Core Idea(l)s: What Do Superheroes "Stand For"

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in re: http://www.ninthart.com/display.php?article=1143

As somewhat of an outsider to the Marvel characters, I got O'B's talk about Hulk and Spidey best. I think his Supes and Bats comments are a little less on target, as both characters were created without core ideals and had them imposed and later reimposed (Xinfinity) as they progressed.
But both Spidey and Hulk seemed to be about quite specific things when they debuted, though it would be quite ridiculous for all the Silver Age Marvel characters to still be flaunting existential angst in the face of the atomic era in 2006.

So, for the benefit of the WORLD, I hereby elect the ILC braintrust to come up with what the CENTRAL IDEA(L)S of every supercharacter ever (or until this gets dull) (or until DaveR or Tom give us some poll results) SHOULD BE.

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 15:54 (twenty years ago)

Wolverine, when he's in the X-Men, stands for the fact that if you want to create a tolerant society in which everyone is equal, you're going to have to SLICE A LOT OF PEOPLE THE FUCK UP.

― Flyboy (Flyboy), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 17:30 (twenty years ago)

Spider-Man: "With Great Power, Yadda Yadda" ergo, if you're going to fuck around with radioactive isotopes, make sure you sweep first.

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 17:46 (twenty years ago)

I think that one of the things that makes X-Men successful is that unlike the rest of the major superhero properties, its core concept allows the comic to transform radically to meet the demands of the marketplace. The evolution and mutation themes of the franchise extend to the cast and execution - there aren't any characters that you NEED to tell a good X-Men story so long as you have an interesting take on the idea of mutants. The big problem that Marvel has is not so much that it's going AWAY from the core concept so much as denying that it can evolve and change into something else. It's this constant conservative push backwards after ever step forward that hurts the franchise - this idea that they can't just do another Giant Size X-Men #1 and bring in a whole new cast, that there actually is a "basics" to go back to when you take into account that the series has always been about a shifting status quo. Grant Morrison did an amazing job on the series and left the writers/editors with a wonderful starting point for the future, and it was totally wasted. It's depressing.

― Matthew C Perpetua (inca), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 17:52 (twenty years ago)

Oh wait, I was being serious and sincere. Was this supposed to be a thread for one-liners?

― Matthew C Perpetua (inca), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 17:53 (twenty years ago)

Who cares? It's ILC!

(I intended it to be a semi-serious thread, but, y'know, do as you will)

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 17:54 (twenty years ago)

HULK STAND FOR A FREE AND TOLERANT SOCIETY FOR ALL REGARDLESS OF RACE, RELIGION OR SEXUAL PERSUASION. AND SMASHING PUNY ARMY MEN.

― chap who would dare to work for the man (chap), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 17:58 (twenty years ago)

Matthew C Perpetua, that's a great point.

Am I the only person who never believed the whole Mutants = Blacks thing? I mean, the oppression issues have always had a Saturday Afternoon Special quality to them. Has anyone poor and/or from a disadvantaged minority written X-Men in the last ten years?

― kenchen, Tuesday, 10 January 2006 18:08 (twenty years ago)

Well, the mutant concept works in a lot of different ways - it can be racism or homophobia, sure, but I really liked Morrison's take on it being quite literally the evolutionary process of humanity, that it was basically about the conflict of progress vs. stagnation.

― Matthew C Perpetua (inca), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 18:11 (twenty years ago)

and Mavrel chose stagnation!

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 18:15 (twenty years ago)

All the editors and writers at Marvel are tethered to their Kick inhalers!

― Matthew C Perpetua (inca), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 18:17 (twenty years ago)

Superman: Originally (stretching), Jewish immigrant success story, Old World is dead, anything can be accomplished in the New World. However, it might still be a good idea to change your name and act mild-manneredly so as to not draw too much attention to yourself.

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 18:30 (twenty years ago)

I always took Xmen to work both as a bigotry/racism thing(Magneto, Genosha, etc) as well as a "weird changes you go thru in puberty"/teenager thing, since wasn't the age that mutant powers manifested?

Tho maybe my reading of it taken from the Claremont era, which the run I collected(late 190s to right before the Age of Apocalypse thing)

― kingfish pibb Xtra (kingfish 2.0), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 19:55 (twenty years ago)

Well, that's kinda my point - the mutant thing is very flexible as a metaphor, and that combined with the ensemble cast allows the series to change with the times in a way other major superhero properties cannot. There are no characters who are utterly essential to an X-Men story, not even Wolverine!

― Matthew C Perpetua (inca), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 20:12 (twenty years ago)

BATMAN - 'o those wacky rich folx' comic adapted for hard realities of the depression. cf BLONDIE.

― j blount (papa la bas), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 21:48 (twenty years ago)

so that's what dagwood did at night!

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 22:03 (twenty years ago)

ergo the naps

― j blount (papa la bas), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 22:04 (twenty years ago)

C'mon dude, Dagwood's hair was always hooked up.

― Dan (Comic Pages' Greatest Conk) Perry (Dan Perry), Tuesday, 10 January 2006 22:36 (twenty years ago)

But what the fuck about his NECK?

― David R. (popshots75`), Wednesday, 11 January 2006 00:46 (twenty years ago)

I think his Supes and Bats comments are a little less on target, as both characters were created without core ideals and had them imposed and later reimposed (Xinfinity) as they progressed.

I actually agreed with him here-- ASS is the only "modern" Superman comic I'm ever likely to buy, because I find it offensive that the writers and artists keep Superman a perennially 29 year old body-builder type with a hot young wife, constantly being exposed to crappy new characters and soap opera stuff. I don't think that "core ideals" is exactly the right phrase to use here-- Superman and Batman were both created to be lone adventure heroes, there's no doubt about that, and Batman was a pulp crimebuster from the get-go, just as Superman was meant to be thrilling in the fact of his very existence as a Herculean-feat doer. Yeah, admittedly the weird fanboy insistence that the "essence" of Batman's character is that he's fucked in the head is just wrong-- the essence of both heroes' characters is that they're escapist fantasies, but that doesn't mean that they don't have particular fantasies that they were designed to embody, just as Spider-Man, Hulk, and the X-Men were. I agree with O'Brien that once you move away from the Ditko Spider-Man or the Kirby Hulk, you've gone off-model. Similarly, I think, if Superman isn't uniquely marvellous a la Siegel/Schuster, he's only a cypher.

And I think that the real subtext behind the X-Men is that they're awkward (because somehow "out of the norm") adolescents. I agree with Perpetua about Marvel's handling of the franchise.

― Chris F. (servoret), Wednesday, 11 January 2006 03:06 (twenty years ago)

But Batman is fucked in the head. He dresses up as a giant fetish bat and hits people for fucks sake!
Escapist fantasy or not, that's still some pretty fucked-up shit.

Arguably the superhero who's most about that "With great power comes great resposibility" bollocks is Superman - or he is now, given the iconic status he's acquired over the last 60 years or so.

I always read the X-Men as part social commentary (Stan Lee says minorities get treated badly - Well, no shit Stan!) and part adolescent angst - I mean, the prospect of your, hitherto, reliably predictable body suddenly stretching out of proportion, sprouting hair in all sorts of places and suddenly erupting secretions all over the place is bound to freak you out more than a little.

― Stone Monkey (Stone Monkey), Wednesday, 11 January 2006 12:15 (twenty years ago)

So the reason I'm not into superhero comix is that I wasn't freaked out by puberty?

― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 14 January 2006 13:03 (twenty years ago)

Probably.

― Matthew C Perpetua (inca), Saturday, 14 January 2006 13:33 (twenty years ago)

Doubtful! Personally, I was reading funny books before I knew what boners and pubic hairs were. However, I did come from a broken home - that's my keycard.

― David R. (popshots75`), Saturday, 14 January 2006 17:33 (twenty years ago)

I wasn't freaked out by my parents' divorce either, though. Although it did cause us to live in E. Hartford for a year, that was a bit upsetting. Are there any comics that are metaphors for being stuck in Connecticut? I think this is why I got into the Transformers.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 14 January 2006 18:37 (twenty years ago)

I think what I liked as a kid--aside from the pre-existing leanings towards adventure stories, having learned to read on Hardy Boys and Narnia and Robert Louis Stevenson and, y'know, defining moments of pre-pube life being Raiders and Empire, was the idea of secret identities, that just because I was a hapless knob, inadequate among my peers (at school at least, I had plenty of neighbourhood friends), it didn't necessarily mean that I wasn't capable of, oh, I don't know, lifting the sun. That there was more to me than merely what the rest of the world saw.
Of course, there isn't. Not really, I'm a remarkably shallow fellow, even by my standards, but when I was a kid, y'know, there was still hope.

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Saturday, 14 January 2006 19:46 (twenty years ago)

Being stuck in CT = INFINITE CRISIS!

― David R. (popshots75`), Saturday, 14 January 2006 20:10 (twenty years ago)

rebecca lobo as the elongated man

― j blount (papa la bas), Saturday, 14 January 2006 22:43 (twenty years ago)

Sue Bird as Zatanna!

― David R. (popshots75`), Saturday, 14 January 2006 23:43 (twenty years ago)

NOICE

― j blount (papa la bas), Sunday, 15 January 2006 00:33 (twenty years ago)

Your Dagwood as vigilante superhero fantasy realized:
http://tinypic.com/k9zzps.jpg

― Robt Van Liefeld, Sunday, 15 January 2006 01:36 (twenty years ago)

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