The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Civvies

This is largely a follow-up post to last week's post on Marvel's Civil War arc. Finally getting a little breathing space I got around to checking on Dwight Williams' Livejournal page, (I do keep finding myself liking elements of the Livejournal structure...) where he'd picked up the topic nearly a week ago.

Dwight, aside from being an illustrator and storyteller, has also been a comics fan for most of his life. He's the sort of comics fan I have always been at heart, even though the realities of the comics biz in the past 20 years have beaten a great deal of it out of me: A fan who cherishes the details and histories of the characters.

Aside from anything to be found in rumor threads or among those with advance info (and I generally stay away from such messageboards as I'm paying enough for the comics to want to keep their contents fresh when I read them) there's no new info since Marvel didn't put out any Civil War tie-in comics this week.

Next week there'll be six (four of which I'll be getting -- I haven't bothered with X-Factor and even if I cared about Wolverine the Humberto Ramos artwork would have kept that off the list) tie-in titles. (The four CW tie-ins I'll be getting will be Amazing Spider-man #533, Civil War Front Line #2, Fantastic Four #538 and New Avengers #21.) I don't mind the wait, since my comics arrive twice-monthly and this isn't a shipping week for me. Next Friday I'll get both weeks worth -- some of which I might get to late that evening as I wind down from the latest blast of clix.

In the end it appears that Dwight and I are both enjoying the current arc sweeping the Marvel universe - however unevenly the sweep - though I have more reservations and am anticipating more pitfalls. Mainly, I don't trust the folks at Marvel very far in recent years.

Still, the core concept -- that the government would insist on making costumed vigilantes accountable for their actions, and would want to set up a registration system as a first, essential step in that process -- is sound.

Whether or not that's the line at which a fan chooses to distinguish escapist fantasy from reality is largely the issue most fans are divided on. For me, the line's farther to one side: I accept the fantasy of the powers and abilities, and would like to have everything else flow reasonably, logically... and more importantly humanly, from there. I'm interested enough to want to see this play out.

Speculating on exactly how they'll do it... I'm not going to go that route, as it quickly starts to confuse things in issues of ego. I will say how I see it at this point, and where I'd expect it to go. (The following is a slightly modified version of what I posted in the comment thread over there. I'm doing this largely to keep matters concentrated in this blog for greater ease of reference down the line.)

I don't believe that the Registration Act necessarily means the end of the secret identity, since there's no intrinsic insistance that they make those IDs public. Stark (Iron Man) chose to do it as he is in both guises a highly public figure, and as a show of good faith. Peter's (Spider-man) decided to do it, in part because he promised to stand with Tony and mostly because of what his loved ones told him. I'm sure that to some degree he's going to feel the relief of not having to constantly split his life; he is, however, more or less trapped as an Avenger now for the sake of the safety of his Aunt May and his wife, Mary Jane.

In the end, if the law stands, I expect that information will become a S.H.I.E.L.D. database, and that it will be within that organization that pay and benefit issues will be handled. S.H.I.E.L.D. will likely set up special accounts in the standard government system for those who don't disclose their identity to the world, and as far as the rest of the federal bureaucracy is concerned those people will simply have become eligible for Social Security disability pay-outs and benefits, etc., or something of the like. All of the important info will be kept out of the general, presumably far more vulnerable federal databases, and as they'll be a new variety of secret agent the public dissemination of their civilian identities will be a federal crime -- you know, unless someone in the Bush Administration doesn't like someone's politics and decides to leak it...

Considering the resources S.H.I.E.L.D. has -- which were recently concentrated in the minds of readers as we saw the organization temporarily shut down the Vision in order to raid his hard drive and distract Spider-man so that their Psi division could read his mind, both to get information on the Collectivethat the Avengers were reluctant to share because the backstory would only fuel the fire against powerful metahumans. The elements - the capabilities at S.H.I.E.L.D.'s disposal - have been there for years, and this is largely just a matter of using them. Once Nick Fury was out of the big chair, bringing his own moral restraint to bear on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s operations, it was open to being operated unchecked. Presumably Nick will eventually find his way back into the top spot - or at least someone else more like him - and the situation will lose much of its current, confrontational charge. Acting director Maria Hill is slamming full force on too many toes and ruffling too many feathers for her to be an effective, long-term choice for this position. There's going to be too much bad blood for that to operate smoothly.

While I can't agree with some fans that the secret identity is an essential part of a comics hero's life, I do agree that it has been a common part of the mythos, and it has been an integral part of most superheroes'/vigilantes' lives. Much of that can still be preserved in a post-Registration Act world, however, and it'll be up to the talents of individual writers (and - hopefully for a change in the Quesada Marvel universe - responsible editors) to show the ups and downs of being a special operative for S.H.I.E.L.D.

There will be times when SHIELD will have one's back and take down villains who are drawn to the heroes. There will also be times when duty will call because SHIELD is monitoring for problems 24/7, and it won't be up to the vagaries of the hero's daily comings and goings to see him stumble into trouble the way most do. Will they be required to make reports? How commonly will they be called on the carpet for questionable actions? All of these are issues to be explored.

I wish that the editorial and storytelling focus vibe I was getting from the DC crew at Wizard World East was reflected over at Marvel. If Marvel took their current, Civil War track and ran it the way DC's editorial structure is running their universe, it would be a winning combination. Unfortunately, Marvels still far too fragmented, and has been growing a newer fan base I have little respect for -- people who seem to view the mainstream and "Ultimate" universes as being almost interchangeable... or, worse, who see the "Ultimate" universe as the one of greater interest. Easily two thirds of the room for the Marvel panels I sat in were heavily-to-exclusively interested in that newcomer's continuity.

Marvel editors continue to mostly be little more than talent handlers hired because of their networking skills with the "talent", whose job it is to keep drinks filled, pillows fluffed, and tell them how brilliant they are in order to keep the work flowing. Too many people working at/for Marvel don't know who many of the characters are and don't seem to care beyond a name, an image, and two or three lines of description. I'm not claiming DC's even close to perfect in that regard, but at least they have an engaged, involved uber-editor in Dan DiDio. They appear honestly engaged in (re-)crafting a universe.

A strong, core, linked and continuing universe was Marvel's strength - what brought it to the top in the 1960s and largely kept it there for a few decades as they bred a couple generations of fans who were emotionally invested in the characters and in it for the long haul. Once the dollar signs started to become big enough, though, that all became negotiable.

In the end, I fear, as the comics industry continues to be ruled by waves of fashion, there will come a time when the push at Marvel will be towards someone's notion of "old school" superheroic trappings for nearly all of the characters and it'll be up to those people to decide how roughly to make those changes. If it's going to be done within continuity, though, it's going to have to be a work of magic or something close to it - much as DC's done - and that's not a great spot to be in. Anything that potentially makes stories, that makes character history, go away is ultimately a bad thing. You may acquire new readers, but most of them are only there for a little while, and in the same stroke you shake loose more of the people who really care about the characters. The people who stuck around for years and more through occasionally crappy runs because they had a connection to the character and his history. Throw us away and all that will be left are the fair weather fans, the groupies who follow the "talent" around, and those brought in for a brief look by the latest blast of senstationalistic exposure in the broader media. We're the bread and butter, make the mortgage payment and put a little away for retirement income. They're the short-range, This Financial Quarter Is All That Matters cash burst that sees the company rushing like a demoralized junkie from one fix to the next. (ie Behaving the way a corportation does due to what's become a customary part of the twisted charter: That they are obliged to seek maximum profit.)

Some intelligent, informed, forceful editorial oversight could allow Marvel to have all of that income, but too often I get the sense that part of the entertainment provided for the newcomers is seeing the character-loyal fans be bitch-slapped by sudden, often violent actions.