An early issue of Spider-man ended with Peter and Betty Brant cuddled tgether in the Daily Bugle offices, and a little note from Stan Lee saying that they're trying to be realistic, so Spider-,man will win a few on occasion. This approach was, of course, abandoned in favor of making Peter Parker into Charlie Brown, but I was thinking of this while watching television the last couple nights.
Veronica Mars and Lost both kicked their characters around like a red-headed step child in their season finales. At least with Lost, I know they have a few seasons left, but on VM, that was it. I like these characters. I don't want to see them beaten savagely by fate. Seinfeld was the same way. The last episode told its viewers that Seinfeld and the gang were just bad people. I didn't watch it regularly, but I did watch enough to know that they were not any worse than anyone else on the show. Additionally, the viewers didn't think they were bad people or they would not have been watching throughout the years.
The season finale of Lost was a wonderful episode, really, but it kind of struck me as a Marvel What If scenario. That got me thinking, are not modern comics doing the same thing? Greg used to be fond of stating the precept that "Every character is somebody's favorite" particularly in regards to the TMK LSH issues, but I don't think that's so much the problem. The issue is not so much that I like Wildfire and TMK hated him. The issue is that nobody came off well in TMK, except Tenzil, and I did not really hate any of them. Sunboy - killed. S. Erin - turned into a transsexual stalker. Blok - Killed. Tomber Wolf - deformed. Cos - crippled. Tellus - Dark circle member. Et cetera.
At that point they've acquired quite the body count. It's not that Tellus and Sun Boy were particular favorites. It's that I didn't hate them either, so I don't really get any pleasure watching them suffer.
Or JMS's Spider-man. Gwen Stacy is dead, but that wasn't enough. Nooooo. We have to turn her into the mistress of the Green Goblin. That's somewhat muted by Peter Parker's now traditional Charlie Brown karma.
Or how about Tony Stark? He's now turned into Dennis Miller.
And over in Superman apparently the Joker is meant to be targetting Jimmy Olsen. Why would the Joker do that? More importantly, why would someone who does not hate the characters want to read about the Joker doing that?
I guess what I'm saying here is I'd like to see things get evened out a little.
Posted by Mike Chary at May 24, 2007 10:10 AM
Re: TMK, I think some of the characters came off well: Jo, Cham, Cos, various others. Various bad things had happened to them (though not so much to Cham, as far as I recall) but they were still basically good and heroic figures, and the things that had happened to them were mostly the sorts of circumstances they could struggle with to show their mettle. That sort of thing bothered me less than what struck me as right-angle turns in personality (Dirk, Nura).
Death per se wasn't necessarily a problem for me-- one thing I used to respect about the LSH was the fact that it wasn't afraid to occasionally show that their business was mortally dangerous and didn't make death a revolving door. But I'm not particularly interested in empty deaths to show how badass the villain is, or piling up body counts to show how serious the authors are. Once a headliner's death stops being a once-a-decade event, you start getting the shock escalation we've become all too familiar with. (Which got pretty ridiculous in v4 itself, which went from killing Legionnaires to blowing up the Moon to blowing up the Earth to destroying the universe in little more time than it takes to say it.)
Re Veronica Mars, I like happy endings and would have enjoyed one just fine, not being much of a purist. But the show never made a secret of being (or at least attempting to be) noir. Given that the ending was actually less of a downer than I feared it might be.
Jo suddenly lost Tinya and became a criminal. (Okay, smuggling sort of lost it's Harry Lime onus with the advent of Han Solo, but it's still not a silver age Legion type activity). I'm not saying they were bad people. I'm saying bad things happened to them, and I don't necessarily like seeing that. I actually kind of gave up on BSG this season because it was so unrelentingly dark for a while.
I don't mind Keith getting indicted (though I want to see them prove it in court) but it was a cliffhanger for the series finale.
The 5YL Legion was pretty dark, yeah, but that's one of the things that made it so strong: it's easy to be a beacon of hope in a universe where everything's pretty good already; it's much harder and more meaningful to be a beacon of hope in a universe where everything sucks. And that's just what they were.
As for Seinfeld and Veronica Mars, I liked both endings. (Although the VM ending could have been crafted better if it had been intended to end the whole series instead of just the season.) Anytime you can look back at what happened and say, "In retrospect, something like that was pretty much inevitable," what you're talking about was probably pretty good, in the sense that it was true to what the show and characters were all about.
In particular I liked Logan's role in the ending. If this episode had lasted forty-five seconds longer, Logan's corpse would have turned up floating in the ocean somewhere. It's the ending he's been looking for all series. For Logan, the fact that Gory is willing and able to have him killed is not just an unavoidable risk to be taken in the course of defending/avenging Veronica... it's dessert.
I like my superhero comics (and LSH in particular) lighter than v4 as a general rule, and Tinya is another of that trail of bodies TMK left. That said, I wouldn't necessarily have minded some offstage badness as a setup for the Legion's comeback Five Years Later.
There's also the matter of tone. Plenty of bad things happened in the Silver Age, after all-- Bouncing Boy's power loss, Lightning Lad's mutilation, the death of Ferro Lad (and to a lesser extent Lightning Lad, though his comeback was hinted at pretty quickly), Star Boy's murder trial, the genocide of the Trommites, inhabited planets exploding (where the major concern was some minor character issue re Mon-El or Supergirl; no one really seemed to lose much sleep over the destroyed planets themselves), etc. But none of that ever felt as dreary as Earth did in v4 pretty much from the moment we first see it till it ignominiously blows up. For me, at least, it's not so much what happened (especially in the case of bad things happening to good people), as how it was played. I know the idea was to show them overcoming adversity, but I saw too much adversity and not enough overcoming.
As for VM, it actually didn't feel like that much of a cliffhanger. It doesn't resolve everything, but it's a reasonable resting place. We know the general direction most of the characters are heading. I'd rather they were heading someplace happier, but that's never really been the way to bet for most of them. I'm mostly just grateful that they're all still alive.
(I also wonder if they had some warning, since that last hour really felt as if it could have been the season 4 arc-- or at least the first ten weeks thereof-- unfolding who was responsible for the video and intertwining it with the Castle plot.)
The 5YL Legion was pretty dark, yeah, but that's one of the things that made it so strong: it's easy to be a beacon of hope in a universe where everything's pretty good already; it's much harder and more meaningful to be a beacon of hope in a universe where everything sucks. And that's just what they were.
I didn't get a lot of hope out of them. Five years later, there were the traitors and the dead and the injured, and the remainder that had watched it all happen and responded to it by retiring to a farm or the equivalent. And they never really did make things substantially better afterwards-- when the series opened, Earth was under occupation. By the time it ended, Earth had been bombarded within a hair of the stone age and then blown to pieces. (Batman's war on crime in Gotham is a stirring, unambiguous victory by comparison, and I think that the progressive darkening of Gotham over the decades has laid a shadow of futility over Batman's status as a hero.) But this is all well-trodden ground by this point. :-)
(I agree that the "Seinfeld" and "Veronica Mars" finales were appropriate for their shows and characters.)
Is it just me, or does every discussion eventually lead back to the TMK Legion?
"Or how about Tony Stark? He's now turned into Dennis Miller."
Tony Stark has abandoned all of his once stated principals in the name of false protection against some imagined bogeyman?
Yeah, guess you're right.
A lot of us are fairly involved LSH fans, but my main point was actually to compare Tony Stark to Dennis Miller.
Thanks for noticing, Scav.
Being Australian, I don't know from Dennis Miller (although I will say this: he was the only thing that made 'Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood' watchable, and that, sadly, even includes Erika Eleniak!) but in regards to the tipping of the dark/light ratio, I will say this; the glory days of Giffen & DeMatteis on Justice League may have its detractors, including Didio the Widowmaker, but that one issue wherein Scott Free died (albeit, and typically, temporarily) and the subsequent funeral chapter hit me harder than just about any other death in comics. Why? The answer is simplicity itself: CONTRAST. The title may have returned to its wacky hijinks PDQ thereafter, but for that moment I understood that superheroes (and readers) could grieve.
Any (and every) death in the current DC Miseryverse and Marvel Gulag barely illicits a defeated shrug. Who notices somebody's bleeding when you're too busy drowning?
Mike: I'd quibble that at least Stark is at least leading whereas Miller just cowers in the shadow of Big Daddy Bush, but yeah...I have my own rants about Dennis Miller.
My problem with the Five Years Later setup wasn't that it was dark, coz I likes me my dark sometimes, but that I couldn't see getting there from the Legion status quo without essentially everybody being callous idiots all the time. Giffen had a stretch there where he seemed to really, really hate superheroics in general, and anything he was involved in the plot side of would require that sort of thing.
Por ejemplo: Earth got taken over by manipulation a couple times in Legion history, by Mordru in Earthwar and then by Universo in the Universo Project. Other planets have had similar problems. You'd think the UP would have a file of Signs Your Chief Executive May Need To Be Punched In The Face By The Heroes, and leverage to insist on things like simple genetic verification that a planetary leader who's suddenly acting strangely is still him/her/it/themself. That wouldn't rule out secret-conquest stories at all - I'm sure foks here can immediately start coming up with ways around it - but it would show a belief that people in the setting think about what's happened to them.
Likewise with the vaults of toxic goo that help destroy the Earth. Way back in "Sojer's Secret War", we saw the LSH helping out with the ongoing effort to clean up dangerous legacies of past eras. For the 5YL setup to work, that has to have stopped incomplete and never, ever come up again as something for Legionnaires and others to do in off times. "Gosh, that could have been a lot worse. Good thing we were on the scene. Let's make sure we're never near the scene again and just leave it all there." seems to be the later approach.
And it went like that. For all Tom and Mary's love for some old characters and storis, they didn't seem to give them the respect of a moment's consideration in plotting up catastrophes.
But back at the post. :)
Mike, that's really nicely put. One of the reasons I stopped reading a lot of supers titles, really, is that sense of petty bullying. I'm a big believer in setting aside what I can't handle well, so that maybe someone else can later. I would like to read about supers doing good in the midst of great challenges, not about the latest sullying of their lives and legacies, and I suspect that the enthusiasm for the downbeat contributed significantly to driving the non-fanboy audience away. It's one thing to feel Schadenfreude about real-life people I think deserve a comeuppance, but brutalizing Grauniad Boy because I thought he got in the way of Captain Loplop's never-consummated love for Footnote Lass is just sad. Schadenfreude only works when there could have been other outcomes, which doesn't apply to fictional people.
I personally liked the 5 Year Gap... for the first year or so. Anything Giffen didn't plot just wandered around in a circle for me. The Bierbaums just never struck me as interesting writers, and Giffen either had major issues with editorial or completely lost the plot. Around issue #10 I'm just getting more and more annoyed. Too many of the later twists seem born of desperation than anything else- Shavauhn is a GUY! Guess who's Back! WRONG! Let's blow up the earth!