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.