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Apr. 11th, 2013 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI may have mentioned it before, but one of the comics I've been reading a lot of on Marvel Unlimited is the recent run of Avengers Academy, which has really pleasantly surprised me in its thoughtfulness. I'd expected it to just be teen drama, but that's not at all what it's about. Instead, it's an entertaining essay on the distorted value of heroism in the Marvel Universe.
What do I mean by that?
Well, to begin with, at some point Norman Osborne, the Green Goblin, took over SHIELD, because Marvel is stupid like that. And as head of SHIELD, he tortured young children with powers to try to force their powers to activate, and despite my frustration in general with the silliness of the Dark Reign concept, I think this is a clever play on the old superhero comic joke about the character who throws himself into a vat of toxic waste to try to become a superhero.
Eventually Osborne is overthrown and SHIELD and the Avengers try to go back to normal, but they don't know what to do with Osborne's successes- teenagers who have had powers activated through torture. They are angry, dangerous, and volatile, and the Avengers want to make sure they don't grow into the next generation of supervillain. So they invite these students to a newly constituted Avengers Academy and tell them they're in training to be the next generation of Avengers. So that they can legitimately train them, and instill moral values in them, but also so they can keep an eye on them and learn their weaknesses and keep them under control. It is deeply creepy, and the moment in the first issue when the students discover the plan is the linchpin moment of the series.
At that point they have a decision to make. Or so it seems. Do they continue to train as heroes, or do they rebel against their creepy superhero masters and get interpreted as villains? But this is only the apparent choice, and what I love about this series so far is that they keep showing that this is a false binary. The series keeps butting these characters up against different models of heroism, different motivations for heroism, different styles of heroism, etc. They meet Captain America. They meet Luke Cage. They meet Norman Osborne. They meet the Hood. They meet Magneto. They meet the X-Men, the Runaways, the Initiative. In all cases the message seems to be that the important question is not about choosing to be a hero or choosing to be a villain. It's about people being faced with hundreds and hundreds of non-binary choices in their lives and struggling to make choices they can live with.
Veil, one of the students, eventually rejects Avengers Academy not because she wants to become a villain, though the Avengers fear that she does. She rejects it because she doesn't want to be an Avenger, doesn't want to be limited in her choices to being that kind of hero. She wants to try to tackle problems she finds important, instead of reacting to supervillain threats. Not because stopping supervillains is unimportant, as this kind of statement sometimes comes out. In Batman comics this theme sometimes resonates in the question of whether Batman has inadvertently created the supervillains in his own image, but Avengers Academy assumes that there will always be supervillains because there are evil people in the world. It just refuses to accept that stopping supervillains is the only or best way to find meaning and make the world better. It cuts right to the heart of brokenness in the Marvel ethos, this idea that people with powers and capes are the real heroes, the only people whose stories are worth telling as epic sagas. And it's a great character moment, too, because it is Veil leaping out into the unknown without a net to try to carve out her own path.
Meanwhile in an amazingly ambiguous gesture, another student who has been blackmailing Quicksilver into giving her lessons on how to be like Magneto tells Quicksilver that she now aspires to learn how to be like him. I've always hated Quicksilver's narrative arc, because after the thirtieth time he betrays you you ought to stop falling for it, but here in Avengers Academy it's working perfectly to show that some people are evil, but some people just mix evil choices in with their hero choices. The Avengers aren't trusting Quicksilver because they believe that *this time*, he has really reformed. They're trusting him because they know that most of the time he is fighting to do good in his own eyes, even if this may hurt them. And Finesse's choice to reject Magneto's path isn't about her moving from the villain's path to something greyer. She was always living in the grey. It's about recognizing that Quicksilver's version of the grey has enough power and meaning to satisfy him. She doesn't need to be a combination of supervillain and superhero. She can just be a combination of a good person and a flawed person.
And in one of the best resolutions to a time travel story I've seen in a long time, a future version of Reptil, traveling back, determinedly pursues the murderous path he believes is necessary to save the world, but when he is thwarted by his conscience and his friends, he discovers that his act of failure has not broken the timeline because it was motivated from the same place as success would have been. It demolishes the Butterfly Effect trope with incredible surety and again dissects false binaries of good and evil.
It is not a perfect comic. The choice to make Hank Pym the head of the Academy is in some ways a great insight. He is a man who has always been less comfortable with Marvel-style heroism than other heroes, who has repeatedly stepped back from the costume, favoring to change the world with scientific discoveries. But it is also a problematic choice because Hank is such an ugly, fucked up human being. He is such a tool of the patriarchy, such a creature of his own id, such a, at this late stage, completely broken man. There are times when I've really enjoyed the way Hank's fuckups can drift into the background of the story, important to the theme but not the point of the story. There are also times when Hank's fuckups have insistently refused to not be the main point of the story, and I get frustrated with those times because I do not particularly want to read a story about Hank Pym and his hangups. I also think AA greatly illustrates how Marvel's onslaught of company-wide stories has hamstrung comics. Whenever a storyline gets moving, having to stop so everyone can fight a bunch of insane Asgardians or Skrulls kills the movement. I'm getting close to the point where AvX is going to disrupt AA and I'm dreading it because I've been enjoying the character-driven storylines it's been telling particularly.
But despite these uneven patches, I would recommend checking out this comic.
Today is the sixteenth day of the Omer.
What do I mean by that?
Well, to begin with, at some point Norman Osborne, the Green Goblin, took over SHIELD, because Marvel is stupid like that. And as head of SHIELD, he tortured young children with powers to try to force their powers to activate, and despite my frustration in general with the silliness of the Dark Reign concept, I think this is a clever play on the old superhero comic joke about the character who throws himself into a vat of toxic waste to try to become a superhero.
Eventually Osborne is overthrown and SHIELD and the Avengers try to go back to normal, but they don't know what to do with Osborne's successes- teenagers who have had powers activated through torture. They are angry, dangerous, and volatile, and the Avengers want to make sure they don't grow into the next generation of supervillain. So they invite these students to a newly constituted Avengers Academy and tell them they're in training to be the next generation of Avengers. So that they can legitimately train them, and instill moral values in them, but also so they can keep an eye on them and learn their weaknesses and keep them under control. It is deeply creepy, and the moment in the first issue when the students discover the plan is the linchpin moment of the series.
At that point they have a decision to make. Or so it seems. Do they continue to train as heroes, or do they rebel against their creepy superhero masters and get interpreted as villains? But this is only the apparent choice, and what I love about this series so far is that they keep showing that this is a false binary. The series keeps butting these characters up against different models of heroism, different motivations for heroism, different styles of heroism, etc. They meet Captain America. They meet Luke Cage. They meet Norman Osborne. They meet the Hood. They meet Magneto. They meet the X-Men, the Runaways, the Initiative. In all cases the message seems to be that the important question is not about choosing to be a hero or choosing to be a villain. It's about people being faced with hundreds and hundreds of non-binary choices in their lives and struggling to make choices they can live with.
Veil, one of the students, eventually rejects Avengers Academy not because she wants to become a villain, though the Avengers fear that she does. She rejects it because she doesn't want to be an Avenger, doesn't want to be limited in her choices to being that kind of hero. She wants to try to tackle problems she finds important, instead of reacting to supervillain threats. Not because stopping supervillains is unimportant, as this kind of statement sometimes comes out. In Batman comics this theme sometimes resonates in the question of whether Batman has inadvertently created the supervillains in his own image, but Avengers Academy assumes that there will always be supervillains because there are evil people in the world. It just refuses to accept that stopping supervillains is the only or best way to find meaning and make the world better. It cuts right to the heart of brokenness in the Marvel ethos, this idea that people with powers and capes are the real heroes, the only people whose stories are worth telling as epic sagas. And it's a great character moment, too, because it is Veil leaping out into the unknown without a net to try to carve out her own path.
Meanwhile in an amazingly ambiguous gesture, another student who has been blackmailing Quicksilver into giving her lessons on how to be like Magneto tells Quicksilver that she now aspires to learn how to be like him. I've always hated Quicksilver's narrative arc, because after the thirtieth time he betrays you you ought to stop falling for it, but here in Avengers Academy it's working perfectly to show that some people are evil, but some people just mix evil choices in with their hero choices. The Avengers aren't trusting Quicksilver because they believe that *this time*, he has really reformed. They're trusting him because they know that most of the time he is fighting to do good in his own eyes, even if this may hurt them. And Finesse's choice to reject Magneto's path isn't about her moving from the villain's path to something greyer. She was always living in the grey. It's about recognizing that Quicksilver's version of the grey has enough power and meaning to satisfy him. She doesn't need to be a combination of supervillain and superhero. She can just be a combination of a good person and a flawed person.
And in one of the best resolutions to a time travel story I've seen in a long time, a future version of Reptil, traveling back, determinedly pursues the murderous path he believes is necessary to save the world, but when he is thwarted by his conscience and his friends, he discovers that his act of failure has not broken the timeline because it was motivated from the same place as success would have been. It demolishes the Butterfly Effect trope with incredible surety and again dissects false binaries of good and evil.
It is not a perfect comic. The choice to make Hank Pym the head of the Academy is in some ways a great insight. He is a man who has always been less comfortable with Marvel-style heroism than other heroes, who has repeatedly stepped back from the costume, favoring to change the world with scientific discoveries. But it is also a problematic choice because Hank is such an ugly, fucked up human being. He is such a tool of the patriarchy, such a creature of his own id, such a, at this late stage, completely broken man. There are times when I've really enjoyed the way Hank's fuckups can drift into the background of the story, important to the theme but not the point of the story. There are also times when Hank's fuckups have insistently refused to not be the main point of the story, and I get frustrated with those times because I do not particularly want to read a story about Hank Pym and his hangups. I also think AA greatly illustrates how Marvel's onslaught of company-wide stories has hamstrung comics. Whenever a storyline gets moving, having to stop so everyone can fight a bunch of insane Asgardians or Skrulls kills the movement. I'm getting close to the point where AvX is going to disrupt AA and I'm dreading it because I've been enjoying the character-driven storylines it's been telling particularly.
But despite these uneven patches, I would recommend checking out this comic.
Today is the sixteenth day of the Omer.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-11 04:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-11 08:14 pm (UTC)