled the creators who grew up in the long shadow of Moore and Miller, who ape their style without getting even a hint of their substance. It's like a tyro novelist trying to be Hemingway without earning it. And it's a trend that's putting off new readers.

The majority of us connect with stories about characters whose concerns are personal, immediate, emotional, simple and relatable. Explore themes, sure – but personalize them. Blade Runner is not an issue-based examination of human identity; Roy Batty wants more life, fucker. And he ups and shows us what it is to be human.

I was in France recently. There you’ll see kids, teens and adults reading comics. The genres are as broad as in cinema or TV drama. The stories are gripping, and wildly popular like Harry Potter books or Sherlock Holmes movies. A ten-year-old picked up the first Mirabilis book. I thought it might be too old for her, but she read it through twice (the second time on her eleventh birthday, actually) and then demanded more. Teens and adults can enjoy that same story, perhaps seeing a little more in it than younger readers but without demanding characters’ eyes to be plucked out to make it “mature”.

I’ll give you a good analogy that shows how comic books could turn themselves around. A few years before J J Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, one of the show’s TV producers was talking about how maybe the ST franchise was just dying. And indeed it was dying – of worthiness, of sterility. Dying because it had made its issues bigger than its characters. To paraphrase The Onion, it was dying because of the heavy-handed messages about tolerance and the scenes set at long tables in which interstellar diplomacy is debated in endless detail.

The reboot made Star Trek once more about characters on a journey. We were with people we cared about as they faced huge challenges, They had to reach inside and discover the part of themselves that could meet such challenges. We saw them grow and change.

You tell a story like that, in any medium you like, and they will come.

"Just a story" is no excuse

When you have characters in a story taking action that’s out of proportion to the emotion you’ve built up, that’s melodrama. When you have something happen that doesn’t make any logical sense, that’s hokum.

Now, I loved loved loved the new Star Trek movie. Ordered the special edition on DVD, can’t wait. But there is that one little bit that I just have to put mental blinkers on for, and that’s where Spock decides to stick Kirk in an escape pod and blast him off the ship on account of he’s been a very bad boy and the brig just won’t do.

Maybe you’re saying, “Don’t you see? That shows how upset Spock was!” Nah, that’s a lame excuse. People show more restraint than that every day, and they don’t even have the advantage of being half Vulcan. The writers needed Kirk in that pod to keep the plot moving, so they just hoped we’d accept the idea of Spock being so worked up into a lather that he’d behave like a little kid whose toy got broke.

And why did they need Kirk in that pod? So he could land on a deserted planet and meet up with Spock’s future self and get told some important plot stuff. So that’s piling hokum onto melodrama.

Now, remember this is a movie I adore. You know that Yeats quote, “Tread softly because you tread upon my dreams”? This movie decidedly did not tread on them. It took them and it made them into something brilliant. It made Star Trek as great as it always should have been – as great, I mean, as it was in my 11-year-old imagination. I’m going to keep saying that so you know this is criticism of a loved one.

But that bit with the escape pod is still melodrama and hokum. And what’s more, the writers knew it.

In a recent interview, J J Abrams mentions a deleted scene:

"In the scene, Spock explains that [the encounter of Kirk and Spock Prime] is a result of the universe trying to restore balance after the time line is changed. They acknowledged the coincidence as a function of the universe to heal itself."

Abrams was right to drop that scene in favour of keeping the mystery, because a mystery is always going to be preferable to a really dumb bit of blather like that. That’s the writer’s equivalent of covering the bad brickwork with a coat of plaster. But if they had wanted an honest logical explanation, older Spock could simply have said he planted the idea in young Spock’s mind. That reincorporates the Vulcan mind-meld, so we know it wasn’t cooked up just for the sake of this one plot point. Doesn’t normally work over hundreds of thousands of miles, sure – but who knows the range of contact between two near-identical minds? And it explains both young Spock’s crazy overreaction and the apparent fluke of Kirk and old Spock’s meeting.

If I get a meal cooked by Raymond Blanc and he burns the steak then I’m going to send it back. Literature and cuisine – they’re both crafts. I want to believe good stories, but I don’t see why I should make allowances. The better the story, the more it’s important to get every detail right. Seduce my disbelief, don’t just count on it to tie itself up. And if you see me cutting corners and sticking on plot patches in Mirabilis or Sweet or anything else, shout it out loud and clear.

Oh, and go and buy the Star Trek DVD right now because it was the best movie of 2009 by several parsecs.