Tag Archives: Ultimate Spider-Man

Retreat from the Citadel: Confessions of an Ex-Comic Book Reader

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It took me a very long time to realize that mainstream comic book industry isn’t at all interested in me, isn’t at all talking to me; that it is, in fact, talking over my shoulder to the straight white man-boy (and people who identify with the straight white man-boy) reading his comic book behind me.

Every time I imagine that I’m just being hyperbolic, seeing problems where none exist, and return to the beloved hobby of my childhood, I am unceremoniously reminded of just how hostile that environment is to a conscious mind. I made the regrettable mistake of reading the current issue of a comic book that I had long abandoned: Wonder Woman. The book’s current course, and current success, can be traced, I believe, to its decidedly macho-friendly, anti-feminist tone.

It wasn’t enough that this new iteration of the character jettisoned her previous origin of a child being formed from clay by a desperate Queen Hippolyta and blessed with powers by loving set goddesses (and one god) from the Greek pantheon. To add insult to injury, we were told that not only was Wonder Woman now the product of a tryst between Hippolyta and Zeus, the womanizing king of the Olympian gods, but that she also belongs to a tribe of man-hating women that periodically creep away from their island hideout to have sex with unsuspecting men, murder them, and would murder the male offspring from those unions too if not for the kindness of another god. If it sounds like ancient Greek misogynist propaganda with a modern twist, it’s because it is. And it is, in my opinion, all for the benefit of making Wonder Woman relatable to a bunch of men in the industry and in the audience, who simply can’t relate to a character designed to attack patriarchal notions and empower women in revolutionary ways.

In the latest issue of Wonder Woman, another character, a new god named Orion, slaps Wonder Woman on the ass in a fit of sexist entitlement. Wonder Woman is denied the ability to respond to the assault because of other matters that take precedence in the story. The story seems to be saying that there are some things more important that getting upset over some harmless slap and tickle. You can almost hear chants of “Let a man be a man! Stop trying to emasculate us!” in the subtext. The wonder, for me, is in how this scene was deemed acceptable and harmless to begin with.
 

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I’m sure that to Brian Azzarello (the writer of the story) and most guys in general, it was all very innocent, designed to show us, through action, just what kind of rapscallion Orion is. No one asks, however, if there are other, less rape-y ways to convey the same point. I imagine most men don’t see the harm because men rarely have to be on the receiving end of these sorts of violations, which are products of rape culture. Largely, men don’t have to walk through creation tense and braced for anything in nature to leap out on them and sexually violate their bodies and spaces. One out of every six men aren’t raped. Ninety percent of rape victims aren’t men. Men’s bodies aren’t under the constant policing and legislation of other men. Don’t let the members of the “men’s rights” movement (yes, that’s an actual thing) hear you say this, though. Ruling every major institution on Earth apparently isn’t enough; men have to be considered innocent and absolved of every crime, too. Patriarchy is a helluva drug.

When you have the luxury and privilege of wielding massive amounts of institutional power, Wonder Woman getting slapped on the ass in a comic books seems like a silly thing to get worked up about. It doesn’t matter that this act is just the latest in a string of very clear hostilities toward the idea of female and feminine self-government and self-determination—hostilities that aren’t limited to comic books. I propose that this action isn’t harmless, not even when it happens in the funny pages. I believe depictions like these reinforce the idea that there are no limits on men’s behavior, particularly in relation to women’s bodies. If the most powerful woman in the universe can get slapped on the ass and all she gets to do in response is get angry and, generally, live with the violation, men’s power is reaffirmed and all is right with the universe.

Except that it isn’t right.

I made another crucial error: I posted my feelings on a comic book message board. Not known for their cultural or political sensitivities, many comic book message boards are merely echo chambers in which people who are, by and large, sycophants gather to reinforce each other’s narrow-mindedness and reflect each other’s images at twice their actual size (to paraphrase Virginia Woolf). The audience, at least by way of message boards and comments sections, is remarkably repetitive when faced with sociopolitical criticism about the stuff they love: first defense, then denial, then a hyper “rational” analysis of why there couldn’t possibly be any misogyny/racism/sexism/homophobia in their beloved art form. They insist that the problem lies with the observer not with the object being observed. Dwayne McDuffie, rest his soul, had this audience pegged.

My comments were met, mostly, with simmering rage or the aforementioned cognitive dissonance: “Let me explain this to you rationally: I’m not a bigot and I like this book. So this book couldn’t possibly be bigoted in any way.” Anyone who agreed with my commentary was summarily dismissed, talked over, or explained away.

And, of course, there’s the tried-and-true option of dragging out the token members of the audience, the few blacks or women or queer people in the ranks who support the status quo. Nothing says “conversation ender” like, “Well, I have a female friend who said it was okay. So it’s not misogynist.” As though institutional pathologies like misogyny, racism, or homophobia require that every member of the oppressed class sign off on its identification; as though members of oppressed classes don’t succumb to the psychological warfare that is bigotry and participate in and perpetuate ideologies that are harmful to them and others in their social group; as though the oppressed don’t sometimes identify with the oppressors. Stockholm syndrome is very real.

I’ll agree that the problem lies within the observer (only not the observer the aforementioned audience believes), but the problem also lies within the object being observed. The reason why this audience doesn’t perceive any harm, intentional or otherwise, is because the creators, institutions, and this audience are literally speaking the same language. White supremacy isn’t white supremacy amongst white supremacists; it’s reality. Misogyny isn’t misogyny amongst misogynists; it’s normalcy. Homophobia isn’t homophobia to homophobes; it’s just the way God intended things. It’s very difficult for anyone inside a giant circle to have the necessary perspective to perceive its full shape.

There’s a reason relatively few women, black people, or openly queer people are employed in the mainstream comic book industry or hold relatively few positions of power within the institutions that distribute them. There’s a reason why those who are employed there have to do much to tamp down any perceived differences in opinion or worldview and get on board with the straight white male status quo. It has nothing to do with women, black people, or queer people not being talented enough to compete or there not being enough them present in the potential talent pool. It has everything to do with already being friends with an influential straight white guy at the company. It has everything to do with a group of frightened individuals setting up shop in their citadel, trying desperately to fortify their tower of straight white male hegemony in a world where that hegemony is becoming decidedly less tenable.

And you don’t only see this happening in the comic book industry. You see it in mainstream politics as well with organizations like the GOP trying to decide if they should jettison some of their more outrageous, overt bigotries in order to court enough Latinos, women, and gays to win elections. It reads to me as a sort of panic, a sort of regrouping of the straight white guard as they try to figure out what it means to be straight, white, and male in a world where queer people are demanding civil rights, a black man is the leader of democracy, and women are asserting control over their own bodies.

One of the ways in which they think they can reclaim the power they believe they’ve lost is through media propaganda. Since Obama’s re-election in 2008, for example, we’ve seen the incredible return of overt racist paradigms like the white savior and black pathology, as well as the puzzling return of 1950s values in relation to feminism post-Sarah Palin—not just in the real world, but in entertainment media as well: Did you miss World’s Finest #7, where Power Girl decided she knew everything she needed to know about African nations and their child soldiers because she watched KONY 2012? Or what about Miles Morales in Ultimate Spider-Man, who was not only at odds with his criminal uncle, but has to hide his identity from his ex-con father, too? Because, you know, nothing says “black” like criminal pathology. And don’t get me started on Bunker in Teen Titans, the gay Mexican character whose power is, wait for it: creating purple energy bricks. Purple. Bricks. I couldn’t create that big of a stereotype even if I tried really hard. But for some folks, it’s apparently rather easy.
 

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We’ve seen these corporations pay lip service to diversity, but it’s always diversity for diversity’s sake—that is, diversity because they think it makes them look cool and hip in multicultural spaces. But bigots don’t understand the difference between diversity and tokenism, nor do they recognize diversity as something beneficial to themselves. They don’t see it as something that can open them and their organizations up to new ideas, new audiences, and new ways of being. They always regard the concept of diversity suspiciously, as something forced upon them, a notion that tries to coerce them into being politically correct, a practice the makes them, against their will, admit into their ranks “unqualified” people who didn’t “earn” their spot (because, you know, being a popular writer’s friend is considered earning a spot).

When called out on their nonsense, these corporations blame the bigotry on their audience: “Well, we tried to get this product featuring X Minority Figure off the ground, but the audience just wasn’t ready for it.” Bigots, unfortunately, have a collusive and mutually beneficial relationship that allows blame to be passed around (but never landing where it should), while keeping us distracted from the fact the structural impediments remain unmoved. And that’s all according to plan.

I’ve concluded that it’s useless to have these discussions with people whose fantasies rest on the fact that none of the social conventions upon which comic books stories are built can be seriously challenged or interrogated. It’s pointless to have these debates in this “post-racial” age where you’re only a racist if you use the n-word, you’re only a misogynist if you beat up women, and you’re not a homophobe, you’re just beholden to religious principles. Bigots—even passive, rational ones—are incredibly similar in their reaction to criticism: “My feelings are more important than your struggles.”

The only option left to individuals like myself who have had enough of the microaggressions and the chorus of defenders and deniers—who have had enough of the grating, tone-deaf depictions of women, people of color, and queer people in these often poorly written, poorly drawn, increasingly expensive books—is to opt out. And that decision is made evermore clear when you consider that the industry has been bigoted since its inception and you simply weren’t conscious enough to detect it when you were a kid. While the country has taken strides toward being a more perfect union, the mainstream comic book industry has, for the most part, dug its heels in and refused to move.

So I admit defeat. I am, ironically, waving the white flag. The bigots win. I’m plum tuckered out. I don’t have the energy to fight anymore. I say if they like the comic book industry and its product just the way they are, faults and all, let them have it. As long as I don’t ever have to read a misogynist Wonder Woman story or a racist Spider-Man story or a Superman story told by a homophobic extremist ever again, it’s all good. There are better products to spend my money on. That the mainstream comic book industry doesn’t want my money for fear of alienating their core audience of bubble blowers is the fault of their bad business model, not mine. In the meantime, I’ll be over here reading novels digitally on my iPad. These works, at least, reflect the world as it is, as it could be, as it should be, rather than as some defective, reductive supremacist fantasy.
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Robert Jones, Jr. is a writer/editor from Brooklyn, New York and creator of the Son of Baldwin blog. He is currently working on his first novel.
 

Bendis Still Sends Me

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It’s easy to knock corporate super-hero comics.  There’s the relentless, unthinking sexism; the apparent paucity of fresh concepts; the tendency to confuse horrific violence with thematic sophistication (and the related inability or unwillingness to address younger readers); the summer crossovers that so often and so transparently put sales figures ahead of internal coherence or aesthetic quality; and the frequent reboots, which may once have been justified as a way of shedding the weight of unwieldy continuity, but now smack of greed, desperation, and cluelessness in about equal measure.

These various problems can be diagnosed as symptoms of a fundamental disrespect for the comic book audience at the corporate level.  But creators, too, are often subjected to this same disrespect, even as they continue to labor within the constraints of the current system.  Probably no one reading this needs to be told about the historic injustices that have arisen out of the “work-for-hire” production model; nor is it hard to imagine the chilling effect that this model must have over time for even the most successful practitioners of the genre.  (Indeed, it’s probably no coincidence that many of my personal favorite writers and artists often seem to do their best work when engaged with creator-owned projects; by comparison, producing comics under a “work-for-hire” contract must feel like swimming with weights.)

The writers and artists who do manage to produce work of consistent quality within the corporate system, on a monthly basis, sometimes for years on end, have therefore beaten some long odds, in my opinion.  And perhaps in such circumstances it is all the more important to offer commendations when commendations are due.

I am here, then, to sing the praises of Brian Michael Bendis and his various co-conspirators for their work on Marvel’s Ultimate Spider-Man.

First, and for the tiny handful of you who might not know this (“Hi, Mum!”): Marvel’s so-called Ultimate universe was initially conceived back in 2001 or so, as a way of re-starting the adventures of the most well-established Marvel characters from their origin stories — with a clean-slate, as it were.  The official reasoning was that creators would no longer be tied to decades of prior continuity, and that this would also encourage new readers to jump on board.  Less often acknowledged, but probably equally important was the opportunity to jettison aspects of the older narratives that had simply dated.  For example, in the 1960s, Stan Lee’s default “origin story” involved some sort of inadvertent exposure to radioactivity.  But radioactivity is a less mysterious concept today than it was sixty years ago.  We don’t expect it to give us superpowers; we do expect it to give us cancer.  Consequently, in the Ultimate universe, corporate and government sponsored experiments in genetic mutation — almost always carried out at the behest of the military — have taken up the plot function that was once fulfilled by radioactive “isotopes.”  (And there’s probably a whole essay of the cultural studies type that could be written about the political and cultural implications of this particular shift of emphasis within the superheroic fantasy, but I’m not going to write it.)

Within the current continuity of this Ultimate universe, a teenager named Miles Morales has recently taken up the webbed mantle and power-and-responsibility mantra of Spider-Man.  Miles resembles his predecessor, Peter Parker, in many ways — he’s intellectually gifted, ethically centered, and terribly young to be a hero — just thirteen years old, in fact.  But unlike Peter Parker, who was obviously Caucasian, Miles is the child of an African-American father and a Hispanic mother.  Marvel’s decision to re-boot one of their flagship characters as a person of color has generated a fair degree of media interest, and even seems to have ruffled the feathers of a few right-wingers and white-supremacist types.  I’ll say a bit more about that, but for now I just want to note that this is just one of the reasons that I like the comic.  Here are some others.

1) It is a great “all-ages” book — or a great 10-years-old-and-up book, at least.  This is important, because there are just not that many quality genre comics that can engage both younger readers and adults out there these days.  In fact, most of my favorite current genre titles (Casanova, Criminal, The Sixth Gun, Scalped) are not appropriate for kids at all.

It is ironic that great comic books for younger readers should nowadays be so very hard to find, given the original target audience for the medium; but perhaps it should not be much cause for surprise.  Quality children’s literature has always been unusual, after all — which is partly why works like Alice In Wonderland or the Oz books or Where The Wild Things Are become objects of veneration.  The really good stuff is rare as hens’ teeth.

I’m not saying that Bendis’s work on Ultimate Spider-Man is an achievement to be ranked alongside Carroll’s or Baum’s or Sendak’s.  That would hardly be comparing like-with-like, after all.  I’m simply saying that there are only a tiny handful of quality monthly genre titles that can engage an adult audience while remaining appropriate for younger readers — and Ultimate Spider-Man is one of them.  (If you are looking for others, Atomic-Robo and Princeless are also pure, joyous fun, but of course neither of them are superhero books.  In fact, it really would be hard for me to name another superhero title with the “all-ages” appeal of USM right now.)

2) While it is easy (and often appropriate) to be cynical about any gesture made by Marvel or DC towards traditionally marginalized members of the readership, I think Bendis’s decision to take one of Marvel’s most recognizable characters and recast him as a person of color is not only entirely commendable, but has also been (thus far) very well handled.  Yes, Marvel and DC can always create “new” non-Caucasian heroes, but the fact is that if the marquee, iconic figures are always white, well … the marquee, iconic figures are always white.

And yes, it is possible to belittle or undermine this move by saying it’s “only” the Spider-Man of the Ultimate universe that we are talking about — as if that makes this a less “real” change.  But even leaving aside the silliness of arguing which version of Marvel universe is more “real,” I think that the people who are inclined to say this have not been following the comics for some time, and therefore don’t realize that the Ultimate universe has now been established for well over a decade.  For a lot of readers, the Ultimate Marvel Universe IS the “real” Marvel universe.  What’s more, the recent Marvel movies owe at least as much to the characters as they are presented in the Ultimate line as they do to the regular 616 line.  So this is not the equivalent of a “what if” or “imaginary” story in which someone other than Peter Parker gets bitten by that magical spider.  It’s a much bigger deal than that.

Nor can the invention of Miles Morales be written off simply as an attempt to boost flagging sales with a headline grabbing plot twist.  While comic book sales in general are apparently regarded as dismal, Ultimate Spider-Man has (I believe) been the most consistently successful Ultimate title.  It’s certainly the longest running — and I’ve personally enjoyed it more than almost any of the Spider-Man books published in the 616 universe for the last decade.  (I’ll admit that Bagley’s art put me off for quite a while.  But I gradually got over it, and eventually came to appreciate his considerable storytelling skills, even though I still generally dislike the details of his faces and figure work.)  So this wasn’t a “hail Mary” pass, or a last ditch effort to save a dying title.  On the contrary, it appears to have been a thoughtful, considered, and even potentially risky move, given the relatively high profile of the book in question.

When we first meet Miles and his parents it is at a “lottery” for places in an elite private school.  They are surrounded by other anxious parents and children, and the importance of this lottery for these families — as a possible route for their children out of the broken public school system, and into the middle class — is made very clear.  When Miles’s number comes up — in a nice touch, the same number is marked on the genetically modified spider that will later bite him, and give him powers — his mother embraces him weeps in relief: “You have a chance. You have a chance.”

By means of this “school lottery” subplot, then, larger themes of race- and poverty-based exclusion have been placed at the center of the new Spider-Man’s origin story. This doesn’t make USM a political tract.  But it suggests that Bendis understands something very important.  He understands that the history of racism — and the attendant problem of the representation of race in various forms of media — is not simply rectified by a change in the hero’s pigmentation.  Miles Morales’s experiences also need to be different from Peter’s — and not just because he is a different person, but also because he is a person-of-color living in a culture where race relations are vexed (to put it laughably mildly).

Those who haven’t read the title, please don’t get me wrong.   Miles’s race is not THE only or even the central issue in the comic; but it is part of the fabric of his experience — just as it should be.

This is tricky stuff to pull off, in any medium, in any genre.  So far it seems to me Bendis is getting it absolutely right.  He deserves praise for that.

4) Finally, the mere creation of Miles Morales seems to have genuinely pissed off Glenn Beck.  Of course, Beck is the king of manufactured outrage — but if Bendis did manage to get under Beck’s toad-like-skin for even a minute, that only makes me want to cheer him on.

So, to come back to my initial observations: it seems to me that there’s a lot of instinctive critical hostility out there online (and also in academic circles) among comics critics when it comes to the superhero genre, and some of it  — maybe even most of it — is justified.

Nevertheless, I can’t help feeling that some of this critical hostility is misplaced — almost like what some philosophers would call a category mistake.  Perhaps the confusion originates in the confused status of the genre itself, as something that began as a form of children’s entertainment, and which therefore gets into all kinds of difficulties when it aspires to “adult” sophistication. But just as it makes no sense to criticize Wall-E for not being Vertigo, similarly, it makes no sense (to me) to attack superhero comics for being superhero comics.  (For being badly drawn or badly written, yes; but for conforming to certain well-established genre conventions, no.)

To put it another way: I don’t expect a Bendis superhero comic to deliver the kind of introspective reflections on parenting and childhood that I expect from, say, the new Alison Bechdel book (which I recently purchased and am keen to read).  I don’t expect his representation of high school to mirror that of an autobiographical cartoonist such as, say, Ariel Schrag.  But within the established conventions of the superhero genre, I find his work consistently entertaining, and often brilliant.  And I think he deserves the highest praise not only for his current work on Ultimate Spider-Man, but also for his previous decade of scripts for the title.

In fact, over the course of his long USM run, Bendis has written some of the only superhero comics that have given me the same “fall-into-the-page” experience that I used to get from the genre when I was a kid (and none of the comics that I read as a kid still work for me THAT way — even when I can find other things to appreciate about them).  Inspired by the latest issues, then, I recently re-read some of those earlier comics from the run — Bendis’s version of the Peter Parker era.  In all honesty, I wasn’t planning on writing critically about these comics, or even thinking too hard about them.  I was too tired for anything that I felt would be more “demanding” — I was just looking for a bit of escapist fun, after a long day teaching (both Hamlet and Watchmen, as it turns out — though not in the same class, I’m sorry to say).

I picked the Venom arc — Venom being a character I never liked in the original Spider-Man universe (an antipathy apparently shared by Bendis himself), but found myself enjoying in his Ultimate incarnation. In Bendis’s revision, the Venom project is something that Peter Parker’s father was working on before he died — a piece of medical research that Richard Parker ends up not owning because (get this) he produced it under a “work for hire” contract for an evil corporation.  The temptation to read this as a self-reflexive commentary on the exploitation of comic book creators is surely irresistible. The story arc ends with a sequence in which Richard Parker speaks from beyond the grave to his son, Peter, via an old VHS tape.  He talks about the feelings of impatience and creative ambition that first led him to sign this flawed “work for hire” contract, and acknowledges that not owning his ideas sucks.  But he also insists on the importance of taking responsibility for one’s own mistakes.  He concludes by telling Peter how much he loves his family — and how having a family at all finally helps him deal with the frustrations he has encountered in the world of his work.  Peter, who has just endured a particularly emotionally punishing series of adventures, is depicted listening to his father with his head bowed.  It’s not the portrait of a winner.  On the contrary, Peter seems utterly crushed.  But as readers we cannot help but nod in assent when Richard Parker expresses hopeful pride in his young son, and faith in the kind of man that his son will become.

The emotional tone of this moment is complex.  It poignantly and powerfully evokes our admiration for the hero not in his moment of triumph, but in the depths of his despair.  And it moved me to reread this sequence.  Indeed, it moved me as much as anything I had encountered earlier that day in the classroom, teaching the works of Shakespeare and Moore.

The critical cliché would be to claim that at moments like this in his Ultimate Spider-Man run Bendis has “transcended the genre.”  But fuck that.  I LIKE genre work, and I wouldn’t patronize any great genre writer with this supposed compliment.  Brian Michael Bendis doesn’t need to transcend the genre to transport me.