Without merit, USA comics won't have "everlasting" appeal

The North State Journal (Raleigh, NC) wrote about why American comics are so great:

Pick one up. Be seduced by its glossy cover. Gaze upon the impossibly muscular body clad in a skin-tight suit. Our hero or heroine will surely be soaring, shouting, blasting a villain into next week.

They are ridiculous. They are addictively great. Comic books, of the superhero variety, are 100% American.

Compare the thin comic book to Europe’s graphic novels, and they come off looking flimsy, infantile. Compare the American comic to Japanese Manga and they appear innocent in their fixation with heroism; they hark back to a departed American age.

Once a nickel, a dime, a quarter, now the price of a latte, they are objects of American consumer capitalism. The comic is literature in junk-food version.

Well it used to be, but that doesn't mean it was always perfect even back in the Golden Age. And if you consider how, by the turn of the century, they were on their way to putting far more forced emphasis on leftist ideologies, that's why it doesn't make much sense now to say they're objects of capitalism. The American age in question has sadly departed, and they're not fixed on heroism like they were before.

Yet what truly makes them American objects is what plays out in their 32 pages month after month, decade upon decade.

When the Fantastic Four took their fateful space journey in 1961 and “cosmic rays” transformed the quartet into unwilling superheroes, comics entered a weird realm where the all-powerful were also the unwilling, decidedly modern victims of science and circumstance.

Spider-Man, the Hulk, Wolverine (the list goes on) were given supernatural abilities that made them outcasts, obliging them to be flawed messiahs.

They were, by some quirk of the American character, bound to Peter Parker’s moral imperative: “With great power comes great responsibility.” They are versions of an American Sisyphus, bound to saving us over and over again.

What could be more American — that might, when lashed to a sense of justice, eventually, makes right? So honorable, so naïve.

Well now even the phrase from Spidey's 1962 premiere has been throughly trashed for the sake of pointless directions, not the least being the erasure of the Spider-marriage. When the paper, possibly a college-type one, won't get into any of those issues, something is decidedly and terribly wrong. There's no justice to be found in modern comics when they force in so much leftist ideologies at the expense of coherency.

To this day, though the tone is darker, Marvel and DC, the two mammoths of comics, continue to reimagine the American character.

Once side attractions in a world of leading white men, Gwen Stacy, Jean Grey and Susan Storm have in recent years emerged as leaders to reinvigorate the Spider-Man, X-Men and Fantastic Four sagas. Absolute Wonder Woman has broken ground with beautiful art. Miles Morales is Spidey for a new generation.

And when they make such ambiguous statements about these leading ladies, something is wrong here too. Note the absurdity of bringing up what I assume is Spider-Gwen, some kind of otherworldly take on the 616 universe Gwen, without even making anything clear, or asking if it really does favors for the Spidey franchise. Also, not all art is good today, what with the woke damage of the past decade still being felt, and the Titans' title in the DCU is one that's suffered as a result. And they don't have a problem with the darker tone? That's practically what brought down comicdom in the long run. Also, do they have a problem with white men? One can only wonder if the writer's saying he considers Peter Parker expendable.

Yet the central fissures remain.

Bruce Wayne can’t connect with anyone other than his butler; he is the lonely individual in an atomized America. Steve Rogers bears the burden of representing the “Greatest Generation” from World War II. He is a Captain America forever out of place, even in his own land.

And could there be a more iconic tech magnate toying with humanity’s fate than Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor and his delusions of grandeur? If only our world had a bespectacled Clark Kent keeping an eye on things. Just in case.

Umm, even this is flawed if they'd consider there were stories where Bruce had affairs with ladies like Vicky Vale, Silver St. Cloud and even Catwoman. Where do they get off using that kind of laughable lecture anyway? The writer's also oblivious to how there were several stories over the years where Marvel tried to replace and harm the reputation of Capt. America for the sake of publicity stunts, and it goes without saying that today's dialogue for a lot of the regular cast doesn't feel like that of the older comics anymore.

So what's the point of this article? Practically nothing, since like a lot of other such modern articles, it won't explore what went wrong over past decades, nor will it take an objective view of Marvel/DC in their modern form. Once again, comicdom's getting nowhere fast as a result of all these phonies writing about what's hardly coverage of history.