My Problem With Superheroes

Hi! 

Welcome back to the blog, or welcome if you're new. My name's Grim, and today I'm going to have a mini rant about superhero comics. I know it's not really anything important, and the overwhelming everything threatens to eat our sanity, but... I just feel the need. 

Until recently, I would have said I was a fan of superheroes. I discovered them at around 12, and started borrowing X-Men comics from my local library. For the next four years, I was a devoted Marvel fan, making a regular pilgrimage to the next town over where a newsagent stocked comics. I didn't know about Forbidden Planet, one short bus ride away in Coventry. In fact, it would take a long time for me to learn about actual comics shops. In the late 80s and early 90s in the UK, comics were still a niche thing, considered childish and crude. It wasn't like you could turn on your TV and see films or shows about them, unless they were cartoons. Even then, you had to hope that the BBC or ITV saw the value of broadcasting something like that over something homegrown, and Disney cartoons usually won out. 

When I went to university, I stopped buying comics because my sister convinced me that nobody else would be reading comics... but being a nerdy type, I soon discovered that there were comics fans there and, through their influence, I decamped from the technicolour world of Marvel to read titles like Hellblazer and The Invisibles. The only superhero book I had any interest in was Starman, which was hardly a story of daring-do but had a hero I felt some kinship with. That was mostly because Jack Knight, the hero, rejected the superhero aesthetic, refused to patrol regularly and was largely ambivalent about the whole thing. He did it to make his father proud, and because at the end of the day, there was nobody else to defend his city. Even more importantly, it felt like the story was about how Jack changed through being a hero, without any pressure to hit the status quo button and reset the whole thing.

Eventually, I found my way back to superhero books. Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of Marvel characters: among them, Archangel, Nightcrawler, Thor, Gambit, Rogue, Betsy Braddock and Wolfsbane. My first love at the company has always been the X-Men, probably because, as an ostracised autistic kid, I really felt a lot of kinship with the mutants. I'm sure many people like me did, and the characters have been an allegory for many social movements over the decades. There's not much crossover between the characters I love at DC, unless you count Hawkman, but that's simply because I apparently like characters with wings and the ability to fly. My first love in that universe, though, is and always will be John Constantine. I'll talk about him in another blog entry, though... this piece isn't about my love of chain-smoking Scouse magicians who'd sell their Mum's soul to get one over the Devil. 

What I liked about superheroes was the possibilities they represented. The larger-than-life struggles and how their personal lives impacted them. I liked the moments of character development, and in some ways, I saw myself in the characters as well. With the X-Men, Archangel always felt closest to who I was as a person... and I think that may be part of the problem now. 

What bothers me in the superhero genre is the lack of development and the repetition of plotlines. To return to Archangel, it feels like he's permanently stuck in a position where if he gets the spotlight at all, it's because Apocalypse abused him and put him in a place that, for some reason, he can't recover from. Given the number of other protagonists who've been transformed into Apocalypse's elite henchmen and recovered, it feels strange that Warren Worthington (the third) is still trapped in this space. Ultimately, it feels like Marvel can't think of anything else to do with the character. More than that, it feels like the company can't be bothered to. 

The problem is that once you start seeing this pattern, you start to see that a lot of heroes are basically bleeding out from psychological trauma. Batman with his parents' murder, Spider-Man with Uncle Ben's death, and Daredevil with the accident that left him blind. There's no attempt to treat these conditions; the heroes just suffer through them, mostly because they provide cheap motivations for them to keep throwing away their lives fighting supervillains. They sell a story that once you're broken, all you can do is keep going. The message is that suffering is noble, even if it breaks you... Healing is sidelined and rarely shown. Of modern writers, only Tom King seems to have a good handle on the impact of trauma on the psyche and explores it in his work. 

In part, this frustrates me because heroes are meant to be inspiring... but what are we inspiring people to be? The other element is that it reduces superhero comics from something burgeoning with possibility to just another repeat. We know that any story about Archangel will simply repeat his trauma, because Marvel thinks that sells. The companies selling these stories don't seem to know how to bring their audiences with them as their characters change. As a result, it's easier to simply repeat the same narratives. This effectively maroons characters in their trauma, with no hope of recovery. 

I've reached a point where I can't deal with this. I've changed as a person, and no longer want stories that simply go round and round from A to B and back to A. I want to see change and growth, and superheroes don't provide that. Perhaps they never did.