Someone needs to pull the brakes on widescale destruction. I’ll explain why (with spoilers, hence the “More” button) under the jump. This week alone, we have Invincible Iron Man pretty much decimating Paris by turning everyone to stone while the Justice League of America manage to split the moon in two. Admittedly, both are part of various stages of Big Event – Iron Man is part of Fear Itself, of course, and JLA is, I am now convinced, running the secret lead up to whatever that “The Dark” launch is going to be for DC – but still: Somewhere along the line, the stakes got raised so much that the moon can get split in two and it’s just the means to an end, the cliffhanger promising something even bigger later (In JLA‘s case, Eclipso wants to kill God. There’s actually some great theological backstory there that ties in, and offers a contradictory view to, Brightest Day and Blackest Night‘s view of why Earth is so important. Go and pick it up to see what I mean), and that strikes me as… I don’t know, both weirdly lazy – You can almost imagine the creators being all “How can we prove that our threat is really dangerous? I know!” – and troublingly ridiculous: There comes a point, surely, when things get so out of perspective that they lose meaning. Splitting the moon in half makes me think, as much as anything, of Todd Ingram punching a hole in the moon in Scott Pilgrim, and that was clearly played as comedy.
It feels wrong, I admit, to be asking for a reduction in scale of ambition in superhero comics – Isn’t that what they’re there for? – but I’d rather have these kinds of things happen as big events (Not in the “event comic” sense, but the sense that these things matter), and not just illustrations that the bad guy du jour is a bad ass and really means it, man. Let’s save turning everyone in Paris to stone until it can be dealt with as something other than the byproduct of a serpent god coming back to unseat Odin, y’know? I don’t know, am I jaded – or the opposite, too hypersensitized to this kind of thing? Have at it (and me) in the comments.
May 19th, 2011 at 11:19 am
Personally, I think the residents of Paris should be turned into stone more often.
My main issue with the IIM issue was that it featured a significantly higher body count than Fear Itself. If Marvel wants to wipe out a major city’s residents (even if they’re French), it should take place in a book where it “does” mean something, as opposed to a tie-in issue featuring a villain that appeared on one panel in the main book.
May 19th, 2011 at 11:34 am
I agree with you. There is just seems to be to much death and destruction in comics. It seems to be done just to do it. We got big story so lets something. My big problem is that Odin was made to look like a big coward and ran with his tail between his legs. Marvel has no problem telling you that either. Robinson’s crappy JLA makes me want the new JLI book come sooner and sooner.
May 19th, 2011 at 12:44 pm
It’s just bad writing, period. These events of destruction have no ramifications and fail to inspire any emotion whatsoever, and the only trick the limited writer has in his book is to up the ante. Heads up: that doesn’t work either, as seen here.
May 19th, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Split the moon in half? Chairface Chippendale is going to be pissed
May 19th, 2011 at 4:29 pm
The biggest feeling I get when I see these scenes of mass destruction, chaos and death is sense that these superheroes are grossly incompetent. Isn’t saving people and preventing this carnage their schtick?
May 19th, 2011 at 7:44 pm
I’ve been saying for years that every regular person in the DCU must be depressed, neurotic or paranoid. Look at all they’ve been through: the Anti-Monitor trying to destroy the universe, the US Government almost being overthrown, Earth being invaded by six or so alien races, the Sun almost being extinguished, Montevideo being destroyed, Imperiex invading and Topeka and other places being destroyed, OMACs hunting down heroes and super-villains escaping all over the country, Black Adam destroying an entire country, Amazons invading, Darkseid taking over the world, the dead coming back to life and many other things I’m sure I can’t think of at the moment. And now the moon’s been split in half.
How could you ever live a normal life in a world where things like this can happen at any time?
May 19th, 2011 at 8:50 pm
Not only that, but due to DC’s compressed timeline nearly all the crazy stuff is supposed to happen in *just ten years* There were some mystery men back in the 40s and a few giant monsters in the 50s, then nothing but normalcy until about 2000… When suddenly the world goes mad.
May 20th, 2011 at 11:05 am
At that point, selective continuity becomes a handy thing. I agree with Michael that alot of heroes today don’t do much world saving.
May 20th, 2011 at 11:44 am
The events of Fear Itself will be justified if every Marvel book for the next 20 years is about the utter collapse of global civilization and the crippling psychological effects of having entire, major cities full of people, history and culture wiped off the map. This stuff passed the point of completely meaningless sensation long ago, and it’s particularly annoying with Marvel books that try to pretend that it’s some kind of relevant commentary on the way anyone lives in the real world. It’s just kids knocking over castles in the sandbox, with exactly as much meaning & consequence. So now they killed Paris, France to make Tony Stark feel bad for a few pages. Three months from now all will be forgotten. So why do it in the first place? These storylines negate themselves.
May 20th, 2011 at 9:34 pm
sadly marvel and dc are on the mind set that they need to always have their characters face big stakes including the wanton destruction over and over. like the moon splitting in half in jla and marvel turning some french citizens into stone. for violence and destruction is what the companies figures sell. when after the latest thing like fear itself ends it will be like paris being wiped out never happen.
May 21st, 2011 at 1:28 pm
Huge-scale events can be exciting, but if you want your audience to feel anything, they have to be grounded in something personal. I read an comparison of the first two Die Hard movies a while back that gives an example of this point. In the first movie, Hans Gruber kills a couple of businessmen with a gun to the head. We may not like the characters he killed, but we got to know them a little first. In the second movie, the main guy causes a jet full of people to crash. But we don’t know them, don’t feel anything for them, and so the larger-scale kill has LESS impact than the deaths of one or two guys.
Threats don’t always have to be smaller – see the finale of Watchmen – but they do have to be earned to have impact. Watchmen earns its big finale by building to it all along the way. And yeah, sometimes the fun of cape comics is just one big idea after the other coming at you – but it becomes a more shallow experience.
I pin some of the blame for these big-scale, low impact events on the creative retreats they take sometimes. (I know Marvel does, not sure about DC.) A bunch of writers in a room, eating treats and brainstorming all sorts of ideas for the next year or two, figuring out if there’s an event they can whip up and how they can tie it in to each other. That’s got to be a heady experience, full of creativity and fanboy-made-good excitement. But then they have to get it all into the comics, racing from event to event, and I get the feeling they just don’t have the time to set it up and earn it. Or the main writer for a character doesn’t want to derail their own ongoing plans, so short shrift is given to the “event” storyline.
May 28th, 2011 at 10:51 pm
In the WATCHMEN finale, a number of characters we did get to know were also among the victims.
But about the prophesied lack of follow-up coming with regard to the destruction of Paris, et al.: it is possible by the end of FEAR ITSELF, some sort of time travel or omnipotent hand-waving will set things to rights. Whether that solves the problem a lot of you seem to have with the large-scale destruction or just makes the whole thing worse, I leave to you.