Well, the voting post seems to be getting a lot more response than the Dave Cockrum one, but I'm going to plow ahead and keep talking comics anyway because there's something I need to get off my chest. One of the other interesting things about reading mass quantities of X-Men comics now, twenty years after the fact, is that certain truths about the comics I grew up on become apparent: features that were then as invisible and omnipresent as the atmosphere now stand out in bold relief.
Foremost among those is the hyperemotionalism. I know it's not exactly a new observation to point out Claremont's feverish, frequently risible soap opera - what interests me more is that his soap opera is now so transient a thing, so fixed in time. After a good fifteen to twenty years in which every team book followed the Claremont model, comics writers are no longer sharing every character's every feeling on every panel. (Given that the current fashion seems to be Mark Millar in his worst Warren Ellis imitation, I'm not sure this is an improvement.) The vintage Claremont X-Men look strangely alien, these weird beings who pour out their deepest hopes and fears to any coworker, any stranger, anyone with the ability to read their copious thought balloons. Now, after the fact, they appear to be some kind of holdover from the Alan Alda seventies, when the hero wasn't just allowed to cry, he was expected to. (Either that or to jump off a cliff in defiance of The Man. Take your pick.)
There is, in fact, something oddly liberal about all this emotiveness, but only in the way that conservatives have turned liberalism into a pejorative (and a deeply inaccurate one) - and since I'm a fan of liberals who roll up their sleeves, tackle poverty and Depression and racism and sexual discrimination and pop Hitler one in the jaw while they're at it, I find that this caring, sharing stuff bothers me precisely because it breathes a little life into the lie, because it helps conservatives to confuse the political goals and ideals (and impressive achievements) of liberalism with the fairly ephemeral popular culture that emerged in the decade of its decline.
But Claremont isn't even the most egregious writer in this regard. If you want to see a formula really carried to its most rarefied extreme, look to the imitators - and nobody imitated the Claremont model better than Marv Wolfman on The New Teen Titans. (That's not a knock against Wolfman - well, not for plagiarism, anyway - as his Titans was easily my favorite comic as a kid.) Having recently read the Trigon storyline that opened the Baxter series - a story that, by the way, marks pretty much the culmination of the Titans' own period of gentle, craftsmanlike decline following the heights of the Citadel, the Vigilante, and the Judas Contract - I can only laugh in a bittersweet melange of nostalgia, ridicule, and shame.
The story sits at a hyperemotional pitch that out-Claremonts Claremont; the only virtue Wolfman acknowledges is empathy and it trumps everything else, apparently including even the survival prospects of the human race. At the end of the first issue Cyborg defends his teammate Jericho for invading other teammate Raven's mind - a stunt that perhaps triggers the return of Trigon, which in turn threatens to end the world - with this exchange:
DICK: You entered Raven's body even after she warned you not to? Why in the world did you--?
VIC: Lay off him, Dick. He was tryin' to help. That's more'n any of us've done.
This is why I was a Nightwing and Cyclops guy, you know? I mean, if I entered somebody's body after they warned me not to, it'd be called rape, but that's not even my point... Dick Grayson and Scott Summers, the team stoics, are the only two members of their respective teams who can reliably be counted on to put little things like logic, common sense, and the greater good (not to mention a healthy respect for privacy) ahead of the all-important need to bond. Sure, Jericho violates Raven's mind, almost causes the end of life as we know it, and spends the rest of the crossover with his thumb wedged firmly up his deaf-mute ass, but at least he was tryin' to help! Dick and Scott would do otherwise and therefore, by the logic of popular culture, they are hopelessly repressed.
And this is something that, unfortunately, hasn't changed in the last twenty years - or if it has, it's changed for the worse. Our society now expects everyone to abase themselves, to annihilate their privacy, not even in the name of empathy but for the spurious and fleeting fame of the video camera. Go ahead - eat bugs, marry a stranger, and if you're a lady don't forget to show us your tits and act like a porn-video lesbian. It doesn't even matter if you don't win the prize just so long as you get on TV. Privacy and reserve aren't just unpatriotic, they're hopelessly uncool.
It's not fair to lay all this at the feet of Marv Wolfman and Chris Claremont, who were just trying to make their heroes a little more caring, and who mistook that caring for narcissism and a creepy erosion of personal space. But in their work you can see the early stirrings, leading indicators perhaps, of the annihilation of privacy that we're all living under today.
Also, the Trigon story gets bonus points for this line, courtesy of (who else?) Gar Logan:
"I was dreamin' bout me and Jennifer Beals, when--"
Note to all future writers: Never be topical.
Okay, first a nitpick: fix the link to Amazon. It has two http:// in it.
Secondly, I was always a Cyclops/Nightwing guy two, but less for the reason you listed (a fine reason to be sure) and more for the fact that they were the most dependable members of the respective teams, when they were written properly. Cyclops may not have had the flashiest or most awesome power, but you always knew he was thinking of a way out of any situation, and it made his character (to me) the most interesting... he didn't do whatever he felt like, he did what he felt was the right thing to do. At least when Claremont wasn't wanking his own fannish obsessions all over the book.
Nightwing/Dick Grayson was even more of a focused individual, on a team gaga with outsized personalities. Changeling, Cyborg, Starfire, even Raven were almost parodies of normal personality traits. (You remember the New Beat Patrol, of course.) Even Kid Flash became ridiculously overemotional (directly because Raven made him fall in love with her) and Jericho was, well...for God's sake, he was a mute who'd had his throat slit and who cultivated a damn white boy fro from hell, equal parts beatific and annoying. Nightwing was often the only character on the team who could be counted on to even remember what they were doing at any given moment.
Of course, I loved the New Teen Titans like mad. All that hyperkinetic emotion... it makes sense that the new cartoon is in anime style. It's not that far a leap.
Posted by: ezrael | March 14, 2004 at 01:27 PM
Fine, fine, it's fixed ya finicky bastard.
And how could I not remember the New Beat Patrol? Or Pete's brilliant Scions pastiche...
Posted by: Marc | March 15, 2004 at 09:34 AM
Certainly explains your affinity for Dan "Grind" Tracey. :)
Posted by: Dave Van Domelen | March 15, 2004 at 01:52 PM
Touche. (You know, that just doesn't look the same in these little comment boxes.)
Okay, that's three references in a row to RACC fiction, so I should probably point everybody to the rec.arts.comics.creative archives at http://archives.eyrie.org/racc. Look for some good, good writin' in the Omega and ASH folders.
Or maybe I should pop some links to the archives, and the universe web pages, up in the sidebar...
Posted by: Marc | March 15, 2004 at 02:30 PM
Marc -- married now?! Implying haircut? ;] On the strength of this discussion, I broke out my own stash of 20-year-old Titans books thinking "hyper-emotional? That's not how I remember them" Seems I bailed right at the Jericho point (with a random Judas Contract Annual pickup). Two notes: 1) that combination of paper and ink is not destined for immortality. Perez is done a disservice. 2) The writing is much better in my memory. I too loved it like mad, and I am now forced to recognise it was a transient love. The number of times Wally sez anything other than "Back off bothering Raven with your completely reasonable questions!!" in the first few books is negligible.
Teen years ARE a hyperemotional time and my drives are different now. I suspect and hope that as I continue the plow I will get past my dissapointment and back to the emotional vitality and wonder that sparked the connection.
Continuing to talk Titans, the other thing I remember was that unlike some team books (at least those that were collections of other-title characters) that pretend back history isn't there, Titans was the first that seemed to REVEL in its out-of-title back history, to use it for driving plots that meant something to the characters. I doubt my reread will spoil that. Plus -- classic Doom Patrol!
And lastly RE: topical references, Porn-star lesbians and Jennifer Beals are as now as it gets, baby! Somewhere an overweight, balding Changeling is living off his idle wealth and invoking the monkey every night over "The L Word"
Posted by: JJMcC | April 08, 2004 at 05:30 PM
Jeff!
Married yes, haircut no, which will no doubt make for some embarrassing wedding-picture moments in future years.
All your observations are well taken, alas too painfully well, but I would say keep on plowin'. The Doom Patrol/Brotherhood of Evil story builds up to a fantastic ending, and the book hits its stride shortly thereafter. I still love 'em. I just wince at almost every single bit of character development...
Posted by: Marc | April 08, 2004 at 06:39 PM