by liberal japonicus
I thought it was Aristotle who came up with ‘suspension of disbelief’, but apparently, it was Samuel Coleridge. Aristotle argued that a convincing impossibility in a story is preferable to an unconvincing possibility, but Coleridge came up with the phrase.
This is prompted by seeing clips for the TV series Lanterns along clips of various Marvel and DC stuff and I’m trying to figure out why I never really liked DC, but had no problems with Marvel.
Certainly, one big thing was geography. I was never happy about Central City or Metropolis or Gotham. On the other hand, 90% of Marvel superheroes were from New York, which was as glaring a plot hole as putting a hero in each major city.
Also, Marvel generally had multi-issue story arcs, while DC comics initially had stories that would wrap up in one issue. That wrapping up was something that I really didn’t like, and so gravitated to Marvel.
Though I’m sure I wasn’t thinking about it, going for multi-issue stories coupled with the actual cities seemed to allow more social commentary. However, in the Lanterns TV series, they have been exploring what it means to be a black superhero. Interesting stuff.
Anyway, a thread for you to discuss comic books, graphic novels or anything else that requires suspension of disbelief.
I was thinking back the other day about some of Marvel’s effects on DC. One of them that I had to go back and check on was that shortly after Marvel introduced the curvaceous Mary Jane Watson character in Spider-Man, the Wonder Girl character in DC’s Teen Titans abruptly changed from a slender teenager to a full-blown fantasy object. Not long after that, the young women in DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes had a similar transition.
…anything else that requires suspension of disbelief.
I thought this was not about current politics. 😉
As for mammary size in comics: The German classic Nick Knatterton had that issue. The artist told the story that a friend recommended to him to make the females in the strips very curvaceous, if he wanted to increase sales. So he did. But in some countries the censors got to work and ..eh.. delarged the characters while in (nominally conservative) Turkey the opposite happened and the strips got published with significantly extended upper and lower backside works.
The artist was notorious for tall tales and this story got questioned. But some years ago printed proof appeared and got included in the jubilee edition.
The general consensus among the various comic artists, fans, and critics about the difference between DC and Marvel in general is that Marvel’s heroes are ordinary people with heroic problems, whereas DC’s heroes are demigods with human problems.
My own take on things, coming from my academic background in narratives about war, is that Marvel’s stories are told like a WWII Combat Film (quite literally in the case of Captain America). The heroes are drawn by circumstance into having to defend their homes against the forces of evil and destruction. They have to overcome their flaws and doubts in order to shoulder the burden of their responsibilities and save the “civilians.” (Thor is, of course, one of Marvel’s actual mythological characters, but he’s less popular than the core characters: Spiderman, Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, Wolverine).
DC, meanwhile is less Call of Duty, and more The Odyssey. The DC hero is more archetypal and larger-than-life, and the conflicts more philosophical and less personal. On that front, I’d point out that Nolan has done both Odysseus and Batman, and that both focused on the big picture of what violence and savagery do to a civilization. Think of how different the scope of Odysseus’ homecoming is from the multi-arc homecoming story that the MCU gives to Captain America.
If you really want to dig into the difference in feel between the two publishers, you can compare the titles that were intended to directly compete with each other – X-Men vs Doom Patrol, Teen Titans vs New Mutants, Justice League vs Avengers. In each case there was a ton of cross-pollination and outright theft, but you can really tell how the house feel tugs at the narratives.
nous, I think that is generally true about DC being demigods, though it’s been observed that Batman was always a bit of an outlier in the DC stable, which I think is why it has lent itself more to movies.
About Nolan, I think it was Jamelle Bouie’s observation that Nolan is interested in what happens when large systems get a huge shock, and how that translates to the person or people who need to deal with it, they fix it but then have to exile themselves. Fortunately or not, comics published in a serial form are not really the place for having main characters exile themselves. And now, we have the sad situation where our world is is more like a comic book where we keep getting them same super villains coming back for another chance to screw our lives up.
It was nice to see the HBO series Watchmen mentioned in lj’s link. Black Panther, too, but I think Watchmen was more relevant to Lanterns.
While on the subject of Black superheroes, I would like to lodge a complaint about Wonder Man being dropped after one season. It was an oddball as superhero shows go but I thought it was exceptionally good.
Womp!
I feel that the Watchmen TV series dropped a few years before its time, occurring at the end of Trump 1 and thinking that it was a fever dream and we were going back to normal. I wonder how it would have been taken if it had dropped last year.
Watchmen also brings up the interesting IP problem that is discussed here
https://www.eliotborenstein.net/thewatchmenwatch/dpe406g13ptq57wydjfaiwrkjj4elj
It is fascinating to me how this all works out. Marvel has famously had their own problems dealing with IP, but, as this interview notes
But the thing that really bugged me was when Watchmen was announced it was, coincidentally, that same summer the entire industry rallied around Jack Kirby against Marvel. It was the era of the “Creator’s Rights Revolution” and DC really used Watchmen at the time. Part of the PR was that it was creator-owned, that these guys would get this property back. DC used it to position themselves against Marvel as the more creator-friendly company.
I was at the San Diego Comic-Con the year that Alan Moore was there. I saw him talk about Watchmen and what a revolutionary thing it was that they’d gotten this deal for it. Part of it felt like a promise to the industry that things were changing. That this was different. And so while the book never went out of print and they never got their ownership, I always felt that on some level Paul Levitz seemed to respect the spirit of the deal: that they had created this thing and while DC officially owned it, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had moral ownership of it, at least.
So to see this happen over the objection of the guy who wrote it, and then to see the responses, “Well, Alan Moore didn’t really create those characters anyway; they’re just the Charlton characters.” Or “He did the same thing with Lost Girls. Would the people who created those characters be happy with the way Alan Moore treated them?” I don’t think he was positioning Lost Girls as an official, in-continuity sequel to those author’s books, for one, but I think two of them are on the record as saying they don’t give a shit what anyone does with their characters. And clearly DC doesn’t think the Watchmen characters are just the Charlton heroes, because they copyrighted and trademarked them as totally different characters.
So it seems to be that DC are a whole nother level of douchedom, though I suppose that it is just them evolving to the next level.