When Legends and History Collide

With AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #36, writer J Michael Straczynski wrote his response to the events of September 11th. Eyewitness John Connors looks at what happens when fictional heroes are sent to the scene of a real-life tragedy.
23 November 2001

It's my belief that criticism should come from a fairly neutral place; that is, the worth of a piece of art should be more or less evident regardless of the viewer's sex, race, social status or state of mind.

It's a belief that is being downplayed in academia these days, where it can sometimes seem that the receiver of a piece of art is more important than the art itself, and yet I cling to it. While complete and total objectivity may be impossible to achieve, they should be the goals a critic attains to. I lay this general philosophy out to you as a kind of mea culpa, an admitted disclaimer, because in this piece I will be wilfully abandoning this cherished belief.

I type these words from a sixth-floor office in Jersey City, New Jersey, right on the Hudson River. Directly to my left, unblocked by any cubicle wall, is a bank of seven-foot tall windows that look east out on downtown New York City. When I took this job ten months ago, two tall, geometrically rigid towers stood almost directly across from my desk, dominating this view; today, of course, these towers are no longer there.

When the first of the two towers fell, more than two months ago now, I was looking out of these same windows, quite literally not believing my eyes. So, consider this piece not a review of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #36, Marvel's attempt to address the terrorist attacks within the fictional world of the Marvel Universe, but a reaction to it, a reaction that comes with all the baggage the above background material would imply.

I can't find it in me to fault Marvel, or even artist John Romita Jr or writer J Michael Straczynski for that matter, for attempting to react to the events of Sept 11th within the regular pages of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. As company chief Joe Quesada has indicated, to some degree Marvel has always referenced the real world in their comics, and given that so much of the Marvel Universe is centred in New York, it does make sense for their fictional world to reference the real.

And yet, by incorporating the attacks into Marvel's New York, Marvel is acknowledging a central question that it can't answer. Where were the super heroes? Of course, here in our world, that question was easy to answer - they don't exist. Many a comics fan, I suspect, had a similar reaction on the eleventh of September - that first ridiculous, yet achingly real wish, that there were superheroes, for, if there were, this never would have happened. And this, I think, is the core problem with the issue. It intrudes on our fantasy.

What Captain America fan hasn't idly, or not so idly, thought about how the good captain would have brought Bin Laden to justice by now? What Avengers fan hasn't thought about how the Avengers would have routed the Taliban within days? And what Superman fan hasn't imagined that Superman probably would have caught both planes, landing them safely at Ellis Island before ripping open the top of each to apprehend the terrorists within.

Is thinking like this almost pathetic? A sad comment on the degree to which comic book reality can seem real for the hardcore fan? Of course. And yet it does speak to a more universal and human desire - the desire to be protected. The desire for life to be simpler than it is. The hunger for that mythical happy ending. And it's not just comics - all of us are entertained by fantasies about how life could be, be they certain Hollywood movies, Broadway musicals or a romance novel.

In some respects, then, AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #36 comes across as almost a second blow - in the world where there were superheroes, they were ineffective as well. The comic does not hesitate to acknowledge this; in what was no doubt a well-intentioned attempt to not pretend that the attacks could have been averted, the issue details Spider-Man's feelings of helplessness, with a couple asking him where he was - how he could let it happen.

The only super-heroic advantages this world seems to have gained are people such as the Thing and Thor helping to clear debris. And, of course, this was the only real possible path for Straczynski to take; to produce an issue in which Thor catches the towers, or Captain America infiltrates Afghanistan - a world in which disaster was averted - would be the height of bad taste.

But I don't know if, for me at least, the alternative was worthwhile. While the comic is appropriately subdued and sombre, with almost no dialogue to speak of, there is, to my mind, a fairly major misstep. As Spider-Man struggles to describe the horror of the attacks, he makes note that even villains are horrified by what has happened. And we're treated to the sight of Magneto, Doctor Doom, the Juggernaut and Doctor Octopus standing by Ground Zero, looking on in disbelief.

As if that wasn't bad enough, it's followed by a shot of a single tear coming out of Doctor Doom's eye. This is where Straczynski's gambit entirely fails. I hate say it, but we all know that the average comics fan could quote instances where any one of those villains have done far worse than what was done in New York on the eleventh.

Take it for what it's worth, but the attacks on the World Trade Center, in the Marvel universe (or, for that matter, the universes of DC, Wildstorm, etc) are a minor event. Not too long ago, didn't Ultron slaughter an entire nation's worth of people? And just some short months ago, wasn't the entire population of Genosha destroyed?

The fact is, for years wham-bam comic book epics have traded in horrors far worse than those perpetrated on the eleventh, so when the real-life events are inserted into that fictional world, there's a very real, and very discomfiting, sense of disconnection. And having the villains who have done so much worse standing there, horrified at the evil that men can do, is the one entirely false note in the entire comic.

Those moments aside, it's still on the personal level that the issue affects me the most. At its core, the issue forces me to acknowledge that no number of superheroes could have stopped the attacks. I'm faced with hard evidence, so to speak, of the lie inherent in that first visceral reaction, that first wish for the super-hero world to be real.

"If only there was a..." - take your pick. Superman. Batman. Perhaps most heart-breakingly, Captain America. The hard truth, Marvel tells us, is that if any of these saviours did exist, not much would be different. Perhaps we need to acknowledge that there are no fairy tale endings in the real world, and that this whole mess won't have an easy ending in reality. And yet I still want that fantasy, that four-colour shelter from the real world, as much as perhaps I shouldn't. I still want to believe, or to just pretend to believe, in a world where brightly clad icons, always there to save the day, can stop things like this. And now, that's just a little bit harder to do.

John Connors is a business writer and editor, currently pursuing a masters in creative writing from William Paterson University.

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