THE FOUR LAWS OF ETHICAL COMICS

Ideas belong to their creators. 

Any permanent transfer of IP ownership from a creator to a corporation is and has always been morally wrong.

Permanent IP transfer under any circumstances is and has always been theft. 

All money made by corporations from the exploitation of stolen IP is and will always be stolen money. 

It occurred to me that we're going about this all wrong. Complicated issues sometimes need simple solutions. How about we try doing things the hard way, no more half-measures.

It's a firm stance. It's not one that most people will be able to get behind. It doesn't allow for a lot of nuance. Hell, I'm not sure I agree with it entirely (Peter Laird sold the Turtles recently and seeing as how he'd already made millions off the property it's hard to argue with his rationale for simply not wanting to be personally responsible for the property anymore [Kevin Eastman sold his stake to Laird a long time ago].) But here is the ideal. This is the goal to strive for. 

In some ways it's clearly fantasyland, yes. But it's also right, and if you don't feel it somewhere deep in your bones you were never paying attention to what all these characters really stand for. 

It's not going to change the world. It's not about fighting for concessions. It's not about staking out an extreme position in hopes of eking out a fair compromise. It's simply right. You believe it or you don't. Decide how to go forward from here. 

Nineteen Thoughts About The Avengers



It's not the world we came up in. These characters don't belong to us anymore, and they certainly don't belong to the men who created them.

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Man, that's a lot of money. One positive side effect of Marvel training a generation of movie viewers to sit patiently through the credits is that we actually have to sit through the credits and look at the names on the screen in front of us. It's important that we remember the men who created these characters, but it's not insignificant that these movies also provide a decent living for hundreds (thousands?) of hard-working craftsmen and women, most of whom probably know little to nothing about any other overarching ethical concerns.

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That said: $220 million dollars. Watching these movies - not just comic book movies, but any kind of massively expensive blockbuster - I am becoming more and more convinced that history is going to judge us poorly for devoting so much of our society's dwindling resources to making these monolithic "entertainments." Sure, $220 million dollars might not seem like a lot compared to the national debt, but let's be serious: in a hundred years these things are going to look an awful lot like the pyramids of Giza. Gaze upon our works, ye mighty.   

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In 1975 Siegel and Shuster receiving a lifetime's pension and credit for Superman, and that was considered a great moral victory. But the circumstances are probably unique: making the concession didn't prevent Warner Brothers from being on the receiving end of subsequent further lawsuits. The grip on their intellectual property is steel.

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Is it too cynical to think that we've passed the point where creators' rights issues could ever gain any kind of traction in mass culture? Millions of people love The Avengers and a few thousands nerds and a handful of commendable pundits didn't do a whit to add to the general public's awareness of Jack Kirby or Don Heck. That sounds really cynical: I should probably qualify that sentiment. But the industry narrative we've had for the last almost forty years has been that Warner Brothers caved to Siegel and Shuster because they dreaded the possibility of having their long-awaited Superman movie soiled by bad publicity. I don't think it's an exaggeration now to say that bad publicity of that kind simply doesn't have traction with today's media. No one working for the national news wants to tell that story. It's a non-starter. The reason - or, at least, one of the reasons - for this is not hard to discern: every media company (every company, period, with any kind of IP holdings, including technology and manufacturing firms) has a few Siegels, Shusters, and Kirbys in their closet. Either that or, more to the point, are actually also owned by Warner Brothers or Disney in the first place.

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I can't help but think that trying to explain to the average moviegoer that The Avengers was made on the backs of generations of exploited creators is as likely to result in glazed eyes and polite nods than actual interest. We're surrounded every day by stories about corruption and exploitation on a scale and significance that beggars the worst practices of the comics industry. The fact that workers in Apple factories are forming desperate suicide pacts because their working conditions are so poor isn't exactly a secret, and yet there is no small irony in the fact that the people most likely to know the details of the Foxconn protests are probably reading all about it on their iPad.

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Is that a call to inaction, a helpless appeal to the ineffectual shrugging of hollow cynicism? Not at all, or at least, it shouldn't be. The problem is not that the chronic ethical failings of the comics industry are unimportant in the context of the larger drama of western civilization, but that the chronic ethical failings of the comics industry do not occur in a vacuum. The problem isn't that Kirby got screwed, but that everyone got screwed. If there's one experience that passes close to universal in this fallen world, it's the sensation that other people are constantly getting rich off the sweat of your brow. The fact that Kirby got screwed out of ideas that made other completely unrelated people Jay-Z-wealthy overnight just makes him a great rallying point. Welcome to Capitalism: prepare to be expropriated.

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What I’m suggesting is that the lack of popular agency, the absence of mass participation in politics, made the presentation of the last decade in comic book terms not only possible but almost inevitable. As Jim Larkin famously said, ‘The great appear great because we are on our knees.’ In a period in which, for most people, the prospect of political participation seems entirely implausible, the depiction of world politics as a tussle between mighty beings makes intuitive sense – and our leaders have played on this relentlessly.*

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You want to know what I find really depressing these days? The Marvel superheroes used to be figures of the counterculture. I don't want to press on this point to hard, because it's easy to lose sight of the fact that Stan Lee pushed the characters as being part of the sixties counterculture when he saw that he could leverage a small but enthusiastic readership of college-aged kids into cultural cache. And, of course, let's not forget that the Marvel books' earliest successes with adult readership came as a result of the relentless anti-Communism of the first few years of Marvel's sixties output. The Marvel super-heroes caught on with Goldwater conservatives who were happy to see such blatant red baiting in children's comic books - when Lee saw that the cultural winds had shifted (by the mid-60s and after Goldwater's defeat, no later than when the "Marvel Pop Art" label inexplicably appeared in mid-'65), he deemphasized vulgar politics in favor of pop philosophy.

It shouldn't have worked and yet it did: going from vehemently anti-Communist to (appearing to) embrace the counterculture by the mid-60s should have been the most brazen attempt at pandering - and yet, perhaps because the comics were still primarily read by children, no one seemed to notice. Only a small percentage of Marvel's audience were - could possibly have been - older, "hip" readers, but it was enough of a percentage for the company to build a lasting brand identity as the underdog, anti-establishment, outlaw comic book company. Of course you wanted to read Marvel, Marvel was what your older brother read. It's very similar to Seventeen magazine: seventeen-year-old girls aren't the main audience for Seventeen; it's younger sisters who want to be seventeen but are stick being twelve and thirteen for the foreseeable future, and who desperately want to learn all about what being seventeen is like.

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And yet, exquisite brand management aside, Dr. Strange was still name-checked on Country Joe & the Fish's "Superbird" (ca. 1967), and appeared on two Pink Floyd albums (on the cover of 1968's A Saucerful of Secrets, and mentioned by name in "Cymbaline" from 1969's Soundtrack from the film More). Certainly, as soon as Robert Crumb moved west and began producing Zap, Marvel had probably outlasted its welcome in the cultural fringe, but the company was able to coast on the lingering buzz of its mid-60s cool for decades.

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[In the documentary With Great Power, directed by Nikki Frakes, Will Hess, and Terry Dougas] we hear about [Stan Lee's] embrace of topical subject matter and hot-button issues, but not about how equivocal it always was, how infrequently it seemed to stem from any real conviction aside from generic humanism and the belief that zeitgeist-chasing was smart business.

We hear about Stan's emergence as a big draw on the college-lecture circuit, as kids who'd grown up on early Marvel and gone on to postsecondary education filled halls to hear him do 20 minutes of patter followed by an endless gulping Q&A. Stan admits he always looked at it as market research; he'd come away from the Q&As with a better understanding of what his audience was responding to. Philosophy majors loved the Silver Surfer, forever wandering the lonely spaceways agonizing over man's inhumanity to man. The college gigs were smart branding. Having sold Marvel's comics to children, he then sold them to college kids, then took the idea that college kids were into them and sold it to the world at large as proof that what he did wasn't junk, that comics could punch their weight alongside literature and cinema and modern art and rock and roll. That they might even have something to offer adults.*

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A Modest Proposal
How about we make copyright - all copyright - non-transferable and and held by the creator and his or her estate until 20 years after the creators' death. And make this rule retroactive to, say, 1900.

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The Avengers, up until very recently, was never Marvel's flagship. The book itself was an afterthought, supposedly added to the schedule at the last minute because Bill Everett was late with the first issue of Daredevil. Tom Spurgeon recently pointed out, correctly, that The Avengers wouldn't even rank in the top 50 Kirby creations. It was a synthetic idea (not really Kirby's metier), and already in 1963 a patently unoriginal idea - let's take a bunch of solo heroes and put them all in one book.

So while the center dynamic for the franchise has always been the dynamic between Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man, the heart of the book lies with the numerous secondary and tertiary characters who compose the team's mainstays. Who really remembers the first 15 issues of the book as being anything other than pro forma early Marvel? It was with issue #16 that the book really took off, when the (temporary) exit of Iron Man, Thor, Giant Man, and the Wasp opened up the door for a group of former criminals to take their places - two members of Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and an ex-jewel thief who had been tricked into a life of crime by a Russian spy (who herself later became an Avenger). From that point on the Avengers would always be defined less by the headliners than the undercard - the characters for whom the book was their only home, whose stories could only be told in The Avengers. When the Avengers is simply a conglomeration of the company's most popular heroes, you lose the crux of what made the book so popular for so many years. But, it must be said, you sell a lot more comics with Wolverine, Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man than with Deathcry, Mantis, US Agent, and Wonder Man. 

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I think the anti-Avengers movement was partly about a target market shooting back, resentful of the notion that they can be bought off with 3-D flash, the hiring of a geek-demigod writer/director, and a few nods to beloved threads of old-school continuity. I think it was about actual comics readers (a demographic that overlaps less and less with comic-book moviegoers) objecting to an emerging paradigm in which comics act as an IP farm for the movies, to the way the medium increasingly contorts itself to catch Hollywood's eye, and to the notion that movie interest somehow validates the art form.

Comics fans are protective and nostalgic and prone to overidentification with corporate trademarks, and the Marvel Universe is growing into something a lot of them don't recognize. The emotional undercurrent to the anti-Avengers outcry isn't rage; it's loss. Kirby's case — the story of a man Marvel left behind as it grew — is a convenient emotional focal point for people who feel similarly abandoned by what the company's become.*

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The Avengers was always a super-hero book for super-hero fans. Lacking the high-concept heft of X-Men, Fantastic Four or The Amazing Spider-Man, the book was free to focus on a purified form of super-hero soap opera whose scope was rivaled only by the ingenuity of its wonkishness.

This was a book that detailed the branching family trees of androids, mutants, time-traveling dictators and sentient plant-men from outer space. This was a book where the mechanics of government regulation of super-heroes was explored in exquisite, grinding detail. (How many other books can you think of that have dealt so consistently with the hazards of municipal permitting?) This was a book where grown adults who were essentially working professionals could bitch and gripe about the fact that super-heroing was a job, and sometimes not even a particularly enjoyable job. 

One of my favorite things about the Avengers, historically speaking, is how the book always managed to find a way to balance the corny bombast of "Earth's Mightiest Heroes!" with an appropriate and quite endearing level of banality. On their way to confront Michael Korvac in what would prove to be their deadliest-ever battle, the Avengers are forced to commandeer a city bus on their way to Queens. One of Marvel's longest-running teen romance characters (Patsy Walker) essentially tricked the Avengers into letting her be a superhero after blackmailing the Beast. The fate of the galaxy hinged on the relationship between a former Vietnamese prostitute (Mantis) and her ex-criminal lover, who had previously infiltrated the team just so he could piss of Hawkeye and use his Avengers ID for swag. That same ex-crook (the Swordsman) was killed and replaced temporarily by one of the aforementioned sentient plant-men, and was then much later replaced by an alternate universe doppelgänger who served another alternate universe doppelgänger of the Black Knight who had dedicated his life to killing every version of Sersi in existence. Etc, etc.

These plot lines aren't likely to appear in future Marvel Studios films.

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The problem with these movies is that seeing these incredibly strange and magical characters and situations onscreen can't help but lionize them. In the books, (at least until very recently, really the New Avengers era) there's almost always something intentionally hokey and gloriously mundane about the characters. The Marvel Universe is full of superheroes, it's rather sick of superheroes - oh, jeez, it's the second Tuesday of the month so 17th Street must be blocked off due to that god-damn Spider-Man. The Avengers are great because so many of the team's mainstays are just a little bit square and uncool, in a way that you could never say for the X-Men. 

But onscreen, with a team mainly composed of the great iconic demigods of the Marvel superhero universe, that level of blasé anticlimax will probably never be translatable. They're massive, larger-than-life figures of righteous strength and inhuman power.

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Is The Avengers a fascist film? No, it’s not. It’s a very rightwing movie but it’s an expression of the mainstream Right, not fascism. But it does hint at what might be around the corner.

That is, the movie drapes its final confrontation in 9/11 imagery, as firemen pull civilians from the ruin of New York skyscrapers. Yet, interestingly, it culminates not in a celebration of the victory over the fearsome goblins from outer space but in a montage showing the divisions emerging in the battle’s aftermath, as various opportunistic politicians blame the superheroes for the devastation.

In the wake of the First World War, German politics was dominated by the "stab-in-the-back" myth – the notion that German soldiers performed like heroes on the front line, but were betrayed at home by the socialists and the Jews. This became a central trope of far-right politics in the decades that followed.*

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All these wonderful stories and situations and characters with whom we grew up, whom we all loved and with whom we all identified, they become something entirely different and entirely alien when projected twenty-feet-tall on the surface of the movie screen. They're not "ours" anymore, no - but we shouldn't feel too bad because they aren't even the same thing that we once had. Onscreen it has become something ugly, shiny, perfectly sculpted, and undoubtedly sturdy down to its bones, but nonetheless alien. I would never argue that The Avengers (the book) was high art or even usually anything more than a well-done superhero comic book, but its charms were unique and, I see now, highly fragile. There was something irreplaceably endearing about the book's haphazard melange of tropes bowdlerized from decades of fantasy, sci-fi, adventure, romance, and horror fiction. It may not have been the line's flagship, but it was still very much at the heart of the Marvel Universe: all the strange, contradictory threads of that great gaudy tapestry met in the pages of The Avengers. In between the crying robots and the nervous breakdowns and fear of dying, there were grand adventures, yes. But the Avengers was always - always a book predicated on the fact that superheroes were an everyday fact of life and that their adventures - while thrilling and strange and dangerous - were still just another Tuesday at the office for the men and women who did them. That's not a feeling that Marvel seems keen on replicating onscreen anytime soon. It's easier - far easier - to make their superheroes into stentorian gods than average Joes.

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The closer the Marvel movies hew to the general template of Mark Millar's Ultimates, the harder it is not to see the characters as tools of political reaction, pawns of a military-industrial-media complex dedicated to promoting and ensuring the continuity of state power through either the implicit or explicit threat of physical coercion. When it's easier to find a can of Dr. Pepper with the Hulk's face than to find an actual Hulk comic book, the meaning of these strange iconoclastic texts has been completely effaced by the message of entrenched capital putting the icons through their paces to sell widgets.

What has become increasingly difficult to recall through the haze of hindsight, obscured by the obfuscating power of billions of dollars of worldwide gross, is that The Ultimates, for all its singular problems, was also satire.

And You Will Know Us By Our Trail Of Dead

One of the reasons why The Walking Dead really strikes me as being - if not perhaps a "great" show - certainly a timely and important show, is that the sensation of a desperate and attenuated slow death is one that seems very current and very much of our moment. This is why I could not for the life of me understand the criticism that "nothing happens" on the show - nothing is supposed to happen. The show isn't about fighting zombies, it's about sitting around and slowly unraveling while you're waiting for the other shoe to drop. Complaining that "nothing happens" on the show is really mistaking a feature for a bug. It's not about the spooky ghoulies, it's about the long attrition of survival options in the face of almost inevitable annihilation. 

I can't remember off the top of my head where I got this link - someone off my Twitter feed, I'm sorry to say, I opened it in a window and didn't read it until later on in the day when I had forgot about attribution - but this is a great article about the survival horror genre seen through the lens of one of the great survival horror video games, the immortal Oregon Trail. I'm not much of a gamer so I am almost completely ignorant of what exactly the survival horror genre currently looks like in the realm of video games, but I liked this explanation of why the genre works (when it does):

In much of the modern world, most of us don't spend our days living in fear of injury or starvation. Why? Because we're prepared to handle them. They no longer pose an immediate threat. We're not scared, because we're just too ready.

Games are often about fulfilling power fantasies, so we tend to start off at least a little heroic and get even more heroic as we go. This can erode the challenge, so we usually increase the opposition (in numbers, in strength, or both) to match. This leads to an "arms race" that turns a lot of survival horror into yet-another-run-and-gun. We're no longer truly fighting to survive; it's just monster hunting, which isn't scary. When we remove the survival, we undermine the horror.

I should probably provide this caveat, by way of an explanation: I'm not exactly a zombie partisan - although, come to think of it, I realize I have seen a great deal of zombie movies, most of them are bad enough that I don't think I could really consider myself a "fan." There have been far more terrible zombie movies than good, and the best of recent vintage have been spoofs (Shaun of the Dead, the underrated Zombieland). 

But I certainly understand the appeal: the "zombie plague" trope may be trite and overdone and ripe for paraody and simply boring by now, but the reason it lingers in pop culture is pretty much solely attributable to the success George Romero found in his original Dead films - specifically, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead (although I know that Day has its fans as well). Those films are "zombie movies," but (and this is hardly a new idea, so please forgive the reiteration) they aren't about zombies. Zombies have no personality, no charisma, no presence. The point is simply to see what happens to people when you put normal people in the pressure cooker of an impossible situation of survival in the face of the strangest, most soul-deadening circumstances possible. Zombies aren't individually a threat, but they tend to come in waves, and the immanent threat posed by tons of decaying flesh possessed by an insatiable appetite has a tendency to shred even the sturdiest disposition.

Oregon Trail uses some of the most fertile soil there is: desperation. Fear itself is too elevated an emotional state to keep up for very long, but desperation is more subtle and more sustainable. An added benefit is that when we're desperate, every emotional response is amplified - stretch a rubber band to its limit, and even a tiny scrape will snap it. This is the place where small problems (a snakebite) become heartbreaks, small victories (fording a river) become triumphs, a little humor (finding another player's tombstone) becomes an oasis in the desert, and a little fear finally becomes horror.

This sense of desperation creates interesting emotional conflicts, as well. When one of your party members dies, part of you mourns the loss - perhaps of the points more than of the character - but another part of you realizes this means fewer mouths to feed ... and the chilling fact is that part of you is a little relieved.

Reading over the comments from my post last week, I realize that I hadn't done a particularly good job of defining precisely why this is such an important sensation. I like the idea that the show is showing us a group of people who are being dismantled by fear to such a degree that they're irrevocably changed for the worst.

I know from the comics that the situation never improves, there's never any "cure" and it's only in recent months - almost 100 issues into the run - that the series has even begun to hint at the possibility of moving past constant survival situations and towards rebuilding some semblance of civilization. I've never been a fan of the comic before - Kirkman's weaknesses as a writer, such as the flatness of his characters and the methodical-as-a-bricklayer pacing and unimaginative plotting, are hard to ignore - but I have to admit I've been reading with some small interest these last few months as the series has begun to inch towards the establishment of a new society. Why? Because this is something different, this is something we've never really seen before in survival horror: rebuilding from the ground up after almost everything else has been destroyed. I don't know where this story will go, but the political theorist in me wants to see if the series will commit to this new direction, or if it's just a feint before the inevitable (and boring) return to the road.

But the show has a while to go before it catches up to that - if it ever does. For the time being, we're left with the spectacle of seeing these watching these people squirm like ants under a magnifying glass in the summer sun - slowly going insane from the heat seeping in from every direction, chewing their own guts out with anxiety. The only people who can thrive in this environment are monsters and sociopaths, and the only way to survive is by becoming a monster or a sociopath.

On that note, one of my other favorite shows - and perhaps my dark horse nominee for the current best show on TV - is Showtime's Shameless. You want to talk about survival horror? There's a show about what it's really like to live on the lowest rung of society, living from hand to mouth with no room for margin. Being poor does a marvelous job of clarifying your options: living so close to the ground means you can't be picky about opportunities. You have to compromise everything in order to make it from one night to the next.

Shameless is very funny. This is one of the show's best insights, and perhaps the best example of what it gets right about living in poverty: being poor is fucking hilarious. If you don't believe me, just try being poor. Everything takes on the aspect of gallows humor, and it's easy to laugh at your misfortune because the alternative scarcely bears considering. When you're desperate, everything assumes comic dimensions, every character becomes exaggerated - grossly distorted - and every decision is a Hobsons' choice. Usually when TV does "poor" they get it all wrong, and that's fine, because the reality of being desperate to pay your rent and having to choose between food and gas is too depressing to really want to see reflected back. But Shameless gets it right in some very important, almost uncanny ways. I can't say I grew up as poor as the Gallagher family, but I have been that poor at various points, and I certainly grew up closer to the Gallagher's than the Huxtables . . . but then, most people reading this probably did. (And that's another thing that the show gets right - being poor does make you feel ashamed, it makes you feel terrible about yourself, it eats away at your self-confidence and your mental reserves without ever offering up anything resembling consolation.) Eventually, being poor for long enough forces you to make some very hard decisions, decisions that either end with you completely broken and discarded, or that leave you a monster or a sociopath.

And I have high hopes for Girls, as well. On first glance this show could not be more dissimilar to The Walking Dead, but a closer look reveals a strange consanguinity. Girls is the precise negative inverse of The Walking Dead: survival horror as playacted by blithely clueless and blessedly naive idiots. Although three episodes in is too early to tell whether the show can sustain this level of quality so far it's been pretty consistently funny, and pretty consistently, deliciously cruel as well. This is a show about preciously insulated twenty-somethings left adrift in the headwaters of Hipsterland, New York. So far the show has made tossed salad out of the most pressing and potentially devastating issues in contemporary life: unemployment, STDs, emotional abuse, unwanted pregnancies. The kinds of issues that could demolish anyone on the lower rungs of the social ladder are grist for the mill for these self-infatuated, and yet supremely self-oblivious scions of privilege. If that sounds reprehensible, well, it is, and gleefully so: it's basically Less Than Zero for the Pitchfork set. Nothing has any consequences whatsoever and everything on the surface appears to be cruising along just fine, but just under the edges everything is beginning to get a little seedy, just a tiny bit shabby. Situations that might have been supremely glamorous just ten or fifteen years previous are now just pitiful and squalid, and the gaudy Sex and the City poster on one of the character's apartment wall calls this contrast vividly to mind.  

One of the best details from these first few weeks of the show is the profusion of internships. Suddenly, everyone is working for companies for free for the nebulous purpose of gaining "experience," with the hopes of achieving permanent staff positions that never quite materialize. These staff positions never materialize because companies know they can just bring in a new crop of interns every six-to-twelve months who will work off their parents' good will and the (almost certainly false) promise of future opportunity. It's a house of cards that continues to stand simply through the willpower of those unfortunate enough to get caught up in the desire to have the same standard of living and job security as people who were born into a permanently elevated tax bracket - the dwindling coterie of real movers and shakers in the New York art and culture world, who thrive simply because they are able to exploit the wishful thinking of those who don't yet realize their relative poverty. (Lena Dunham's character's great project is a book of essays entitled with the provisional title "Midnight Snack." I'm sure you can imagine what the book jacket would look like, if it were ever finished.)

Girls is all about class, and the fact that the upper classes ain't what they used to be. Even the supposed upper-middle class really isn't upper-middle class anymore, they're all just peons who manage to skate by working for peanuts because they're "allowed" the ostensible luxury of maintaining a preposterous bohemian lifestyle in trendy downtown locales. They're all just as doomed as the idiots on The Walking Dead, but at least the folks on that show have the common decency to acknowledge their hopelessness. In any event, the modern condition remains one of agitated delusion - it's just that sometimes the zombies are more visible than others.

Why I Watch The Walking Dead  How strange that such a benign show should prove so divisive. It seems odd to me that the program should inspire such a vociferous reaction on the part of its critics - who are seemingly legion - all of whom see the inexplicable success of The Walking Dead as some sort of referendum on the death of American high culture. Which is an exaggeration, but no more so than any of these breathless denunciations.

I admit I'm baffled, and it occurs to me that a large part of my bemusement in this matter might stem from a pure disconnect with whatever passes for critical consensus in contemporary television. I'm not a snob: I watch TV. I like watching good TV, and there's a fair amount of it these days. What there is not, at least not in my opinion, is good television drama. I am of the belief - built on years of observation and careful consideration - that America has lost the ability to produce effective drama. I haven't seen but a handful of American drama films in the last five years that haven't made me cringe - either because of bad acting, poor writing, simple childishness, or the general air of vapidity that has come to infect almost every attempt to produce "serious" stories in contemporary America. We are supposedly in the midst - or, at least, have just emerged from - a "Golden Age" of television drama, of which the supposed zenith (The Sopranos) was an amiable enough example of middlebrow entertainment, but by no stretch of the imagination any kind of great achievement. The Sopranos is only a great show in the context of all the terrible shows it succeeded, and I suppose it is to the show's credit that it has spawned a number of halfway decent imitators. But seriously, folks: if you think The Sopranos is a great and meaningful work of art, my suggestion is that you read a God-damned book once in a while.

If that sounds confrontational? Good. I'm not speaking from ignorance here: I sat through every episode of The Sopranos - every plot twist, mini-epiphany, and fizzled character arc. I grew attached to the characters out of inertia more than anything else, more the result of spending dozens of hours with appealing performers than any elevated quality of the material itself. And just that statement points towards exactly why American drama - both television and film - usually fails: the mediums are filled with performers, not actors. If that seems like a pedantic distinction, well, it probably is. But I can't take drama seriously if the actors are mugging like idiots - the unearned self-satisfaction of the drama-camp tyros on Mad Men seems barely distinguishable from something you might expect to see on Glee.

So, yes: the undercurrent behind so much of the criticism leveled against The Walking Dead is that it's a "terrible" show, as if being a poor show (as opposed to "merely" an entertaining show) is somehow a sin. It's predicated on an inflated overestimation of the mean quality of televised drama over the last 10-15 years. It doesn't help that The Walking Dead consistently sets viewership records, whereas critical darling Mad Men - and was there ever a more profoundly overpraised show? - gets all-time best ratings by pulling in a scant 1/3 the viewership of The Walking Dead. Well, gosh-dang, isn't that a shame?

People say the acting on The Walking Dead is terrible, but I honestly can't see it. How is the acting on that show any different than the violent scenery-chewing that passes for profound acting on any other overpraised basic cable television show? I'm not trying to be contrary here, I promise: I honestly can't tell how the acting on The Walking Dead is significantly worse than the acting on Mad Men. At least on The Walking Dead I'm not often pulled out of the show by moments of hammy "little kids walking around in their parents clothes" off-Broadway amateur hour emoting. I can readily believe that the folks on The Walking Dead are desperately scared rednecks wandering around the backwoods of Georgia trying not to get eaten, not contemporary actors pretending to look snazzy in their parents' clothing.

I grew up in hick towns in Northern California - far north, just south of Oregon. The parts of California that most people don't even realize exists, way out in the middle of nowhere. The types of places where Confederate flag bumper stickers are a regular sight, usually attached to pickup trucks with gun racks. (And, yeah, obviously California was never part of the Confederacy, I am very well aware of that delicious little piece of irony.) I also lived in Oklahoma for a few years. So I know from "Good Ol' Boys" even if I've never lived in the deep South of Georgia. And one of the things that show gets exactly right - in my estimation - is its evocation of Good Ol' Boy attitudes and behaviors. This isn't an element of the show I've seen discussed often, but the setting is absolutely crucial to the show's drama. It would be an entirely different story if it were set in Southern California, or New England, or Northeast Ohio, or the wilds of Montana. But no: it's set in rural Georgia, the land of Good Ol' Boys and proud self-proclaimed rednecks. And the characters who comprise the show's main cast are by no stretch of the imagination great intellectuals: a couple small-town police officers, a couple lowlifes, some homemakers, a few assorted nobodies. Not a single strategic thinker among them. There's a lawyer who spent most of the first season and much of the second trying not to kill herself. A veterinarian. They're not that smart, they're not that dumb, they're just normal everyday people. Walking cliches? No more than your average Good Ol' Boy. It's a definite type, and furthermore a type to which the self-identifying exemplars enthusiastically conform. I can't help but wonder if there isn't something of a class element in much of the criticism of the show - instead of upper-middle-class WASPS, we're down in the deep south with poor whites and - gasp! - people who actually own guns.

People criticize the show for the fact that the characters consistently act like idiots - well, yeah, I believe that. The show wouldn't really be the same story if it was filled with people who knew what was going on and acted appropriately in all situations - most people, when push comes to shove, just aren't that good in an emergency. And the situation we're given on this show is nothing if not a long, never-ending emergency, the kind of situation that frays your nerves and demolishes your resolve over long periods of time. As annoying as it might seem, it's refreshing to see a story where people so consistently do the wrong things: we're all so used to seeing movies and reading books where people always know what to do that the sensation of seeing people who do stupid things on purpose seems almost radical. Genre fiction especially is held in the sway of the cult of competence: no one likes to read adventure fiction starring idiots. People like to identify with fantasies of extreme competence, we like to believe deep in some part of our brain that if we were put in that situation - whatever it may be, dodging zombies, fighting aliens, racing cars down crowded city streets - we'd know just what to do. In reality, we wouldn't. Fight or flight doesn't always work to our benefit. It's not the same thing as stupid teenagers in a slasher film making the stupid decision to go back in the house instead of just running down the street as fast as they can - it's people in life-or-death situations presented with bad options who make the worst possible decision because they're tired, they're sick, they're worried half to death, they're operating on incomplete information. They get worn down and they die because they make stupid mistakes.

A few years back in class a professor passed out in front of me. I was sitting in the front row and he sat down on the table behind him and just sort of nodded off, faded slowly onto the floor, before he could even finish saying, "I don't feel so good." Everyone else around me stood up like a bolt and ran to his side, but I was rooted to my seat - I couldn't do anything. I felt a little bit faint myself, truth be told. No one at all cared about what I was doing, no one noticed, but I had just sat there while this guy keeled over right in front of me - I felt like a rank coward. I used to work a stressful job that required constant alertness and - very occasionally - split-second decisions and actual physical reflexes. (That was when I worked in the mental hospital, dealing with occasionally violent patients.) I was good at my job. But that was because it was my job, I could deal with it, I walked into the building and I was "on," ready to do these things for which I was paid. But when my professor passed out on the ground three feet in front of me? I didn't do a damn thing. That was just life - and sometimes when unexpected and stressful things happen in life you just sit there with your thumb in your ass. Sometimes we just aren't as good at dealing with surprises as we think we are.


The point is precisely that these people have been put in an impossible situation that requires every iota of their intelligence and skill to survive, and they just aren't prepared to - and, more to the point, aren't able to perform at this level of constant stress. And as much as we, the audience, sitting at home would like to believe that we would do better, it's important to note that every stupid mistake made on this show is made in an air of either vague or definite panic. No one gets to make plans, the best they can hope is to be able to recover from unforced errors. Usually they can't. Whenever the attempt is made to deliberate problems in a calm and rational manner, the process is usually overwhelmed by strong personalities with definite agendas, agendas influenced at least in part by the fact that the constant stress of unreal pressure is causing them to crack ever so surely. Those that survive - and we know that some will survive - will learn to do better. The stupid will die off, the smart will learn from their mistakes - just like people in warzones do, or people running from ethnic cleansing or civil war.

And this, ultimately, is what I find so compelling about The Walking Dead: more than just about any show on TV right now, it is about right now, the moment in which we are currently living. In case you haven't noticed, everything is falling apart right outside your window. Large swaths of people have lost confidence in all levels of contemporary society - you can't turn on the news without seeing further proof of the deepening political, economic, environmental, and psychological crises at the heart of modern life. Oh, wait, excuse me, if you turn on the TV what you really see is a bunch of talking heads and millionaire entertainers whistling past the graveyard of rapidly crumbling western civilization, with massively rich playboys running for president who might as well be speaking Swahili for all their words hold any relevance to the life that is being lived (endured?) on the ground not just across the country but across the world.

 So what zombie shows like The Walking Dead - and Armageddon fantasies in general - actually offer is a way out. This is something demagogues have understood for thousands of years: the idea of immanent disaster, a final tally, closing of accounts, confrontation between good & evil, holds immense appeal for people who feel completely trapped and helpless in their own lives. As strange as it may seem, the end of the world is an empowering fantasy: if everything you take for granted about the world you live in and the life you live suddenly disappeared, if there were no rules, well, you'd have the freedom to do anything you wanted, wouldn't you? Sure, you'd be scared and running for your life and probably wouldn't be able to think straight because you couldn't close your eyes without seeing the faces of all the loved ones you left behind to be eaten, but you'd be on your own with no one responsible for your life but yourself. (Putting aside the fact that these kinds of "end of the world" scenarios actually do happen and have happened across the planet with depressing regularity - hell, are currently happening as we speak in far-off lands we only hear about on late night BBC World Service broadcast.)

Because - here's the thing - the modern condition is one of abject helplessness. People know things aren't going well. Although people across the spectrum disagree and the hows and the whys, there is a broad consensus among a surprisingly diverse array of interests that things are falling apart. Debt levels keep rising higher and higher - and, yes, that bothers the far left just as much as the far right, but for entirely different reasons. Summers and winters are weird now. The lockstep advance of corporate and bio-political coercive power continues unabated. Politics as we know it is essentially a null category and even people who still line up their ballot to vote for the right-center rats over the even-further-right rats are aware of this fact.

The difference is that the crises and emergencies we encounter in our daily lives have no immediate cause. We can't shoot "capitalism" in the face; we can't fire a crossbow shaft through "democracy" or "liberal consensus"; we can't take out "student loan debt" at the knees or run over "environmental degradation" with a truck. Action to change the world around us is long and arduous, and the forces arrayed against even the most gossamer possibilities of substantive change are truly formidable. How much better to imagine a fantasy wherein real actions do matter, where all politics have been radically reduced to local action - nothing is more local than the space between a barn and a farmhouse. What if you were in a life-or-death situation where what you - you personally - did actually mattered? You know, as opposed to the real life-or-death situation we're all in now when even the concerted effort of millions of people across the planet can't even dent the stalwart opposition of multinational corporations and banking conglomerates. Just like now, as many people feel helpless and frightened as feel active and empowered. The difference is that it's so much easier to understand just why the world is falling apart when zombies have killed 99% of the population, as opposed to now when our real enemies are not individual or even collective people but systems, vast dysfunctional "isms" whose collective death grip threatens to strangle the planet nigh unto asphyxiation.

You could say that the zombie plague genre - long since having surpassed its status as a micro-genre and having grown into a significant and lasting fixture on the pop-culture landscape - has become for the 21st century American psyche what the Western genre was to that of the 19th and 20th. I say this not necessarily as a die-hard fan of the genre: it's very rarely done well, it's prone to a lot of in-jokey silliness, and it's just as formulaic - if not moreso - as westerns were in John Wayne's heyday. But bear with me: the western was a genre of hope and national triumphalism, the endlessly reiterated story of strong individuals making their way through a chaotic landscape, creating order through strength and wit, carrying the "virtues" of civilization in the wake of the gunslinger. At the core of the western was either the implicit or explicit promise of manifest destiny, the understanding that the fantasy of the untamed west had receded into the pages of history books, because the west had been tamed, the wilderness had been mapped, the savages definitively routed. This has been the explicit subject matter of the most significant "revisionist" westerns of recent years - Unforgiven, Deadwood, almost Cormac McCarthy's entire oeuvre.

The flip side of this is the zombie apocalypse (and it's worth noting that McCarthy produced his own end-of-the-world tale - if not exactly a zombie story - with The Road). Instead of inherently hopeful, the zombie apocalypse is inherently pessimistic. There is no longer the promise of immanent civilization, a political and social order made possible by the exertions of stolid and courageous individualists. Civilization is gone. Instead of cowboys leading wagon trains in advance of the coming expansion of the commonwealth, you've got small bands of survivors fleeing the ruins of cities and towns - what were once the great symbols of progress are now the infested warrens of cannibalistic killers. The only chance for heroism is survival. Rome has fallen, and those poor bands of stragglers left to huddle together for warmth can't look to the east for the sudden arrival of horse cavalry to save the day. It's a profoundly, sickeningly hopeless myth, eschatological pornography, inherently humorless and implacable.

Is The Walking Dead a great show? Perhaps not. It strains against the limits of hour-long television production. The performers are game and the stories are certainly timely but there is doubt whether or not the formula - which, if the show follows the book, will prove crushingly fatalistic and inescapably depressing over the long run, with no solution or resolution in sight or ever provided - will prove tiresome over the course of however many seasons the series will run. For the moment, it succeeds because it has caught the updraft of a definite mood - a certain vein of crushing despair welling up under the facade of a soft recovery, the indeterminate knowledge that even if it feels like things might be getting better, the augers of future hardship simply don't lie. For now the audience seems to relish the slow suffocation and gradual whittling of the main cast. We'll see how things stand when the show is on season eight and the characters have turned into hardened killers with thousand-yard stares. The inherent humorlessness of the show is a necessary concession to the source material, but already the show veers towards sententiousness and self-parody. But if you accept that the show will always be deathly serious, there are also moments of profound beauty livened by the never-dissipating atmosphere of existential dread.

Horror is customarily a finite genre - you will have to look hard for example of horror fiction that can be successfully sustained in serial format. If the villain / monster / menace can't be dispatched at the end of the movie, well, what is left? The sense of cathartic release one customarily expects to find at the conclusion of a horror narrative never arrives, replaced with a hard, grinding anxiety elicited by the certainty that the threat remains unvanquished, unvanquishable. We never get to see these people enjoy a moment of hard-won peace, it's just one damn thing after another, nauseous uncertainty punctuated by recurring moments of blinding white-hot terror. Is it any wonder that the characters on this show walk around half in a daze, unable to think straight, making mistake after mistake? You would too, if you were in a horror story from which you couldn't wake up and from which there was no promise of release - oh wait, you already are.

The Tao of Iron Man



The most important thing to remember about Tony Stark is that he is first and foremost an engineer. He's not some generic comic book super-scientist, he's not a theorist, and he's not an explorer. He's a man of science, but even more to the point he's a practical thinker: he sees problems and he solves them.

Tony Stark has control issues. He has trouble relating to people - one of the hallmarks of his character since all the way back in Stan's day, when he was cold and distant towards the people in his life, burdened by the terrible secret of the heart problem that was slowly killing him. He's never been one to let others in. He appears as imperturbable as his metal armor. Time and again he is pulled up short by his inability to trust other people, even his closest friends and lovers. This is pretty much the oldest Iron Man story formula in the books: Tony thinks he has the situation under control, he refuses to ask his friends for help, and things only get worse the more headstrong he becomes.

As many problems as there were with the execution - and boy were there ever problems with the execution - the core idea at the root of Civil War was a sound one. Anyone who had a problem with conceiving of Iron Man and Captain America coming to blows over the finer points of ethical behavior should just think back to the last few times Iron Man and Captain America came to blows over ethical behavior. This is right at the heart of why these characters play off each other so well: Cap is an idealist, Iron Man is a pragmatist. It's the difference between ends and means. Cap has seen too much war and too much death to ever believe that any good can come from compromising your beliefs in the name of expedience. Iron Man believes in nothing so much as his own ability to solve problems. Captain America goes through periodic crises of confidence, wherein his resolve is tested by the discrepancy between his ideals and our reality; Iron Man goes through periodic crises of distrust, wherein his failure to fully control the consequences of his actions and his inability to trust the people around him alienates friends and allies.



This is why, as fun as the movies can be, Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of Tony Stark is completely wrong in a few crucial aspects. Downey plays Tony Stark as if Stark were a version of himself - hyperactive, ebullient, sarcastic. He's a happy man, secure in the knowledge that he's the smartest asshole in the room, and smug enough to know that everyone else understands that fact perfectly well. In the movies Tony Stark is funny, and perhaps more importantly he's sexy. The character has a great appeal and it's not hard to understand why the immense success of the movies has influenced the character's portrayal in the comics.

The problem is that while the movies certainly do a good job of filling in a general outline of Stark's character, they miss something very important: Tony Stark takes himself very seriously, and furthermore, he's very serious about having dedicated his life to helping others. He took himself seriously before receiving a chestful of shrapnel in Vietnam, and he took himself even more seriously when he had to plug his armor into a wall socket every few hours in order to stay alive. He took himself so seriously that when he had trouble keeping his act together, when circumstances threatened to become overwhelming, he turned inward and self-medicated with alcohol. And when he did that, he lost control of everything. He's not someone who would throw a massive party in his Iron Man armor and show off for some pretty starlets. He's not a happy drunk, not at all - when he falls far enough to drink, he's a self-pitying, melancholy mess.

Movie Iron Man is a loose cannon, distrusted by the government and impossible to control. In the comics, of course, Iron Man has been cast as a humorless straight-man more-or-less since time immemorial. Tony Stark takes his responsibilities very seriously. It's important to remember that Tony Stark was a full-grown adult when he became Iron Man, with an established world view and personality. The one important thing that changed in Stark as a result of the circumstances that led to his becoming Iron Man was that he became a philanthropist, someone who dedicated his time and resources to helping others - someone who believed it was his duty to help others, because he was the only one worthy to be trusted with the secrets of his armor. Compare that to Captain America, who is defined primarily by his ability to inspire the best in others, or even Thor, who considers his duty as a hero to be a function of his inherent nobility of a warrior, and you see why Iron Man stands apart. He's a bleeding heart, but it's coming from a very weird place - born rich and privileged beyond most people's wildest dreams, when he comes to responsibility he comes to it as a kind of individual mandate. There's always something just a little bit condescending in Iron Man's tone - something inextricably WASP-y and old-money - that stands at odds with the egalitarian language utilized by Captain America or the honor code that motivates Thor. He's not motivated by anything as fancy as ideals or honor, but plain old ethical pragmatism. He sees problems and tries to solve them, because he sees himself as the most qualified person in the room when it comes to solving problems.

Which is not to say for one second that his desire to help the world is anything less than entirely sincere. The problems are that he isn't entirely selfless, and he isn't capable of identifying his own shortcomings. He ends up making the same mistakes over and over again, because while he may be one of the smartest men on the planet he's still not smart enough to recognize his own hubris.



Stan Lee always says that Iron Man, of all the original Marvel hero books, was the most popular with women. They received more fan letters from women for Iron Man than any other character. It's not hard to see why: originally, Tony Stark was drawn by Don Heck as pretty much the spitting image of Clark Gable, down to the pencil mustache on his upper lip. He wasn't a lothario by any means, but he was a grown adult who carried himself as a grown adult, albeit an extremely attractive and powerful adult, and one who also carried the strange secret of a literally wounded heart. Is there any metaphor more likely to win a young girl's fancy?

For decades Iron Man's gimmick was that Tony Stark had some kind of disability. First, he was dying of heart failure because there was shrapnel suspended near his heart. Then, after his heart was fixed, he developed a problem with alcohol, and his battle with alcohol eventually led to him losing complete control of his company, his money, the Iron Man armor, and even his life for a significant amount of time. After he regained control following that he was shot by a jealous lover and spent a year in a wheelchair, after which he was cured by an experimental surgical implant that enabled a group of villains to take control of his body - the upshot of getting free of that situation was that he was left almost entirely paralyzed and near death. He faked his death after that, a decision that (sing the chorus!) alienated his closest friends and allies for years. (And then, well, it was revealed that he had been mind-controlled by Kang since 1964 and turned into a murderer before being replaced by his teen counterpart from an alternate Earth . . . well, the less said about that the better.)

The point is that he has always been a "hard luck hero," but he was never obsessed with self-pity. He didn't mope around like Spider-Man - certainly an attractive identification figure for insecure male readers but hardly a romantic ideal for young women to lionize. (At least not initially - I know plenty of women have fictional crushes on Peter Parker, but compare the portrayal of the male protagonists in Lee & Heck's earliest Iron Man stories with Lee & Ditko's Spider-Man and you'll see a world of difference - which of those two characters do you think you most resemble, and which do you want to actually be?) He was / is attractive to women because he was vulnerable but not obsessed with his vulnerability - that his confidence is often belied by reality is perfectly besides the point. His lack of self-reflection was always the root of his greatest problem. It's been years since Tony Stark has had an actual physical disability, and in that time it's become sufficient merely to assert that Stark's greatest weakness is his poisonous self-regard.

Would people otherwise have trouble identifying with an insanely wealthy protagonist, if he weren't on some level a highly dysfunctional person? Batman is rich as Croesus and people have rarely felt that this attribute made the character less relatable. Batman is a wish-fulfillment fantasy par excellence - his money is a means by which he achieves his goal of avenging his parents and fighting crime. Iron Man, however, isn't working from any kind of primal trauma. He's actually kind of insufferable - and this is true of every Iron Man, in any medium. The character is less approachable than Batman or Spider-Man or even - I would argue - Superman, because there's something in Tony Stark's character that keeps him from ever being the purely selfless heroic ideal. He's a businessman and an engineer, a man of rationality with a supreme confidence in his own ability to fix any situation, no matter how seemingly insoluble. He's not a family man like Reed Richards and he doesn't have the family trauma of Peter Parker or Bruce Wayne (although it was explained in hindsight that his family was cold and distant, it was hardly a defining trait), so the only things that keep him grounded are his own feet of clay. His model of do-gooding is profoundly philanthropic - sincere and serious-minded, but vaguely condescending for all that.

Iron Man is unique in super-hero comics because he's a protagonist the audience is often encouraged to dislike, either obliquely or explicitly. His greatest conflicts usually involve overcoming his own highly inflated sense of importance, and dealing with the repercussions of bad decisions made in the name of utility. He will always be the "cool exec with a heart of steel," a plutocrat who has perversely dedicated himself to the betterment of mankind - but on his terms and no others.