A Comic Book Issue, or The Problem With Power Creep, and the Virtue of Democracy
Shout-out to Brian Heinz for inspiring that pun, one of the few Channel Awesome recap style review era guys I can actually stand. Not sure if he does the Comic Book Issues series anymore. Anyway,
General Note: Superhero comics are a medium that often criticizes itself with hindsight, different writers sometimes write the same characters very differently and concurrently in crossovers and the like, and titles will at times change hands mid-run resulting in someone doing both. I can only talk about what I’ve read, so there might be similar criticisms by writers in-universe down the road. Moments like the one with Sam Wilson I’ll talk about later are very frustrating and dunderheaded in a way that did not need any backwards analyzing to realize were fundamental flaws, and I’m not terribly interested in the retroactive recapitulations on those matters. And the stuff on democracy is obviously more complicated in implementation, but here I’m talking more about ideas than the beast as it exists.
Returning Reader Note: The promised political issue of the newsletter mentioned in that brief update is still coming, but I have been, unfortunately, spoiled for choice in terms of illustrative examples, which had bogged things down.
That the big two comic book publishers in America, and some smaller publishers with a superhero focus, have a problem with too many characters accumulating too much, or too many powers, that it messes with the balance or consistency of the universes they’re in is not a novel observation. I think if you read comics long enough it’s inevitable that you’ll come across a character that’s simply too much. Maybe they breeze through obstacles so easily that the stories become plain tedious. Maybe they make the niggling question of “why haven’t all these amazing individuals put their heads together to solve problems like disease or world hunger, or at least found a way to lock up a murderous clown for his full sentence?” too prominent in the mind to really get into the plot at hand. Maybe they’re just a bit more dour than someone who can zip around the universe and take in the whole of creation should be. Every reader, it seems, has some kind of limit, even if there’s disagreement about who crosses the line.
This would be less of an issue if more comics were fine with being a lark—popcorn adventures in sequential art form—or for children, or thier own narratives sometimes crossing over without much concern with timelines or a shared world. Unfortunately, there is a great insistence on being meaningful, grown-up, and titles existing in a shared continuity. None of these features are bad in isolation, it’s more a problem of compoundment of these qualities on top of each other in increasingly contorted ways. Standard disclaimers: There are more child friendly comics still being made, there are characters and runs that are mostly just for fun, and more standalone titles and spin-off universes-although Marvel’s first Ultimate universe preceding its death and partially getting rolled into the main (616) continuity. There are even those stories, main-line in continuity stories , that do have something substantial to say about the mundane world.
“Power creep” can happen for a variety of reasons. But a simple way for it to happen is the need, or at least perceived need, for gradual stakes raising. A nasty new villain—or returning face of evil—wants to do nasty things, and a simple way to escalate the threat beyond the usual plotting is to give them some way to do it on a scale that surpasses previous attempts. And what’s a way to counter that? Have a new hero emerge that can counter this new threat take the stage, or have some returning goodie(s) push themselves beyond their previous limits in order to rise to the occasion and defeat them. Batman must stop a ninja from killing the the city from without by embracing and rejecting his methods according to his personal morality, then he has to stop a terrible threat from within, an Australian trying to turn the city to chaos and amorality with his Big Bat-Brother device that violates his principles and must be destroyed. He must also manufacture a beacon of hope separate from himself, which helps make the end feel like it was a less personal, more big picture focused story. The he has to stop a competitive weightlifter who probably loves Lolita in a way Nabokov would hate, and secret object of said weightlifter’s affection who really pulls the strings, from nuking the city by making the ultimate sacrifice of fucking off to Italy with a flighty woman. A Dragon Ball by any other name is just as pretty strong. Repeat this often enough, and for long enough, and there’s enough thresholds being surpassed on all sides that newcomers, and slower to change members of the old cast, often have their starting baseline of power set higher than was standard for characters of the earlier eras to keep up. If my memory serves me correctly, in Superior Foes of Spider-Man there’s a good gag in which the merry band of not so super villains are mortified when they realize that they don’t have anyone with the seemingly mandatory suite of powers that would help them move a heavy safe easily, such as flight+super strength. Characters also gain new abilities or expand on old ones for other reasons, like mastering their strange abilities that were once more like curses or through resolution of some more relatable inner conflict, and it wouldn’t be good advice to say “don’t do that”, but that’s where the shared universe can cause problems. Big event power increases and the smaller scale ones all get tangled up into a big ball of everybody getting the ability to shoot beams of some kind. Or get a way to fuck people up with a touch if they’re a legacy or clone Spider-Man. I think Kaine and Miles Morales doing a laying of hands on the same person would be some kind of crime against humanity. Kind of like whenever Batman does a mock execution via dropping.
These changes can be a way to shake up a title, move a more humble character into a new sphere of challenges. Give them greater responsibility or bigger shoes to fill. But this changes the character of the character. We don’t see Superman take on the typically corrupt within an issue as often as we see him stopping something more grand or imposing. Grant Morrison felt it would be wrong to write Batman as a guy beating up random drug dealers, and his Batman tenure is indeed filled with grand threats and supernatural fake dad shenanigans. Even the more powerless human focused, detective work heavy limited series for Dick Grayson’s Batman has him face down the psychopathic son of Jim Gordon over a plot to poison baby formula in a way that will create a new generation of psychopaths by reversing the effects of his experimental medication, which is not exactly grounded noir. It wouldn’t be satisfying to see those characters do the same thing forever, but there’s something fundamental about these changes.
Early days Superman is power fantasy done well, because the fantasy is not that he’s merely powerful, but that he uses it righteously. That’s been said plenty, but there’s nuance to that combination that is sometimes missed. In early issues he faces slumlords, prison wardens, mine owners, organized crime, and other such foes. His powers, despite being much lesser than they would later be, are an important part of who he is not solely because he is a powerful guy using it benevolently whilst others use them for evil, a moral paragon to be emulated, but simply because he is unstoppable. They can’t hurt him, they physically cannot make a challenge he can’t thwart. Not only can he not be dissuaded by simple violence, he can single handedly unblock a mine. He can stop not only the active transgressions, he can prevent the consequences of negligence and chasing the dollar at the expense of safety. Not even foolishness and shortsightedness and the literally disastrous wages of greed can stop him from rescuing the innocent and punishing the wicked. When a prison warden builds a little hell for his subjects, Superman can walk in, dunk his head in the misery he’s made until he repents, and walk back out without having to stop to catch his breath. When that mine collapses he doesn’t have to wait around for help, he can start acting as soon as he is aware of the issue, and if he needs help, he can get around faster than a game of telephone to the proper authorities. And nobody can get back at him directly. This also helps explain why he doesn’t need to kill these rank exploiters or struggle with the temptation to do so like other characters might. A man with a gun is just going to make a fool of himself. The people who get so far on threats against the commoner have no leverage, and if they are tempted to take it out on anyone less super, he can always come back to stop them and make them regret that too. But also, in having to travel by foot and be near things to know they’re happening, it makes sense why he can’t solve the world’s problems. He isn’t that powerful yet, which also makes Clark Kent such a useful thing to be. A man who truly can reach the whole world through his work. A human face to present the human struggles behind the adventures of someone more than human. Once you introduce ways to hurt him, or beings that are on his level or greater, he faces new challenges, true, but he is no longer the unstoppable force for good. Once he has the power to save the world as a hero alone, writers are tempted to come up with more abstract ideological reasons why he doesn’t, or keep throwing macro-threats at him that must take up quite a bit of his time. The simplicity disappears, and the complexity that replaces it doesn’t necessarily say anything more insightful about reality. Superman is not an ideal as a n individual exactly, no one in real life will ever be so untouchable as to be afforded such moral clarity when faced with violence, but he is a moving piece of escapism. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing to see the arsenals of the worst police forces in the country get crushed into a little cube while they had to watch, and if they want to get cross about it, they’ll all get juggled until they weep? The simplicity is not realistic, but it’s pleasing, and not any less realistic than a man that can punch out evil Space Hitlers that shoot time displacement beams, no matter how sincerely that Superman talks about the importance of personal growth. On a more simple level, let’s be honest, Batman can essentially dodge bullets, has technology whole governments would kill for, and can come back from what should be life altering injuries with regularity rather than across long arcs at this point. Calling him grounded or even peak human is sort of a lie.
Marvel has a problem of everyone moving towards a cosmic or mythic twist in their background. Venom is not a simple space parasite, but part of some hive consciousness that then turned out to be connected to a god. Spider-Man is a living totem. Hulk is influenced by some greater being. I actually enjoy ideas in Immortal Hulk, and I like comics getting weird with it, but learning that the Hulk was created by contact with the powers of an evil god was enough to make me check out of comics for a bit. That and all the events. I like Venom. I don’t like Spider-verse. I don’t need Venomverse in my life. Making Bruce Banner someone that was already deeply emotionally damaged was an interesting elaboration on why he struggled with the Hulk. That the Hulk was a rage beast was a good counter to his raw strength, a clear narrative cost. Him gaining intelligence in his Hulk form was a way to give him new capabilities without having to beef him up. The god stuff? It’s new, sure. It’s also literally takes some humanity out of his struggle, from my perspective . It also seems you can’t swing your arms without hitting a super genius in that universe. Whether they be comic super geniuses, or would be super geniuses in real life. And some of the technology they develop makes it seem strange that their world has all that much similarity to ours at this point. The geniuses seem to lack imagination, although I guess lanterns and that girl from Doom Patrol are both DC properties, so it makes sense it’s a power they don’t have, I suppose. That’s a point where having a company wide continuity and trying to speak on the real issues are at odds. They’re world faces problems like ours, sure. Seems like they could have solved some of the big ones though. Nothing that can’t be fixed by having Reed Richards…taking pay-offs to sit on helpful advancements? Alright then.
Marvel has perhaps the worst example of jamming realpolitik into comics by people who don’t seem to understand real world politics terribly well. Early in the Sam Wilson Captain America run, Wilson discovers a group of companies doing business with a gaggle of creeps called The Serpent Squadron, who are themselves working with an evil scientist to do illegal genetic experiments on undocumented migrants kidnapped by a hate group while crossing the border. The companies are buying the innovations created by this horror show to sell on the legal markets. The CEOs convince him not to bring the full force of the law on their heads because it would ruin their companies, be bad for the overall economy, and that they’re just too big to fail. That phrase is invoked directly. His solution is to use one CEO as the fall guy, and have his company bought up by the others, all employees and benefits retained. Yes, his solution is a kinder than usual merger. His punishment is market consolidation. Between companies operating in a distinctly Nazi-esque manner while he is proving himself as Captain America. No, he does not have any of his wealthy buddies take a chunk out of them at minimum. This is a farcically stupid resolution, and all the jabs of the cold cruelty of the market turn to shit and an unintended condemnation of the limits of liberal imagination in even fictional scenarios and mass media’s need to try and inject needless realism in writer Nick Spencer’s hands. It also managed to age horrendously despite starting awful. Spencer has done good work, but in trying to make a level-headed satire about something he seems to have not grasped the implications of, he ran where he shouldn’t have tread.
I’m going in on Marvel because they have perhaps an ur and continuing text in power creep making the split devotion to maturity, real word issues, and devotion to continuity into gibberish. The X-men.
You know who's actually a pretty workable character as a stand in? Angel, the X-men people often point to as pretty superfluous. Why? Because for all his peculiarities, there is nothing inhuman about him. He is vulnerable to all sorts of things people are. If he was menacing your neighborhood, you could just take a gun and aim up to resolve the issue. If a bulletproof lady was doing it, you could hit her with a car. Even Wolverine is stoppable by fairly conventional means. Blow him up, drop his skeleton in concrete until you find a more humane solution. and he has to get in stabbing range for those claws to kill you. The magnetism power guy that can ruin a city block with his mind is something inhuman in terms of raw ability. Which is to say X-men all getting lumped in together has always made them a metaphor for the oppressed a bit tricky. That metaphor falls apart entirely when you introduce a mutant called Orphan-Maker who will kill the world if his special suit fails. Xavier called that ability a curse, which shows there is a line at which the X-powers are simply too dangerous. I don’t think you can be so gay that there’s no solution but to isolate you away from the world for the time being. Or maybe that’s what really happened to Liberace. It seems like an actual solution is that there shouldn’t be X-gene based discrimination, but everyone who has “there goes the neighborhood into very small pieces” powers should have to do some paperwork if they insist on using them in public. I know about Civil War, the inter-dimensional gulag, Tony Stark semi-accidentally making legal child soldiers that came out of it, and all that, but I wouldn’t say that was an even keeled examination of the idea as much as a series of blockbuster events engineered around creating action, plotted out in a top down fashion that left a number of writers flat-footed in how to engage with it without enough knowledge of how it would all play out. This is where the problem with power differentials and creep in comics intersects with a desire to tell insightful stories beyond morality plays. Mutants can’t be a great stand in for anyone when they can individually be an existential threat to civilization. But there are practical, business of writing issues too. When everyone else can fly, or teleport, or leap tall buildings in a single bound, Angel does become redundant. Which is partially why they tried to give him a power-up, which moves him away from that central strength of being very different, but fundamentally human. And remember, he is part of a team, his flying could have been useful if not for all those team members having comparable powers, having access to personal flight technology, which is a problem when the X-men have to exist persistently with the Starks and Richards of that universe, or even other X-men who have technology building abilities like Forge. By making everyone do so much, along with the other factors, you lose the ability to explore the new and interesting ways people who are only somewhat different might experience the world, which, hey, might be a point with some real world relevance.
The X-men can be the bizarre team of sometimes awesomely powerful misfits they are, but don’t keep insisting that the metaphor is deep when you can’t reel in any industry excesses, because a metaphor does not end where you say it does. Once you make a comparison, the comparison will be taken to further conclusions than what you strictly intend. That is a strength and risk of the practice. A writer can’t have Kitty Pride drop the n-bomb to make a point, and then expect people to not point out that it all somewhat falls apart due to the fact that real life groups can’t kill someone by thinking really hard at them, or, you know, whatever it is they’ve decided Apocalypse can do now. This is not to say that people are wrong to find them inspirational or motivational, or find kinship or comfort in the books, but that’s different than insisting that there is some essential , intrinsic grounding if you just separate ever more of the continuously piling up stuff that ungrounds it. I think writers mean well when they make queer allegories in the X titles, but the company’s practice of knocking them on their asses and setting them back to square one for various reasons makes it all seem like it’s saying integration is impossible, if one looks at it holistically. And queer people don’t have a magic island to flee to make a nation unto themselves. Although, neither do the X-men anymore. And I don’t think Disney will let anyone be totally open about what those Krakoa/Israel parallels were all supposed to add up to—a loose inspiration that raised more eyebrows than usual due to recent events, or Hickman trying to build a janky fable about real world violence and hubris—for the foreseeable future. Trying to jam together general queer analogy with specific Israel analogy is a thing that’s only going to come across as more internally at odds if that’s a path that gets taken, or arguably has been taken, which is always a weakness of a metaphor so broad people can slap it on multiple groups in very different situations.
The least charitable but not unreasonable reading of certain X-men arcs is that they are a fairly thoughtless scolding of disempowered people about the dangers of taking power and becoming victimizers themselves. This is not a bad point, but depending on what sort of people the mutants are standing in for, it becomes a sort of finger wagging at people who don’t have the institutional aims they’re being implied to desire, told with characters that have individual power well beyond what is possible. Magneto is sometimes compared to Malcolm X, and has been for some time, but he spent his first roughly 18 years as a standard megalomaniac with mass murderous aims who flirted with fascistic iconography. That Magneto would be a straw man caricature, at best. And comic characters who have been around long enough tend to develop multiple popular interpretations, so if you’re saying “Magneto is the Malcolm X to Xavier’s Martin Luther King Jr.” you can still be saying very little. Which cultural idea of Malcom X do you mean, which interpretation of Magneto? If those parameters are not communicated, it’s something of an empty comparison, at worst an intentionally empty one that’s trying to get people to supply their own meaning while not saying anything in particular about the thing it is invoking while pretending it is.
X-Men would work better without all the additional power that’s slowly been building up. This might be easier if they weren’t stuck in continuity with all those other super-people, or were able to put out more titles that are self-contained and outside the main canon to some degree. X-men would work better if it didn’t decide to occasionally stick its foot in real world specificity in ways that it's not currently built for as a mainline product.
Or, I think X-men makes great children to all-ages entertainment. Not the comics as they have been for awhile. I like some of his run, but ultimately I don’t think I could recommend the Grant Morrison run that ends with Magneto—quickly retconned to be a different guy—getting hopped up on sentient meth and putting people from a city with a large Jewish population into a giant murder crematorium to small children. And a surprising amount of comics are like that in one way or another. Oddly gruesome in pretty blasé ways. Clumsy and/or too bogged down in the history of the fiction in their attempts at teaching lessons. Dubious sex stuff. They’ve embraced the “we are Homo Superior who will inevitably replace humanity” idea and ended up playing with replacement theory tropes in questionable ways at times. But as a concept, X-Men is great for kids. The thing is, if you’re going to tell me that something is well-considered adult entertainment, I’m going to be looking for nuance and care in the details of what it's trying to say. You can go more broad with material for younger audiences.
The metaphors don’t need to hold up to the same level of teasing out if the lesson is simple. The X-Men are good guys who people fear because they don’t understand them. Because they don’t understand them, they don’t separate them as different from the ones that do bad things like they might be able to do for people they do understand. Despite these issues, the X-men try to do what they think is the right thing anyway. They’ll fight bad humans and bad mutants, but they know where they’re both coming from. They don’t excuse anyone, but they are willing to reach out a hand to mutants who are willing to see that they’re too wrapped up in counter-hate. They try to teach humanity too, but are willing to be more stubbornly pugilistic with those in power who discriminate than they are with mutants who have good reasons to be angry. They teach each other their value and worth, and that being different isn’t bad. Bring in explicit commentary on real world identities on that last point. That they have all those weird and wonderful powers is nice for kids who feel powerless. I think this fantasy does not need the same level of caution when it’s not trying to reflect sober reality, but communicate basic ideas about acceptance, bravery, etc. Tell the viewers they’re like the X-Men, that Cyclops struggles with his own issues like everyone else but it doesn’t make him any less of a person, and let them have the catharsis of seeing him blast a real dickhead through a wall. Have some lessons on responsibly handling your gifts and being considerate of others special needs. The X-Men has also always had a certain tension where the stories are about acceptance, but creatives definitely make plenty of character designs that are meant to make you go “look at that freaky creature” at a glance. A good writer can resolve this by being able to humanize them anyway. The youths love freaky creatures. Glob Herman is perfect for that. He’s very odd looking, but he’s still a person. Reel them in with a visual, leave them with a lesson. I see the value in that as a childish thing that can be moved on from as they learn about the complexities of the world, And I don’t mean that as an insult, it’s good to have things for children that stay for children. That’s worth making. I think that’s why the cartoon had such an impact. Again, there can be strength in simplicity. Simplicity does not mean broad characters or always straightforward stories, it means having a clarity to not get weighed down in trying to say too much with a base too thin to support all you’re putting on it. You can address real world issues explicitly. You can address discrimination and bigotry, what you can’t do is what seems like a play on “Never Again”—No More—as a national rallying cry and be surprised when people get stuck on trying to scrutinize what follows through certain lenses that were being invoked by the creatives in the first place.
I don’t think it’s impossible to do mature X-Men stories, I think that the power creep, and the things that cause it, are going to always get in the way. Now, you don’t need to get rid of the stuff that people enjoy, but maybe one of those special lines should really be focused on scaled-back power and embracing looseness, consistency of character and morality rather than building a new continuity. Marvel already does the flip-side of this where they put out titles that are just for fun, or are exploring a particularly kooky character or idea. Which I have no problem with. The problem is when the out-there and the serious are smushed together by the whims and dictates of editors, the need to exist in this continual universe, and writers out of their depth in ways that ultimately makes the exercise unserious.
But here is the bigger issue with power creep. I said I like some power fantasy. But mostly as escapism or for simple story telling. This is not because I think comics are some beautiful thing that need to be isolated from the real world. I would be fine if comics addressed real world issues in more thoughtful ways. But there’s a great stumbling block to that. People get really into the weeds when talking about whether or not superhero comics are fascist. Which is fine to do, but I think there’s a more straightforward point to be made.. Superhero comics tend to forget one very important thing.Power is a terrible thing.
I mean that. We all unfortunately labor under it. When there is the power to kill and destroy and people willing to use it, we want a counter to it. And that power is a fact of life. When we build a complex society on a massive scale, we develop institutions with power over the mechanical and procedural running of its infrastructure without the need for popular consensus on each decision to keep it running smoothly and consistently. It’s a good idea to have formal ways to counter that power if it is abused. When we think about a better society, a lot of that is thinking about power management. What do we centralize, what do we diffuse? Who gets to wield extraordinary power, who is it reasonable to withhold power from? Should anyone or any position get more de jure power than others in the first place? What power do people get to enforce laws and functions, and who gets to use force to take it away? Power is, and the most revolutionary thing you could ever do is diminish its ability to become too concentrated.
The admirable goal of democracy, to my eye, is not that power is distributed more evenly. The distribution is the tool. The goal is to make it so that there is a serious limitation on the power available to any one person. I think this is sometimes what people get misty eyed about when they talk about the potential of the Constitution, even when they’re skeptical or even disdainful of the actual nation organized around it. The idea that there are multiple institutions who can check each other’s power by having distinct but important spheres of direct influence, and that they are in turn accountable to the people, is broad strokes sensible, the judiciary being something of a fly in the ointment, especially with how much influence the Supreme Court has carved out for itself while being an appointment based institution. One can accept that Hamilton was an elitist and that the Senate itself is functionally anti-democratic while still seeing that a check on the “tyranny of the majority” is important in a similar way that preventing a single person or institution from gaining too much unilateral power is. Guaranteed universal rights that can’t be taken away by any simple majority vote or single institution is a decent expression of that idea. You can’t make laws against an ethnic group even if most people are on board with the idea, and if you plainly can’t carve away rights for one group, that does prevent the establishment of precedent and legal methods of taking them away from other groups later. It is saving people from themselves in a way. Nobody has the legal authority to do it, what power there is, is the power to stop it. Enfranchisement is also a sort of check. If only a few people can vote, those few only need to have the will to work toward discriminatory aims to make them happen. When many people can vote, you don’t need to get everyone holding hands to prevent that, you only need to convince enough voters that even if they dislike x group, expanding the ability to discriminate is ultimately against their own interests. You have to convince more people of this, but the more people are involved, the more points of friction you can find. The difficulty in shaping a clear consensus is frustrating when an aim is laudable, but that’s not a mistake of the system, that’s the price of being able to frustrate ignoble goals. That’s why conservatism has so often landed on getting voters to accept discrimination as a worthy goal all on its own: that’s why it engenders anti-democratic sentiment in moments like the present, it needs to reduce the friction. Discrimination is good, why oppose it if you’re one the good ones who surely won’t ever be on the other side of it? Why not let us accumulate power, if power will get us to that goal? That’s why things like capping wealth are more liberatory than not. Sure, no one has the freedom to make as much as they like, but then no one has the ability to accumulate so much that they have a massively disproportionate amount of money based influence they can use to try and take other people’s freedoms away. Thomas Paine proposed the 100% marginal tax rate for a reason.
Power also controls the powerful. Powerful institutions and people both have to expend great amounts of power to preserve what they have. The logic of people within churches who betray their principles to cover up unchristian behavior justify themselves with “well, think of all the other good uses of power we might lose if this came out.” Which of course worsens the problem and allows a failure of care to become deeper rot. People in positions of little power will still abuse what they have to maintain a meager position for fear of losing it. Slave owners have complained of how it makes men tyrannical. Hypocritical in a sense, but it also proves the point. If you directly control the army, you have to make sure no one usurps it. A civilian head of the military is two way protection under ideal circumstances: the authorities within the military cannot take power away from you in the way they could a peer, coup prevention, but also they have oaths beyond you so that you cannot tell them to do whatever you want. Neither can simply and legally seize authority. Even if they have technical limitations that unilateral authority does not, a block on the mad, bloodthirsty, and power hungry also prevents inefficiency. And so, when thinking of how we improve democracy, we should not just think of how we empower each other, but how we can restrain each other in ways that ensure we can’t reduce each other.
Marvel had a limited series called Gold Goblin. Although it’s tied heavily into the Dark Web event, so it’s not a standalone series you can easily pick up on, another of those running continuity issues that makes getting into Big Two comics a pain. The backstory is that Norman Osborn had his sins forgiven in a magic way and is a reformed man. In this series he struggles with guilt over what he has done, and is haunted by the old Green Goblin persona —and the ghosts of his victims, primarily Gwen Stacey—while trying to make himself into a hero. Don't worry, he got worse again later. I don’t want to criticize the series writer too harshly, as it’s par for the course in the business, and it does end with him in a moment of crisis after he does a sort of justifiable homicide—don’t worry, she gets better again—but now experiences remorse and doubt he wouldn’t have before. But it’s a bad idea on its face. He is a man who already fell so low because of his ambition and the seeking of power of one kind or another. He’s got a homicidal monster running around in his head trying to taunt him back to the old ways. He struggles with moments of his old, malignant competitiveness coming to the surface in the first few pages of issue 1. But that’s the format. If Norman is going to learn lessons in his own series, he needs to do superhero things. But everyone in his life should be telling him very clearly that he is a man who should not be using power like that. It’s already ruined him, and he ruined lives because of it, he has shown an inability to handle it. Spider-Man should web him to his desk chair until he is disabused of this desire. He developed an unhealthy capacity for violence and risk already, even if that first go around was washed away. He should probably take the complex hallucination as a sign that he’s not all better even if he’s not evil. He really should not even be a buisnessman, with the sort of power and ability to affect anonymous people’s lives profoundly, but Peter Parker explicitly gives him permission on the grounds that his company could do a lot of good. While those stories do happen, the format is going to resist telling a story in which someone says no to exercising power when they have a choice not to—and not just some great and terrible power, but lesser and more mundane power— sticking to that decision, and it being the best thing. That is a mature story, more so than any exploration of a man making himself miserable because he decided to fly around on glider, be a captain of industry, and punch bad guys when he obviously shouldn’t have, even in a universe where that sort of thing is necessary for some people to do. Batman shouldn’t have told that kid to redeem the recognizable IP of Watchmen’s Rorschach when those worlds collided, you know? I will give it some praise for asking the question of who Osborn would even be after living so long with every relationship based on manipulation after he gives up being that person. Unfortunately, he got injected with his sins again and is back to his old ways, so that idea had a pretty limited runway.
That’s why I liked the earlier Superior Spider-Man run by its conclusion. Doc Ock took over Peter Parker’s body in an attempt to escape his dying one, long story, but was pulled to goodishness by the memories and bonds of his host. So he decides to become Spider-Man, but one who uses his full potential rather than being a perpetually overextended loser. This ends with him building his own surveillance state with minions and skittering camera bots . This all gets yoinked and subverted by Norman Osborn. Doc Ock learns a valuable lesson that Peter Parker, for all his flaws, was a better man by virtue of he wouldn’t have made a surveillance state to seize, and could face incredible odds rather than obsessively try to impose control. So he gracefully passes on and lets Parker take back his body with compliments. Don’t worry, he got better, and worse, again.
That, I guess, is the deep problem with comics. Would Superman want a world where people are like him, willing to stand alone against the great evils and temptations of the world, even if that’s an admirable thing to be? Or would he rather everyone was just brave and compassionate enough that no one has to stand alone? I think the latter is ultimately a more useful motivation or inspiration, it gives us something more real to think about, even if you’re of the opinion that it’s just as far-fetched a fantasy. Use power as you must, spread it where it is needed, and constrain it when you can.