Review 77: Identity Crisis

Identity Crisis by Brad Meltzer and Rags Morales

There are, traditionally, two modes of thought when it comes to comic book super-heroes. The first is that just as these people are stronger, faster and more powerful than we, so must they also be better than we.

This is the philosophy behind the immortal words penned by Stan Lee in the first Spider-Man story - "With great power comes great responsibility." It's not enough to be able to see through walls, teleport, manipulate eldrich energies or talk to gods if you do not live up to the incredible burden that comes with such powers. Even if you're a self-made hero, with nothing more than your wits, a jaunty cap and a quiver full of trick arrows, there is still the expectation that you will always do the right thing. Or at least try to.

There is a nobility to this kind of super-hero. He is not motivated by fear - he surpasses it. She does not fall prey to baser human nature - she provides a model for us all to be better. These heroes don't do what is easy - they do what is right. They don't ever do the wrong thing, even if it is for the right reasons. They are, in a word, heroic.

This story is not about those kinds of heroes. This story is about the other kind - the heroes who are, when you strip away the Batarangs and magic rings and masks and tights, just as human as we are. Just as fallible, just as vulnerable to anger, fear and weakness as we. Much like the traditional hero, they are us writ large - in every way, unfortunately.

Being a super-hero - either kind - has never been easy. Balancing your hero life and your private life is something that even the best heroes have trouble with, and the decision to involve someone else in your life is one that carries great danger with it. If you marry someone, if you have a father or mother or lover, they all become potential targets for those who would want to hurt you. At some point, you have to decide which one is more important to you, and the special people in your life need to be included in that.

For Ralph Dibney - The Elongated Man - the choice was simple. He loved his wife, Sue, and his heroism, so he decided to have them both and became one of the very few heroes to make his identity public. Together, they were a true celebrity couple, touring the world, solving mysteries and showing everyone what a truly happy marriage looked like. And they were so very happy. Sue became an honorary member of the Justice League (an honor that not even Lois Lane has been granted) and their love inspired everyone who knew them. The heroes' love for Sue Dibney led them to one of their greatest mistakes - albeit one that would not come back to haunt them until the worst had already happened. Not until Sue Dibney was murdered.

The heroes of the DC Universe went into overdrive, searching every corner of the world for Sue's killer. Whoever it was had bested the technology of four worlds and eluded the greatest detectives in history. And what's more, this new villain was targeting others that heroes loved. It was only a matter of time before someone else died, and if they could not find the killer then the very fabric of the hero community would be torn apart.

While this is, with a few caveats, a good story, it's not a pretty one by any means. It shows the darker side of the heroes we love. They act in morally questionable ways - something that the traditional super-hero would never do - in order to serve the greater good. By using their powers to adjust the personality of Dr. Light, turning him from a menacing villain to a laughable punching bag, they set in motion a chain of events that would have universe-wide repercussions.

All told, I liked this story. For one thing, the writing was really solid, with great care paid to pacing and visual impact. The story is not really about the heroes, at least not by themselves. It's about the relationships they have with other people, and how those relationships affect their decisions. That's why characters are constantly introduced in terms of their relationships to each other. You can see it on the very first page - "Lorraine Reilly and Ralph Dibney. Co-workers." The fact that they're both super-heroes is self-evident. The fact that they're people, with a relationship to each other, is often taken for granted in comics.

Ray Palmer and Jean Loring go from "Divorcees" to "Lovers" in the span of two pages, while Firestorm goes from hero to atomic bomb. "Father and son," "Husband and Wife," "Partners" - characters are constantly being introduced by their relationships, and usually by their given names, rather than their superhero sobriquets. In fact, Green Arrow, who is one of the driving forces in this story, rarely refers to anyone by their code name. When he does, it's an immediate signal that this is a person he doesn't know well. To Ollie, and thus to us, these are people under those masks, and it's important to remember that.

My favorite example of the heroes' humanity is the scene in the issue "Father's Day," wherein Robin and Batman are racing to save the life of Robin's father. Set up by the mysterious killer who murdered Sue Dibney, Jack Drake tries desperately to tell his son not to blame himself while Tim tries just as desperately to save him. In the end, even the incredible Batman is unable to save this one life, and the reader is forced to feel every moment of it. It's a painful, beautiful sequence, both in terms of the writing and the artwork.

I would be amiss if I didn't mention the villains as well. All too often they have been portrayed as madmen and megalomaniacs, driven by nothing more than nefarious purposes and misanthropy. The villains in this book are also humanized. They tell stories, have trouble making ends meet, even have hobbies outside of villainy. And, like the heroes, they have relationships with each other. They are fathers and sons, friends, employers and employees, and the tragedy being visited upon the heroes spills into their world as well. While we may not root for the bad guys, we can at least sympathize with them a little more.

There certainly are flaws to the story, though. For one, it's been described as "tragedy porn," and I can't disagree. Much as regular pornography takes the sexual act and distorts it into a pleasurable fantasy, so does tragedy porn take an unfortunate event, such as rape or murder, and make it into something even more horrible than it normally would be. Whether this is entirely a bad thing, I can't really say. Writers have always used pain and death for our entertainment - hell, look at Titus Andronicus. Not only was Lavinia raped, she was mutilated on top of it. Was Shakespeare just trying to get a rise out of the masses? Maybe. Is Meltzer doing the same here? Probably. Does it work? Hell, yes.

There have been a lot of objections raised to the use of rape as a plot device in this book - whether it was appropriate for a super-hero comic book, for one, and whether it was nothing more than a gut-punch. A story choice that's effective, but ultimately unimaginative. All this may be true, but my take on it is this: That's not what the story is about.

The story isn't about rape or murder. It's not about mind-wipes and magic. It's about the relationships between these people, heroes and villains all. It's about their identities, as the title implies - how they see themselves and how others see them. It's about people, with all the flaws and defects that make them human. It's a book of revelations, illumination and truth, none of which are ever easy to confront.

While this wasn't the first comic book story to feature its characters as humans rather than heroes, it could be the most influential. At least in recent years. The events of this book started a chain reaction that has followed through to every universe-wide event that DC has published in the last six years, from Infinite Crisis all the way to Blackest Night. Meltzer built a story that provided a solid foundation for a new DC Universe. It's a universe that gives us heroes more realistic than before, more human and fallible. While it may not be the kind of story that you like, you cannot deny the impact that it's had.

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"Think about your own life, Wally - everything you've done to keep your secrets safe. You don't just wear the mask for yourself. It's for your wife, your parents, even for - one day - your children. There are animals out there, Wally. And when it comes to family, we can't always be there to defend them. But the mask will."
- Oliver Queen (Green Arrow) to Wally West (Flash), Identity Crisis
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Identity Crisis on Wikipedia
Brad Meltzer on Wikipedia
Rags Morales on Wikipedia
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Identity Crisis at Amazon.com

Review 69: Skipping Towards Gomorrah

Skipping Towards Gomorrah by Dan Savage

America. Here and now, in the first decade of the 21st century, there are those who say that America is on the decline. It's a nation awash in sin and degradation, vice and immorality. Pot smokers, gamblers, homosexuals, feminists, Liberals - oh, those damned Liberals - they're all conspiring to destroy everything that is good and moral about the United States of America, and you - yes, you are letting them do it! Soon this nation that we all love and cherish will be nothing but an opium orgy den for a bunch of homosexual atheist abortion doctors.

This is what they believe, those whom Dan Savage refers to as the Scolds, the Virtuecrats and the Naysayers. We know who they are - usually Republican conservatives, often of the evangelical Christian variety. They are men (and occasionally women) such as Robert Bork, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, and of all the things they have in common, the most glaring is that they believe that The United States is in a state of utter moral decay. Americans who choose sex for any function other than making babies, who choose to put drugs into their bodies, who allow themselves to be fat and indolent - SHAME on you! It is your sinning that is destroying America! Jerry Falwell himself said as much after the attacks on 9/11:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."

And, it would seem - given the naysayers' ubiquity and volume - they are right.

Or maybe not.

Dan Savage is an acclaimed advice columnist, specializing in relationship and sex advice. He started with a newspaper column nearly twenty years ago, and he's gained international attention, mainly by being very good at his job. He doesn't sugar-coat his advice, often telling people instead to DTMFA (Dump the mother-f*cker already!) if it's clear they're in a bad relationship. He helped coin a new meaning for the word santorum as well as pegging (Google them - I'm trying to keep this clean). He's abrasive, contrarian, direct - and an outspoken advocate of the pursuit of happiness. Most of his advice can be boiled down to a simple question: Are you happy?

What Savage is exploring in this book is all the ways people try to make themselves happy, and why those are all the things that the Virtuecrats believe are sinful, immoral and conducive to America's decline in the world. In order to understand the sins, he has to meet the sinners and, as much as possible, indulge.

The book is set up around the classic Seven Deadly Sins - greed, lust, sloth, gluttony, envy, pride and anger. In each chapter, Savage tries to understand what it is about these sins that make them so irresistible, and if they're actually deadly at all. For Greed, he indulges in gambling, learning how to play blackjack and win - except when he loses. For Gluttony he visits a convention for the NAAFA (National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance) to find out how fat people feel about being fat. He learns to channel his Anger in a shooting range in Texas, studies Lust in swingers' clubs in Las Vegas, and realizes that maybe we all need a little more Sloth in our lives. He takes great pains to Envy the rich and to determine whether gays really need to bother with Pride anymore. And then he tops it all off with a great attempt to commit all seven deadly sins within a forty-eight hour period in New York City.

As provocative as it all sounds, the book isn't really about sinning. It's about human nature and freedom, and how those two things clash and merge. It's about how some humans want to enjoy themselves, while other humans would rather they didn't. They tell us about the horrors of drugs, the terrors of infidelity and the inherent corrosive nature of the very existence of gay people, much less married ones. They tell us that by pursuing our happiness, we are destroying the country.

Dan Savage says otherwise, mainly by pointing out what the conservative naysayers don't want to hear: human beings are complex, irreducible characters who are not very good at not doing what they're not supposed to do. We all want to enjoy ourselves. We want to feel pleasure, one way or the other, and we will do everything in our power to make this happen. Whether it's sex or reading, drugs or travel, food or art, going to the gym or gambling, we want to feel good. And for some reason, there are people who have a problem with this.

Savage believes that the first principle we should follow is that of freedom: if one isn't harming others, then one should be free to do whatever one wants. In this book, he makes an excellent case for the legalization of marijuana, talks to productive, religious, moral swingers, and meets with sex workers in New York City. He examines the hypocrisy of the moralist movement and the general weakness of their arguments.

For example, with gambling long having been one of the most deadly of sins in the Christian catalog, why don't modern conservatives rail against it? Is it because it's an economic boon to so many places? Is it because it makes money for the country? On gambling the conservatives are quiet, though surely cards and dice have broken far more families than gays and lesbians?

And if the concept of "personal responsibility" is so sacred that any mention of gun control is considered an immediate attack on our freedoms, why can't that same love of responsibility extend to marijuana use - an activity far, far less deadly than gunplay.

Savage's understanding of human nature tells him that while we all want happiness, the happiness of one person is the immorality of another. In America, however, there is room to disagree, room to argue and to grow. American culture evolves and changes whether you like it or not, and it is better to learn to live in that culture than to try and bend it to your will. While you may disagree with how your fellow American leads his or her life, it is not your job to try and change it, just as they have no business trying to change yours.

So take heart, sinners! Dan Savage is on your side.

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Take me to the driest county in the most conservative state, and in two hours this determined hedonist will find you all the drugs, whores, and booze you'll need to pass an eventful weekend.
- Dan Savage, Skipping Towards Gomorrah
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