Needless to say, I'm going to agree completely.

I've never liked the "superheroes are modern mythology" meme. I think they're their own thing, but if I were to liken them [1] to anything it would be fairy tales -- and like fairy tales, examining the world too closely for "realism" is more apt to weaken the telling (or make the whole house of cards fall apart) than it is to generate more entertaining stories.

When you start getting into stuff like Civil War, Damage Control as integrated with the mainstream of the MU, Night Nurse, it starts to feel more like someone's Champions campaign or fanfic and less like superhero action in the Mighty Marvel Manner. [2]

[1] Traditional mainstream Marvel/DC type superhero stories.

[2] Superhero action in the Mighty Marvel Manner isn't dead, but it is on life support. We're looking at a long and painful recovery -- if the patient can pull through and doesn't suffer any additional setbacks.

"I put Night Nurse in the same category as Damage Control and Civil War's central conceit of registering and licensing all the superheroes."

Why? Yes, I could see Damage Control (a comic I haven't read, but its premise sounds fun) but how in Odin's name could you compare her to the year-long spanning monstrosity that is Civil War?? Night Nurse is a cute character idea, used well in the mini, and that was it. One could argue that this series, like Astonishing X-Men, takes place in Marvel-That-Could-Be because of its serious LACK of concern over the stories being told regarding Civil War and now Initiative or whatever the hell it is now.

Doc Strange is supposed to be one of the mindless, character-rending bad guys based on the Illuminati series but here we have him in his native environment, doing magical stuff, and relating to his origin in a way few comics in Marvel are doing. It was, in short, pretty cool stuff.

But Night Nurse is on par with Civil War?? Civil War has essentially wrecked and re-written some major characters in the MU. Has Night Nurse? Civil War has created a narrow vision of superheroic deeds that the MU will have to struggle under until Hulk Pounds Tony into next year when we can get back to heroes acting heroic. Night Nurse is akin to this? A cute one-off character concept used in a neat way for a 5 issue mini that will most likely never see the light of day again? I don't know. I think it is just your hatred of the medical profession or a fear of needles.

Now THAT, my friends, is a Curmudgeon.

*APPLAUSE*

fil, Civil War was an atrociusly bad story, but that's because Millar and Quesada and whoever else wrote the thing have apparently suffered some sort of head injury that renders them incapable of witing a decent story. But if you wanted to do a good story about the heroes splitting into two camps and fighting each other, you could do one. George W. Bush calls out Wakanda for having weapons of mass destrution and orders the Avengers to invade. Sides are drawn up.

But my point wasn't to criticize Civil-War-the-story. My point was to criticize the idea that superheroes have to register with the government and get trained and certified. That's stupid. Has anyone in the history of the universe ever picked up an issue of Spider-Man and thought "Yeah, he's whupping on the Lizard, but where's the beauracracy?" Never. It's a kind of verisimilitude that slows the story down.

Likewise, Night Nurse. Vaughan gave us four or five pages of Arana and Iron Fist sittig in a waiting room discussing co-pays. Why in God's name am I supposed to want to read it? What's next -- an issue of Fantastic Four in which Reed Richards visits his accountant to determine whether he needs to amortize the cost of the equipment he uses to open a portal to the Negative Zone?

Vaughan's mini had Dr. Strange explain that he was still covered under the Defenders' group health insurance policy. Even ER doesn't spend time talking about health insurance coverage, and that's a medical drama.

Er... Damage Control was integrated into the Marvel U since its inception. After the first miniseries there were several offhand references to it in other books, and the second mini was a core title in the Acts of Vengeance crossover.

Where things got dicey is when that Wolverine arc revealed the CEO's culpability in the Stamford incident and no other title picked up on it. Millar didn't even pay attention to the other titles in the series and boy did it show.

Night Nurse isn't a concept I'm pleased with either, since it seems so smirkingly clever.

If I may make the observation: One of the core problems, as I see it, is that the superhero genre - like science fiction, fantasy and to a lesser extent horror genres - is actually composed of a montage of sub genres which overlap with each other and out into other genres. And this has certain consequences for the likes of fictional settings like the DC or Marvel universes which have the characteristics of being long lasting multiple writer shared title universes. Over time those settings are going to accumulate a lot of different ideas and takes on ideas - particularly as the writers/publishers experiment with new ideas in an attempt to find the Next Big Thing or even just stave of moribundity. If you're going to have a shared writer universe, then the universe has to be 'big enough' to accommodate all of it - not just take all the details of fictionalised HISTORY, but also the different styles of STORY. A chaotic sprawl can do that, since it can accommodate small pockets of order within itself. I don't think a rigidly ordered structure could do the same, or at least nowhere near as well.

So I don't think that any one particular approach to storytelling is the problem. I may not be particularly fond of, for example, grim'n'gritty morally ambiguous urban vigilantes, but I'm not going to call for that type of story to be barred. I'm just not going to bother purchasing an examples of it unless it's written really well. Yes, the maxim 'there are no bad characters, just bad writers' applies to story styles as well. I think the problem may be in using one particular approach to storytelling to the exclusion of all others, and worse yet mandating that it can be the only approach. In that regard I think I agree with Jason's basic premise, to a degree.

To wit: the Marvel and DC universes both posit settings that use the real world as a template and then add in bits of superhuman weirdness. (I am still divided about whether this is done deliberately so as not to alienate potential new buyers, or whether it's because with so much back story the writers cannot be trusted to keep the accumulated fictional history straight. Let's go for the average and assume it's a bit of both.) I personally would argue that a good dividing line between what parts of the shared universe to occasionally selectively ignore and what parts not to would be whether the part in question is a superhero genre element. By all means, get totally anal-retentive about the various bits of superhero history if you want, and weave them together into a larger whole. This is how we got things like the Kree-Skrull War, for example: taking disparate bits of comic book lore and bringing them into contact with each other. But I don't think the mundane aspects of the real world should be allowed to overwhelm the superhero elements. Encroach on them, sure, but not overwhelm them. I am reminded of something I stumbled across again recently while going through the entries on the TV Tropes Wiki: "One of the original (and still the most useful) definitions of the difference was that Science Fiction is about the social consequences of improbable events or technologies, whereas Fantasy is just about telling a good story." I think for the purposes of our shared writing superhero universes we want a type of fantasy setting, where there a lots (but by no means exhaustive) consequences springing from the use of superhero elements but very little springing from real world elements. To use Jason's example, I don't particularly mind the use of Night Nurse and mentions of the Defenders health fund. As long as they are throwaway examples of realism then they're within my willing suspension of disbelief. I do, however, worry about something purportedly based in realism like Civil War being used as a unifying concept that excludes superheroic concepts by its execution.

Dan, you're 100% right in your first paragraph, and yet ...

I don't know. It just seems there's something qualitatively different between making offhand references to a humor book set in the Marvel Universe, on the one hand, and taking the premise of the humor book seriously.

On the other hand, the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League never bothered me, so who knows.

Perhaps I'm really getting ticked off about a completely separate issue: the way Marvel has integrated Damage Control into the Marvel Universe, as you mention in your second paragraph. It's not enough to tarnish the superheroes; now we have to tarnish the humor characters too.

This article seems to end before Jason actually makes his argument. What on Earth is wrong with showing how a superhero universe "works"? As long as it's clever, funny, and/or entertaining, why would you take issue with something that helps add another level to the Marvel U.? For God's sake, people used to obsess over how many pounds each hero could lift (press), and there was a period where every freaking character in the Marvel Universe turned out to be related to each other somehow. That kind of stuff was far drier and more obsessive than this.

Vaughn's series isn't actually about superheroes filling out HMO forms, right? It's just a single scene in a larger story (which I haven't read myself), yes? So again I ask, what's the big deal?

I don't make an argument, Prankster, because I'm not sure I have one. As Mike points out, it's more of a curmudgeonly rant.

My point, though -- and here I will make it into an argument -- is that as you burden the Marvel Universe down with more and more mundane details about how healthcare works or how the government regulates superheroes, the less I want to read the books. At least when they gave us diagrams of how Dr. Octopus's tentacles work and tables comparing the Thing's strength to the Hulk's, they kept it out of the books and in the Handbook.

Besides, it's not as if having real-type characters to fill in the gaps is a new thing. Nobody really complains about Paul Gambi.

(of course, I'm awaiting the... "until now".)

I was just about to compare Night Nurse to Paul Gambi. Well played, Terence.

Tone is the problem for me.

I loved the Damage Control mini-series-es because they were funny (at least the first two were; haven't read the third). They take up something that could be crushingly miserable if done seriously and instead, rightly, make it a source of delight and fun. "One of my workers had a origin story." And the scene where Doom encourages the intern asking for photo ID with his check because "Procedures must be followed!" Well, I'll skip the recitation of favorite moments and say that it made me laugh, and yet it felt suitably heroic - very much laughing with its situations rather than at its characters, or at superheroes.

Damage Control as scheming villains doesn't work for me because one of the key things in their earlier appearances is that they're very kind people, albeit sometimes under gruff exteriors. It's the difference between UNESCO and SHIELD.

I never read Night Nurse's original appearances, so I can't talk about that, but I will say that I very much liked the tone of that waiting room scene in Doctor Strange: The Oath #1. It reminded me of the scene in the first Superman movie where he's running along looking for a phone booth and pauses in front of the modern waist-up stands, shakes his head, and runs on. I felt like it took the question "Who's gonna pay for this?" about as seriously as supers comics generally take the question "Where am I gonna stash my civvies?", and rightly so. It made me laugh, and eased into the main story with me smiling as I went.

Insofar as I think the scene had (or needed) a point, it wasn't about payment methods, but about the contrast between Iron Fist as the experienced hero who's calm and collected because he's been through it and knows how it goes and Arana as the up-and-comer who has great ambitions but great fears too, eager to make a good impression, struggling between bravado and honesty. Part of the difference is Danny's attitude of not worrying about it - he's got his particular solution because of the Rand family fortune, but I took him to be telling Arana that it does work out, one way or another, and she'll be able to relax about it. That then sets up for the drama of the next scene, with Wong wondering if this time Strange is up against something that truly won't work out.

I don't mind odd bits and characters that exist to develop or explain "realism" in a comic book. These questions come up from time to time in a fan's mind, and I think something good can come out of it.

However, it should always be as window dressing or as a subplot. "Explaining continuity" or "fitting things together" may make for a good encyclopdiea entry, but rarely make for an entertaining story in its own right. And entertainment is the prime goal of a comic.

In other words, I'd rather have Henry Peter Gyrich show up to indicate that the government is dealing with superheroes - and giving the Avengers or whoever a subplot dealing with a jerk - than an extended miniseries of Gyrich and politicians enacting laws. Good writers are able to deal with this elegantly. A comment or brief subplot can work far better than long explanations.

The only problem I have with Night Nurse is that once again we are retroactively inserting events. It would be far more entertaining to read a new story that introduces this element. It would develop a supporting character for Daredevil, let's say. Then it would slowly leak into other books and eventually become a cherished Marvel institution. Instead, readers are cheated of this - as well as denied the opportunity of vetoing a development if they don't like it. If this is a subplot, readers can announce opposition to it, and the writers can drop it before any big storylines arise from it. If it works, then it grows organically and wins over the audience. Simply inserting something into the past and saying "It happened" is arrogance and laziness on the part of the writer.

Ultimately, retroactive continuity is simply a bad narrative device.

In slight defense of Marvel. the villain in Damage Control turned out to be an all-new character and not Anne-Marie Hoag, Robin, or any of the other characters in the original minis had anything to do with it. He was a guy who came in to run the company when they were bought out by Roxxon.

What bugs me is that Wolverine jammed his claw through the guy's head in the middle of midtown Manhattan, and told Miriam Sharpe the whole story, and... NO OTHER BOOK HAS MENTIONED THIS. The Knaufs have Sharpe as a bloodthirsty anti-cape lobbyist and she never says, "and by the way, corporate oversight..."

Of course, this may be a commentary about the lack of corporate oversight in the Iraq occupation, which is the real reason the country is so out of control. Millar and Jenkins are smug enough to consider that. But it's too much plot hammering.

Robert Kirkman, who's geeky mcgeeksalot, is recasting Damage Control as not only a cleanup, but rescue crew in Irredeemable Ant-Man, and Hoag is back at the top spot in the company.

Wow, I agree with that so much I can't stand it, Chris, and I can't believe it's been staring me in the face so long without me seeing it. The penny drops: our current Marvel regime is obsessed with retconning details and plots that in previous years would have been introduced as new features and built up in the MU over time, because for some reason they think that's cool. But, if a story is based largely on revealing never-before-seen details that have "always" been there, then there's fewer things left to actually happen in the story, aren't there? Not to mention that suddenly you have all these retconned details that don't mesh well with everything else around them, because they don't get worked through by different writers, they just get dropped like a huge boulder in the middle of the road.

Personally, though I love The Oath and agree with what Bruce said about using the waiting room to some real storytelling purpose (by the way, the Superman/phone booth thing was lifted from Superman Vs. Spider-Man, if my memory serves), as far as "realism" goes I don't buy the Defenders ever having had a kind of group insurance plan anyway, you know? First of all, if the Defenders are anything they're a "non-team", and secondly why would they need group coverage at all? Kyle and Doc are both rich, Namor's the King of Atlantis for heaven's sake, Val's a legal non-person, the Hulk...I mean, come on, the Hulk can't need medical insurance, can he? I'm totally willing to tolerate Night Nurse's medical practice for the sake of the story, but that's what it boils down to: I'm tolerating it. And if I sit down and think about my idea of "realism" in Marvel comics, I'm thinking that if somebody truly needs medical attention in a hurry, they just go to the emergency ward of their local hospital. After all, that's what they've done before in the comics, time and time again.

It could've worked if it'd been built up slowly. I can see how Matt Murdock might not have wanted to have his secret identity discovered by his insurance company -- why's a blind lawyer getting all these shoulder injuries, hmm...

And of course, McDuffie has had Damage Control show up in his FF run, natch.

"han an extended miniseries of Gyrich and politicians enacting laws"

If Priest wrote it, I'd be there!

I'm not sure how much you can blame* Bendis for the curent incarnation of Night Nurse, since Gail Simone was supposed to write a mini featuring her. I'm not sure, but its possible Bendis was just previewing the new take.

*Though I'm not sure why you would want to. IMO, Night Nurse is no different than Leslie Tompkins's role in the Bat-books inbetween her debut and her being recast as a murderer, but better considering it's not reusing a pre-existing character and she's not lmited to just helping one character and his extended family.

I'm frankly bewildered at the idea that it should matter whether a bit of background was built up over time or not. It strikes me as an entirely inappropriate concern with method, as though I were to insist that I could enjoy a story only if it were written with open-source software, so that I shouldn't enjoy anything by Harry Turtledove (who does his first drafts in longhand). If it leads to a smooth and enjoyable story in the present moment, why on earth would I want to get upset over the period of time it took to set up?

Bruce: Apparently you wouldn't. But -- and I don't want to shatter any deeply held belief systems here -- not all people share your sensibility. It's called "willing suspension of disbelief." I don't think it's that big a deal either, but they've only so many pages, so what should they use them on, Doctor Stephen Strange xplaining how he gets health care, or maybe a fight with Baron Mordo?

Wow, the Bruce of Earth-2 is posting! I'm up for a fight before we team up, but can I get my OJ first? :)

Seriously, I do appreciate that taste is what taste is, and know that I have some blind spots of my own equally unamenable to poking at.

IIRC, Simone's Night Nurse series was going to lean towards more comedy-horror than superheroics, wasn't it?