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Places where Comics and Life don't mesh
Barnes and Noble sells graphic novels, and TPBs. So sometimes, when I'm on break and just sitting down, as opposed to standing for 8 hours straight, I go grab one, since I can read decently far in them in 15 minutes or so. There's shelves and shelves of manga, and most of the American stuff is Marvel, but there's random other stuff too. One of the random other things I picked up was a Superman book. I like Superman in theory, but he's just so uber it's hard to write him well. I'm more of a Batman guy. But Superman's still like THE archetypical superhero.
But there's times when the metaphysics and underlying assumptions of superhero-dom don't mesh with real life, and then somebody tries to involve current events and it doesn't feel right at all. This was one of those times.
I don't keep up with the DC universe as a whole, so I couldn't tell you which fictional countries exist, which real ones, and so on. I knew that Luthor had been elected president at one point, which seemed an interesting story. But this had nothing to do with that. In the collection I read, "Unconventional Warfare" I think it was called, involved two separate plot threads. In one, there's somebody who wants to kill Superman, because he drains our Precious Bodily Fluids and would cause the Earth's death in 4.9 billion years. He's killed and captured and brainwashed some alien family to do this. Okay, that's kinda goofy, but it's also accepted fare for comics. There's also a subplot to this about Clark Kent being fired then re-hired so he's now working the Special Response Unit beat. Cops that go try and stop supervillians. So that's all about expected and well and good and within the bounds of goofy comic book plots.
In the other main plot thread, Lois Lane is being sent to report on the DC universe's version of the Iraq War. And this is where things started to fall apart for me. It's not that I can't see Lois Lane going to cover the Iraq war. I can see that fine. She's a reporter, and theoretically a good one, for all that she's spent much of her comic life getting into mishaps for Superman to rescue her.
The problem comes later on in the comic, when Lois is embedded with her group of soldiers, and they're pinned down by a sniper. The action here's cutting between Lois and the soldiers, and Superman fighting back in Metropolis. I know, in theory, this is supposed to be literary paralleling, both characters lives in danger, etc, etc, but it didn't work for me. At all. See, Superman's SUPERMAN, FFS, his life's not really in danger. He's the main character, and they already did the "Superman dies" thing. And contrasting the soldiers pinned down and being picked off by the sniper, and I just don't care about Superman and some other costumed dude kicking each other through walls. It doesn't matter.
The soldiers are fighting, and dying, and that little bit of reality doesn't mesh with costumed aliens fighting in Metropolis very well, at all. On the one hand, you have Superman, the JLA, alien empires, etc, and on the other you have guys younger than me in the desert and scared and people shooting at them. I can see the logic of Superman feeling he had to stay neutral in fights between nations of Earth, or something, but the philosophical disconnect between the worlds is just too much.
Superman's too powerful to work well in "gritty realism", unless it's amazingly well written. Which I guess this wasn't. It wasn't bad, and would have been fine with Superman in his universe of operatic space emperors, mad scientists, and comic book hyperbole. The Iraq war just felt like an unnecessary and out of place addition. Which is mostly how it is IRL, too, but we don't have a flying guy in pajamas who's powerful enough he could scare people into surrendering, just by showing up.
Tags: Mindscribbles, Comics
But there's times when the metaphysics and underlying assumptions of superhero-dom don't mesh with real life, and then somebody tries to involve current events and it doesn't feel right at all. This was one of those times.
I don't keep up with the DC universe as a whole, so I couldn't tell you which fictional countries exist, which real ones, and so on. I knew that Luthor had been elected president at one point, which seemed an interesting story. But this had nothing to do with that. In the collection I read, "Unconventional Warfare" I think it was called, involved two separate plot threads. In one, there's somebody who wants to kill Superman, because he drains our Precious Bodily Fluids and would cause the Earth's death in 4.9 billion years. He's killed and captured and brainwashed some alien family to do this. Okay, that's kinda goofy, but it's also accepted fare for comics. There's also a subplot to this about Clark Kent being fired then re-hired so he's now working the Special Response Unit beat. Cops that go try and stop supervillians. So that's all about expected and well and good and within the bounds of goofy comic book plots.
In the other main plot thread, Lois Lane is being sent to report on the DC universe's version of the Iraq War. And this is where things started to fall apart for me. It's not that I can't see Lois Lane going to cover the Iraq war. I can see that fine. She's a reporter, and theoretically a good one, for all that she's spent much of her comic life getting into mishaps for Superman to rescue her.
The problem comes later on in the comic, when Lois is embedded with her group of soldiers, and they're pinned down by a sniper. The action here's cutting between Lois and the soldiers, and Superman fighting back in Metropolis. I know, in theory, this is supposed to be literary paralleling, both characters lives in danger, etc, etc, but it didn't work for me. At all. See, Superman's SUPERMAN, FFS, his life's not really in danger. He's the main character, and they already did the "Superman dies" thing. And contrasting the soldiers pinned down and being picked off by the sniper, and I just don't care about Superman and some other costumed dude kicking each other through walls. It doesn't matter.
The soldiers are fighting, and dying, and that little bit of reality doesn't mesh with costumed aliens fighting in Metropolis very well, at all. On the one hand, you have Superman, the JLA, alien empires, etc, and on the other you have guys younger than me in the desert and scared and people shooting at them. I can see the logic of Superman feeling he had to stay neutral in fights between nations of Earth, or something, but the philosophical disconnect between the worlds is just too much.
Superman's too powerful to work well in "gritty realism", unless it's amazingly well written. Which I guess this wasn't. It wasn't bad, and would have been fine with Superman in his universe of operatic space emperors, mad scientists, and comic book hyperbole. The Iraq war just felt like an unnecessary and out of place addition. Which is mostly how it is IRL, too, but we don't have a flying guy in pajamas who's powerful enough he could scare people into surrendering, just by showing up.
Tags: Mindscribbles, Comics
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