1. An Admission
It's been quite intense on this blog for awhile, and so I thought it might be time for a change of pace. Perhaps a lighter-hearted piece might cheer up your day, and add some variety to the recent entries on TooBusyThinkingAboutMyComics. And there may well be a need for something of a breathing space for regular visitors here, and a cheeky little piece with a slight froth on the top might even encourage a few new folks to drop over too. There were, I thought, indeed quite a few good reasons to consider moderating the intensity, as it were.
And yet, for reasons which I don't quite understand, but which I suspect are firmly planted in the "character as destiny" principle, I started to write about why the overwhelming majority of super-villains never seem to seriously consider reforming themselves, being that most of them are constantly being defeated and thrown into quite miserable institutions for very long periods of time.
Ah, and so it is that the intended light-hearted piece didn't quite materialise. Next time, perhaps. I really will try.
But at least this one's a little bit shorter than normal. Just a little bit shorter, I'll concede, but shorter all the same, I promise. (*1)
(*1) Argh. This may not actually be exactly true. Unexpected last thoughts and all that.
2. Did I Miss Something? In Which A Rarely-Considered Explanation For Super-Villain Recidivism is Considered.
In Neil
Gaiman's "When Is A Door: The Secret Origin Of The
Riddler", Edward
Nigma reflects upon the changes which have occurred in his comic-book world between the 1960s of the camp Batman TV show and the post-Dark Knight landscape of the late 1980s;
"You look around these days -- It's all different. It's all changed. The Joker's killing people, for God's sake! Did I miss something?"Well, if we could have engaged with the
Riddler at that moment of his fictional existence, we might have explained to him that the demographics of the comic-book audience had changed, that young and particularly male readers had been relatively desensitised to violence in the media, that fan-boys had infiltrated the ranks of the professional creators and subverted what was once popular entertainment for kids, that comic book companies had been long locked in an evolutionary scramble to desperately secure some niche in the marketplace where they might survive, if not prosper. Those and many other very familiar explanations might have been delivered to Mr
Nigma in the attempt to help him understand and overcome his existential despair.
But there's another possible explanation for why things have got so bleak in the DC Universe, for why the law-breakers there have become such appalling beasts, as indeed they have in the super-hero universes as a whole. And though it's an explanation that I've never seen put forward before, it's surely one that the
Riddler himself could understand and perhaps even sympathise with.
For have any of us considered how appalling the crime and punishment system is in the super-hero universes? (*2) And are any of us surprised that the likes of
Ryker's Island and
Arkham Asylum seem to breed crime rather than controlling and even reducing it?
(*2) Actually, I'm sure that lots of folks have. My apologies for not coming across their work before I wrote this piece.
3. Life In Prison
If there's one thing that might show us how little concerned with the matter of prisoner rehabilitation the creators of modern-day super-hero comic books are, it would surely be the way that they typically represent prisons and their business. For the basic template of comic-book prisons was surely codified in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's "Watchman", where we learn that the authorities of that particular universe happily place known superheroes into prisons where the very worst of beasts are allowed to mix with new prisoners who haven't even yet come to trial. (Rorschach has only been in the custody of the state for 4 days by the time we first see him being interviewed by Dr Long.) No, it's impossible to imagine that this prison of Moore and Gibbons is an institution that's got an enlightened view of its' own purpose. It's hard if not inconceivable to imagine that a great deal of therapeutic measures are in play with the inmates there, for the evidence is that the staff are either incompetent (Dr Long, the guards who ought be watching Rorschach in the dinner line) or cowardly and corrupt (the officer who's blackmailed by "Big Figure"), and the power in the institution seems to lie solidly with the inmates. Effectively, this is a stage-set to emphasise Rorschach's apparent powerlessness, a backdrop against which our damaged and incarcerated vigilante can throw around hot chip fat to his lost heart's bleak content. And everyone else there in prison with him is simply nothing more than an apparently irredeemable and
recidivous monster.
And it's hard to think of many prisons in comic books since which break radically with that template. You'd never imagine, for example, that there are county jails, or indeed any of the other different categories of institutions. Short of a lone issue of the
Punisher by Garth Ennis, I can't think of a single time I've seen somewhere that looked like a Category One prison in a comic book. On the whole, what we get shown are the great almost-Victorian Category Five prisons, heaving with
ne'er'do'wells and barely suppressed physical and sexual violence. What else is the Marvel Universe's
Rykers Island Prison, particularly as seen in the "Daredevil: The Devil, Inside And Out" collection by Ed
Brubaker and Michael Lark. What an unimaginably terrible place that
Rykers Island is, and, indeed, it's such an unimaginably awful place that I truly couldn't imagine it. Though I do admit to having thoroughly enjoyed the story, I had to constantly struggle with my own disbelief. For this is every stereotype of a hell-on-Earth prison ever created. The Governor is again utterly corrupt, the officers - again - vile and depraved, the prisoners again running wild and in charge of everything. And consider the incredible mix of different types of criminal too: the Kingpin and Hammerhead mixed in with far less dangerous prisoners? Does New York not have access to a
SuperMax facility? Because there's not an institution in the world that could effectively function even as a holding facility under those conditions. It's
daft.
And the message that this gives us about prisoners is simple: they're all the same, they're all dangerous, they all riot at the drop of a brush, and they're not like you and I because they always behave as a depraved mass in the same depraved fashion. What's more, their value is easily measured by the fact that their safety is of no consequence to the State or often the super-heroes visiting their underworlds, while their well-being is an irrelevance, and their nature entirely base and savage.
Which is a message that we find similarly transmitted by our regular visits to
Arkham Asylum in the DC Universe. Given that the Elizabeth
Arkham Asylum For The Criminally Insane is an institution designed for individuals who cannot be held accountable for their own behaviour, we might at least hope there to come across some sense of social responsibility, of patient-centred treatment and of an attempt to provide at the least a safe and controlled environment for the inmates.
But you know what
Arkham Asylum's like. If
Rykers Island seems quite unbelievable in the sheer depth of its incompetence and corruption, then
Arkham Asylum is simply beyond imagining. What are we being told about these victims of their own psychology, and what are we being told about the society that treats these
human powder-kegs in this fashion?
Ignore, if you would, for a moment the obviously pertinent issues of human rights and common decency. And consider instead the fact that these prisons are nothing more than machines for increasing to the Nth degree the savagery of their inmates. And I can think of no prisons and holding institutions in fiction as likely as these to suffer regular and catastrophic breakdowns in order and mass breakouts. Even in the name of self-defence, no society would allow their super-villains to be so ill-contained in such
stupid environments. Even a culture which cared not a whit for reformation and which believed strongly in retributive justice wouldn't organise things like this. And it's quite unbelievable that our lovably humane super-heroes keep delivering up more and more prisoners to these places without raising so much an official complaint against such a fusion of dirt-poor security and soul-dead inhumanity.
No wonder so many fans wonder why threats such as the Joker are permitted to live. But the real question, as I'm sure you'd agree, is why is the Joker locked up in such ridiculously irrational, counter-productive environments in the first place?
And what does this tell us about the representations of criminals in comic-books? What are we being told about the worth of the great mass of folks who break that law? Are all of them really that different to us, and are they all really that utterly unworthy of our compassion?
4. We All Know Why The Joker Must Not Die
This year marks, as I'm sure you'll be aware, the seventieth anniversary of the Joker's first appearance in "Batman" # 1, which was cover-dated "Spring 1940". And despite the appalling death rate wracked up year after year by the "Clown Prince Of Year", and especially after Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' re-casting of the character in "Batman" # 251, there's never been the slightest chance that DC would allow the Joker to be permanently laid into the ground. For it doesn't matter how logical (*3) the case for the culling of the Joker might be in real-world terms, he's never going to be allocated any other lasting destiny except for that of periodically escaping from Arkham Asylum, killing innocent bystanders, getting beaten by Batman, and then returning, yes, to Arkham Asylum. (*4) Because those who argue that the Joker is such a terrible monster that he must be executed have quite missed the point. The implication of the arguments of the "kill the Joker" school of thought is surely that;
- any lethally dangerous villain who becomes popular enough to reappear regularly in comic books will inevitably need to be killed off, because they're so dangerous, meaning that comic books will loose a central part of their appeal, namely lethally malignant and popular characters, or;
- comic book villains must not be too dangerous. Galactus must hence-forth only chew on the Popsicles that are lost comets torn accidentally loose from their solar systems of origin. Dr Doom must become "Dr Quite-Threatening". Even the Puzzle-Master will need to be re-branded as "Starter-Crossword-Man".
It's obviously a daft argument. DC would have to be insane to have the cash cow that is the Joker strapped to a metal table in some anti-septic prison chamber before being pumped full of a fatal barbiturate solution and condemned to an
un-afterlife as the ashes in a little commemorative urn
that'd sit under the dinosaur in the
Batcave.
And this is one of those rare cases where the interests of the comic book companies and those of the comic-book reading audiences so obviously coincide. We all appreciate the value of the great comic-book super-villains and we all want the likes of the Red Skull and
Lex Luthor, the Joker and Dr Doom, maintained as being suitably villainous for generations to come. Oh, there may be debate about how terrible the crimes of the Green Goblin should be, for example, for there's nothing to be gained by making an antagonist so vile that our flesh creeps with distaste rather than a pleasurable disgust when we come across them, but we must surely all accept that we want the big guns of the bad
gals'n'guys permanently available for service in the
capes'n'booties universes.
And we have only to consider the example of Dr Arthur Light to reinforce the case that villains need to be handed with some restraint and care so that they can continually return to hurt the fictional denizens of the fictional realities that they fictionally inhabit.
Or: the Joker's not real, so Batman's not morally obligated to put him down. It's a comic book, silly.
(*3) There was even a piece in "The New York Times" of 5/7/08 by Mark D. White and Robert Arp entitled "Should Batman Kill The Joker", though they didn't conclude that he should be wiped from the face of the Earth by a bloke in a rodent costume with pointy-sticky-up-bits on his helmet.
(*4) Arkham must surely have the worst record on prisoner security, containment and recidivism anywhere in the non-existent worlds. There must be someone somewhere currently writing a paper on how not to treat seriously disturbed criminals using Arkham as a Weberian Ideal Type. If they do like it's done at Arkham, then it's a bad place to put your psychotics away in.
5. Ah, The Appalling Example Of The Appalling Dr Arthur LightPoor stewardship of comic book villains can lead, at its' worst extremes, to the characters being so conceptually degraded, so repugnant to their audience, that there's nothing left to do but kill them off. And of course the prime example of editorial and authorial incompetence here is Dr Light, who functioned perfectly well as an incompetent, little-league, delusions-of-grandeur-possessed, blow-hard antagonist before he was recast as a super-powered rapist. Any senior member of the DC Editorial team who perused the proposal that read "Dr Light rapes Sue
Dibney, the wife of the Elongated Man" and didn't immediately throw it out with an exceptionally forceful measure of contempt was surely suffering from the hitherto-ill-defined psychological condition "comic-book cognitive dissonance". It's a problem which is, thanks to 2004's "Identity Crisis", now easy to diagnose. All that need be done to do so is to place the following obviously mutually exclusive and antagonistic concepts next to each other in a single statement on a piece of paper and wait for the subject to respond in one of the two following ways;
statement: Dr Light should rape Sue Dibney, the capable and witty wife of the light-comedy super-hero the Elongated Man, who possess a stretchy body and a nose which wibbles from side to side when mysterious crimes occur.
response 1: (adaptive, "typical" response) This is exploitative garbage. Get everyone who has had to read this psychological support. This is not only gruesomely inappropriate, but we'll never be able to use Dr Light again. We'll have to kill him off because of one stupid fan-boy story.
response 2: (non-adaptive, abnormal response.) Ne-at! It's grown-up, progressive and clever at the same time. It'll show that there's more to the Elongated Man than just that wiggly-nose. Oh. And it'll develop his wife's character too.
(Next week: Starro the Conqueror: the real architect of the Holocaust. Hitler was innocent.)
And of course, Dr Light was rendered quite unusable by the addition of rapery to his existing arsenal of a light-projecting stick-thing and a metallic-helmet with a radical '50's Detroit fin on the top of it. He was a repugnant character walking his morally-unclean walk for 5 years until some of those who'd unwittingly sanctioned his un-planned obsolescence had him killed off by one of the various Spectres who periodically slog their way through the DCU from time to time.
An utter waste of a minor, but eminently useful DC super-villain. And a distastefully tacky waste as well, too.
6. But What If The Joker Had Just Been Loved A Little More?
But there's one genuinely serious problem with wanting and indeed
having to keep to keep these villains in-play
and suitably villainous. And that's that they can
never reform and they never can be
allowed to reform. The sub-text and the text here therefore combine to make an absolutely clear message about the whole business of criminal recidivism: these folks are different to us and they're never going to be the same as us. They're criminals, we're not, and the best thing to do is hit them hard and stick them somewhere where there undeserving behinds can safely rock away. Stick them in Rykers, thrown them in Arkham. They're all the same. Let 'em rot.
Now, unlike in previous some of my previous pieces, I'm not going to suggest that this is a callous example of short-sighted, ill-judged creators and editors failing in their social responsibility, although it would be good if folks knew a little more about the social institutions they're representing. (Or, perhaps, showed what they know about such institutions.) Because although I do think that there's an absolutely valid smorgasbord of moral and practical arguments in favour of attempting to reform criminals where the evidence is that such is possible, I can't see any shadow of that belief in the sub-text of most super-hero comic books. And that's because those splendid villains have to keep coming back, and they have to keep coming back in a way that at the very least maintains the same sense of deadly jeopardy that they inspired last time. And so, it may be that there's a fault-line here in the very nature of the super-hero comic book itself, in that they rely on effectively if not deliberately arguing that nobody - with a very few exceptions - except the least important and powerful criminals in super-hero land ever reform themselves.
But then a considerable proportion of criminals in the "real world"
do of course reform themselves, or are helped to reform by trained professionals and, yes, loving and concerned "ordinary" people. In fact, the very statement "criminals can reform themselves" shows how ridiculous the whole debate about "criminals" can become. Are we talking about serial killers or tax dodgers, drug-abusers or internet pedophiles? Because as soon as the discussion becomes about "criminals", every one who's broken the law becomes a "criminal", each as bad as each other and each as irredeemable as their worst brethren. It's a ridiculous business, arguing about whether "criminals" can become law-abiding. It's like asking whether human beings will ever be able to restrain their appetites; well, which human beings, and what appetites?
However, given that comic books have always been so very awful at creating convincing and consistent explanations for the behaviour of their super-villains, it's been easy for writers and artists to simply portray a kind of generic "bad person". Where, for example, Superman and Batman are rooted in simple and sturdy psychological foundations, their opponents can be pretty much anybody their temporary curators want them to be. They may kill here, rob there, knock a few buildings over in their lunch-times, but the nature of what they do and how they go about doing it is rarely clear and even more rarely fixed. Consequently, if it's impossible to present the possibility of reform as a general concern in super-hero comics because of the practical demands of serial fiction, then it's also largely impossible because few writers actually understand very much about criminal psychology at all. (*5) I'm not sure many creators think of their criminally-minded characters as
people, as
individuals, who could be reformed. I don't think that very often comes in it.
This ignorance of criminal sociology and psychology has led to the clear measure of psychopathic drift that we've discussed before in this blog, and in this blog's sister ThatRemindsMeOfThis too. We've long since got to the point where it can seem that pretty much every villain is either psychotic or psychopathic or both. This is a parallel process to the growth of super-powers in the super-hero universes. Just as it seems easy to the fanboy mind to create stories which consist of little but thousands of super-powered costume-wearing "heroes" knocking the living hell out of each other, making the narratives more and more isolated from any mundane experience of everyday reality, so too it naively seems that making villains all the more threatening by grafting onto them elements of psychopathy is a scarily good idea. But that process has
massive disadvantages;
- it's narrows the variety of "villainous" motivation and behaviour, making stories all the more homogeneous and predictable
- it's often based on a version of psychopathy that's been gleamed from the media rather than real-life, meaning that the psychopath behaves as an unstoppable force of nature rather than a pathetic-if-fearsome character. (I've discussed writer John Wagner's brilliant portrayal of the psychopathic Mayor Ambrose in the latest Judge Dredd serial over on 2000AD: ThatRemindsMeOfThis. You can get there through the link top-right. And Mr Wagner's work in 2000AD is well worth anybody checking out, I assure you.)
- most relevant to this blog's theme, it presents a huge proportion of criminals as being either psychopathic or psychopathic-lite, and reality is far more complex than that. Constantly portray criminals as predominantly psychotic and psychopathic and of course there's no reason for readers to ever have whatever preconceptions they have about criminal reform challenged.
And yes, I can already hear the entirely sensible response: comic books aren't for challenging people's preconceptions about prisoner reform. And, yes, I'm sure you can already hear the entirely necessary response; given that the sub-text of comic books is pretty much 100% that criminals can't be reformed, because that hardly ever happens, it is indeed important for a challenge to such attitudes to be kept constantly in play. Not to insult readers by constantly arguing that we're all deserving of a second chance because we're all really God's fluffy little creatures led astray by the environment, or society, or computer games, or whatever other ridiculously reductionist nonsense might be advanced forward, but because the super-hero comic book is actively if unconsciously taking one side of the debate with some force anyway. It's not about preaching for one side, as if this was the turn of the Seventies and DC had again decided to ally itself with the counter-culture. (Make War No More: Be Nice To Criminals) The preaching is already being done, and has been so for more than seventy years now.
(*5) Kudos to Grant Morrison where the Joker is concerned. If I've read it rightly, every explanation for the Joker's behaviour is at any one time quite likely to be true. That degree of existential explanation for one character's behaviour is something of a get-out-of-jail card, as it were, but it works for that one character. The Joker is whoever he decides to be that morning. But what of every other bad gal'n'guy?
7. What Is To Be Done?Given that most popular super-villains are both too valuable to lose as characters and too disturbed to ever convincingly reform, what can be done? And here I have to admit that I'm quite stumped. It may be that the narrative tradition and functional imperatives of super-hero comics simply mean that the sub-text of them is always going to stamp its' sturdy foot and declare that them bad boys ain't no damn good. For even if some of the most successful super-villains were to reform, how would they then be kept in the limelight? If we were to take the banal example of the Penguin, traditionally one of the least unpleasant of Batman's opponents, what could be done with him after he'd reformed? For whatever role he was given, from minor supporting character to - God help us - crusading super-hero "Penguin-Man", it's unlikely that any narrative that constantly focused on the issue of his ongoing process of reform could maintain its' interest for the audience and its purpose for the relevant creative team. And anyway, since the underlying principle of Western States is that criminals undergo their punishment and are then "criminals" no more, a truly positive example would be for Oswald to put his poor choices behind himself and bed himself down as an everyday umbrella manufacturer, or whatever. If he's "done his time", then perhaps we need to see that he ceases to be anything other than a "normal" citizen. And that would mean that a major Batman villain would simply stop existing as a character of any weight at all. Take the villain out of the Penguin and there's nothing left there at all.
Is Batman to drop in for tea with Mr Cobblepot every few issues? Or to drop into a "Super-Villain Anonymous" meeting once a month or two, where he can sit quietly and show his support for those hoods and henchmen who're struggling to put the old ways behind them?
And, anyway, how will creative teams ever resist the urge to have their reformed character turn back to the "dark side" again? Those of us familiar with the very early Spider-Man tales will remember Frederick Foswell, the crime-lord known as the "Big Man" who was finally unmasked by Spider-Man. Upon his unfeasibly early release from prison, Foswell was long suspected by Peter Parker of having returned to his villainous ways, but, with the help of a job given to him as an act of decency by J. Jonah Jameson, Foswell proved himself to be a reformed character, and that taught Spider-Man an important lesson too.
Oops. Until Stan Lee decided to have Foswell turn again to become a gangland rival for the Kingpin's power. Ah, well. You really can't ever ever ever trust these reformed criminals, you know, even when they finally die taking a bullet for good ol'philantrophic JJJ, as Foswell does. (Like dogs, criminals can be won over by random acts of generosity.)
8. That Ol'Double Standard
No, I have no idea how to square this particular problem, if problem it can be accepted to be. I'm certainly not arguing for the mass reformation of any major-league bad guys'n'gals, for the reasons explained above. Oh, I do think that there may be a market for a well-written comic about a reformed super-villain who is doing her or his best to make up for what they've done, but even that wouldn't even begin to redress seventy years of hero-fights-bad-people narratives. And though there are plenty of super-heroes who have roles which might allow them to come into contact with a wider cross-section of law-breakers, and to even engage in a measure of support for trying-to-turn-the-corner characters, it can't ever be the central purpose of enough books to send out a better balanced message. (*6)
But one thing that might help, and I'm going to touch upon this again in a soon-coming piece in this blog, is that we might end a particularly pernicious double-standard where criminal activity is concerned in comic books. For one consequence of dividing the world up into "criminals" and "non-criminals" is that the labels stick regardless of how individuals from each group behave. So while the super-hero narrative carries with it a sense that few criminals ever reform, and that those few who do usually become super-heroes rather than ordinary folks, it also permits so called "super-heroes" to behave quite disgracefully without ever paying the price for their crimes. They're heroes, so the sub-text argues, so whatever they do must be justifiable and heroic. And in this double-standard is a worrying sense that virtuous folks are virtuous because of who they
are, and not what they
do. So, certain so-called "super-heroes" are permitted to commit quite appalling crimes without ever being brought before a judge and jury and tried for their behaviour. A criminal who deliberately murdered another super-villain such as Green Arrow recently murdered Prometheus would be expected to pay an appropriate price. But Green Arrow won't. He won't, I'm willing to believe, even be brought before a jury, (*7) though if he were to be so, there's a damn good chance he'd get off regardless of the law. (*8) (In fact, I'd love to see that story. GA is willing to do the time, but the jury stand by him, and he has to live with the consequences. Ah, consequences, that rarest of factors in the super-hero universe.)
And over in the Marvel Universe, Quicksilver is, I see, not only a member of the Avengers again, but a teacher at the academy for Young Avengers! Why haven't I seen outrage spitting from the keyboards of internet posters? Have we become so desensitised to issues of right and wrong that we think a brief spurt of regret and the possession of a neat set of costume'n'powers is the equivalent of paying your debt to society? Quicksilver has spent years being the most appallingly anti-social beast. I've hated to see it, having always loved the Quicksilver of the later Roy Thomas "Avengers" years, a selfish but noble individual, but if comics are to mean anything beyond genuinely mindless behaviour, then there has to be consequences for character's behaviour. Which of the crimes of grand theft, deceit, attempted murder and any number of other offences have had to be ignored for Pietro Maximoff to have children entrusted into his care? How can this character be allowed access to a teaching post, and how can those well-loved figures who connived in the deception that permitted Quicksilver to be returned to public favour live with their deceitful acts. (Edwin Jarvis, how
could you?)
And unlike Green Arrow, I don't think that Quicksilver could rely on a jury to get him off if he actually was brought before one. He carries the racist stigma of being a mutant, he's been aligned to the wrong side of the law too many times before, and he'd be lousy at playing up to a jury. He'd probably manage to double any sentence the prosecution requested just through showing an arrogantly despicable attitude.
And you know what? He'd deserve that double-time for what he's done. Unless he's been criminally insane for a very protracted period, in which case he needs to be undergoing serious therapy and certainly shouldn't be entrusted with a duty of care to young people.
It's a wretched business this, this hypocritical practise of having "our" side behave in ways that "their" side could never be forgiven for. Cyclops and torture. Captain America and a
rebellion against the constitutionally-legitimate Super-Hero Registration Act. The Punisher, Wolverine, Daredevil; all characters I love, but - and here I can't resist - if you commit the crime, you really
do have to do the time.
Or is the law only sacred when the "other" side break it?
(*6) Manhunter and Black Lightening come to mind at DC. Daredevil, if he's ever scrubbed clean of the accumulated sins of his time running the Hand, comes immediately to mind at Marvel.
(*7) Though if I've missed it, my apologies, and huzzah for DC.(*8) With all the options open to the major-league super-hero, pre-meditated murder was the only one? Aw, the narrative was fixed so the reader could get off on righteous angst and revenge, a despicable and cowardly story.
9. The Psychological Integrity Of Ridiculous CharactersI. Absurd characters must have consistent and believable psychological natures. We know this. And the more absurd the character, the more that principle holds. For example, Superman and Batman are both, despite some considerable claims to the contrary for the latter, quite openly ridiculous characters. (And the so-called physical and mental perfection that is associated with Batman is as stupid a conceit as Superman's flight, strength, micro-vision and so on. We know this.) But we readily accept these silly super-abilities as long as the simple underlying natures of the characters stay true. Superman has lost his home and yet has been raised as an optimist by a loving mid-West family. Batman has had his family murdered before him and cannot rest for fear that that will occur to some other innocent. For these fundamental psychological "bases" need not be complex or even particularly realistic so long as they speak to us of some simple human truth. (This was, after all, the insight gained by Stan Lee in the early '60s, where he deliberately saddled many of his leads with specific disadvantages to drive their motivations.) And it's no coincidence that the most long-lasting and successful characters tend to have the simplest and most fundamentally-moving of motivations.
But around those "still points", as it were, the picture needs to become more complex. Certainly every antagonist can't be torn from the same villainous and pseudo-psychopathic cloth, especially when there's so many utterly convincing road-maps to villainous behaviour in the psychological text-books. (It's not as if much of it even needs to be adapted. It's all there.) For as long as the psychological "truth" of a character holds, the reader will accept any damn silliness the creators care to throw at them, and that goes for villains as well as heroes too.
Let's consider this by comparing two story-telling options;
- Superman assembles a "Super-Villains" Squad to undertake missions which are too dangerous even for the Justice League. Members of this Squad include the Parasite, the Atomic Skull, Soloman Grundy and Bizarro. Technological back-up will be granted by Lex Luthor. Tag-line: "What Super-Evil causes, Super-Evil cures." And if the villains don't co-operate, Superman will destroy someone or something dear to them. (Oh, he doesn't want to do these things, but he's been driven to it by angst and suffering and the JLA constantly being off-world on Venus or something. But the point is that he will be unhappy about it all, though not as unhappy as the suddenly left-leg-less Atomic Skull after issue # 3. But he shouldn't argue with Supes. Tag-Line: "You shouldn't argue with Supes")
- Superman's chest becomes sentient under the influence of a hitherto-unsuspected variant of Kryptonite. This quickly becomes a problem for Superman. He and Lois are never alone, but he still builds an artificial mouth and set of eyes for the chest and gives it ownership of his body every second day, unless a major crime is occurring, and as long as it respects his vows to Lois. Eventually the Super-Chest begins to agitate for the removal of Superman's shirt so that it can see what's going on even on the days that Clark is in charge of himself. Eventually, Superman and the chest agree to go their separate ways. They're in some way sad to do so, but it's for the best. And so Superman works with many pre-eminent bio-chemists in the DCU and eventually discovers a method that allows him to clone his own chest, permitting the removal of the thinking breast and its' replacement by a traditionally-unthinking one. The now-free Super-Chest is offered a berth in the Fortress Of Solitude, but decides to explore the universe for other chests of its' kind. Falling asleep around a yellow sun, the chest starts to swell with energy and eventually becomes so large that a tribe of wandering lost Kryptonians make him their home. Superman visits every once in a while, so that the Super-Chest doesn't feel abandoned by his roots, or at least ribs, and the story ends happily.
Well, it's obvious that the first option is a fanboy fantasy and wouldn't work because Superman doesn't do compulsion and torture, even when he can't find the Justice League to help him save the world on a Tuesday morning. And the second, though on the surface of it far less believable, is actually comparatively more compelling and "true" because that's how Superman would behave if his chest developed independent thought. (Which is, of course, no more stupid an idea than, for example, super-freezing breath.)
Or: it's not enough to simply know
what a character wants. We also need to know
why they want it, and what they're likely to
do to obtain it.
II. And if it's hard to combat the entire genre's bias towards what we might call a fundamentalist approach to crime and punishment in the constant cycle of arrest, escape, crime and arrest that marks the super-hero comic, then perhaps we could start by making different classes of criminals distinct and psychologically accurate, so that at least every one of the "bad" folks aren't becoming more and more completely callous and irredeemable psychotics. That would stop the drift to psychopathy and compel writers to create individuals representative of an actual type rather than of an imaginary tribe of utterly unsaveable bogey-men. It would give characters a form of pseudo-psychological realism which though hardly likely to be as compelling as that of Superman's, for instance, would at least make them more substantial, individual and easier to engage with. And since most classes of "criminals" are eminently reformable, (*9) it might mean that somewhere down the line the possibility of "doing the crime" and then "walking the line" might become a more common staple of the background if not the foreground of some books. Well, we might even start showing how society tries, for better or ill, to deal with individuals who have broken the law. (*10) We could begin by looking at why Rykers Island and Arkham Asylum haven't been struck down as un-Constitutional, unless there's been an amendment in the comic-book USA's which actively
encourages cruel and unusual punishments. We might illustrate how The Sentry should have been sectioned under existing Mental Health legislation rather than protected and effectively abetted by Marvel's big-gun superhero community. We could even examine how it would be quite impossible for a psychotic schizophrenic with a substantial criminal record to get even a job as a cleaner in a New Jersey High School let alone as the Director of H.A.M.M.E.R., why nobody with an ounce of sense would allow psychopaths into Suicide Squads or Thunderbolts, and how some of the commonsense hysteria about crime is neither commonsense nor anything but hysterical.
And then we might take the truly radical step of making "And Justice For All" actually mean
justice for all in super-hero comic books, rather than for just those that we don't like very much, so that the divide between law-abiding and criminal becomes a matter of fact rather than a matter of personal prejudice. Because if
all criminals are doomed to remain predatory beasts preying on our communities, then that goes surely for the ones in the White House and the Justice League too. And if breaking the law means exactly that, then respect for the law means that Oliver Queen, Pietro Maximoff and Henry Pym and Jarvis, and the Punisher and the whole damn lot of them do it too need to be tried and sentenced.
For if I lived in a universe where the major super-hero figures were so far above justice that they regularly broke the law in fundamental ways without anybody taking any significant notice of it, well, I wonder how I'd feel about things. (*11) At the very least, I'd be out there campaigning for a Super-Hero Registration Act, and some effective legal oversight of the behaviour of the super-powered community. You know, with laws, and trained officials, and courts, and legal transparency.
Because it isn't just the Green Goblin who's breaking those laws, and it isn't just the "evil-doers" doomed to be constantly beaten and returned to incarceration that are a threat to our fundamental liberties. And if your local police force, or teachers, or business community was behaving as so many of our super-heroes do, you'd of course be up in arms. Perhaps even literally.
The real criminals aren't limited to the ranks of the super-villains. These comic books we love are
lying to us. (*12)
(*9) Most, most! I said "most". Not all.(*10) Absolutely different in Texas to NYC to Manchester UK, I know, but that makes for interesting stories too, no?
(*11) I know, I know; metaphorically I do.
(*12) I do love them though. Can't help it, don't want to. Splendid things.
Thank you for reading, and my especially special "thank you" to everyone who comments on this blog. Whether it's just to say "hi", or to raise a point, to disagree or to point out factual errors, I very much appreciate the kindness of folks who get in touch. You'd be welcome to have a say too. And commenting or not, have a splendid day and, as they used to say in "Hill Street Blues", be careful out there!.
