As Purple As Galactus Himself
Halloween is finished for another year, and winter has begun. With the spirit night shenanigans done with, we’ll be returning to the delineations this week. And as you may have noticed, the site has undergone a couple of changes. Very, very purple changes.
I started this Journal in June 2007, although I suppose the real anniversary is October 15th, when regular posting began (and for those interested, we’re fast approaching the 300th post, which is hard to believe). I would have mentioned something a couple of weeks ago, but we were in the middle of the delineation posts and I was on a roll, so I forgot. I think a bit of a change after a year is a good thing, although I may get fed up of the new layout and go back. For the moment, we’ll see how this goes. Anyone spot any problems or issues, or if the new template borks things up for anyone, or if you just find it unbelievably hideous, I’d appreciate a comment or an email and I’ll see what I can do.
A few thoughts on superheroes, as we’ve been discussing them a fair bit recently. With the secret identities that almost always go along with them, they’re an excellent tool for examining themes of duality, dishonesty, masks, and identity itself. I think that in recent years, the superhero genre has become obsessed with these themes, and with good reason. If you want to look grown-up and artistic, you need to define a theme, and this is the easiest and most obvious one.
How many times do we need to see the concept of ‘dichotomy’ addressed in strip form? At which point can we move on from the first ‘artistic’ interpretation of superheroes creators have been eager to play with? At some point, it needs to stop being good enough to crap out something that gives lip service to psychological analysis in order to be complemented on insight. You don’t need a story that can be dissected on multiple levels, anyway (says the man who’s been dissecting away for a couple of weeks). You just need a good superhero story.
I find myself repeating this point over and over, but it is the heart of these posts: superhero stories boil down to interactions between heroes and villains. The drift towards writing stories about how superheroes interact with themselves, how they resolve inner conflicts, is the natural extension of psychological analysis. But it’s very inward-looking, and not the ideal way to tackle a set of characters who were created as a way of externalising various things. Heroes fight with themselves, heroes fight with each other, but rarely do their comics show anything meaning from their fights with supervillains.
This is a deliberate decision on the part of creators. It’s very post-modern to characterise fighting villains as pointless, as a kind of distraction. Millar’s Spider-man sees villains deliberately created by Norman Osborn to divert heroes from doing anything meaningful (oh, by the way, Geek Fail of the day: I had to check what spelling of “Osborn” the character uses. I suppose Norman Osbourne sounds more like a banker, or a dodgy MP). Joe Casey’s Iron Man miniseries The Inevitable has Stark growing ‘beyond’ old fashioned villains. Superman and Lex Luthor’s eternal cycle of battle wastes the potential of both of them.
Very modern, very self-aware, very cynical. We must only enjoy these stories ironically, or not at all. We all have to giggle at a dumb guy in a dumb goblin costume. We are all meta now.
But I tell you, the best stories are ones where Galactus is about to eat the planet, and only the Fantastic Four can save us. Where the Joker’s burning Gotham, and Batman puts out the fires. We don’t need an excuse to enjoy this, or a way to laugh at ourselves. It is more than good enough to engage with the material within its own context. This isn’t to say I don’t like a bit of Clever in my comics. I just don’t want the same fucking Clever I’ve been reading since Alan Moore thought that having Alec Holland be really dead was Clever.
Galactus is a good example, actually. He is coming to eat your world, and you’d better find a way to stop him or everyone’s dead. Conflict doesn’t have to be dumb, just two people slugging it out. Think of the mechanics of dealing with a cosmic threat. Man versus god, Mr Fantastic’s advanced intelligence versus a mind eons old. Brute force and power in play, the Thing becoming a breed of immovable object. And the Surfer: a superb villain, one that is eventually won to our side at an enormous cost to himself. And how evil is Galactus, really? Any more evil than any creature that requires sustenance? That realisation that Galactus has an important purpose comes later than in Fantastic Four #48-50, but the seeds are there. Sure, the resolution via the Ultimate Nullifier is copoutery of the highest order, but it doesn’t negate anything that comes before. There’s a lot in here, and that’s not bad for disposable kid’s entertainment.
So let’s get our superheroes out of their own heads. Let’s have some meaningful external conflict, and not worry quite so much about how our heroes war with themselves. We’ll be addressing the matter of the Hulk this week, and it will be worth bearing some of this in mind for that, because the Hulk is perfect for both these elements: at one level, he’s at war with himself, and as a creature of almost limitless strength, he’s at war with the rest of the world, too.
That reminds me: I’ve been meaning to do some posts to illustrate what I mean by some of the concepts I’ve written about here, by way of good (and bad) stories. I haven’t so far because (a) using the scanner’s a bit like hard work and (b) I don’t tend to use many images here because I like to keep the Journal optimised for sneaky reading at work. Of course, my consideration for where you good people may be reading this blog has just gone straight out the window with the big purple manor house I’m now using as a background, so, you know. Bollocks to it. Time for some pictures.
