I Am Not the Demographic

The recent announcement about the impending changes to the Marvel Universe has served to drive home something I've known for a while, but haven't truly unpacked and considered until now. For those not following the state of Marvel comics, it was announced last week that the primary Marvel continuity (the 616, as it's commonly referred to) will be destroyed at the beginning of the upcoming Secret Wars event, and a 'Battleworld' will be stitched together from chunks of that Marvel Earth and dozens of alternate Earths. Supposedly this change is intended to be permanent and will be the setting for Marvel comics going forward.

It's possible, of course, that this will end up going the way of Heroes Reborn and the changes will be walked back. I fully believe, however, that Marvel really is intending to try and make this the new status quo especially after DC's linewide reboot a few years ago. Either way, come May neither of the main super-hero universes I grew up with will exist any longer. Both will have been replaced with newer, 'fresher' versions.

This serves to really drive home the message that I am no longer the target demographic they're after, and I haven't been for a while now. At 37, I no longer qualify as a young adult, and my habits aren't what's driving the decisions big media companies are making. You see the same thing with movies, where properties like Transformers and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been re-imagined in ways that are utterly unappealing to me. Why should I expect them to appeal to me? They're not for me; they're for the teenagers and young adults of today.

This isn't to say that no one is making media for me. Certainly nostalgia has been big in recent years, and there are plenty of cool Kickstarters and indie projects aimed squarely at us children of the 80s. But the big companies, the Disneys and Warner Brothers, the EAs and Sonys, they've moved on. Any interest of mine in their products is now a happy bonus for them, not the goal.

It would be easy to become bitter and rail against the perceived injustice of this abandonment, but that would hardly do me any good, and it certainly wouldn't be healthy. Thanks to the internet, niche products can survive and thrive, so there will always be new things for me to read and watch and play, I'll just have to look a little harder to find them. And I'll have to learn to let go of the things that are no longer for me. I'm going to continue reading Marvel's books at least until Secret Wars, and then I'll have a decision to make. It's possible I'll decide that this new direction is something I enjoy and want to follow, but I don't find that likely. If it's not, I'll have to close the book on Marvel and move on. It's good to know when to let things go.

Justice, Like Lightning...

So I mentioned my favorite superhero team yesterday, and that their existence was a direct result of the less than amazing Onslaught event that occured in mid-90s Marvel Comics.  Well today you get to find out who they are. (Marvel Comics fans should already have a pretty good idea)

So in 1996, Marvel decided it was time to do something big.  DC had recently killed and resurrected Superman and then replaced Batman with a crazy guy in armor, and apparently Marvel wanted in on this.  Thus, Onslaught the X-Men story that killed the Avengers and Fantastic Four.  Basically, Professor X birthed/became an evil super-powerful psychic entity due to his mind-wiping Magneto.  Somehow Magneto's evil brain impregnated Xavier's psychic brain or some such.  I'm honestly still not 100% clear on it; I wasn't actually reading comics at the time having quit a couple years prior, shortly after the Spider-Man Clone Saga started.  That's a whole different barrel of crazy we won't get into today.

Anyway, evil super psychic guy.  Ultimately, to defeat him, a whole bunch of super-heroes had to throw themselves into him to disrupt his energy form and destroy him.  Conveniently, the mutant heroes couldn't be a part of this for fear that Onslaught might possess one of them and start the whole thing over, so the Fantastic Four and the Avengers sacrificed themselves.  No more Avengers.  Well, some of the C-list guys were still around, but they went on like one mission afterwards that went really bad, then disbanded.

So that led into Heroes Reborn, where Marvel re-imagined the characters who had died in the main Marvel Universe in a new edgier universe written and drawn by Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld.  It was kind of an early attempt at the Ultimate Marvel Universe as done by Image Comics.

Back in the main reality, there was a sudden hole in the superhero world.  The Avengers were gone, so who would protect the world?  Into this gap came a new team, the Thunderbolts!

Okay, it's a pretty typical superhero team: patriotic leader, power armor guy, giant super-strong guy, tech guy, etc, etc.  Cool character designs, but what make it special?  Ah, well that's where the final page of issue 1 comes in.

Wolves in sheeps' clothing!  Villains masquerading as heroes in hopes of gaining Avengers-level security clearance!  This was huge; nothing like this had been done before.  Individual villains pretending to be heroes for a single story maybe, but not a book with that as the base premise.   Better yet, some of these were the sort of villain who might not want to give up the fame and respect that comes with being a hero.  On top of that, this actually remained a secret until the book hit stands.  Nowadays it seems like every big twist is spoiled weeks or months out, but this one had full impact.

I came across this book while leafing through comics at Books-A-Million one day.  I got to that last page and was just amazed.  I bought it immediately and got every issue religiously until the day they turned it into super-hero fight club.  Boy, that was weird.

Thunderbolts is single-handedly responsible for my getting back into comics.  From that one book, I branched out to pick up other Marvel books.  Then Heroes Return brought back the characters that died in Onslaught, and I was pretty much in it for good.

Death in Comics

Isey's ruminations in response to my post yesterday got me thinking more about death in comics.  Death has been a part of superhero comics for a long time, and has been handled in varying ways.  Sometimes it's been done well, but more often it just seems like a last desperate attempt to do something shocking with a character that isn't as relevant as they once were.

One of the earliest superhero deaths was that of Lightning Lad, way back in 1963.  He remained dead for a less than a year and was then resurrected by super-science.  There was never really any question that he would be back, though; even the end blurb of the story he died in alludes to his eventual resurrection.  Gwen Stacy is another famous death from the 60's, and one of the few that hasn't been overturned.  Later appearances have inevitably been clones.

These days, death and resurrection seem to go hand in hand, just another plot device among many.  I can't say I entirely disapprove of characters in superhero comics dying, but I do think it should be rare and meaningful.  The death of the original Captain Marvel is a good example of a superhero death that was well handled and made for an excellent story.  Much of the story is actually focused on how his friends and fellow superheroes deal with his death.

Barry Allen is another character whose death I can't disapprove of.  The Silver Age Flash went out in the most superheroic of ways, saving not just the world, not even just the universe, but an entire multiverse from destruction.  His death in Crisis on Infinite Earths ended and era and passed the torch to his sidekick, Wally West, who took up the mantle of the Flash.

More often, though, character death seems to be a way to try and raise the stakes by knocking off a few heroes to show that the threat should be taken seriously.  Avengers Disassembled killed off Hawkeye, Vision, Ant-Man, Jack of Hearts, and Agatha Harkness among others to try and drive the threat of the Scarlet Witch's madness home.  It's worth pointing out that the first three of those characters have all been returned to life since, and the remaining two could be easily brought back at any time based on their established powers.

It's always possible that part of why I accept the deaths from longer ago is the simple fact that they occurred before I was reading comics.  To me, Wally West was the Flash and Gwen Stacy had always been dead.  I'm sure readers of the time were as dismayed by their deaths as I was when Nightcrawler died (he's also back now, by the way).  Time heals all wounds, and distance lends objectivity.

Ultimately, death is a part of the story now, for good or ill.  I guess I can't complain too much, since it seems even the most ignominious of superhero deaths have a silver lining.  Without Avengers Disassembled we would never have gotten the sublime Young Avengers.  And my all-time favorite superhero team owes its existence to one of the most derided of crossovers, the story that killed off the Fantastic Four and Avengers all at once, Onslaught.

Heroes Reborn, on the other hand, was pretty much 100% hot garbage.

On Retcons

Superhero comics, particularly Marvel and DC, have a number of peculiarities that come from effectively being incredibly long serial works.  You get the strange effect of having an ongoing setting that has been built up over the course of decades by a great number of authors.  Individual characters can go through periods of wildly different characterization due to changing times, changing writers, and the demands of the company as a whole.

One of the most uniquely comic-booky of concepts is the retcon.  Short for retroactive continuity, a retcon occurs when an aspect of established continuity is changed after the fact.  You can into a lot of debate over just what counts a retcon.  Is it any change to the past at all? Does it matter if it's done by the same writer who created the element being changed, or by a different writer?

I view retcons as story changes that actively modify past stories and directly contradict continuity as it previously existed.  It's not a perfect definition, but mostly it works.  Superman's return after his apparent death wouldn't be a retcon because he was never intended to stay dead; Barry Allen's return from the dead is, since his death was meant to be permanent.

What got me thinking about this is a series of retcons that have been going on over the past few years in Marvel Comics around Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D.  Specifically, Jonathan Hickman's Secret Warriors comic that ran from 2009-2011 and the current Original Sin event.  Both have resulted in major changes, but where I ended up happy with Secret Warriors turned out, I've been more and more disappointed with Original Sin as it goes on.

I think in both cases a lot of the impetus has been a desire to bring the comic book versions of Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. more in line with the movie version.  Where movie Fury is Sam Jackson, the comic book Fury is a white guy who fought in World War II and became a super spy in the 60's.  He's kept young by a serum called the Infinity Formula.

Without spoiling too much, Secret Warriors ended with Nick leaving S.H.I.E.L.D., breaking his triple-agent girlfriend out of prison, and riding off into the sunset.  It was a great send-off that retired the character after giving him one more great story.  I was sad to see Nick go, but I was okay with it.

Spoilers for Original Sin after this point.

Original Sin brought him back to reveal that he's been secretly murdering aliens and monsters for decades to preemptively protect Earth from them.  The Infinity Formula wore off, so he's an old man now.  He's apparently murdered the Watcher.  And his best friend was actually killed in 1966 and all his appearances since then were actually a robotic replacement.

If the final issue of the story doesn't end with Fury dead, I'll be shocked.  Everything about this story just feels like an attempt to not only ensure he's no longer usable, but also no longer liked.  I'm sure once this is finished, it'll be a long time before we see him again.  What makes me sad is that he was already set aside, but in a way that seemed appropriate to the character.

Eventually though, decades from now most likely, someone will decide they want to bring him back.  And they'll do it, because in comic books death is never permanent.  Just ask Barry Allen.

Thalen Goes to the Movies

Guardians of the Galaxy hit theaters this weekend.  It takes some doing to get me to watch a movie in the theater, but so far anything from Marvel Studios is pretty much a lock.  As mentioned yesterday, I'm a long-time comic collector, and the Marvel Universe is my first and strongest love.  Beyond that, I tend to develop a particular attachment to the more minor and obscure characters, so a Marvel movie outside the traditional super-hero mold was right up my alley.  Guardians of the Galaxy was great fun, and the best space opera I've seen in years.

As an aside, I've seen confusion about when the Guardians were created in the comics.  This version of the team originated in 2008, yes.  But the individual characters have been around much longer.  Apart from Groot, whose first appearance was in 1960, they all hail from the early to mid 70's, a time when some seriously high-concept stories were coming out of the House of Ideas thanks to creators like Jim Starlin, Steve Engelhart, Steve Gerber, Bill Mantlo, and more.  I don't think it's any accident that the soundtrack for Guardians of the Galaxy is made up of songs from that same era.

The 70's also gave us most of the key plot elements that Guardians of the Galaxy uses. (Minor spoilers here, though most of this you would know about from the trailers.)  Thanos, the Infinity Gems, Xandar, and the Celestials all entered the Marvel universe in the 70's.  Speaking of the Celestials, can I say how much joy it gave me to see a full-on Kirby-style Celestial appear?

My hope now is that if this movie does as well as it seems poised to, and if the Ant-Man movie succeeds, that this could open the door for more of the weirder and less 'traditional superhero' aspects of the Marvel Universe to show up, and even headline.  Just coming out of Guardians, there are easy paths for Marvel to introduce Nova, the Eternals, or Adam Warlock.