Interview at "A Thousand Faces"

[snurri]

I was interviewed by Frank Byrns over at A Thousand Faces: The Quarterly Journal of Superhuman Fiction. An excerpt:

One thing that bothered me about The Incredibles was that the self-made character, the character who went to a determined and ingenious effort to better himself, was the villain. This isn't an uncommon meme in superhero stories; most of the heroes are given power, either through accidents (birth, explosion, radioactive spider-bite) or by way of an inherited fortune. On the villain side we find an inordinate amount of "mad scientist" characters, but really the only difference between them and Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne is the size of their R&D budget--I might turn to crime too, if it was the only way to fund my world-saving invention without handing it over to a corporation.

Check out the journal's other features too, including a whole mess of original fiction!

Comments

[snurri.livejournal.com]

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?

[ted chiang (from livejournal.com)]

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?

[snurri.livejournal.com]

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.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

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.

[ted chiang (from livejournal.com)]

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.

[snurri.livejournal.com]

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.)

[ted chiang (from livejournal.com)]

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)?

[snurri.livejournal.com]

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?

[ted chiang (from livejournal.com)]

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.