Article 10: The Wonderful World Of Dibny

Welcome to the wacky comics world of the Elongated Man, a world of goofy heroes, gimmicky villains, and a little rape and murder. Paul O'Brien examines Brad Meltzer's 'event' comic, IDENTITY CRISIS.
19 July 2004

I don't know about you, but if there's one thing that's always been missing from my life, it's a comic where Dr Light rapes the Elongated Man's wife. Thank heavens, then, for IDENTITY CRISIS #2 - a comic that can take pride of place in that empty box in the corner which, for years, has sat silent and unused, with a sign saying, 'Reserved for comics where Dr Light rapes the Elongated Man's wife'.

Alright, maybe that's a slight exaggeration. To be honest, I don't really care about the Elongated Man or any members of his supporting cast. As a general rule, third-tier DC characters have never really done much for me. Still, in my capacity as a self-appointed commentator, I feel obliged to at least pop my head round the door to see what DC's big mega-project for the summer happens to be.

And so I find myself reading the first two issues of IDENTITY CRISIS and thinking... is that it? Are we really still at the stage where doing nasty things to innocent characters merits a press release, as long as it has a ton of guest stars?

If you haven't been reading the series, it goes like this. In issue #1, Sue Dibny - the aforementioned wife - is murdered. Rather unpleasantly, too. All the superheroes set out to hunt for the bad guy responsible. But a group of them secretly suspect Dr Light.

In issue #2, we get a flashback to Dr Light raping Sue, and establish that the group in question (the ones who caught Light afterwards) had a stab at changing his personality. They botched it and turned him into a Silver Age goof, but that apparently didn't stop them trying the same thing with others. Presumably this idea of changing characters' personalities is the basis for the IDENTITY CRISIS title.

In many respects, it's a perfectly solid piece of superhero writing. It's the sort of thing that would, at one point, have been the spine for a six-month crossover, and we can at least say a silent prayer of thanks that the thing is self-contained. Meltzer handles his enormous cast quite effectively by shoving most of them into background roles, and the first issue does a nice job of setting up Sue's relationship with her husband before sacrificing her to the gods of plot necessity. Meltzer seems to be enjoying himself playing with the DCU toys, and the whodunnit aspect is well constructed.

Of course, the volume of characters and lack of background on most of them mean that it'll be virtually incomprehensible to anyone who isn't already a comics reader, and certainly make it a bizarre book for DC to try and market to a mainstream audience. But that's another matter.

Still, that rape scene - it really does have problems. To be fair, it certainly isn't gratuitous. On the contrary, it's clearly a central motivation for the heroes' actions, and therefore key to the plot. But it seems ridiculously out of place for these characters. It's the Elongated Man and his wife, for heaven's sake. Even by DC standards, these are nice, shiny happy characters. There are a few second-tier characters where it would be vaguely believable to insert something like this into their back story, but this just seems absurdly out of place.

Of course, it's hardly an original observation that women in superhero comics tend to meet violently unpleasant ends. Personally, I don't attribute that to misogyny. I see it as a knock-on effect of the heroes being overwhelmingly male, combined with lazy writing.

It's a genre staple that the villain will try to threaten the hero through his supporting cast. There are many excellent reasons why this should be so. For one thing, the hero will often be ridiculously powerful (especially if it's a Superman comic), and attacking the supporting cast is the only real option that the villain has. For another, it's precisely the sort of cowardly thing that villains are meant to do. The most obvious supporting cast member is the wife or girlfriend, simply because that's the one the hero is supposed to care most about.

Most importantly, it provides a link between the hero's crimefighting career and his private life. That's essential if you're going to play off a "secret identity" gimmick, since to get any dramatic tension out of that, you need to bring the two sides of the hero's life together. Most long-running superheroes tail after them a battered and shellshocked supporting cast who seem to spend half their time being beaten up by villains without ever being quite sure why.

Spider-Man is a particularly chronic case - his book has relied on this device to such an extent that the quest for new forms of supporting character abuse has left almost his entire cast with absurd and ridiculous back stories that, for all practical purposes, are simply ignored.

Unfortunately, a lot of writers continue to fall into the Edginess Fallacy: if it's more violent, and nastier, it must be more grown-up. Consequently, supporting characters have suffered ever more outrageous and repellent fates over recent years.

This general inflation in suffering has applied to some extent across all media. There was a time when, if you were going to write about rape or child abuse, there was a feeling that it had to be dealt with properly. Now it's just become another stock piece of back story. I suppose in some ways it's a good thing that the subject has become normalised and can be written about without turning the story into a Very Special Episode, but it's all too easy to use as a lazy shorthand.

Usually, though, it's shorthand for a "troubled past", which doesn't really fit Sue Dibny at all. If nothing else, Meltzer can't be accused of using that particular rape cliché. Unfortunately, this one goes in the other direction - a particularly violent and traumatic event is bolted on to a character who's never shown any sign whatsoever of feeling the effects. It feels like something that is being used for shock value and spurious dramatic weight without really thinking through the consequences.

Then again, the whole "behaviour modification" idea shows worrying signs of an attempt to add grim weight and depth to characters who not only don't need it, but are better off without it. Meltzer is, at the very least, teasing this as an explanation for the behaviour of goofy DC villains.

But the strength and appeal of those characters lies precisely in their endearingly silly innocence. Many fans (and creators), through overexposure to the characters, seem to lose sight of this. And to be fair, many one-dimensional Silver Age characters have survived a transition to later years where writers forcibly grafted more rounded personalities onto them.

Magneto is perhaps the classic example - he started off as a particularly thin 1960s villain who wanted to take over the world, only to be overhauled a decade later and retrofitted with a new back story that turned him into an ideological campaigner with an arguably good point. It's virtually a different character from the one Stan Lee wrote, of course, but that's fine just as long as people don't try too hard to reconcile it all.

God save us, though, from attempts to explain away old comics in a modern style. The world does not need an explanation for why DC villains used to be goofy. They were goofy for the same reason that they looked different - that was the style back then. In all but the most skilful hands, trying to explain it any further just sucks the life out of them. It's parlour game writing that generates little more than an explanation for old stories that never really works when you re-read them, and serves no purpose otherwise.

IDENTITY CRISIS is clearly the work of somebody with tons of enthusiasm for the DC Universe, but I'm less convinced that it shows an understanding of why some of these characters work. Time will tell how far Meltzer will fall into these traps, but it shows worrying signs of being the sort of book that drags characters kicking and screaming into the angst-ridden modern day when they were doing a much more effective job as relics of a more innocent time.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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