Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, [Mark Millar, Stan Lee, Ed Brubaker, David Michelinie, Bob Layton, Roy Thomas, Don Heck, Gene Colan, Steve Epting, John Buscema, Steve Ditko,] Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, Anthony Russo, and Joe Russo, 2016
#82, 2016 Skandies
Superhero comics started as fantasies about fighting crime, righting injustice, and fending off the depradations of foreign dictators, but among the children who snapped these books up by the hundreds of thousands, the discourse of good and evil took a back seat to the discourse of strength and weakness. It’s “my dad can beat up your dad”, not “my dad has superior moral fiber”. And thus (so the story goes) kids would deluge the offices of what would become DC Comics with letters asking, “If Superman fought Batman, who’d win?”, and were wholly dissatisfied with the answer, “Why, Superman and Batman are good friends and share a common crusade against wrongdoing! They would never fight each other!” But Stan Lee believed in giving the people what they want. His superheroes fought each other all the damn time. The Fantastic Four went on adventures in large part to give Reed and Sue a break from watching Ben and Johnny chuck lab equipment and fireballs at each other. Avengers meetings almost invariably devolved into brawls. When two heroes from different books met up, the Marvel formula dictated that a “misunderstanding” lead them to fight for ten pages before finally teaming up to take out that issue’s baddie. For instance, in the first story I ever read featuring Tony Stark as Iron Man, a reprint of Tales of Suspense #58 (1964), he battles Captain America for half the issue, thinking that Cap is the Chameleon, until Giant-Man and the Wasp show up with the real Chameleon in tow. In the plus ça change department, a much more involved dispute between Captain America and Iron Man was Marvel’s big event for 2006: Mark Millar’s “Civil War” series and its dozens upon dozens of tie-in issues, in which the two Avengers each assemble an army and battle it out over the question of whether superheroes should have to operate under governmental sanction. In microcosm, this is what we get here: it’s 6 vs. 6 instead of 100 vs. 100, but the basic idea is the same.
Millar has said that while his story couldn’t help but be influenced by then-semi-current events such as the passage of the Patriot Act, “above all else, this was a beat-’em-up”. Similarly, this movie revolves around its 17-minute airport fight sequence—like, just on the off chance that you don’t get that this is the important bit, the movie’s aspect ratio actually changes during it, effectively signaling that the rest of the movie is preamble and denouement. And, fine—if you’re into chaotic CGI combat with cartoon people flying around and bouncing off things like pachinko balls, this should meet your needs. But for the sake of having something to say other than “biff! bam! pow!”, I guess I’ll talk about that preamble and denouement a bit. In the Civil War series, the precipitating event is that the New Warriors, a group of college-age superheroes whose exploits are featured on a reality show, recklessly take on a group of supervillains in a fight that culminates in an explosion that kills hundreds of people, many of them children. Public outrage is so great that it looks like superheroics may be banned, but Tony Stark channels the anger into an initiative to train superpowered adventurers and have them operate as officially licensed law enforcement agents. Captain America objects to having Washington set his agenda, and the civil war is on. It is a fairly abstract philosophical dispute. In the film, though the question of institutional sanction is still the initial basis of the conflict, it is the Avengers’ own collateral damage rather than that of some random C‑list team that prompts the backlash. And the “war” becomes more personal still when it becomes specifically about whether to apprehend Cap’s old partner Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, for blowing up a U.N. meeting. In this case, Bucky is being framed by Baron Zemo (not actually a baron in the movies, so I guess I should say Regular Guy Zemo), but we do learn that, while brainwashed, Bucky did murder Howard and Maria Stark with his bare hands. So Cap is fighting Iron Man not over a philosophical dispute but because Bucky is his bro, and Iron Man is fighting Cap not over a philosophical dispute but because Cap is protecting Bucky, and yeah, he may have been brainwashed, but “I don’t care. He killed my mom.” And, y’know, it’s a fair point!
For ages, one of the rules of the Marvel Universe has been that you can signal that an idea is supposed to be correct by having Captain America espouse it. Millar’s twist was to have Iron Man actually win the war: Cap has the upper hand in the final fight, but before he can deliver the coup de grâce, he is tackled by a bunch of regular civilians because his position is extremely unpopular. “Other writers chose to go against registration, but I don’t believe for a second people would feel that way in the real world,” Millar explained. “Would you really want these guys to be unlicensed? Vigilantes don’t have superpowers and they’re outlawed. Superheroes would be a nightmare. […] I was backing Tony all the way.” But that’s just not how Marvel works. Despite what Millar may have intended, in the comics Cap was ultimately vindicated, as the institutions meant to provide oversight over superheroes were hijacked by villains, leading to the year-long “Dark Reign” event. The movie stacks the deck further by putting “Captain America” right in the title, and when he wins the fight, there’s no crowd of onlookers to come to Iron Man’s defense. Stark is left spluttering at Cap’s unequivocal win. And we are encouraged to cheer the notion that, when it comes to dealing with a brainwashed mass murderer and a bunch of rogue superpowered vigilantes, we should place our faith not in such public institutions as the justice system, but rather in the unilateral decisions of the the murderer’s war buddy. Just leave it up to the (extremely) old boys’ network!
Before watching the Civil War movie, I had quite a bit of MCU TV to catch up on, so here are some quick thoughts on that stuff…
Agent Carter (season 2)
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely, 2016
Not much to say about this second and final season that I didn’t say about the first one. Once again we see characters from the modern MU booted back into the 1940s—this time around it’s Whitney Frost, though the Agent Carter version shares virtually nothing in common with her comics counterpart (the supervillain Madame Masque). I dunno. It just seems weird to go to the trouble of setting a series in the past, likely alienating a chunk of the potential audience in the process, and then, rather than set down some key foundational pieces of the MCU to come, import characters from the present and tell a random story that could just as easily be set in the present.
Daredevil (season 2)
Stan Lee, Bill Everett, [Frank Miller, Gerry Conway, John Romita Sr.,]
and Drew Goddard, 2016
I had assumed that, having devoted to the first season of Daredevil to Stan Lee’s trio of Matt, Foggy, and Karen, with the Kingpin as the season’s Big Bad, the folks running this show would move on to Frank Miller’s defining story arc with Elektra and Bullseye. And so they did, mostly, just with no Bullseye. Instead, I was surprised to find, the initial antagonist of the season was the Punisher. That is, I was partly surprised that the Punisher was chosen, and partly surprised that he was, at least in the first few episodes, the antagonist.
A common trick in defining a character is to contrast him with a distorted reflection. For instance: the people who wrote comic books in the 1970s tended to be a countercultural lot, and consequently for years Captain America was written as the biggest bleeding heart this side of Tsarevich Alexei. When Mark Gruenwald took over the writing chores on Cap’s book in the mid-’80s, he introduced a new character called the Super-Patriot, a dim-witted, ’roided-up right-winger more in tune with the era of Reagan and Rambo, and used him as a foil for the title character. “Who is this ‘Captain America’ walking around in a flag costume and getting into fights, you ask? Well, he’s not this other guy walking around in a flag costume and getting into fights! Let’s explore how they differ!” The Punisher has a similar story. He started off as a Spider‑Man villain in the mid-’70s. Spider‑Man, famously, was a teenager inspired to fight crime by the murder of his beloved uncle, and took it upon himself to patrol the streets of New York, socking baddies in the jaw and webbing them up for the cops to collect. Readers were meant to be outraged that the local paper would tar Spider‑Man as a menace… but as Mark Millar might point out, in the real world a teenager who takes it upon himself to head into the city and mete out violence to those he has decided are the baddies is not “Spider‑Man” but “Kyle Rittenhouse”. So what if the idea behind Spider‑Man were pushed a couple of steps further? Change “murdered uncle” to “murdered wife and children”, change “teenager” to “combat-savvy Vietnam vet”, and change “socking baddies in the jaw” to “blowing baddies away with high-powered assault weapons”—et voilà, the Punisher! “Who is this ‘Spider‑Man’? Okay, sure, he’s a vigilante… but he’s not that kind of vigilante!” Except it turned out that readers, especially in the high-crime era of Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and Taxi Driver, quite liked that kind of vigilante. In the discourse of strength and weakness, a one-man death squad who gunned down legions of foot soldiers of druglords and mafiosi wasn’t a bad guy—he was a badass. So the Punisher was quickly turned from villain to antihero to star, landing his own limited series, then an ongoing series, then a second series running alongside the first, Punisher War Journal. Early on in the Punisher’s ascent, Frank Miller poached him from the Spider-books for a Daredevil arc. The Punisher made an even better foil for Daredevil than for Spider‑Man, as Daredevil was a darker form of vigilante: trained as a ninja, prone to dishing out brutal beatings, and romantically entangled with the assassin Elektra. His M.O. was very close to that of the Punisher. But Daredevil didn’t kill. The Punisher did. There’s your contrast, and thus your theme.
That is basically the engine behind this season of the Daredevil TV show as well. The Punisher goes on a killing spree, putting him on a collision course with Daredevil, whom the Punisher accuses of taking “half measures”; once the Punisher is apprehended, Elektra shows up to enlist Daredevil’s help in taking down an organization of ninja necromancers known as the Hand, and they continue the debate over the morality of murdering bad guys. But I dunno—this leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because it undersells the damage Daredevil does do. One afternoon back in college I was walking home from campus when I was hit in the crosswalk by a bike that was running a red light. The back of my head hit the asphalt, and I went blind for a couple of hours. And this was a love tap compared to the sort of damage that Daredevil dishes out on a regular basis. He’s constantly bashing people’s heads against walls or clonking them with metal pipes. So, sure, props for not outright murdering people, but do we really just give him a pass for all the brain damage, paralysis, and other lifelong trauma he inflicts every night? I mean, you can say that it’s not real, that it’s the equivalent of people in 1930s cartoons getting clonked in the noggin by rolling pins and coming away with a big lump before turning up fine in the next scene, but even stipulating that—which I don’t think I would—you can’t start from that basis and then say, hey, let’s use this story world as a jumping-off point for a serious examination of violence and vigilantism.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (season 3)
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, [Jim Steranko, Brian Bendis, Mike Friedrich,
Mark Gruenwald,] Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, and Joss Whedon,
2015–2016
Back in 2006, NBC started airing a series that was, at least briefly, a big hit: Heroes, in which a varied assortment of people around the world develop superpowers, but keep their abilities on the down-low rather than adopting codenames and flying around in outlandish costumes. Meanwhile, a shadowy organization, with a middle-aged dad type as its point man, attempts to track these superhumans down. The creators spun out a dizzying array of characters and frantically tried to fill in a vast (and inconsistent) backstory and portents of the future, seemingly in order to match the scope of big-name superhero comic worlds. Basically, they created an off-brand Marvel Universe. Well, here’s the on-brand version, and it feels like an off-brand version of Heroes. This season revolves around the Inhumans, but it’s not about Crystal and Black Bolt and all a’ them—while we do find some concepts from the Inhumans comics are kicking around, like terrigen crystals and Alpha Primitives, the TV Inhumans are just a varied assortment of people around the world who develop superpowers, but keep their abilities on the down-low rather than adopting codenames and flying around in outlandish costumes. Meanwhile, a shadowy organization, with a middle-aged dad type as its point man, attempts to track these superhumans down. It’s not terrible, but Heroes, for all its many faults, was better. (Or at least the first season was.)
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