As I am wont to do every few weeks, I spent my Wednesday afternoon reading comics. Today, I read DC's Identity Crisis limited series, the pseudo-event that led to the most recent Massive Universe-wide Crossover Events (tm). The general plot is about a new threat to heroes that targets not just them, but their families and friends - a villain who knows their Identities (remember, in the ever-realistic world of comics, nobody can see through the clever disguise of Clark Kent's eyeglasses).
On one hand, I enjoyed the way that the series author, Brad Metzler, explicitly wrestled with continuity and history of the DC universe. This is what most of my current research is about - how current writers manage to write unique and innovative stories about characters that have existed in series form for decades (some characters, like Superman, have been in more-or-less continuous print since 1939).
In this series, there was a concerted focus on characters and stories from the 1970s and 1980s, as Metzler attempted to explain the 'familar' plots and behaviors in a clearly modern context, filling in the gaps between past issues, taking great pains to show what happens to the superheroes and supervillains after the spectacular fighting is finished.
What bothers me about Identity Crisis is, for lack of a better word, its intensity. Metzler's not just re-writing the old stories, he's making them a lot less fun - not only is there an average of one brutal murder per issue (there's 6 issues), but the plot pivots on the 1970s Justice League (the classic "League of Heroes," just before J.M. DeMatties transformed the league into a sitcom-style grouping of extremely quirky personalities) essentially lobotomizing one villain and erasing the memories of several others (as well as Batman, who was the sole dissenting voice in the whole magic-brain-messing stuff). The 'lobotomy' is how Metzler explains the chronic inefficiency and foolishness of most of the great supervillains. What's worse is the reason for the lobotomizing: the graphic rape of a League member's wife.
Other comics authors have famously used graphic violence in the process of criticizing mainstream comics - Alan Moore has several sequences involving rape, assaults, and violent beatings in most books, starting with Watchmen, and Grant Morrison's run on The Authority had a nausea-inducing scene where the Batman-analogue sodomizes a defeated villain [let's see how many Google hits that phrasing gets me]. In these other cases, violence takes place outside of dominant continuity - both Moore and Morrison are clearly using archetypes of well-known characters to 'safely' develop criticisms.
What makes Identity Crisis different is that now the violence has been established as part of dominant superhero continuity - worse, narrative history has been rewritten (literally), so that violence has always been part of the superhero story.
[If you've read this far, thanks - I'm on a rant-friendly mood on this topic, as I'm developing a similar reading of Ed Brubaker's Captain America series for next March's PCA conference.]
2 comments:
-interesting critique.
-the name of the author of identity crisis is spelled meltzer, not metzler.
-there's a general trend now in the dcu, perhaps growing out of identity crisis, that comics can't really be good or realistic or whatever unless lots of people are dying. dan didio has basically said as much in some newsarama interviews.
I'm sure Meltzer would spell my name wrong if given a choice, so...meh
The whole "killing off characters" trend isn't anything new, but I think that the brutal manner of death is a little troubling. When you can't tell the difference between JLA and the Authority, there's a problem.
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