General Marvel Legends

Regarding 1940s's Steve Rogers and women. Wasn't one of his other 1940's "partners" Golden Girl/Betsy Ross ? Also, they may be contemporary insertions but his great love at the time was Peggy Carter, who comes across as anything but some damsel in distress. He also fought beside Miss America from the Liberty Legion and Spitfire in the Invaders. The forties is also the time women started taking up the slack from their male counterparts away in a foreign war, working in factories, doing things their boyfriends/husbands weren't around to do. Plus, Cap as a sickly young man before taking the serum, has an affinity for not prejudging what other people can accomplish. Have zero trouble seeing him having an enlightened attitude about women that wasn't exactly typical in the 1940s.
 
hmmberto said:
Obviously I don't think that's what the X-Men is about - really, the money is just an easy way to explain how they have all these cool toys, and not something that gets dealt with thematically.
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Right. There's a practical limit to how much an ongoing franchise superhero book with soap opera plotting can actually do (or should do, for that matter) to address real world moral issues. In much the same way even the best written Western will never actually contain the final word on, say, a cultural outlook on AI, X-Men will never, by it's own structure, be more than a metaphor. An increasingly complex metaphor, absolutely. But a metaphor. It's the difference between fiction that's politically aware, and true political action.

Like, my mind goes back to Marvel trying to address 9/11 and how entirely flaccid it felt to see Dr. Doom cry over the twin towers. At some point you've got to realize the fiction can't ever get 1-to-1 with reality, and trying to make it do so can get really gross.

That's in some way why you occassionally need the X-Men to go to space or fight leprechauns. As a palette cleanser to remind the reader "btw, this is still just colorful drawings on a page". I have great respect for fiction's ability to inspire, but I'm deeply skeptical of its responsibility (and even more its ability) to address, as it were.
 
tasmaniantwister said:
Regarding 1940s's Steve Rogers and women. Wasn't one of his other 1940's "partners" Golden Girl/Betsy Ross ? Also, they may be contemporary insertions but his great love at the time was Peggy Carter, who comes across as anything but some damsel in distress. He also fought beside Miss America from the Liberty Legion and Spitfire in the Invaders. The forties is also the time women started taking up the slack from their male counterparts away in a foreign war, working in factories, doing things their boyfriends/husbands weren't around to do. Plus, Cap as a sickly young man before taking the serum, has an affinity for not prejudging what other people can accomplish. Have zero trouble seeing him having an enlightened attitude about women that wasn't exactly typical in the 1940s.
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Yeah, there's a lot of reasons why Millar's take was lazy and mean and dumb, and it was clear he wanted to write the worst of Cap's generation embodied in him instead of how progressive Steve actually was. (Which made sense given who created him.)
 
Stories and legends of heroes and monsters have always been tools to teach moral lessons: it’s literally the reason why they exist.
I think the problem is less about those sorts of stories “getting political” and more about how common-sense moral/humanist issues have been reframed as “political issues” by folks with something to gain. Stuff like “heroes fight Nazis” and “no one should be discriminated against for who they are” and “freedom is the right of all sentient beings” should not be treated as “political issues”, in fiction nor in real life.
 
tasmaniantwister said:
Regarding 1940s's Steve Rogers and women. Wasn't one of his other 1940's "partners" Golden Girl/Betsy Ross ? Also, they may be contemporary insertions but his great love at the time was Peggy Carter, who comes across as anything but some damsel in distress. He also fought beside Miss America from the Liberty Legion and Spitfire in the Invaders. The forties is also the time women started taking up the slack from their male counterparts away in a foreign war, working in factories, doing things their boyfriends/husbands weren't around to do. Plus, Cap as a sickly young man before taking the serum, has an affinity for not prejudging what other people can accomplish. Have zero trouble seeing him having an enlightened attitude about women that wasn't exactly typical in the 1940s.
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I love this essay about this very subject: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/10/steven-attewell-steve-rogers-isnt-just-any-hero
 
CTV said:
This is where I always circle back to "because he's nuts." If you asked him, he'd probably tell you being Batman is a better option than using his wealth to fund social programs that would eliminate (most of) Gotham's crime, and he'd believe it.
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He does both though. Wayne Foundation exists in canon and spends on social welfare even as Batman spends his nights creating new colorful villains.
 
I suppose you've gotta explain the Westchester money somehow if you have an Xavier Academy in an X-Men reboot, but if I were pitching it, I'd have Xavier starting out with moderate family money (because you need starting capital for this scheme), and we find out he funds the school by using his powers to fuck with the stock market, listening in on how terrible men are manipulating the market, who they're shorting, basically eavesdropping on the bad guys and siphoning off money from their schemes. If he gets caught:

"Wall Street is built upon the blood spilled by men manipulating the fortunes of others for their own gain. We have never prosecuted them in any meaningful way. Are you going to truly accuse me of a crime by simply taking advantage of bad men's intrusive thoughts or nudging the occasional neuron? We've lived through an era of elected officials manipulating the stock market through social media. Have I not simply beat them at their own game? Take legal action against me if you wish, but it will be far easier to prove Senator Kelly enaged in insider trading than it is that I heard his deepest thoughts about what he'd buy his mistress with this week's gains."
 
AceofKnaves said:
Also: I guess I see Batman a little differently. I see him as the terrestrial version of the Superman altruism fantasy: “what if *one* of these rich shits was secretly a hyper-altruist who used all his financial power for good?”
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This is really the point for me. I can't draw a line from Tony, Bruce, Ollie, whoever, to Bezos or Musk or the rest because of the buy in that they suit up and do Hero Things.

That's the difference, and that's the conceit I make when I read the stories. But I also know it's a fantasy. No different than being a vet, knowing our military world, and liking GI Joe (thought admittedly I couldn't reconcile the cop, but that's my demon).

And yeah, they absolutely should address politics. Same as any other media. I like to think I am where I am and learned what I learned because those cartoons and comics gave me the leads and media literacy/critical thinking to explore them on my own terms. A lot of people thanks to bubbles and algorithms don't even get that anymore.
 
altcunningham said:
This is really the point for me. I can't draw a line from Tony, Bruce, Ollie, whoever, to Bezos or Musk or the rest because of the buy in that they suit up and do Hero Things.
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the number of times people have said "we thought Elon was Tony Stark but he's Justin Hammer" and maybe it's because I worked in tech but I've looooong been the asshole saying he's not even Justin Hammer and nobody EVERY thought he was Tony Stark. But I'm wrong, cos people still, STILL, in the Year of Cthulhu 2025, think billionaires might swoop in and save us.

Let's face it, whatever they do in the comics, whatever they do regardless of the writer in charge, if someone with the ETHICS we ascribe to Tony, Bruce, Reed, Ollie, saw what was going on in the world, one guy would take healthcare, one guy would take housing, one guy would take food, and one guy would take energy, and with their monetary forces combined, we'd live in a better world. As infuriating as it can be to try to parse out rich superheroes in our comics and movies, the real fucked up thing is no matter how bad they are, they're angels compared to the people who are their closest financial analogs in the real world. I mean fuck, Luthor was a better president than Trump. The VILLAINS are more aspirational than our real world examples. That's a huge cognitive load for readers.
 
AceofKnaves said:
Stories and legends of heroes and monsters have always been tools to teach moral lessons: it’s literally the reason why they exist.
I think the problem is less about those sorts of stories “getting political” and more about how common-sense moral/humanist issues have been reframed as “political issues” by folks with something to gain. Stuff like “heroes fight Nazis” and “no one should be discriminated against for who they are” and “freedom is the right of all sentient beings” should not be treated as “political issues”, in fiction nor in real life.
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I was going to say something like this earlier but couldn't come up with the right words that didn't seem like I was targeting anyone or what-have-you. But this is it right here. If you decide that 'destroying Nazis' is now a BAD thing to want to do, and makes you a 'violent radical leftist' then I don't know where you go from there in terms of heroic fiction.
 
Damien said:
I was going to say something like this earlier but couldn't come up with the right words that didn't seem like I was targeting anyone or what-have-you. But this is it right here. If you decide that 'destroying Nazis' is now a BAD thing to want to do, and makes you a 'violent radical leftist' then I don't know where you go from there in terms of heroic fiction.
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Van Sciver and a host of other indie comics like Based Stickman have you covered.
 
docsilence said:
the number of times people have said "we thought Elon was Tony Stark but he's Justin Hammer" and maybe it's because I worked in tech but I've looooong been the asshole saying he's not even Justin Hammer and nobody EVERY thought he was Tony Stark. But I'm wrong, cos people still, STILL, in the Year of Cthulhu 2025, think billionaires might swoop in and save us.

Let's face it, whatever they do in the comics, whatever they do regardless of the writer in charge, if someone with the ETHICS we ascribe to Tony, Bruce, Reed, Ollie, saw what was going on in the world, one guy would take healthcare, one guy would take housing, one guy would take food, and one guy would take energy, and with their monetary forces combined, we'd live in a better world. As infuriating as it can be to try to parse out rich superheroes in our comics and movies, the real fucked up thing is no matter how bad they are, they're angels compared to the people who are their closest financial analogs in the real world. I mean fuck, Luthor was a better president than Trump. The VILLAINS are more aspirational than our real world examples. That's a huge cognitive load for readers.
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This is why one of the few political art pieces I've drawn was Trump as the Grand Nagus from Star Trek. He's not a supervillain. That's an insult to supervillains. He's a disgusting, venal troll king who everyone should recognize as a joke on sight.
 
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