Comments on: Why Superhero Movies Suck, Part I

By: Mark Gallagher

Mark Gallagher — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 23:19:46 +0000

I appreciate the thoughtful critique, Kristina. I hope as you note that the tone of my piece indicates that some of its claims are fundamentally indefensible, particularly given (as you note too) the breadth of fan production. My subjective view is that textual forms whose authorship can be ascertained do possess some form of integrity that I see eroding, based on the studio filmic evidence. I recognize the limits of that view, and the elitist discourses with which it can merge. I’m not a student or scholar of fandom (as evidence of my fossil status, I hadn’t heard of AO3), but I hope some of the stories there find ways to slash up the thoroughly corporatized Marvel world, to add many more women and people of color (other than green) into the mix, and to avoid impulses to render “epic” effects in prose form.

By: Kristina Busse

Kristina Busse — Sun, 13 Sep 2015 04:09:02 +0000

Mark, there seem to be quite a few points in your essay that posit personal opinions as universal truths. And while I have a lot of sympathy with your position as an apparent comic book fan seeing your beloved fan objects used and reused, adapted and transformed, I'm not sure your judgmental, if not elitist, language serves your argument well. To argue for any sense of authenticity in a medium that regularly reboots itself and creates alternate worlds at the drop of a hat seems strange. To pity us poor fools who only know the characters through the movies resonates with the way literary studies has long looked down on filmic and televisual adaptations, and that somehow feels wrong to me. To blame the decline of comic studies (if that indeed is true) to blockbuster movies seems to create causation among a variety of correlated issues, and personally I'm not sure that the depletion of subcultural capital is really to be laid at the feet of Spiderman and Superman or if there are a multitude of other things at work. But then you know all that, and you've chosen to write a polemic nevertheless, I assume trying to oversell your argument in order to get across some of the very clear frustration you, a longtime comic fan feel about the current popularity of at least some of these films. I can't help but note an undertone of the "not real fans" narrative that we all feel when our favorite underground X suddenly becomes popular. But as academics, we should also be self aware enough to question this nostalgia. I think what I take most issue with, however, is the following: In moving comics materials from dispersed subculture to the center of a globalized monoculture, though, studios and their corporate parents dilute the artistic and political qualities that accompany subcultural production and circulation. The 2000s and 2010s wave of comic-book adaptations ... sharply limits opportunities for creativity and imagination on the part of both producers and receivers. Ironically or not, superhero films’ outsize scales foster an inverse degree of imagination. As a fan fiction scholar who happens to be active in MCU, I'd beg to differ. Yes, we can debate how subversive and subcultural fan fiction and fan art and fan vids ultimately are, but I'm pretty certain we can't debate the sheer creativity that the Marvel films (in all their glorious failure on many issues) have spawned, such as (to list a tiny fraction of the daily output on various platforms) this vid or this, this tumblr or this one, or the more than 100K stories tagged as Marvel Cinematic Universe on AO3

By: Sumana Harihareswara

Sumana Harihareswara — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 16:24:05 +0000

Thanks for the explanation, Mark. I appreciate the context.

By: Mark Gallagher

Mark Gallagher — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 00:09:11 +0000

Thanks for your response, Sumana. To answer your question in brief, I’d say the Mandarin’s appeal lies largely in his iconicity–as a long-running character and also as a mirror image of the Iron Man character. The 1960s Iron Man functions as a “good” avatar of the Cold War military-industrial complex, opposed to the “bad” avatar the Mandarin, who embodies with his technology-produced powers (a set of high-tech rings, each with a different lethal power) a conflated Soviet/Chinese Communist threat. The Mandarin of yore is indeed an extension of the racist Fu Manchu caricature, but he also had agency (if with de facto government backing) and was notably the only East Asian face in comic books of his heyday. The film version not only throws East Asianness to the curb, it also redefines the character as merely a front for a white villain, this one, if memory serves, an aggrieved nerd (played by Guy Pearce) jilted by protagonist Tony Stark in formulaic “what’s his motivation?” backstory. So that sense of nonwhite agency, while it squared with racist constructs of Asiannness, is entirely abandoned in the film (or is handed off to the superfluous Chinese minor characters). What could’ve been a provocative reimagining of the Mandarin as an ambivalent figuration of Chinese global power becomes instead one more aspect of the “property” thrown under the bus.

By: Sumana Harihareswara

Sumana Harihareswara — Thu, 10 Sep 2015 13:15:44 +0000

I've seen the Iron Man movies and had not read the comics; can you help me understand what was interesting about the Mandarin in the comics? The reveal -- that the Mandarin in IM3 was our own military-industrial complex screwing with us using racist stereotypes, not a racialized Other -- was a big relief to the Marvel fans I know. But maybe I am missing something about what was particularly interesting about the comics Mandarin.