Ragnell got me thinking about something I’ve been wanting to say for awhile now, so forgive my soapbox.
Awhile back in a Newsarama interview, when Bendis seemed to have no problem suddenly making the formerly heroic (and most certainly tragic) Hulk a mass murderer from the start retroactively in order to justify shooting him into space, there was some hubub about the issue. Dan Slott weighed in with the most dead on reason why every time we hit a little too close to home in books someone should be stepping back.
Integrity.
from Newsarama: The Hulk, just by being alive, is pretty much proof that he hasn’t taken an innocent life.
But what about all of those cities he’s leveled?
Well… What about all of those buildings that Thor’s knocked the Absorbing Man through? Or all of the buildings that Iron Man’s knocked the Titanium Man through? And so on, and so on… If you’re going to play by THOSE rules than the entire Marvel Universe is populated by heroes with buckets and buckets of blood on their hands. And WHO wants to read about THAT?
Yes, who WOULD want to read about that?
He brought attention to the same point in She-Hulk #7 this week, where the comic book archivist mentioned that this whole ‘Starfox Sexual Harassment’ story was ’skeevy’. It’s not that I don’t think there a place for adult issues in comics. It’s not that I don’t understand that rape happens and I’m trying to make the comic world a pretty sparkly place. After all, there’s a time and a place for everything and it’s called the ‘MAX’, ‘Ultimate’ or ‘Vertigo’ imprint. All I’m saying is that these days, with rape suddenly cropping up in superheroine’s backgrounds, when children are murdered in bulk, we seem to be lacking a sense of integrity in our stories.
Integrity means (thanks, M-W.com!) a firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values, like Spider-Man’s ‘with great power comes great responciblity’ mantra, an unimpaired condition, like the Wasp not letting her troubled personal life get in the way of being the Avengers’ leading chairwoman, and/or the quality or state of being complete or undivided. I guess that doesn’t sell comics.
One Comment
No, Integrity doesn’t sell comics, but then again, I’d be hard pressed to say that it ever has. From almost the beginning, comics and their covers especially were predicated on shock value, disturbing images (usually of women in peril), mortal danger, and passion plays that largely either were sugar-coated with feel-good morality that avoided the larger issues or ridiculously one-sided arguments.
That said, I’m with ya. I don’t object to comics using real-world issues per se, but when they are written with shameless hackery (I’m lookin’ at YOU, Kevin Smith/BMB), then it becomes offensive.
I’m not entirely sure what my point is here. I had one, then lost it.
Buy Jonah Hex.