When you gaze into the abyss …

“Never underestimate the attraction to grown-up fanboys of a ‘darker, more adult’ version of something they liked as kids”—John Seavey.
As a lifelong comic-book fan (even though Seavey’s referring to Empire Strikes Back), I agree 100 percent, mostly because of the “grim and gritty” period comics entered in the late eighties/early nineties (and periodically revert to).
Dark versions of super-heroes and their worlds (even Batman, whose hardly sunshine and joy to start with)—or other creations, such as Oz (I’ve read a lot of Dark Oz over the years)—have, if nothing else, the advantage of shock value, of seeing something sweet and light turned sick and menacing. In comic-books, they’re also held up as inherently superior—more realistic, more mature and more serious than the prototypes.
And they can be. it’s certainly realistic to point out that even in a world with super-heroes, injustice exists; killers get away; powerful criminals such as the Kingpin can laugh at the law; and no matter how many times the Justice League saves the world, people are dying of starvation, violence and cancer.
In practice, gritty/dark/adult comics usually end up taking unrealism in another direction. The message isn’t that injustice exists but that justice doesn’t, that nothing we do will make a difference, that everyone is dying of cancer (not literally but some of them take that tone). Super-heroes? Futile. Useless. Powerless to do anything that matters.
I can understand the appeal. As Ursula LeGuin observed in one of her stories, we tend to see happiness as rather superficial, shallow, something only silly, naive people believe in (come to think of it, Rodgers and Hammerstein made the same point in South Pacific‘s “Cockeyed Optimist.”). You couldn’t possibly be happy if you were smart and realistic about life (“It’s hip to be miserable/When you’re young and intellectual”—Carly Simon. Damn, apparently I’m far from the first to make this point).
I think it’s bullshit (admittedly being an upbeat person, I’m biased). It’s like the pod people informing Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers that “You were in love. It didn’t last. It never does.” It’s like claiming that since many couples divorce, therefore no marriage can ever work out.
(Yes, I do realize we’re all going to die, but death, in itself, doesn’t mean life sucks. To paraphrase Lloyd Alexander, every day we’re alive, we’re kicking death’s butt).
X-Men during this era was a particularly bad example of this. I dropped the book because scripter Chris Claremont presented a wildly unrealistic bleakness, a world where no human being ever feels anything but hate for mutants (supporting characters in the strip excepted), no mutant can ever get justice, where people will listen to their fears instead of their hopes every single fricking time. A world where arguing with Magneto is almost impossible since violence is apparently the only solution.
Slogging through those issues (back in the days when quitting a book I once liked was like pulling teeth) I couldn’t help finding it tedious; now I find so unrealistic it’s laughable.
Sure, the history of the human race is full of bigotry, hate and savage brutality to the “other” (gay, black, transgender, Latino, Muslim, Jew, Asian …). But even in the days when slavery was SOP for Americans, there were abolitionists who could look at slaves and see fellow human beings (as Fergus Bordewich points out in Bound for Canaan). During the civil rights movement, some white southerners were willing to stand up and be counted on the right side, purely because it was the right thing to do). And for all the hate that’s often directed at gays, we’ve reached the point where gay marriage is now (according to some polls) has majority support.
The assumption fear will always win out is simply not true. The assumption that there’s nothing the X-Men can do to change things is just as false. Claremont characters seem completely oblivious to the fact civil-rights activists didn’t simply stand around and wait for people to become nicer, they went out and forced the issue. And that the blowback, threats and hate they got were an inevitable part of the fight, not proof they couldn’t win.
Seavey’s post made me think of film noir, which does the dark realism thing right. Noir films accept that horrible things can happen, completely unfairly and arbitrarily (like DOA, where the hero is poisoned in the assumption he’s read a piece of paperwork he never even saw). That we live in a universe that can be monstrously, completely unfair.
But it doesn’t imply that it’s unfair every single time, that nobody’s dreams or hopes or life will ever work out. Or that the things we want are always out of reach, or aren’t worth even making an effort for.
Darkness is real. But that doesn’t make light an illusion