The Death of Comic Books

Left to right: Snowflake, Safespace, Screentime, Trailblazer, and B-Negative.

Marvel Comics has released a series supposed to be hep and with-it for the youngsters of Generation Z, “The New Warriors,” showcasing heroes named “Screentime,” “Safespace,” and “Snowflake.” The brainchild of a writer named Daniel Kibblesmith.

This looks like the end of Marvel Comics; perhaps of comics generally. If not the world.

I was, in my younger days, a fierce devotee of Marvel Comics, back in the Silver Age. Like everyone else, I’ve also enjoyed the recent movies, for the most part, with my own kids.

I do not love the movies so much as I did the comics, and I have not followed the comics for some time.

This is because I discovered mythology; I discovered the stories in their original versions.

The secret to the success of 1960s Marvel was that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and their gang knew the stories. Probably because they were all Jewish kids growing up reading the Torah. They were retelling the essential stories in modern Spandex.

The “super-hero” is simply the legendary hero, as he always has been. Heroes have superpowers. Perseus could fly; Herakles had superhuman strength.

Superhero comics before Fantastic Four, however, were missing an essential element: heroes lead troubled lives. They have problems; they are outcasts. Robin Hood; the Heroes of the Water Margin; Samson and Delilah. The creators of Superman and Batman missed this.

Superheroes—heroes—come from the storehouse imagination. We are inclined to think that the imagination is random and limitless. To the contrary, to the imagination only some things are real—vivid to the mind’s eye—and they are a limited set. Every culture has dragons, and dragons have certain known features. There are no dragons in nature. Every culture has unicorns, and unicorns have certain identifiable features, although there are no unicorns in nature. Every culture has fairies, elves, ogres, and so on.

The bright colours and the solid line art are also part of the mix; it is no coincidence that the art in comic books resembles the art of the stained glass window. This is how things appear in the imagination: bright and distinct. Lines are solid; there are few shadows or gradients. Things simply are, or are not.

Kibblesmith seems to have no sense of any of this. He has read nothing. Hero legends, tapping the storehouse consciousness, speak of things eternal. Trying to be “trendy,” regardless of the trend, is anathema to the genre. It is like putting contemporary references in a cowboy movie.

One problem faced by the comic book author is that there are only a limited number of compelling superpowers. This is why there are so many near-duplicates in the DC and the Marvel universe. Iron Man, for example, the man made of metal with a fatal flaw, is Talos, the bronze giant of the Argonautica. The Thing is the Golem. The Flash, of course, is Hermes, Mercury. Everyone dreams of flying, like Superman. Everyone dreams of being invisible.

Kibblesmith does not get this, and tries to invent new powers. “Snowflake” throws projectiles shaped like snowflakes. There’s the stuff of legends. “Safespace” generates forcefields that arbitrarily protect others, but not himself. Not too useful in a bar fight. “Screentime,” thanks to the effects of “Internet gas,” is directly connected at all times to the Internet. Meaning, I guess, that he does not need to pull his iPhone out of his pocket like everybody else.

Snowflake and Safespace are plainly meant to reflect current ideas of fluid “gender identity”: the visibly male “Safespace” is pink, the visibly female “Snowflake” is baby blue, and supposedly “non-binary.” The message is the postmodern message that the imagination and its archetypes and associations are purely arbitrary and subject to conscious manipulation.

This is the opposite of the core message of comic books.

It is all mythically illiterate. Kibblesmith and the current Marvel are, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, playing with powers they do not comprehend. It will not go well for them.