jmatonak

(When all else fails, try the direct approach. If I could, I would whack Joe Quesada with a rolled up newspaper.)

I like the Fantastic Four. The movie restored a certain amount of affection for Iron Man. I am told I was obsessed with Spider-Man when I was six. Cyclops, c'est moi. Despite all that, I find I can live with my self-imposed boycott of Marvel books with surprising equanimity.

It's because I know that Marvel is/are doing their comics according to the "everything you know is wrong!" playbook. In order to predict Marvel's plot twists, I merely have to think of the least shocking and surprising thing one could do- what's the utterly predictable way to advance a story? That's the Marvel way!

Of course the ending is not an ending. Of course they're going to kill off a good female character. Of course the villains win in the end. If I had never seen a pop-culture product before, I might be surprised by one of these "shocking twists." But I have. I know Spider-Man is deliberately being written as almost a parody of the late seventies version. The company basically put out a press release that said that.

If Marvel wants to get anywhere, eye em oh, they need to act counter-intuitively and produce solid super-hero books. They need stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, where the readers reach a point of emotional closure. The end result of endlessly stringing the reader along is not a reader perpetually trapped at the edge of his or her seat, it's ennui.

I have given the matter considerable thought, and the biggest reason I look back fondly on Marvel books of the mid-eighties is not the well-known phenomenon that pop culture was at its zenith when you, whoever you are, were twelve. It's that the comics conformed to basic rules of writing you can find in anyone's How to Write A Screenplay book.