Joss Whedon, Philip Roth, and Ed Brubaker: What I've Been Reading and Watching
Dollhouse: The trick to watching doomed shows that you’re likely to love is to wait until their doom is complete. That way, you know what you’re getting into, and you can savor it, or binge on it, or take whatever approach you please. But when it ends early, it’s not a surprise. I’m only a couple of episodes into the first season, and it hasn’t entirely grabbed me yet — it’s still too episodic, too procedural, too disguise-of-the-week for my taste — but it’s clearly going somewhere interesting. Also clear is that the network’s decision-makers were under the impression that they’d bought Hot Girl Wears Sexy Costumes: On TV — a sort of sci-fi Charlie’s Angels — and what they got was something very, very different.
The Human Stain: It’s an interesting partner and (for me) follow-up to Ravelstein, another 2001 novel about a classics professor told from the perspective of his friend. It’s a very different book, of course: Roth’s novel inhabits a variety of characters in a way that Bellow’s does not, and he is concerned as much with studying the particular period, and its tormented culture and politics, as with revealing the central character. There’s also the matter of sex. Bellow touches upon it as a part of human existence; Roth is obsessed with it, seeming to view it as life’s central facet. I don’t think I care for it as much as American Pastoral, which is probably my favorite novel of the last twenty years, but it’s certainly worth reading. Like nearly all the best novels, its primary virtue is the creation of a fully-realized fictional world — populated with characters who seem as real as the people you know — that is easy to imagine existing long before the events of the book start and well after they end.
Incognito: Though it doesn’t quite live up to its supervillain-gone-good concept, Ed Brubaker’s stylish superhero noir at least takes a stab at answering one of the comic world’s most frequently overlooked — or at least unsatisfyingly answered — questions: Why do superheroes choose to do good? And not just to do good, but to do it for free, at the cost of sleep, relationships, etc. In Brubaker’s story, sometimes they don’t, and when they do it’s not always because that’s what they really want, but because that’s the option they have. I’d still like to see a comic book take a psychologically complex look at the genre’s usual device, which is that “good” people acquire powers and end up with a moral compulsion to freely give of themselves in service of what they believe to be (and in the world of comic books, usually is) the greater good. Spider-Man and Batman offer reasonable but entirely too simplistic explanations for why a hero might choose that path, but I’m not aware of any comic that actually spends a lot of time examining the hero’s choice — perhaps allowing him or her to choose otherwise — and how hard it would presumably be to maintain with any consistency. Watchmen did a great job of taking the superhero genre’s greater-good shtick to its logical authoritarian endpoint, but no work that I’m aware of really dives into the gray area of why one would do good, or not, and all the non-hero, non-villain options a superpowered individual might actually have in terms of using his or her abilities. Or, to put it another way: In the real world, if people started to develop superpowers, I suspect few of them would run around in tights fighting other superpowered people in tights. Instead, they’d probably put their powers to some sort of productive and/or selfish use that wouldn’t always be easy to classify as “good” or “bad.”
Because I have a longstanding interest in how video games deal with narrative, I picked up Heavy Rain — a game purported to take game storytelling to new levels — last week. Still haven’t played it yet, but I’ll report back once I do.
For a good comic depicting the grey areas of having superpowers check out DEMO by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan. The first volume came out years ago, but they recently relaunched the series with a 2nd volume. Primarily deals with young people developing powers and how they individually cope with and utilize them. No superheroes in sight, just the human element of having “powers”.
Another title that is tangently related is Garth Ennis’ THE BOYS. Way more on the tights and spandex side of things, but it looks at how people would act if they had powers and still had the same level of self-absorption and ego that any normal person would have.
Lastly, Warren Ellis’ SUPERGOD takes a look at things from the other end of the spectrum, and gets into how a superpowered being would act in a world that it had no connection to. Picture Superman seeing human beings as no more significant than ants, or any other type of life form on Earth.
I’m sure there are tons more, but these are just some of the current titles you can find on stands today.
— GabeM · Apr 7, 09:43 PM · #
Gabe, thanks. I’ve read Supergod and a little bit of The Boys, and while I liked both, neither struck me as exactly what I’m looking for – a long-form exploration of what someone (or a few people) might actually do with superpowers. I like Wood’s DMZ a lot, though, so I’ll check out Demo.
— Peter Suderman · Apr 8, 02:32 AM · #
Dollhouse gets on with the larger story arc around episode 5 or 6. It’s very interesting and thought-provoking, if not always great. Worth watching 2 seasons.
— Ano · Apr 12, 06:51 PM · #
I often find that some of the better foreign policy related superhero comics do a good job of getting into some of the issues you mention. The foreign policy espionage/intervention focus makes it easier to address issue of motivation and morality without dropping the action that is the staple of the genre.
My favorites for this tend to be anything by John Ostrander, notably Suicide Squad and for a different author using some of the same characters I liked Checkmate Vol. 2 which had a squad working under the authority of the U.N. Security Council that had explicit status quo actor incentives rather than heroic ones.
— Greg Sanders · Apr 13, 04:31 PM · #