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For me, this brings to mind two examples I can remember of superhero comics failing even their now-core audiences of adults, or adolescents developing towards adults. I quit reading Marvel comics towards the end of the first Civil War storyline (wow, exactly 15 years ago!). Peter Parker, as Spider-Man, becomes Tony Stark's poster boy for superheroes revealing their secret identities and registering with the government. But after a crisis of conscience, he defects from Stark's program and goes on the run with Aunt May and Mary Jane. A bounty goes out, and Aunt May takes a sniper bullet meant for Peter. In order to save Aunt May, Peter and Mary Jane make a deal with the conveniently Marvel-branded, IP-protected version of the Devil. The cost is that history is altered so that Peter and Mary Jane were never married, and neither they nor anyone else would remember them ever being married. I believe some of the writers at the time came right out and said that it was easier to go back to writing angst-ridden, "will they or won't they" romance storylines than to try to write two adult characters maintaining a successful marriage. For me as a young adult, Peter the successful husband was a much more desirable hero figure than a less mature Peter who struggled with women. That caused me to drop Marvel comics, and I have seldom gone back since, even though I understand they've done a number of better-written and more impactful storylines since. DC Comics, on the other hand, has seemed absolutely desperate to catch up with the Disney-Marvel juggernaut during the past decade, and one of the ways that's manifested is trying to market the Joker's girlfriend Harley Quinn as some kind of perverse equivalent to a Disney princess. Since that means Harley can no longer be a straight villain, they recently introduced the Joker's new girlfriend, Punchline. Punchline's super-villain origin story is that she was on a high-school field trip to a TV station when the Joker broke in, took everybody hostage, and forced her to read whatever insane screed he had prepared live on-air. As a result of this, over the years, she became more and more obsessed with the Joker, and by the time she was a young adult, was putting out a podcast tracing the Joker's most famous crimes. The Joker caught wind of it, recruited her as a new love interest and protege, and off the storyline goes. If my kids were reading this, I would need to sit them down and explain that it is reinforcing strongly negative stereotypes about how women respond to trauma and abuse. The writers and editors fail to do so within the context of the story, as they're mainly looking for a new anti-hero to market, since that's what's sold so well for years now. |