Review: Frank Miller's Holy Terror graphic novel (Legendary Comics)

[Guest reviewer Zach King blogs about movies as The Cinema King]

It's been said that Frank Miller has lost his touch. To be sure, The Dark Knight Strikes Again is nowhere near the one-two punch of The Dark Knight Returns or Year One (although I contend that All-Star Batman and Robin is more readable than its detractors give it credit). While his early work has been all but canonized, Miller's post-9/11 work has been criticized, often in tandem with his polarizing political perspective.

All Miller's extreme conservatism, all his political anger, all his willingness to sacrifice aesthetics for the sake of his message -- all of that gets distilled into Frank Miller's Holy Terror, an oversized OGN with the physical dimensions of 300 and the political subtlety of ... well, Frank Miller.

While in hot pursuit of slinky cat burglar Natalie Stack, Empire City's great defender -- The Fixer -- is caught off-guard by a series of coordinated suicide bombings. The Fixer knows intuitively that it's the work of Al-Qaeda, led by a chainmailed successor of bin Laden. Unable to trust the cops of Empire City -- even "tough cop" Dan Donegal -- The Fixer drafts Natalie Stack into the war for some good old-fashioned "postmodern diplomacy."

Originally conceived as a Batman vehicle, Holy Terror never lets you forget that fact. The Fixer, Natalie Stack, and Dan Donegal are straight out of Gotham City (with a healthy dose of Sin City, especially the scene in which The Fixer seems to visit Old Town). But despite Miller's attempts to distance himself from his original version of the story -- the cleverest being when Natalie Stack inquires about The Fixer's origins by asking, "Murdered parents? An exploded planet?" -- it's nigh impossible to read this story without seeing Batman, Catwoman, and Jim Gordon.

That said, there are a number of reasons why Holy Terror could never work as a Batman story -- even one written by Frank Miller. The rooftop-chase-turned-sex-scene between The Fixer and Natalie Stack isn't a far cry from Miller's All-Star Batman, but The Fixer's casual use of lethal force is. As a Batman exaggeration, The Fixer is perhaps more appealing; strip away the mantle of the Bat, and you have a less than compelling character. Ostensibly Miller's heroic avatar, The Fixer is "ready for killing," and the only thing he seems to fear is falling in love with his sultry sidekick.

With The Fixer as a stand-in figure for Miller himself, the message is entirely clear -- the United States faces a monstrous opponent and must repay blood with blood. He's not far off the mark, politically speaking, but his approach is more than a touch reductive. Miller's indictment of contemporary figures (i.e., Obama, Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton) is less convincing, since it's done haphazardly and scattershot. Miller's finger of blame is rightly pointed at the extremist terrorists, who are seen to manipulate malleable minds with promises of paradise, but the attempts to accuse American figures of guilt by silent complicity is less successful.

The most fruitful work Miller does, however, is to humanize the conflict by bookending scenes of violence with small panels which provide close-ups on the faces of the victims. Miller's artwork, recalling the loose sketchy quality of Sin City, captures perfectly the innocence of the doomed and the raging madness of their killers. Elsewhere, Miller's art proves to be Holy Terror's greatest strength, taking advantage of the book's widescreen dimensions to capture the dynamism of the rooftop chases and to thrill the reader with cinematic action sequences.

For as large as the Holy Terror is, though, it's an incredibly quick read, in part because there's nothing particularly innovative about the story. The splash pages are lavish, but the plot can be telegraphed from the bookshelf. We know how this is going to turn out from page one, and it's diverting enough -- but not terribly substantive. The final pages fall flat, failing to deliver any kind of conclusion to the story. With a stronger ending, Holy Terror might have transcended accusations of shallow war-mongering, but as it stands the book concludes as an empty popcorn action film -- granted, entertaining in the brief time it'll take to read, but ultimately empty nonetheless.

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What Did Iron Man Forget & Mr Fantastic Too?: Extreme Dispositional Changes In The Characters Of Superheroes:- Part 3 of 3

continued and most certainly concluded from last Monday;

1.

Hal Jordan. The Scarlet Witch. Magenta. Daredevil. Arsenal. Bloodstone. Quicksilver. The Sentry. Henry Pym. Mento.

Mento? Mento?

Well, considering how everything turned out there, that's a sensitive and supportive code name, isn't it?

2.

There's a fine line between making a mainstream superhero tragically interesting and both depressingly dull and off-putting, and it really isn't quantum mechanics working out where that line should be drawn, if uncontentious commercial success is the motivation: the fun to be gained by a reader through imagining themselves as that superhero shouldn't be outweighed by the unease and unhappiness inspired by any such act of wishful association. And, quite obviously, any hint of a serious and recurrent mental disability in the personality of a super-person is going to run the risk of acting as a deterrent to the daydreamer considering engaging with their adventures in a traditional superhero narrative. Where Henry Pym is concerned, for example, the cost-benefit analysis here is always going to count against him unless the stories he's placed in and the way his character is defined are completely changed. After all, take any of his costumed identities and he inevitably comes over as under-engaging even before his psychological problems are considered. Imagining being Giant-Man, for example is to


summon up an experience which would undoubtedly thrill the first time, but after that the excitement fades. Giant-Man grows tall. That's what he does. And when he does it, he's hemmed in by buildings, curtailed by wires, bent double to see whoever he's fighting, and unable to move around for the certainty of destroying everything beneath his feet including his fellow citizens. And it's somewhat the same process with engaging with Ant-Man, except that there the extra complications of being unable to walk across a floor without a pack of little sandwiches, two pints of water and a free afternoon come into play. (And that's not even considering the exciting privilege of being able to ride on flying ants.) And Yellowjacket? Well, Yellowjacket's just a second-rank Spider-Man, with none of the charm and some exceptionally daft elongated shoulder pads that are sometimes supposed to function as wings.

And Henry Pym as the Wasp? Oh, dear.

And then, if we might transfer our attention to the debit column of our role-fantasising, well, Pym's a frequently-disturbed ex-schizophrenic, subject to pretty much every serious psychological problem from despair to wife-beating-inspiring stress disorders. He can stand as tall, tall, tall as a skyscraper, but he can't keep from breaking down, and even when he's apparently sane, he's self-regarding and shiny-silver-robot-snogging odd.

If ever the odds were against a superhero earning marquee-headlining status, that superhero was whichever one Henry Pym was trying to be at the time.


II. It's not simply that it'd be a depressing and alienating business imagining ourselves being Henry Pym as he's been portrayed. It's also the awareness on the reader's part that Pym's possession of super-powers is inevitably tied up with the social stigma of being the distrusted and disturbed superhero, the one who's commonly despised as an unheroic whiner, in addition to being labelled as one of those mad, bad and dangerous to know people.

The character's broken where anything other than conflict-inspiring second-string roles are concerned. Or at least it is as long as it's a standard-issue superhero the reader is looking for.

Though if a publisher was looking to show respect to the psychological problems faced by so many hundreds of millions of people world-wide, then perhaps a superhero who wasn't so "standard-issue", who was shown in a sympathetic and accurate light facing problems which others might define as "odd" and "off-putting", would be a very good idea indeed.

And a really interesting one too.


III. There are, as we've discussed, mentally disordered superheroes who've been designed by purpose or chance to display mental disorders which enhance rather than diminish their appeal. Wolverine, for example, may be psychotic, but in his case that seems to mean that he's as disciplined and moral as any sane individual except for the fact that he gets to slice up his enemies whenever his writers want him to while - and this is the key point - feeling noble when he does so and noble when he chooses not to! How wonderful a trick that is, to have an uncontrollable killer who isn't uncontrollable, to possess as a property a superhero who's admirable enough for kiddie's comics and yet so tortured that he can blood'n'guts his way across the Marvel Universe whenever it seems thrilling and angsty.

But other characters who aren't possessed of such a fortunate madness are tipping over that fine line mentioned above, and this is almost unavoidable, for reasons we've discussed before. For if the label of a serious mental disorder has been stuck to them in the past, it will quite likely continue to afflict how they're presented today. Daredevil, for example, is currently so "driven" that he appears to have quite lost his sense of what's moral under the rule of law and what's very much not, which for a superhero really does involve straying beyond an extreme of acceptable behaviour. Inevitably, since Matt Murdock has already spent decades collapsing into the kind of depression and mania which inspires the digging up of the corpses of dead ex-girlfriends, his past is now totally interpreted in the light of mental insecurity and disorder and his adventures are now utterly directed by the omnipresence in each writer's mind of this. And there's no escape for Matt Murdock as a character now. The fresh start of a sane life that Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli lent him a quarter of a century ago is now so much of an anomaly that it reads like a "What-If" story. For almost immediately after Mr Miller had written Murdock into a happy state and a stable role protecting Hell's Kitchen, Daredevil was back wandering the borderlands between being a functioning superhero and a candidate for care outside the community. And the approach to Daredevil since then has nearly always been to focus on the version of a broken Matt Murdock which appeared at the beginning of "Born Again" rather than the healed and redeemed man at the book's end


And so Daredevil's behaviour has got worse and worse, as has his state of mind, and the process shows no signs of slowing, let alone reversing. And the cost/benefit wish-fulfillment analysis, or CBWF because the very idea of an acronym for that makes me laugh out loud, is beginning to get difficult to maintain. It's getting harder to care for Daredevil, let alone want to be imagining experiencing his life on the level of wish-fulfillment. (Whose dreams are that grubby and conditional?) Daredevil's super-senses, his acrobatic skills, his bed-every-beautiful-woman super-power, and his street-level thug-beating appeal remains, to a degree. But there's that awful and despairing madness to take into account.

3.

I. But don't worry. The superhero with a serious mental disorder nearly always ends her or his trials in redemption. True, that redemption is usually followed by more periods of greater disorder, and more trials, and then yet more redemption, and eventually all that will remain is the fact that screwing up will be their defining characteristic, but the big fights to save their souls through, er, big fights will reoccur like Stargate re-runs on Sky-UK TV. For the fact is that these psychologically-wounded superheroes are usually permitted to temporarily get better for long enough to punch out a super-villain or two, and thereby prove that they're not so disordered any more.

Until they become disordered again. And so on.


II. There are two well-worn paths to superhero redemption for those whose mental problems have that trace of a real-world and challenging disorder which would make the thought of possessing it disturbing to the reader of superheroes.

The first is the straight-forward and traditional way of how the "disturbed" super-person can prove that they're fine, and, indeed, as good as any other benevolent super-person, and that's by pulling on the costume once more, charging up the Kirby Krackles and thrashing around a fearsome super-villain that nobody else can defeat. What, after all, could signify super-heroic virtue - as well as sanity - better than dressing up in spandex and knocking seven bells out of another person, who's also wearing a costume, but who's bad and in need of punching too?

The second method to the redemption of the mentally disordered superhero is to never have been mentally disordered at all. This is a more difficult narrative strategy to pull off, because lots of readers will probably have noticed how one of their superheroes had been shown going mad. Even more so, that character will almost certainly have been shown doing some very bad things indeed of just checking into a clinic for some treatment and support. (*1) It's hard for a readership that's invested a fair degree of fan-angst in watching a character change so catastrophically from sane to insane, from world-saving hero into crazy dangerous mad-person, to suddenly accept that the mental disorder had never been there in the first place. After all, it was tough enough watching Hal Jordan psychologically implode literally between the pages of a single comic book, from a venerated and experienced space-cop into a mass murderer of epic proportions. But then to be told that he was never mad in the first place because something else had made him do it does threaten to make a mockery of all the original upset. Still, a remarkably focused and determined narrative operation to remove the taint of comic-book madness from a superhero can be pulled off, as Geoff Johns did with his favourite Green lantern. And if scrubbing out that stain is tough work, its removal does return the character concerned to something other than the madness/redemption/madness/redemption cycle.


And anyway, many readers were so pleased to see Hal Jordan returned from his unconvincing dispositional change from sane to insane that they went happily along for the ride, even accepting that it was the Parallax monster who'd done all those terrible things while in control of Hal's mind and body rather than Mr Jordan himself. Still, even though he'd apparently never been mentally disordered in the first place, it was still obligatory for Hal to go through the first path to redemption too, proving that he'd not been weak to surrender to the alien madness-causing thing, and showing that, yes, he could be trusted to fight alien warlords and not wipe out great numbers of his colleagues again.

Which of course he'd never technically done in the first place.

It's not enough to be free of the label of mental disorder, for even other super-characters who really should know better seem to believe those pernicious labels have justifiably stuck. No, in order to prove a superheroes sanity and virtue, folks have got to get punched too.

*1 - Of course, the vast majority of the mentally disordered pose no danger to anybody, except on occasion in some conditions to themselves. But this again is not a commonly grasped fact, especially in the superhero narrative, where psychological problems tend to indicate a failure of the part of a superhero in fulfilling their duty, or a compulsion to become a super-villain.


III: Hasn't this struck more of the creators and consumers of superhero books as being a rather insulting and medieval attitude to mental illness? That the victim and survivor of terrible circumstances quite beyond their control should have to prove themselves either through public displays of violence, or a professional absolution from the taint of mental disorder?

Is what used to be known as "mental illness" so unacceptable and so shameful still that the only choice for the afflicted superhero is to be better than everyone else or proven never to have been vulnerable to "real" disorder at all?

After all, even Superman suffered his psychological crisis in the Nineties, after feeling compelled to execute some alternate-universe Kryptonians, and he was returned to mental health, even though it seems the process of that was less than thrilling to some readers. Why is such an option so often ignored today when the big red "S" has undergone it and not lost his lustre?


IV: Of course, the superhero narrative functions symbolically. We know this. But the stories of the MU and the DCU still manage to quite appropriately show their respects to serious physical illnesses which are so challenging and dangerous to those that suffer them. Cancer, Leukaemia, AIDS, and a host of other blameless and appalling diseases are never represented as being conditions which must be overcome with a cape, an energy blast, and perhaps the revelation that that cancer had never been there all along.

And those who survive these physical conditions are never thought to be blameworthy for the condition which has afflicted them so awfully. Yet Henry Pym is still haunted as a character by the stigma of having lashed out and fiercely swatted away his wife while undergoing a complete "mental collapse". And while the act of a man beating a woman is patently abhorrent, a man who commits a single if appalling act of violence while psychologically disintegrating seems to me to be an ill person rather an evil one.

Or is it always and utterly the act and not the actor that we judge when determining guilt?


VI: For if Henry Pym is simply a weak man, or even an unpleasantly self-involved one, and thereby nothing but a"wife-beater", then we're back in the middle ages, where the sufferer was responsible for their own suffering, where victims were all considered sinners and where the psychologically self-brutalised were thought of as immoral brutes. Or is it that Dr Pym is an embodiment of a more modern form of prejudicial "diagnosis", the man who became mentally disordered because he was too weak, because he didn't try hard enough to stay sane, the man who was neither good enough nor strong enough to resist madness?

Which is pretty much all the same thing, actually. Both Medieval sin and modern weakness have an equal validity when evaluating mental disorder, which is to say, none at all. They're both absolutely appalling approaches to the question of representing mental disorder in the 21st century.

VII. The truth is that repeatedly representing mental disorder in such a light is no more helpful, or moral, or believable, than taking a character who's just survived chemotherapy and insisting that she smokes three packs a day in order to prove her bravery.

Which would be worse than insane where the character is concerned, for it would be cruel to the people reading the comic too, and especially to all of those who are survivors of the disease itself.

4.

I: Henry Pym, as we've discussed, has never been convincingly diagnosed, for the simple reason that his various disorders have been so broadly and inaccurately drawn that a diagnosis that covers all his symptoms would be so broad as to be meaningless. (Well, he's "Aspergic-manic-depressive-stress-traumatised-chemically-imbalanced-multiple-personalitied-and-really-not-well-ish", isn't he?) But those stories of his disintegrations have included a great many explicitly represented symptoms;

• Roy Thomas gave Hank "king-sized schizophrenia" caused at least in substantial part through an accidentally gas-based drug overdose.
• Jim Shooter described a "mental collapse" and what appeared to be a pronounced stress disorder founded in part on an excessive inferiority complex
• Steve Engelhart portrayed Hank as suffering a major depressive disorder, with the character doing more than merely flirt with the idea of suicide
• Kurt Busiek had Hank suffering stress, depression and a strange and unique comic-book take on dissociative identity disorder too.
  

And yet after every "incident", Dr Pym has eventually returned to duty as a superhero, despite the fact that all of his breakdowns have occurred at least in significant part as a result of the stresses and strains of performing as, yes, you''re there already, a superhero. It's not that it's Hank Pym's weakness, weirdness or wife-beating sinfulness that's caused him to be so ill-fated. It's being a superhero that's undoubtedly caused it, and yet being a superhero is the only way that the writers and editors who've been responsible for him could imagine representing his triumph over adversity, could envisage portraying his redemption.

Being a superhero helps break him, but being a superhero is the only thing that anyone can lastingly think to do with him either.


II. Being a superhero isn't good for Hank Pym. (*2) Any competent counsellor, let alone psychiatrist, would've immediately identified this fact and advised him to right-this-moment hang up his spandex and his growth pills and his shiny booties. The stressors of functioning in the challenging and unregulated environment of super-heroing has laid low our boy every time. It places responsibilities and expectations upon Pym that he feels he can't fulfil unless he works himself into the ground. It provides excessive stressors which his psychology could probably bear in a typical environment, but which, through no choice or fault of his own, he struggles to cope with when fighting Kang or preparing for the possibility of one day doing so. Being out with the Avengers or the Defenders or whoever places him into situations which he's not capable of controlling or bearing, and produces challenges which his character isn't adapted to cope with.

Well, I think that would describe just about each and every one of us too. I suspect that Pym's mental state is one that we'd share if we were in the cape'n'costume brigade after the fourth multi-dimensional crisis of the month. (There's an irony in the fact that Pym's response to being superheroic is much closer to what a "real" persons would be than is often considered.)

Still, he's a brilliant scientist, a caring colleague, and a brave man. Indeed, I'd go as far as to say that he's braver than most of his super-powered colleagues, because the whole business of trying to be a superhero in a superhero world has defeated him time and time again, but he keeps trying, and he really ought to be allowed to stop.

*2 - Steve Engelhart seemed to grasp this in West-Coast Avengers, and then had Pym become a superhero again, though without a costume, as if the absence of the spandex would make the stressors disappear. Before him, Roger Stern had understood the issues completely and presented a Henry Pym abandoning his superhero role despite Captain America's desire for him to continue, saying: "Trying to play super hero was the biggest mistake I ever made with my life!"

5.

I. I've a great deal of time for Dan Slott where his work on Hank Pym is concerned. (In fact, I've a great respect for Mr Slott's work in general.) He's fond of Dr Pym and he's worked hard to find him a role of some importance as a superhero in the Marvel Universe. But a second glance at the first few issues of Mr Slott's run on "Mighty Avengers" show that the standard-model "redeem-the-mentally-disordered-superhero-through-super-hero-ing" narrative is still being used, despite the best intentions of Mr Slott to treat Pym with some greater measure of kindness.

II. When the reader first encounters Dr Pym in "Mighty Avengers", he's locked himself away in a spectacular and secret laboratory, and he's not pleased to see the super-people who've come to ask for his help. In fact, he's plain unwelcoming. And if those facts on their own aren't a sign that Pym's back into a bad place, he's created yet another superhero identity, which is often a foreboding sign with the unstable Doctor, and he's named his new new alter-ego after his dead ex-wife too.

And then there's a quite untypical display of self-regarding mania from Pym, as a result of displaying all the above concerns, should have anybody who understands anything about mental health thinking about the welfare of their obviously-sick colleague;

"I'm in the middle of some extremely important work. It could change the very nature of a universe. Not our universe, mind you, but that's still very impressive."


Now, the Bendis-era has had Dr Pym portrayed as a selfish, self-regarding beater of women, but this is way beyond even that derogatory reading of the character. This has taken a self-involved man and puffed him up with an astonishing measure of self-importance and even, yep, mania. (The arrogance on the character's face as he says all of the above is quite chilling.) And taken along with Pym's unpleasantness, his desire to be isolated from human beings, his adoption of a new identity, his association of his own superhero guise with that of his dead wife's, shouldn't someone have cared a little more?

Look, Avengers-folks; Pym's telling everyone how brilliant he is and he's thoroughly unpleasant while doing so, and he's living in a secret home he's designed to allow him to hide away in from the world. He's sharing his safe hidden hidey-hole with a female robot who carries his dead ex-wife's "brain patterns", and he's taken Janet Van Dyne's code-name and her powers for his own. Isn't he rather obviously in need of help so that he doesn't seriously relapse into whatever of his previous problems, or combination of them, is threatening here?

For since continuity is held to be so important, and since this continuity and a respect for extreme and inconsistent dispositional change has frozen Pym into this role of the mentally dysfunctional hero, shouldn't respect for continuity also mean that care for the mentally disordered, whether or not they're recovered or they're relapsing, should be a prominent concern in the text?


III. His fellow Avengers ought never to have even considered pressurising a disturbed Hank Pym to lead them into an end-of-the-world brawl without having made some provision for medical support. (In fact, regardless of his apparent state of mind, they ought to have left him alone or provided care for him, giving his propensity for relapsing under pressure.) The very fact of his obvious mental difficulties combined with his psychological history should have had at least Jarvis realising that help was going to be needed, if it wasn't already. And if nobody but Pym could go once more into the breach, dear friends, then some psychological professionals should have gone with him. That needn't have undermined his heroism. Quite the opposite, actually, because it could have very effectively illustrated how brave, and indeed important, Pym is. The only way to establish heroism isn't to show the gritting the of the teeth, the girding of the loins and the wearing of the cowl. And Doc Sansom and Night Nurse assisting Henry, laying into Hercules and USAgent for their ignorance, and Stark for his cruelty, would have made for a fascinating dynamic in the book.

It's not that folks don't inevitably fail to recover from psychological incapacity, absolutely not. And it's not that Pym needs his hand held in all situations at all times. But it is that he shouldn't be going into the very environments and performing the very roles which have most exacerbated his problems in the past, and especially not when he's showing signs of distress. That's a bad message to send out to the readers of comic books, that those with mental disorders need to prove themselves by being someone else rather than themselves, that they need to be fulfilling dysfuctional expectations rather than learning how to be what they are and how to contribute in the light of that.

Dr Pym is a brilliant back-room boy, and the backroom gals and guys are often, it should be remembered, the women and men who turn the course of wars. There would be nothing shameful in Pym serving the cause in a way that allowed him to escape triggering the stress-fractures of his mind.


IV: Dan Slott's tale of Pym's partial redemption follows the typical pattern which is outlined above. The odds are against him, the danger is extreme, but the disordered man proves himself to be a superhero simply by acting as a superhero does.

But there are moments in the story which, while quite appropriate in an ordinary superhero tale, strike a very ugly note indeed in the context of Pym's history, and which make many of the Avengers seem quite repellent. For example, we might expect Hercules to be insensitive and unhelpful, so it's possible to understand him declaring to Pym that "You're a founding Avenger. Now act like one!", though surely somebody else there might have noticed that Henry needed support and encouragement rather than contempt and hectoring. And perhaps Hercules's decision to abandon Pym and, with the notoriously hard-hearted USAgent, follow Iron Man's lead, can be seen as a reflection on those character's personalities rather that Hank's. But the fact of how Tony Stark responds to Pym illustrates how this tale is actually one about the Avenger's stupidity and cruelty, about their ignorance of and disinterest in the mental health of their colleague. For Stark is a man who's twice succumbed to alcoholism, and the second time he did so, it happened despite him being in full position of all the information about how that illness operates. Iron Man knows what a psychological disorder is and he


knows how it can take and profoundly damage a person despite their very best efforts. He knows that individuals who suffer such disorder aren't to be blamed or held Medievally culpable for their actions. He's been at the bottom himself, he's hurt people, and, let's be honest, there was nothing but luck between the alcoholic Tony and mass murder, given his habit of driving drunk while in possession of a super-powered armoured suit.

Tony Stark's been there. He ought to know, and care.

But he doesn't. "I'm sorry, Yellowjacket, but we don't have time to deal with all of your baggage." he declares with the maximum measure of dismissive disdain when Pym attempts to help him. And later, when Henry Pym really has saved the day, Stark's response is repellent: "Don't screw up!"

That's all he says as he flies away. "Don't Screw up!". Not "Well done." or "I'll help whenever I can." or even "Thank you for saving the entire world."

If the function of Tony Stark's alcoholism, as we discussed before, is to humanise the character, the effect of Mr Slott's script is to establish him despite all that as a utterly despicable arse.


V: And for heaven's sake, let's not discuss Reed Richards and his spectacularly ignorant and cruel way of treating Pym later in the pages of "Mighty Avengers". These are brightest men in the MU? They know pretty much everything?

Everything except compassion for its own sake, and mental disorders in particular.

VI: The habit that writers have of creating conflict for the sake of the dynamics it offers a story can be quite nauseating when it leads to such unpleasant and out-of-character behaviour.

For one thing, the Reed Richards shown to us previously by Mark Waid, who was bent double by the weight of the guilt he'd cursed himself to for having caused his colleagues to become the "Fantastic Four", simply wouldn't judge another so harshly. Not when this most conscionable man was still bearing the responsibility for the death of Bill Foster. That makes no sense at all. For either these characters are psychologically consistent or they're nothing at all, and I for one would rather believe that the folks I'm reading about today pay some feasible relationship to their past fictional selves.

6.

No-one would deny that comic-books have a responsibility to engage responsibly with issues of sex and gender. Nobody would reject the premise that matters of race should be dealt with respectfully in the pages of the superhero tale. (Indeed when they're not, as in the virtual wiping out of a generation of multi-cultural heroes at DC, there's an appropriate response from a substantial number of readers.) But the treatment of superheroes with conditions redolent of those psychological disorders seen as frighteneing and disturbing in the real-world can be, albeit entirely unwittingly, extremely problematical. In the case of Henry Pym, and regardless of whether his story in "Mighty Avengers" can be read to show him as disturbed or not, he should always be presented in the light of an awareness of what his psychological problems have been, and in a way that reflects how someone with those problems should be treated. (The first step, of course, is to clearly define those problems.) And if there's a possibility of a script seeming to be dismissive of the responsibility to be supportive and respectful of those who've survived such disorder as we've been discussing, then the script also needs to compensate for this by putting forward a more positive view of the situation too.

It's not that Dan Slott or any of his colleagues are consciously meaning to portray some issues relating to mental disorder in the light of a terribly old-fashioned and often counter-productive narrative tradition. (I'll always read a Dan Slott book. I thoroughly enjoy his work.) It's that the various traditions of the superhero tale and the habits of superhero creators and fans have meant this substantial blind spot has developed over decades, and no good can come from that.


Or to put it another way: if a reader is suffering from anxiety, or has undergone a schizophrenic incident, as a number of teenagers in particular do, what might they learn about their situation from the superhero comic? Do they learn that their condition must be ignored, that it's shameful or a mark of weakness, that it must be denied through will and extremes of physical daring, that they're on their own until they prove themselves to be as "good" as the best of the "normal", and super-normal, folks, or worse, that they'll never be well or free of stigma?

For it's not just that extreme dispositional change involving serious psychological problems to superheroes creates endless problems for the characters as time progresses. It's also that the message being sent out here, about bravery and suffering, responsibility and blame, isn't an accurate, helpful or fair one. I'm certainly not suggesting that the solution is to produce a simple-minded set of happy survivors of disorders being loved by their communities and supported by trained professionals, anymore than the solution to the problem of race in comics is to make every black character a hero and a take on MLK too.

But we could all do better here. For once those labels are applied to a character, it's the responsibility of the creative teams to respect wider issues than simply those of what makes a superhero tale more supposedly thrilling, just as it is their responsibility to do so where issues of sex, and race, and gender, and a host of other social issues, are concerned.

7.

And the Sentry? Oh, don't get me started on The Sentry. For a man with so many thousands of friends, he didn't seem to know a single competent psychiatrist to help him on any consistent and productive basis. (Or was that covered in a story while I was hiding away from another daft Sentry tale?) What a lonely life he had, and what a futile message his existence sent out: not only can't mental disorder be cured, but it can't even be treated. In fact, even the insane superheroes can't even be trusted to stay safely in whatever secure accomodation we leave them in, whether it's a prison of their own mind or something more material in Avengers Tower.

And those messages are the ones that the Sentry's life and death sent out, because no character of equal prominence to the Sentry since that character's invention has made the opposite journey, from hopelessness to hope, to indicate any other more inspiring possibility at all.

These mad people. They're going to get you, you know, one way or another, and there's really only one solution.


But it's not clever, and it's not funny. It's actually rather .... well, upsetting actually.

We should all be doing better than this by now. Creators shouldn't be writing this stuff, and readers shouldn't be buying it either. We should all simply know better. And though in the very near future, these stories are undoubtedly going to be as embarressing as, for example, Ebony in The Spirit, and as cringeworthy as "adorable" and marriage-crazy Janet Van Dyne tricking the schizoid Henry Pym across the altar, in today's world they're far more worrying than that.

Or, as Mr Terrific would have said: "Fair Play".


I'm sure I've expressed myself badly here, and that I've used terminology in an awkward way. It's not been my intention to offend anyone, let alone Mr Slott, who was never meant to be getting the blame for what's an utterly common problem. Do shoot me down for my screw-ups and I'll amend the above or sign up a relevant comment. And there were so many other characters to discuss, from Morrison's "Doom Patrol" to the Hulk and onwards. But there just wasn't time, and I fear this wasn't such a well-expressed piece anyway to justify fourth or fifth chapters. Ah, well. I'd like the opportunity to write about the above situation with the super-villain in mind, so perhaps that'll be up for your consideration at some time in the future. Thanks for reading. TooBusyThinkingAboutMyComics will be back in a few days time with a piece or two on Mark Millar and The Fantastic Four, and probably Wolverine too, long promised in the comment boxes. It would be a genuine privilege to see you there.

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Who's The Real Hero Here? No 1: Daredevil & Foggy Nelson, The Man With Quite Rightly A Great Deal Of Fear!

1. Who's The Real Hero Here?

I.

No matter how anybody tries, it's impossible to fix a text so that only one reading of it is possible. There's no story so tightly constructed and so carefully executed that readers can't draw quite the opposite conclusion from it than the creators intended, if, of course, the creators intended anything so didactic as a particular conclusion to be drawn from their work at all. All this we know.

But I sometimes wonder if any genre loads the dice in favour of particular readings as much as the superhero comic book does. The very nature of stories which tend to be concluded and closed by colourful, sympathetic and powerful figures, who've been driven to the extremes of suffering and loss by obviously dangerous and usually unpleasant opponents, means that we're strongly compelled to see things from the super-heroes' point of view. And when everything is often in the last analysis relying on a costumed character that we feel empathic towards, knocking seven bells out of a costumed character we're to one degree or another appalled by, the punch thrown from the apparent side of the angels tends to be the closing comment on whatever issue, large or small, sophisticated or banal, it is that we've invested our time and attention in.

This is, of course, I know you know, a dangerous thing.

II.

We readers actively collude in this, of course. I well remember even in the '70s, when fan rage could only be transmitted through the relatively poorly-conducting mediums of letter-pages, fanzines and face-to-face conversations, that any attempt to not have the superhero's fists end whatever struggle was underway resulted in dissatisfaction and even that most quixotic of fan responses, rabid fury. When Don McGregor and Billy Graham had the Black Panther actually defeated by Killmonger after months and months of fighting and then saved by a small child, who unexpectedly knocked the arch-fiend off of a precipice, fans were not happy. It was as if they themselves had been emasculated by McGregor's deliberate decision to underline the key point that we can't rely on heroes to do our fighting for us all the time. When everyone's in danger, everyone needs to do their bit.

Well, it wasn't just T'Challa's status as " ... the man who won't cop out when there's danger all about" that seemed to have been snipped and tied off there. It was if McGregor had declared that not only didn't God and Santa Claus exist, but that they were also in their non-existence up to some very unsavoury activities indeed. And I suspect that the threat of the heresy of suggesting that all our problems can't be solved by just hitting people very hard still lurks worryingly under the thin sheen of relative sophistication that today's comic-books fans have pasted over themselves. Like naked Celtic warriors striding off to face the Roman war-machine confidently clad in useless-though-pretty woad, we seem to think we've cracked the problems of associating violence with virtue through an equal measure of cynicism, familiarity with criticism and what's supposedly an "ironic" engagement with the text.

But look, Daredevil just hit the Kingpin really hard and broke the big fat guy's knee!Hah! The Kingpin's bones are sticking out of his pudgy leg! That Daredevil's " .. a bad mother- (shut your mouth!)"

III.

And it doesn't really matter how Pyrrhic the victory, or how carefully we're shown that no single fight can right the structural inequities of the world or straighten out the tortured and contradictory drives of individual human beings, the woman or man in the costume still closes the story with a haymaker and a fierce kick, with gritted teeth and a buttock-clenching Herculean effort, with a self-serving weary mop of the brow to let us know that all that senseless and explicit violence really cost our poor heroic costume-wearer dear.

IV.

The placement of the superhero in comic-book narratives as both victim, because all heroes must be persecuted and consequently driven largely against their will into thumping Stilt-Man or Angle Man or whoever, and also as avenging angel, means that we nearly always know who's side we're on, and what it is that we're definitely supporting.

Take the example of Daredevil, for example. Since Frank Miller started in 1979 to reconcile the inevitable contradictions in the character of a long-standing children's comic book hero by using them as evidence of a deeply-flawed personality, our Man Without Fear has been accumulating screw-ups and near-pathological flaws to the degree to which you'd hesitate to let him receive a delivery of recorded mail, for fear he'd maim the postman and begin a progression of disasters which would leave the United States quite without letters or parcels for a very long time.

Matt Murdock totters along an unsure line between dodgy vigilante and criminal fruitcake, accumulating angst-generating guilt that never can reform him, because that would mean that he'd have to make rational decisions informed by a careful judgement of his own actions and those of others, and where would be the fun of that? So, on and on go the screw-ups, the dead lovers stacked feet-up and heads to the wall in a desperate attempt to save space in Murdock's very crowded freezer-of-the-soul, the slaughtered innocent bystanders - nobody is innocent in a seedy, faithless world! - the shattered friends, the Beirut-in-the-1980's neighbourhood that's supposed to be being protected. It sometimes seems to me that the only thing Matt Murdock ever manages to save is the perfect sheen of very tight skin pulled over those splendid abdominal muscles of his.

And still he's the hero! The worse he screw-ups, the more his creators feel that he ought to screw up, and, so, it seems, the more his fans see this as sign of sophisticated story-telling and moral relativism and adult entertainment.

Which I'll conceed it can be.

But Daredevil still gets to be the hero, which he patently isn't. He's a berk in tights who shouldn't be being put in jail to illustrate how corrupt the "system" and the "Man" is, but because Daredevil consistently breaks the law and ends up hurting people who ought to be able to live their lives without receiving the trauma-causing end of his bully-club. Sorry. Billy-club.

V.

Don't get me wrong. I love Daredevil. I have a little jar by the front door where I'm trying to save 50 pence pieces in order to be able the Brubraker/Lark Omnibus. At the current rate of capital accumulation, I'll be able to afford it in around November of this year.

And I think that the idea of a lead character who consistently makes catastrophically-stupid and destructive designs is a fascinating one. But we have to remember that no matter how often he's sold as a hero, he isn't a hero. Oh, yes, he often does heroic things, but that doesn't in itself make him a hero. There is a centrifugal force operating when costumes and super-powers and virtuous intentions combine, all pushing the reader's awareness away from the moral core of these stories. And no matter how much we're told that readers engage with Daredevil's stories with an awareness of his flaws, I doubt very much that he's viewed by the overwhelming majority as anything other than a sort-of flawed hero.

But there surely comes a time when all the accumulated grime of moral compromise, death-causing carelessness, selfishness and plain old-fashioned law-breaking should cease to constitute an interestingly ambiguous heroic figure and instead constitute a common criminal, a self-obsessed and callous skirt-chaser who can't keep it under his tights even as his wife suffers so in her sickbed, and who isn't so much a woebegotten Jonah as a consenting carrier of anti-Munchhausen Syndrome, whereby he's compelled to create as many real injuries for himself and as many others as possible.

There comes a time when a superhero is longer a super hero just because he has to over-come so many self-generated problems. There comes a time when that superhero becomes revealed to be an idiot, and a criminal idiot too.


VI.

Oh, but he's jumping off the skyscraper, and that man in the skull-mask is flying through the air on a scary looking jet thing, and there's concentric rings pulsating from Daredevil's head, and HE'S PUNCHING THE SKULL-MASKED MAN REALLY HARD!!! Hurrah!

And I feel it too. I do.

But it's not true. And by that, I don't mean that it's actually not true, because I get that just as much as you do. It's not true because the sensation of being powerful and safe and of the world being put to rights when DD violently shows how much of a man without fear he is distorts our perceptions until we can't help but get carried away with the sheer adrenalin "wow-wee" and "huzzah!" of it all.

It isn't as if Mr Bendis and Mr Miller and Mr Brubraker and Mr Diggle and all the other excellent caretakers of Matthew Murdock haven't given us all the evidence we need. It's that we don't really want to know. We are, in our far far more innocent comic-book reading way, the nice white folks who refused to pass the guilty verdict on the cops who beat Rodney King, and the nice black folks who refused to pass a guilty verdict on O J Simpson. We're the folks that refused to see that Elektra was quite psychopathically mad and in no way a force for good, even when Miller and Romita quite deliberately showed how utterly on-her-way-to-quite-insane she was.

But. But. But, she's wearing a costume and she didn't kill Foggy when she had the chance. She only killed lots of other people who we don't care about. She's a heroine. And Matt loves her. And they run over rooftops together.

Or to quote the estimable Mr J. Ohnny Rotten: "And we don't C-A-R-E!!!!"


2. A Necessary Digression Back To 1981

I.

I thought my girl-friend had something of a little crush on Daredevil, and I thoroughly approved. Anything to get her reading comics.

I'd offer her issues of "All-Star Squadron" and "Marvel-Two-In-one", and she'd look at me with that kind of fond pity that women give men when we're missing the point but trying hard anyway. And then she'd surreptitiously reach for my latest imported copy of Frank Miller's "Daredevil", which, I would reassure myself, is still certainly a comic book, as well a very fine one too, and therefore a very good sign that the superhero addiction was biting. Perhaps tomorrow she'd get a little more involved with the FF or the LSH or the JLA or the Amazing Whoever-It-Doesn't-Matter-Cause-He-Flies Man.

I knew from experience, didn't I? This was all a good sign. Nobody can't stop at just one comic book.

Can they?

II.

Now, some 30 years later, I realise that J. barely noticed the Man Without Fear, who might have been " the Man Without A Head and yet still possessed of a strange halitosis problem" for all she cared.

The crush she had something of was for Foggy Nelson, which is quite a different thing entirely.

And if I had understood what was going on between my girlfriend and that completely imaginary character, I surely would not have approved. I'd have felt strangely uneasy and told her that this was absurd, that she was getting attached to the wrong unreal bloke, pushing her like some opinionated comic-book-dealing pimp into lusting after the bloke in the red tights with the two little dinky horns on his mask. And faced with her reluctance to read the pages of fist-fights with ninja archers and very large mobsters, faced with her preference for the panels showing Foggy Nelson missing his wife and Foggy Nelson being competent with Nelson & Murdock's clients, I would have felt rather insecure and threatened.

Why wasn't she attracted to the bloke with the radar senses and the rock-solid torso and that spiffing habit of bouncing off roof-tops and whacking really bad people? Why is it that she seemed so very much more interested in the fat guy, who rarely gets a break, who never pulls on a costume, who only seems to work hard and do his best for his friend? Which of them is a really important superhero - correct answer: Daredevil - and why is the best friend of Porkchop Peterson winning the battle for J's affections?

What do women want, I might have whinged, getting as close to Freud's mind-set as I ever had before and ever would again. What do women want if they don't want powerful men in scarlet tights bearing perfect stomachs and a strangely attractive burden of melancholia?


III.

Well, of course, some women do want those powerful men, clothed in scarlet tights or not.

But not all of them do, and certainly not all of the time.

IV.

And though I'd have been horrified to have had this explained to me, J's affection for Foggy was actually a really good idea for J, if not for me, because it showed that her emotional radar where men were concerned wasn't entirely down and dangerously useless, despite her untypical affection for me. Because - and here in defiance of William Goldman I am indeed declaring that somebody, me, knows something - this all showed that somewhere in her fond-fuddled teenage mind there was the sensible intuition that I was an arse, and not to be trusted, and that Foggy was, and has remained, a much better man than me.

And that would have been true.

For I was actually far closer to Matt Murdock than I realised. Oh, not in the surface stuff, like stamina and strength and billy-club manoeuvrability. No.

No, me and Matt, you see, we're like this is just one particular fashion. I can be a right selfish fool too.

And it's Foggy that I should have been learning from, not Matt, not from the man without an ounce of common sense in his head.

3. Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain

I.

Because our eye is constantly being taken by Matt Murdock, because of that costume and those feats of prodigious and balletic roof-jumping, and because of the big red logo across each cover with the title "Daredevil" declaring for all to see that this superhero is a very impressive thing, I don't think we notice as much as we should quite how fundamentally heroic Foggy Nelson is. The camera keeps following his best friend and sometimes-business partner Matthew Murdock, but the strange thing is that Foggy Nelson's life would be, in some ways, far more instructive and far more interesting.

So often Foggy is cast as the wearisome if compassionate voice of common-sense, as if this was a grind and an imposition on Daredevil's already frantic schedule of frankly screwing up. We're touched by Foggy's concern, but he doesn't understand, does he, that a man without fear's got to do what a man with fear's got to do. Which, of course, means getting people, and especially women, into death-threatening trouble, being a trouble-attracting target because of his bright-red costume, and causing Hell's Kitchen to get bombed and swamped with strangely-ineffective massed ranks of arrow-firing ninjas. Again.

Let's be sensible, Matt, says Foggy Nelson time and time again. And time and time again, Foggy's right. Phone the police, Matt. (The police can't help.) Phone SHIELD, Matt. (I don't know their number.) Phone the Fantastic Four, Matt, or the Avengers. (Aw, they don't want to be bothered with lil'ol'me.) Don't be an idiot, Matt. (Whoops. 'Nother dead lover, 'nother raised city block, 'nother policeman with serious facial injuries because Matt's just had to hit him really hard.)

II.

If Daredevil really is a man without fear, then it might explain his reckless stupidity. After all, those souls who suffer a congenital insensitivity to pain tragically can't recognise when they're doing something dangerous, such as resting on a scolding hot pipe. They can't even know to keep twitching and moving their limbs to relieve everyday pressure. And they tend to die very early, worn out by the suffering caused through no fault of their own by an inability to feel and learn from that distress. So it could be with Matt. Put him in danger and he doesn't realise why he ought to be avoiding it. He might even seek it out in a desperate attempt to cause himself to feel fear, to overload his system so that whatever prevents him from being as clever as his IQ should determine burns out and he can look at the world as a rational, responsible person. For as the Wizard of Oz so sensibly declared to the not-so-cowardly lion;

"You my friend are a victim of disorganised thinking. You are under the unfortunate impression that just because you run away you have no courage; you're confusing courage with wisdom."

But of course, we know that Matt does know what fear is, which makes his position all the more untenable. Foggy, on the other hand, really really does know all about fear, and he doesn't have a impressive look-away-now reputation, gymnastic ability or radar sense to protect him. Yet still he stands by his friend, despite being stabbed, threatened with sais, and bullets, and really big men with the power to level buildings just through an Elvis-shiver of their shoulders. Foggy has had his livilihood threatened and indeed repeatedly taken from him. He's been shocked, blackmailed, bullied, sunk into a witness protection programme that wasn't very efficient on the protecting part of the deal. He's been kicked from one end of New York City to the other and back again, several times. He's suffered just about every affliction a male character can - if he were female, he'd probably be dead by now by as an offering to the Gods of Angst- and yet he still stands by his friend.


And if that sounds abit Tammy Wynette, then perhaps that helps us put a finger on something that's really still wrong with the superhero genre, despite a considerable improvement in the quality of gender representations in recent years. Perhaps Foggy is seen, albeit unconsciously, as being not quite masculine enough for us to notice the quiet nobility of his contribution enough. He fulfils a role which is traditionally feminine, the caring supportive almost-spouse who can be driven to distraction but never to disloyalty. He's abit soft, is Foggy Nelson, and rather out of shape, round where he should be sharp, soft where he should be hard. He's a girl, isn't he?

Which is a deeply worrying idea, because if we are, on some level, feeling that Foggy isn't heroic enough because he's not macho enough, then we really are continuing to get ourselves into a dysfunctional and insulting ideological cul-de-sac. Because Foggy isn't lacking in backbone or daring. We know that he visits Matt in prison despite his terror of what's happening there because he values his friend far more than his peace of mind or even his own safety. (That bravery and determination gets him stabbed, too.) We know that he'll fight when he has to, when it's right and appropriate. (I still recall with pleasure the time he protected Glorianna by hurling a bowling ball at her bag-snatching assailiant.) And he's brave enough to say that things that Matt, and we, don't want to hear.


For when Foggy temporarily cuts off Matt because his old friend has allied himself to the Kingpin, part of us feels that Nelson's being a killjoy. Oh, we recognise that somebodies got to say that Matt's being stupid and immoral, but the very idea that Matt is Daredevil leads us to see this unacceptable alliance as the equivalent of driving 32 in a 30 mph zone; we don't want to hear too much about any moral judgements when our supposed hero is in bed with the very bad guy. And the same stands for when Matt takes control of the Hand. Because the idea of Daredevil leading the Hand is a Fanboy "Yeah!!!" moment, because it's exciting, because t's so wrong that it's really wrong, we can't help but feel that the comic it's all the better for it. All those thrills of the good man gone bad with extra ninja gangsters too, and we even know that Matt can in the future suffer all the more from extra angst after he's thrillingly extracted himself from the whole stupid mess he never should have gotten himself into in the first place. But it's wrong, regardless of how much fun it brings the comic itself. Matt's wrong.

And Foggy's right. If we don't have due process, we don't have a civilisation, in the least ethnocentric sense of that word. Society is at its heart governed by law, by all of us facing the same rules and suffering the same penalties too. I don't get to have my neighbour's cat shot by local hard men because I don't like cat-poo in my snow-drops. If I do, my neighbour gets to hire someone to assassinate my dog, and, the next thing you know, my Mums' charcoal-fried in a mysterious house fire and it's Corsica circa 1870. Foggy's right. There were alternatives. There are nearly always alternatives.

And one of the alternatives is that Matt Murdock ought to go away and stop hurting people. Or even surrender himself and let himself be killed if it's a choice between that and taking control of a super-villain Mafia.

Because society can't function unless it's one rule for "us" and the same one rule for "them", whoever "they" are. And Daredevil is, and has been for a very long time, quite obviously in the wrong camp, in there with the "theys", with the criminal lords and the occult secret societies. Good intentions wouldn't cut it in court, as surely Mr Murdock would know, because the rule of law doesn't tend to care that much about what people mean when they consistently do such harmful things. Such motivations might stand as mitigating factors, but the first principle is "What did you do?"

Acting, for example, like a thinner Kingpin, ruling Hell's Kitchen in the name of the greater good as defined by Mr M. Murdock, might make for interesting stories. (Undoubtedly it does.) But it doesn't make for a healthy society. (As we know.) And being that way means that DD isn't a hero. (Mmmmm. What was that again? Can't quite hear you.)

And that's why we should have put down pretty much each and every issue of Daredevil for about the last 40 years and say "That Foggy Nelson. He's my hero. But that Matt Murdock. What a fool."

III.

Of course, Foggy doesn't cut Matt out of his life, or at least, not as far as I know, for poor finances have left me without a radar sense of what has happened since Brubraker departed. (And if Foggy did slash his ties with Matt, I wouldn't believe it. Not anymore than I believed Foggy betrayed Matt just before Daredevil left for a sojourn in San Francisco, a rather coincidental bout of friendship-breaking faithlessness just happening to arrive just when Gerry Conway needed to break up the old status quo.) For if ever there was a character who embodied E. M. Forster's famous quote that "Given the choice between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I would have the courage to betray my country.", then it's Foggy.

Which means that's he's not entirely on the side of the angels either. If he believed in the law as much as he claims, he'd turn Matt in. But he doesn't, and he won't, no matter how much harm it does to him. It's not the chance that he's a moral paragon that makes him a hero. It's because he's brave and true, caring and nurturing, and also sensible, that least attractive quality for the perpetually adolescent to aspire to. He possesses the most unlikely heroic mix of backbone and brain, which must terrify any writer who wants to move his dumb characters around an exploitative plot for cheap effect. Matt'll jump through pretty much any stupid hoops you put up for him. Foggy's cleverer than that. He may be a tortoise, Matt may have been the star student at law school, but it's Foggy who eventually did the hard study and who really knows his stuff. And though he'll do whatever a writer demands, like some superheated material which does remarkable things when glowing and then inevitably returns to its original form, in the end Foggy Nelson will be what he is. A bloody good bloke.

Foggy works, you see. At everything including the restriction of his calorific intake, though he might not work there as hard as he ought to.

IV.

So, I would contend, as is pretty obvious by now, that Matt Murdock isn't a hero, but a blithering selfish boy who causes far more havoc than he prevents. And I put to you that the real hero of Daredevil is Foggy Nelson, despite the fact that he's everything much of his audience would hate to be caught aspiring to when they're got their Daredevil-reading cap on; hard-working, caring, nurturing, constant, brave without power, self-sacrificing without any promise of an equitable return.

Matt Murdock isn't a hero. He's an escape fantasy for the irresponsible.

Foggy Nelson is the man. A real man. Which is, of course, a real good person.

And "J" could have told me that in 1981, if I could have listened, if I'd had the radar sense, or rather the common sense, to tell the truth from the foolishness.

But I was too busy dreaming of thwarting super-powered criminals and extra-dimensional alien invaders.


If anybody has any nominations for other supporting characters who are the "real" heroes of the books they appear in, please do let me know. Or why not tell me where I've got it all wrong? Good night & sleep well!

Further reading: To my mind, the two Frank Miller 'Daredevil' Omnibus Editions would be the best introduction, and sadly the most expensive ones to, to our hero Foggy. Get your library to order them! A fine & more affordable alternative to all those pages would be the paperback of "Born Again" by Miller and Mazzucchelli. Lots of fun if you like your fun miserable, grim & talky - not meant as a bad thing! - is the version of DD by Mr Bendis and Mr Maleev, and a nice balance between the two can be found in the Brubraker & Lark volumes. Beyond that, Marvel does a fun set of black-and-white Essentials volumes reprinting the first 125 issues. But sadly, "Foggy Nelson, Agent of O.r.d.i.n.a.r.y" has yet to be printed anywhere except in my mind.

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