Jun
1
RIP Martian Manhunter
Filed Under Comics
I’m a Marvel Zombie. DC treats their heroes like icons and not like characters. They have no idea what to do with Superman or Batman or Wonder Woman, not wanting to tarnish the characters’ precious iconography, so they don’t do much of anything with them. As such, DC cranks out dozens of the most banal titles every month. Superman and Batman have four or so monthlies apiece, not counting the “Justice League of America” title, their team-up books (”Superman/Batman,” “Brave and the Bold,” etc.), and whatever crossovers they also appear in. Wonder Woman, being a girl in the man’s world of superheroics, has one monthly, though she’s a frequent guest star in other titles as well.
I want to like DC more than I do. Superman and Batman are still two of my favorite heroes, just not in the comics medium, ironically. I’ll pick up their books now and again if nothing more than to remind myself why I don’t read them every single month.
It’s this sort of creative inertia that DC has indirectly capitalized on over the past few years with their mega-crossovers. The weekly event book “52″ didn’t even have the holy trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, who’d for whatever reason gone on a year-long leave of absence. It was up to the B-listers to take on the baddies and have a little something I like to call “character development.” What made headlines during that run was the revelation of Batwoman’s homosexuality. That’s Batwoman, not Batgirl. Okay, maybe it was the C-listers who were front and center in “52.”
This summer, the big whoopty-do crossover title for DC is “Final Crisis,” not to be confused with “Identity Crisis” or “Infinite Crisis,” and especially not “Crisis on Infinite Earths.” This is a completely different crisis from a publisher who knows from crises. In “Identity Crisis” they killed off Sue Dibny (Elongated Man’s wife) and Jack Drake (Robin’s dad), and in “Infinite Crisis,” they killed off Superboy. Keeping with DC’s long tradition of doing away with people you couldn’t care less about, in “Final Crisis” #1, the Martian Manhunter gets skewered by a flaming sword.
DC seems to like dispatching the more useless supporting characters then seeing how the major players react to it. Superman’s saddened, Batman’s hardened and Wonder Woman’s still pretty boring for a chick who likes tying people up. At the end of the day, they punch someone and things go back to normal. A day may come, however, when DC will have run out of adjectives to shove in front of the word “Crisis” and every last one of the lower-tiered meta-humans will have been vanquished. What will the writers do then?
I just want to see some character development is all. Batman had a son (with Talia, the daughter of his nemesis, Ra’s Al-Ghul) who showed up for a couple of issues, annoyed the bloody hell out of me, and was ultimately “killed” in a shipwreck. He didn’t really die, of course, but that’s not the point. DC toed the line of taking Batman in a new direction and then chickened out, while leaving the door open to chicken out again in the future.
Martian Manhunter’s death in the first issue of “Final Crisis” seems to be more of the same from the publisher. Only uber-geeks care about crap like that, obscure characters getting killed off during these tempest in a teapot “events.” It’s the same uber-geeks, though, who should be shrugging at each these quasi-earth-shattering moments. Death is meaningless in comics. Ask Superman. And I’d personally like to see something other than the umpteenth hero’s funeral.
Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman haven’t endured for sixty-odd years because they’re the same as they’ve always been. Superman originally couldn’t fly. Batman once carried a gun. Wonder Woman may have had a personality at some point. Man alive, bringing back those characteristics alone could provide brand new directions for all three heroes.
Killing off no one who’ll be missed is just standard operating procedure for DC. They’re not challenging themselves or the readers. It’s why Marvel is the bigger of the Big Two publishers. Marvel’s not afraid of irking fans by ret-conning Spider-Man’s marriage, snuffing an A-lister like Captain America and planting the shape-shifter Skrulls throughout the superhero rank and file. The publisher’s not perfect (Spider-Man’s “Brand New Day” saga isn’t anywhere near as good as it could be), but their books, for better or worse, at least try new things.
That’s really all it’ll take to make me a DC Zombie, too.
-Brad Lohan
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5 Responses to “RIP Martian Manhunter”
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I’m just waiting for the inevitable prequel, “Penultimate Crisis”.
I think I burned myself out with 52.
You had me till the last paragraph, but then lost me with your typical Marvel Zombie “logic.”
Marvel is doing no better than DC these days, both companies are relying more on shock value of the whoring of their a-listers rather than quality and character development.
Marvel tore apart the Avengers just so they could make their “New Avengers” with a-listers Spider-Man and Wolverine on the team to increase the sales of the book. That’s not creative, it’s lazy. Any true Marvel fan would know that neither Spider-Man nor Wolverine belong on the Avengers roster.
Have you read any of the interviews about “One More Day” with Joe Quesada? He bluntly stated numerous times that giving Spider-Man growth and character development was a bad idea, and that the purpose of OMD was to move Peter Parker back decades in his growth as a character.
In fact Marvel hit us for two years with back-to-back controversial Spider-Man stories ranging from organic web-shooters to The Other to the unmasking, all while they already knew that they will retcon it all away down the line.
And then there was the crap-fest known as Civil War, which was plot and stunt driven and poorly planned that Marvel had to hire Dwayne McDuffey to retcon Reed Richard’s motivation for siding with the registration after the fact. And it drips with stunts. not just Spider-Man’s unmasking which was magically undone as soon as the extra attention it drew died down (so much for the character development you’re praising allmighty Marvel for), but also the Thor clone that was included as a cliffhanger to exploit the fan anticipation for Thor’s return. Cloning a fallen alley and friend to use as a weapon raises huge ethical questions, but non of those even cross the minds of any of the heroes involved, as that would be to inconvenient to the plot.
Maybe I should hire Dwayne McDuffey to retcon my blog.
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