OK, Why I Hate Marvel

 Background to this post: I made the mistake of revealing too much of my personal intimate and dangerous information with a class in Week 1, 2021 Spring. I should have kept things less controversial, such as my opinion on the death penalty, legalizing marijuana, and the American industrial-congress-military complex. But I put my foot in my nostril and said that I hate Marvel.

So, let me say it, I hate Marvel. 

I always have. Back in my teens and through university years, I read comics a lot. I spent more money on comics each week than I should have -- hundreds of dollars over the years and some of those would be valuable today but after I felt that my purchasing were approaching an unhealthy obsession, I sent all my books to my former uni roommie in Seattle. So, I stopped reading comics.

I had always leaned to DC and indie books. Watchmen; Dark Knight; the DC Crisis; the indie books with very complex characters and emerging artists. Those universes were more adult and were anchored in their city worlds. 

My roomie, OTOH, leaned toward Marvel. Of course, we were constantly reading each other's collections and we argued every week a few hours after hitting the comic store. FWIW, my roomie was an artist, or emerging artist (his drawing skills were never trained; he never took a class from high school, never at uni, so his art was always very raw, and all male characters seemed to look like Conan and all female characters looked like young Eartha Kitt, I don't know why).

I think the reason I started hating Marvel was that X-Men were less about adult themes and more about adolescent themes. I mean, back in Stan Lee years, Peter Parker was famous for being an adolescent hero, always awkward in real life, struggling with family and girl relationships, and Spiderman's life was the adolescent answer to that insecurity. But X-Men did the same thing ... and I still see that insecurity. At the core, right, X-Men is a story of outsiders being oppressed by the dominant culture. That's a very adolescent theme.

OK, I realize that this could be a parallel story of any minority oppressed by the hegemony, but Marvel did not present that as a systemic oppression. It was always about the characters finding their superpower to supplant normal ("normal") socializing in society. 

Once the MCU came upon, I tried to enjoy the movies as action, just for exceptionalism, but MCU made early mistakes to use humor to entertain the audience, humor that was not reflected in the comics. Even in Black Panther, which was overall a very good film, the use of humor was a distraction and unnecessary. Humor, in light of universal destruction doesn't really make it satisfying for me, as the audience. Iron Man, for example, is a horrible character, with his cute asides in the midst of being threatened to death or while destroying someone else. Superman never did that. Dark Knight didn't use humor but he did use film noir-like dialog to complete the destruction of the bad guys. 

Further, I agree with Martin Scorcese (though his argument is much more thorough) that the MCU films "aren't cinema." It's a good argument and everyone should read it, even if you might disagree (plenty folks disagree). He criticizes the film industry, the de(evolution) of CGI, the MCU corporation pandering to an audience who don't want to be challenged.

And if you’re going to tell me that it’s simply a matter of supply and demand and giving the people what they want, I’m going to disagree. It’s a chicken-and-egg issue. If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing.

And, I do not like DC films except for a few of the Batman films. The Superman series have been awful. Justice League is embarrassing. Though I enjoyed Wonder Woman (2017), I've heard only bad things about Wonder Woman 1984 and I didn't intend to watch it anyway. So, even though I'm anti-Marvel, I'm not a zealot about DC's film industry.

As for comics, I've been pushing into more contemporary graphic novels, including non-American graphic novels. As for films, I go through phases and I'm returning to my film noir preferences, some post-war Japanese films, and I need to return to Star Wars IV -- A New Hope not because I might quote it after watching a dozen times, but I now want to see the performance tension between Hamill and Ford. And Alec Guinness ... I mean, Guinness. The original (better) version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a masterpiece of slow, slow, slow tension in a simple story. 

OK. So, I try to defend my hostility towards MCU. I've seen several of the films, but I couldn't swallow enough to watch the latest Avengers film. 

Mea culpa, ok? You'll forgive me. 

P.S. I had forgotten that Transformers come from MCU. You need to read my screed against one of those movies, in another blog, or what I called, "How Transformers Ruined my Day, or I Haven't Been This Disappointed in Mark Wahlburg Since He Left New Kids on the Block."