The Superhero Mega-thread

Well shit, so much for that. I won't be watching The Penguin unless I can find it on some other sevice, like Netflix or something. The only way to watch it on Amazon is to get a subscription to Max. Well, maybe I'll do it for a month if it costs about the same as Netflix. But I'll wait till all the episodes are out so I can binge them all in a few days, not wait months for them to show up. I hate all this money-grab subscription service shit.

I'm just about done watching The Batman for the first time. I had heard both good and bad things about it, but I didn't think I was going to like it judging from the trailers. I was wrong. Though there was a long part in the middle I got really bored on, and it's also a ridiculously long movie. Like twice as long as most movies. But I really like the tone of it, I like What's-his-name as the Batman and as a reclusive goth Bruce Wane (based on Kurt Cobain). He moves better than any of the others too. This really is the comic book Batman, his neck isn't stiff and inflexible like they usually are, he's both athletic and acrobatic, AND they're playing up the World's Greatest Detective angle most movies seem to ignore. It's the best Batman mask I've seen in any movie, and I like the actor playing Jim Gordon. There's a lot I like about it. Zoe Kravitz is incredible.

I decided to watch it last night, after seeing Snarky Jay's review for The Penguin. I'll be watching that as soon as The Batman is over. The Penguin looks even better. It looks like it might be on a level with Daredevil (the Netflix series).

I still don't know if The Joker is part of this same movie world or not. It would fit the tone, and also the naming convention. So far they all start with a The follwed by the main character's name.

I watched a pretty big chunk of The Dark Knight, and came to the conclusion that the movie was deliberately made to be boring, and all the actors told to be dull and humorless all the time (except Heath Ledger, and to a small extent the guy playing Harvey Dent) so it all becomes a field of boredom for the Joker to prance and caper across. He seems to be a critique on the entire rest of the move with his "Why so serious?" and his torn-open full-face smile. It was made to be a certain kind of thriller, and it's all too slick and controlled, which is part of what makes it so boring. There's no sense of anything being dangerous or real, because it's all so overproduced (to borrow a music term). The dialogue is all so clipped and terse, and if you miss a line or two you can't figure out what's going on. Each character speaks in these weird little micro-bursts of words.

It's a movie built on limitations. Limited lighting, extremely limited humor and charisma, severely limited human feelings. There's little besidews grimness and dullness and occasional brief moments of shock and fear or excitement when the action kicks in. But the way it's all filmed drains even those scenes of any fun or excitement. I really feel like Nolan designed it to be frustrating. The only characters I found engaging in any way are Harvey Dent and the Joker and to a limited extend Alfred. And Lucius Fox, just a smidgeon. I think Nolan told everyone else to choke down all emotion and feeling. I think he was going for that thing where gold becomes more valuable when it's rare, only here the gold consists of all the things that make a movie fun or engaging.

I also dislike dark grim humorless superhero movies, like Civil War and The Winter Soldier, Infinity War and Endgame. And yet I have no problem with Jessica Jones or Daredevil, both of which could largely be called grim and dark. I think the difference is there's enough humor and liveliness and other feelings in these shows so when they're squeezed out you feel the lack of them, not that they were never there to begin with. I remember Jeff Goldblum saying, I think in relation to The Fly, that horror movies begin with the character full of life and vitality, so that when those things drain away it really gets to you. But if you don't have any life or vitality to begin with you don't get that contrast.

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Len Wein was the writer (and editor-in-chief) who created the All New X-Men, along with artist Dave Cockrum, and wrote the first few issues, before Chris Claremont became the writer and took them to the stratosphere. He had all these new characters to work with who hadn't been developed to any depth yet, and that was exactly what he was really good at. But I wanted to learn what I could about Wein from this video.

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I've been binging on superhero and comic book videos again. I'm learning more about comic books and the characters and the creators than I had learned in my entire life just in the course of this thread. Well, maybe not quite.

The Stan Lee video above gives a good breakdown of the way Marvel comics were written in the early days, though not all the writers were as cheesy as he could be. I found reading the comments as informative (and yet perplexing) as the video itself. The argument over how much creative control Stan Lee and Jack Kirby each had has always raged, and there have always been Stan-haters and Stan-lovers. I always thought he was pretty cool, but that's mostly just charisma and con-man tricks (to be a little brutal about it). But seeing what the early 60's and 70's stuff looked like and how it was written really sets the stage. In contrast, the Chris Claremont/John Byrne era of the Uncanny X-Men that began in the mid Seventies was a quantum leap forward (though Stan and Jack definitely did some amazing things and created some great characters). That early stuff was with me when I was a kid and I loved it, and then just as I was becoming an adult the newer, more thoughtful and much more humanistic stuff started hitting.

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I just re-watched this video. RIP Ed Piskor. I started reading the comments, and ran across one saying it was Chris Clarement who came up with the backstory for Magneto making him a Jewish boy in a concentration camp.

He added a lot of things when he took over. Actually some of it was started by his predecessor Len Wein, who was writing when they started to replace the original team with the All New and much more diverse team. Professor X used Cerebro to find mutants in other countries all around the world, and assembled them together in America (for some reason) to form a new team, because the original team, aside from Cyclops, had disappeared. A pretty good way to bring in new characters, change the dynamics, and introduce the new characters one by one.

There had always been the idea that though the X-Men defended humanity from monsters and other threats, they were never accepted because their mutations made them strange and frightening. But with the advent of the All New team, that became more explicitly a symbol for racial or ethnic differences that make people outcasts. And of course, the concentration camps were just about the ultimate symbol of that. And yet it was done in an understated way—as I recall it never came across as preachy and they never lectured the readers, nor did they blame them when their activism failed to sell a lot of comic books. I joke—you couldn't call it activism back in those days, it was simply a theme, and a well-handled one. It becomes activism when the message is more important than character or story.

Of COURSE it was Claremeont who did that. Though I don't know how much of the idea was already in place when he took over as the writer. I suspect some of it was, but he came up with the specifics.

Claremont brought in a new depth of humanity to the stories and characters he was involved with. Then when the next generation of artists and writers came along, led by Jim Lee, and most of them would split off to form Image Comics, all that humanity was out the window. The characters became badass posturing Pro Wrestler types, grimacing and flexing all the time. Lee and the rest of the artists brought a new kind of art for the Nineties, and many of them were technically powerful artists, but their characters just lacked that dimension of humanity. That was a thing that lasted from the mid Seventies when Claremont joined the team until the late Eighties when everything started to shift toward the Image aesthetic—badassery and surface glitz with no real humanity underlying it.

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Now I'm starting to find the good stuff:

• How Jack Kirby's New Gods was (and is) a story about the world today

Of course religion and mythology have always been about what's happening right now, in the inner world of your psyche. Not things that happened centuries ago in the deserts of the Middle East or the shores of the Mediterranean.

Darkseid was one of the new gods, and he represented fascism. That jibes well with Jordan Peterson's observation that the God of the Old Testament is (among other things) the spirit that calls you to escape from tyranny (relating to the story of Exodus).

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Bingo! There it is. I did know Kirby was Jewish, and that he adopted certain design elements from the Aztecs (though I had forgotten that). But now it all makes perfect sense. He was devoutly religious, and had a real interest in religions across the board. Now I want to keep looking deeper into this. There's plenty of material about him out there, he's been written about and had videos made about him more than probably any other comics creator.

"Odin and Zeus (and other gods) would occasionally come down and wander the earth disguised as beggars. They wanted to see which mortals would take them in and give them food, treat them decently, and those humans were rewarded richly. Of course the rewards were representative of inner non-physical rewards. More like good fortune than actual gold. Blessings.

This is very much in keeping with the way archetypes of the unconscious will show up in people's dreams." (From a few posts back)

The way it would work is like this. If you're a decent person who would take in a beggar and feed them, assuming they don't seen malevolent or dangerous or anything, then that behavior will show up in your dreams. Especially if your unconscious decides to test you and send a ragged beggar figure in a dream. Some parts of dreams seem to be pre-determined—they run on what I've heard called the Dream Script. You have to play the part assigned, you have no choice. But certain parts are filled in by your usual behavior or tendencies. So something like this would work perfectly. If you're a stingy person who would just tell a beggar to get lost, that will show up in your dreams. Therefore you would turn the Self figure (the disguised god) away. If you do have a dream like that it might be followed (or preceded) by some bad luck, or what you might see as bad luck anyway, but it could be more the result of your own untrusting or ungenerous nature. Maybe you refused to help someone who needed help and they were a decent person, but you assumed they wanted to take advantage of you, and so you get a dream of the ragged visistor showing up at your door asking for some food and a place to stay for a while. And you send them away and suffer the consequences (in the dream I mean).

This would be the dream showing you why you've been having what you consider bad luck, because it's really more like karma. All these ancient ideas have a basis in reality, they're not really about what happens after you die. I've come to realize 'the place you go after you die' represents the unconscious. That can be a heaven or a hell, depending on how you live your life. And again, as I say every now and then, it isn't determined by some vengeful god, it's just the natural result of the way you live. A decent person will get rewards that a suspicious or unkind one won't. Of course a trusting soul can also be taken in by a disguised Loki, and that's a very real danger. Nothing is easy in life, it's difficult, and you need to walk a tightrope all the time.

Maybe it's more that they're to be seen as your companions in battle. You want Thor by your side (whether the battles are exterior or interior), and definitely not Loki. It was a warning to carefully vet your companions in life to make sure they're not deceptive tricksters. And in the more symbolic sense it means check your inner companions—your desires, goals, ideas etc. Make sure none of them are undermining you. Seen in this light they do seem to represent something very similar to Christ and Satan, or Abel and Caine—the earliest and most primitive ideations of the opposed brothers, which found its ultimate expression as Jesus and Satan. They weren't technically brothers of course, the term is to be taken somewhat loosely as is everything in mythology, religion, dreams, and other symbolic unconscious contents.

I've just been struck by this weird thought—I suppose you could say

Thor was the Viking Jesus and Loki the Viking Satan. ​

I know, Thor is more of a war god than one of peace and love, but then war was the way of life for the Vikings. Of course their patron god would be a war god. And their Satan would be that which undermines courage and valor—treachery, lies, and cowardly back-stabbing in the guise of friendship.

Of course, the way superheroes are depicted, and especially the things they do, are fundamentally different from what gods would do. They're actually very much like mythical heroes, though even then I doubt the monsters represent anything from the unconscious such as the Shadow, or some obstacle to Individuation that requires help from the psyche to defeat. Sometimes they might, probably largely by accident, or rather because it's natural to link up superheroes with archetypes, whether the writer is aware of it or not. But superheroes were created in a very materialistic age (though starting in the 1930s, before religion was so widely reviled).

I'll bet at times both Odin and Zeus in the comic books (Marvel also published a Hercules comic) would wander the earth in ragged beggar guise. And if done by a writer who's familiar with the source material and wants to be true to it, then maybe they even check to find whether certain mortals will take them in with kindness. I think Simonson might have done just that at some point in his Thor series. But I'd say it was probably done in imitation of the original material, with no understanding of the way it represents elements of the unconscious psyche.

THIS is the part that excites me (obviously)—the connections between myth/religion, and psychology. The connections Jung discovered and revealed. As I've been saying for a long time now, religion (of which myths are the illustrations) has always been psychology. Our ancient ancestors intuited the nature of the psyche and ferreted out some of the major players in it, and told their tales by word of mouth for generations before written language was created. This is why they understood these stories to be so important, and why they lasted so long. I'm sure they didn't realize they were seeing glimpses of something hidden in the depths of the human mind, but they knew these ideas, these personaified symbols, were vital and alive and powerful. They would see them in dreams and visions and fantasies, and see some of them in certain people who exibited admirable (or despicable) character traits.

Odin and Zeus (and other gods) would occasionally come down and wander the earth disguised as beggars. They wanted to see which mortals would take them in and give them food, treat them decently, and those humans were rewarded richly. Of course the rewards were representative of inner non-physical rewards. More like good fortune than actual gold. Blessings.

This is very much in keeping with the way archetypes of the unconscious will show up in people's dreams. The most powerful ones, often beginning as ragged beggars or poor humble sickly people, will sometimes reveal themselves to have divine qualities. I've had several such dreams in my life. Those figures are what Jung dubbed the Self archetype, named after the concept of the Hindu Atman (or is it Brahman?), which represents the ultimate divine essence of each one of us that lives deep inside.

• History and Development of Jung's Psychology: The Early Years, 1900 to 1935

Not only do these archetypes show up in dreams, but we also see them reflected in people around us, or in the media. Certain people carry powerful traits, just like the gods and demigods do. The Greeks and other ancients represented these traits, these archetypes, through their sculpture, mosaics, and vase paintings as well as in their mythology and religion. And of course, we each carry certain of these traits, to varying degrees, inside of us.

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I watched a few comic book videos I didn't list here, including a couple on Walt Simonson. One was about his epic run on Thor. He mentioned that in the Norse mythology Thor's father was Odin, who mostly stayed up in Asgaard, while Thor himself, blessed with the same powers of lightning, thunder and storm, spent a lot of his time here on Midgard protecting the Earthlings from various monsters and other threats.

Thor is very much like Hercules, except he's a full god rather than a demigod, and he also has his evil half-brother Loki, who is Thor's opposite in several important regards. Where Thor is valiant, courageous and straightforward, Loki is devious, untrustworthy and will betray his so-called friends. He's basically Thor's shadow-self, and thus the sahdow of the bold and courageous Vikings themselves. Actually Simonson only said the first part, I added the rest. This has added to my understanding—that the titans and frost giants represent the unleashed fury of nature in its wildest, most destructive forms, and the gods are more human-like variants on that, with the same power sources, but allied with particular matching human traits, and they protect humans from the savagery of nature and help us move toward civilization. Their offspring, especially the half-human ones, live often among us here on Earth (rather than in the divine realm, which is the unconscious) and can help us directly with our problems. They're closer to the human (the material, or the conscious mind)—they're more 'down to earth' than their fully-divine parents. Lately I've been having a lot of new insights into this paradigm, and I'm filling in the blanks that existed for me before. As I read more from the Heroes, Masked and Mythic book I'm learning even more.

But now it's pretty clear to me that Jack Kirby always knew about the mythical heroes and the gods. Or maybe he realized the connections early on in his career (which started at the dawn of comic books back in the thirties) and did a little research. He seems to be the main creator who has linked superheroes with gods and mythical heroes, as well as bringing in all manner of cosmic baddies and monsters.