| Posted: 18 November 2014 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | 2
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Joe Zhang wrote: "I don't know if this counts as a cliché, but alternate-reality stories have been overdone. DC is the leader in this regard. They should be called "Dimension Comics".
I don't believe this is true any longer. Once upon a time perhaps, but even taking into account all of the Elseworlds titles out there, once you stack them against Marvel's multiple alternate timelines, event universes, parallel comic lines like MC2, 2009, & the Ultimate Universe, as well as Counter-Earth, Earth-S, and titles such as Exiles and What If, Marvel is probably running neck and neck with the competition at this point.
Dan, I think I've told this story before but years ago I was walking to a friend's house for lunch during the school day and telling her about the Madelyne Pryor storyline taking place in comics at the time, how Scott's girlfriend was apparently back from the dead after a plane crash and he didn't know if she was really Jean Grey or just someone who looked like her. She said the whole thing sounded really silly and exactly like what you'd expect to find in a comic book.
At her place, her mom had the soaps on and my friend curled up in front of the TV to watch. She filled me in on what was going on. It seemed our hero was in a dilemma. The woman he loved had died in a plane crash. Now she had shown up again under a different name, claiming not to know our hero at all...
"It's the SAME STORY!" I said, right down to the heroine's red hair!
As for the redemption of the villain cliche, I'd have to say that many of my favorite stories revolve around this theme to some extent or another. It was established during the 70's that Luthor would some day get over his long-standing, irrational hatred of Superman and wind up traveling the universe with him when they were both very old men. To this end, there were even flashes of humanity shown with the character long before that point. In a back-up story, he escapes jail solely for the purpose of giving his nephew a birthday gift. He opposes the plans of his Earth-2 counterpart to destroy the world. He reforms when he falls in love with a beautiful woman who it turns out was actually a trap designed to transport Superman to an alternate dimension when he kissed her at her wedding to Luthor. Luthor himself had come up with the plan and then induced amnesia in himself so that he could fall in love with her and play the role convincingly. Trouble was, he didn't count on A.) how much falling in love would hurt and B.) Superman figuring it out, albeit too late to save the woman herself from being lost in the dimensional vortex. Not the greatest story ever, but impossible if all Luthor is is a smug, preening bastard who really hates being compared to actor William Frawley.
Imaginary future stories written by Alfred show the Joker reforming, sharing lemonade with the retired Batman, and despairing of his useless son who has taken up his criminal mantle and is currently fighting the Dick Grayson Batman and Bruce Wayne Jr. as Robin. Wonder Woman from the beginning had the intent to not simply defeat but to reform her foes as she succeeded in doing with Paula Von Gunther. The Flash early on faced Mr. Element and Dr. Alchemy, both the same man who went on to reform as Heat Wave would later do. I think they even reformed Mirror Master and Brainiac at certain points in the early 80's, before replacing them with deadlier versions.
Marvel made a cottage industry of switching opponents to the winning side and keeping them there. Sandman is an odd case since he was shown as fairly irredeemable (with the possible exception of MTU #1 where he broke jail to visit his mom at Christmas) right up to the point where he was redeemed over a beer. JB insists Sandman's a murderer since he was on the FBI's ten most wanted list, but in the stories themselves, have they ever talked about who he killed or under what circumstances? It would seem in context that he somehow made the list solely on bank robbery charges. If so, then the reform could have stuck. It didn't. I'm pretty sure Sandman's back on the side of the devils and cringes to look back on his time with Silver Sable and her Wild Pack. As do we all.
Two of my favorite issues of What If are the ones where Spidey succeeds in showbiz and becomes a right bastard doing so and Dr. Doom heeds Reed Richards' warning and successfully contacts his mother in Hell, going on to become a hero to the people of Latveria.
Back in the day before all villains were serial killers all the time, they tended to be driven individuals with specific goals in mind. If those goals could be met or left behind, then they didn't have to be villains any longer. The decisions they made mattered, often more than just being "bad people" defined solely by their actions in the past. Not that bad people don't exist. They do. In vast numbers and they are, by and large, irredeemable. But they are not very interesting and the stories told about them are often thin and unsatisfying.
Literature has it's share of moustache-twirling baddies, but they're usually confined to one or two novels. It's difficult to do anything interesting with such characters over the long haul without at least visiting the possibility of seeing if there isn't something redeemable in their background or future.
Not that it's the best decision to make every time. See "The Tragedy of Darth Vader." Overall, though, I'm fine with the possibility of the guy the Thing punching in the nose today fighting alongside him tomorrow.
"Good guys to bad" however is a more slippery slope and a real problem, given that Marvel has fallen in love with this paradigm and has thrown a number of previously decent, admirable characters under the wheels of this runaway chariot. If Magneto is good, Professor X must be ____ (fill in the blank, gentle reader. No, wait. Never mind. We'll do it for you.) If Professor X is bad, then Cyclops who was his most faithful acolyte, can only become good by killing him. Which makes him evil. Which is okay because we brought his teenage self out of the past to be Good, allowing Today's wretched bastard Cyclops to be even more EEeeEvilll... Clever, no? No.
Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, and all of the Illuminati members are a good deal shadier now than they were before the events of Civil War and War of the Kings when "difficult decisions had to be made" and "being a nice guy wasn't an option..." Good grief, Gwen Stacy is a corrupt little trollop in today's books. What the hell...? Wonder Woman's a neck-breaking violence junkie. Superman's a morally conflicted useless thumbsucker. Batman's a backstage puppeteer, designing deathtraps for his pals because, hey, there's no guarantee they will always be his pals. God forbid Aquaman or the Atom should turn against the human race. If they do, here's how I'll kill them... You know what would be cool? If the heroes were shown to have ALWAYS been cowardly little bastards! I have this idea here called "Identity Crisis" I'd like to share with you all....
Doing the right thing is hard. Writing about the people who do the right thing is not easy either. Coming up with the claptrap listed above? That is a f*ckin' cakewalk. Whew! Thank goodness we came up with moral turpitude as a modern comic-book concept! Now everything gets easy from this point forward! And all it costs us are the characters themselves! Ha! Bargain!! High fives all around!
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