snurri | Interview at "A Thousand Faces"

I think there's a much bigger difference between "mad scientist" characters and Tony Stark/Bruce Wayne than the size of their R&D budgets: the former use their inventions to steal while the latter use them to save lives. I'm not saying that there's no subtext to be read in common superhero tropes, but really, how many comic-book villains were actually trying to fund a world-saving invention?

I'm not sure that any of them were trying to fund a world-saving invention, necessarily; but I think that the starting point for a given inventor/innovator character is more important than you seem to be implying, and certainly has a bearing on the villain/hero definition. There's a whole mess of Spider-Man and Daredevil villains--Vulture, Rocket Racer, Stilt-Man--who have used technology that one could easily imagine being used by heroes; the difference is that they don't have the luxury of using it for heroic or humanitarian purposes. Granted, the comics usually portray them as petty thieves and aren't too concerned with the implied class differences, but the economics of the situation would seem to be right there on the page--Bruce Wayne doesn't need to profit from the batarang (and doesn't), Tony Stark doesn't need to profit from his disruptor blast technology (but he probably does). Their built-in privilege means that certain options--hiring themselves out to the Kingpin or the Joker, plotting heists with other super-powered individuals--are not even contemplated. One could easily argue, also, that from a certain perspective Tony Stark (at least) is a supervillain, because in the comics at least he still profits as an arms dealer.

They don't "have the luxury" of pursuing legal applications for their inventions? Are you saying that if they didn't go work for the Kingpin or the Joker, they'd be facing starvation? These people are engineering geniuses; they have more opportunities available to them than the average citizen walking in the background of the comics. What's preventing them from getting a job at Stark Industries or Wayne Enterprises?

Fair question--although one with somewhat troubling implications--but not one that's easily answered by the information we have about these examples, at least. The Vulture was Adrian Toomes, an electronics engineer in a two-man firm whose partner embezzled all the money from the company and "forced" him into a life of crime. Rocket Racer turned to crime (according to Wikipedia) because he became responsible for six younger siblings while still in high school, and couldn't find a legal way to support them all. Stilt-Man's biography is even more sketchy.

I do realize that the obvious counter-example here is Peter Parker; but even there it took something very dramatic and personal to convince him not to use his powers for profit. Wayne and Stark both have similar experiences in their origin stories that convinced them to stand up for truth 'n justice. Many villains have similar tipping points in their origin stories, and economics seems to be a pretty common factor in them. The Vulture's response to having his company ruined or Rocket Racer's desperate need to care for his siblings are more understandable in many ways than Bruce Wayne's obsession.

I'm not making an argument that villains are heroes, or that their choices are good ones. But I find it interesting that it's so often the small-timers who are being used as punching bags, and it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me that if Toomes had started with Stark's money and company, etc., and Stark had been the struggling engineer, that the two may have made very different choices.

I think the counter-question is whether getting a job with Wayne or Stark is the default position for an engineering genius, or a last resort? What if one of these comics geniuses (or not; Stilt-Man's Wiki entry refers to him as "a competent, although perhaps not genius, engineer and inventor") simply didn't wish to work for a mega-corporation, and give up their intellectual property rights to whatever they were working on?

Wayne Enterprises and Stark Industries were just examples; there are presumably plenty of other companies one could work for. In the real world, most inventors don't turn to crime, and I don't see anything in the comics that indicates that their world is substantially more unforgiving in that particular regard. Given that the origins of many villains aren't specified in detail, what made you assume that they turned to crime as a way of retaining IP rights?

Obviously I've hit the IP example too hard, because I'm not trying to say that it's something supported by any of the texts, necessarily. I was using it as an example of why someone might wish to operate outside of the corporate model, and how the deck might be stacked against them.

That said, I'm not advocating crime or saying that the comic-book world should be held to different standards. It's just that I'm interested in a reading of comic book norms as often upholding, not just the status quo of law and order, but also the interests of those who already have money and power, like for example corporations.

RE: this, which I said above:

It's just that I'm interested in a reading of comic book norms as often upholding, not just the status quo of law and order, but also the interests of those who already have money and power, like for example corporations.

I should add that I don't think the comic book world is unlike the real world in this respect.

Okay, that's a better way to phrase it, I think. To what extent is the crimefighting that superheroes engage in a fight for justice, and to what extent is it a force for maintaining the status quo?

Most superheroes operate without government sanction and are thus law-breaking vigilantes, so to a certain extent any non-governmental superhero is upsetting the status quo by (roughly speaking) violating the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force. But most superheroes are forgiven this because much of the time they do what legitimate law enforcement would do if it had the capacity, i.e. superheroes are performing superpowered citizen's arrests. To that extent, superheroes preserve the interests of the rich and powerful in the same way that legitimate law enforcement does.

Do superheroes enforce the law selectively based on the economic status of the criminal (as sometimes happens with legitimate law enforcement)? Superman doesn't give Lex Luthor a pass because he's rich, but Superman only engages Luthor when he has some involvement in violent crime; if Luthor's engaged in more typical white-collar crimes like embezzlement, we don't see it. Should Superman or some other superhero be focusing on that? Do we want to read a comic about a supersmart forensic accountant exposing Enron's misleading financial statements?

Another way to consider your question is, to what extent do superheroes enforce unjust laws? To what extent do they ignore crimes committed by the state? I think the answers vary widely, depending not only on the individual superhero, but on the particular storyline. In Dark Knight Returns, for example, the Green Arrow has clearly opted go against the state; Batman, too, but to a lesser extent. Superman has chosen to largely support it. (Of course, Dark Knight Returns isn't part of regular DC continuity.)

To me the clearest example of anti-establishment superheroes is in the movie The Matrix, which is pretty explicitly about upsetting the status quo. Morpheus, Trinity, and Neo are labeled terrorists by the government, but we as viewers root for them even when they kill lots of security guards. The movie version of V for Vendetta did something similar, but traditional superhero comics don't generally pursue this tack. Maybe they should.

I agree with you that most superheroes aren't stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. But neither are most comic book villains. Batman may not be Robin Hood, but he's far from the Sheriff of Nottingham.

It sounds like we more or less agree. The Matrix and V for Vendetta are good examples of anti-establishment heroes; perhaps The Invisibles as well? At times just about any hero or team has gone against the authorities, but it's usually in cases of "a few bad eggs," i.e. pockets of corruption which are easily cut out of an otherwise healthy system.

As to going after white-collar crime, I think comic-book reality more or less fits with your Lex Luthor example, probably for the same reason that we get TV shows and movies about Eliot Ness and the Untouchables rather than the treasury agents who actually put Capone away. (Although along those lines, have you seen The Dark Knight yet? The accountant's storyline in there was one that I thought had some potential, although it was crowded out by too many other things.)

Yep, I saw The Dark Knight last weekend. I enjoyed it more than you, I think; it's far from perfect, but it's probably the best movie adaptation of a superhero comic to date.

Have you read Jim Henley's essay about superhero stories as the literature of ethics (the way SF is called the literature of ideas)?

Between the two recent Batman movies I might be able to agree with Best Adaptation, it's just that this one in particular I had some major reservations about. Overall I enjoyed the first one more.

I just found and read Henley's essay. (My Google-fu is strong!) He makes a lot of sense; my impulse with essays like that is to try and argue at least my own work out of the lines they draw, but Superpowers fits pretty neatly into that box. Gets me thinking about my own ideas for comics, too. Out of curiosity, Ted, have you ever thought about writing comics?

Not really. I enjoy comics the way I enjoy movies: as a consumer. But I don't think I have sufficient affinity for either medium to tell a story using them.

I felt the same way about the Incredibles and me and Jan got into a big fight about it.

It really, REALLY bothered me that the guy who was trying to look "above his station," who didn't know his place, who wanted and worked, was the bad guy.

Pretty much ruined the movie for me, honestly, even though there was so much to love in it.

Yeah, I pretty much see it as en enjoyable but deeply flawed film, whereas it seems like a lot of folks I knew see it as an undisputed classic.

We introduced Hunter to the Incredibles this past week, even though I, too, hate the "you have to be born special in order to count as a human being" message. We tried to re-frame the movie by explaining to Hunter that the reason that Syndrome wasn't a superhero was because he wasn't trying to help other people and the only person he cared about was himself. We also talked about how cool it was that he invented all these really neat things, and how sad it was that he decided to use them to be a bad guy.

It's kind of messed up how almost anything that comes from Disney (maybe not some Pixar stuff) needs an extensive gloss when you show it to kids. At least, I feel that way about a lot of the films.

Yeah, just about anything coming in -- even a lot of programs supposedly aimed at little kids -- needs to be interpreted for Hunter in ways that reinforce the lessons we want him to learn. Thank goodness for Noggin, which seems most aligned with what we're trying to teach.

Huh. Well, I'm gonna hafta say that I think most of you are missing the point. There's a big difference between using what you have for personal gain, and using what you have to do bad things (be it theft, violence, slander, murder, or deliberately making other people look bad just so you can have a laugh at their expense). One is normal, and socially acceptable. The other is the definition of anti-social behaviour. We can apply the same scales to super-powered actions as we can to regular-powered actions. Even if Spider-man's uncle never died, and he'd gone on to become a famous wrestler and action movie star, that wouldn't make him a bad guy. And Syndrome wouldn't have been a bad guy if he hadn't taken his hissy fit to extreme proportions and decided to kill people. There is a reason why we call them superheroes and supervillains after all.

Hg

Granted that Syndrome is not, in the final analysis, a good guy; but your argument strikes me as almost willfully simplistic. There's a strong argument to be made that Mr. Incredible is partly responsible for the direction that Syndrome's life took, and I don't think that's as easily brushed aside as you imply. The fact that "hero" and "villain" are handy labels doesn't make them any less open to scrutiny.

Wait! Oh, wait -- the implications of your statement kinda scare me. Does that mean that anyone who's ever been brushed off by someone they looked up to has the right to try to kill them, and to kill countless others along the way? What about someone who's bullied in the school yard -- does that make it okay when they become a spouse abuser, or a rapist, or a serial killer? The "literature of ethics" really means a literature of choice. Ethics is all about the choices people make.

And I wasn't using "hero" and "villain" as "handy labels". I was using them as icons to draw attention to the way the social psyche has categorized behaviour. Sort of a "ten million comic book fans can't be completely wrong" statement.

Hg

Show me where I talked about Syndrome's bad actions being justified. I'm talking about cause and effect, and the fact that choices are not made in a vacuum. The comic-book world may be morally black-and-white, but the real world isn't.

Also, I'm not particularly interested in continually clarifying myself to someone who appears determined to deliberately misunderstand, so if you decide to come back with more of the same don't expect a further response.

Well, thank you for clarifying. And please don't assume I (or anyone else, for that matter) misunderstands you on purpose. It could very well be that you were, in fact, unclear. It took a third reading of your statements to understand the point you were trying to make (after your explanation about cause and effect).

Granted that comic-book morality is black-and-white, but I obviously wasn't clear enough about the context of my statements. I was talking about the real world. In fact, if Mr. Incredible is going to go around being a hero, he should really accept the responsibility of being aware of the effect of his actions, attitudes and behaviours on others. He was horribly, callously rude to a young man who was just trying to be helpful, and never bothered to go back and apologize after the fact. (Of course, he also had his own issues to deal with after the fact, like the bystander suing him after he saved the man's life -- which would be like suing an emergency responder for injuring your spine when he pulls you from a burning vehicle.) That, however, doesn't change the fact that Syndrome chose to do bad things, just like Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh chose to blow people up, and just like those postal worker in the '80s and '90s chose to walk into their workplaces and start shooting people. Yes, they all probably had had numerous insults to their psyches piled on them, or may have been clinically insane, but that doesn't change the fact that they all chose to do what they did. No one else put the guns or bombs in their hands and forced them to kill people. They chose.

Similarly, almost all villains in comic books (and the large majority of popular media) choose to do bad things. For almost all of them, there are other options (short of death, which should never be considered an option). Yet they choose (rather, they are written as having chosen) to do bad things, and to continue to do them. Remember, the comics show plenty of heroes who used to be villains (Hawkeye springs immediately to mind), so it's not like there's no precedent for the villains to choose other actions.

Hg

Well, thank you for clarifying. And please don't assume I (or anyone else, for that matter) misunderstands you on purpose. It could very well be that you were, in fact, unclear. It took a third reading of your statements to understand the point you were trying to make (after your explanation about cause and effect).

I don't normally make such assumptions, but I had evidence that suggested that was the case. Remember that the knife of clarity cuts both ways. From your comments you seemed (frankly, you still seem) eager to brand me an apologist for anti-social behavior, fiction or otherwise. I think I can be forgiven for not taking that insinuation well, and for becoming impatient with the need to correct that misapprehension.

As to the rest, yes, choice. You've made your point very clear, albeit unnecessarily, since I at no point disagreed with it.

Interview at "A Thousand Faces"

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