How Comics Expose Our Expectations Around Critical Analysis
Recently I’ve been spending a lot more time in comic book and super hero spaces. Despite being a low-key (and occasionally high-key) fan of a few different franchises for years, those kinds of spaces were not great to navigate as a kid or teen femme-presenting person. As an adult, I don’t give as many shits, and I’ve been dying for community spaces. It does mean I tend to straddle the line between community newcomer and knowledgeable fan. So this presents a lot of interesting observations.
What’s very fun about super hero IPs is because they spread across multiple different forms of media and are very big, long-running stories, you can come in from a lot of different angles. Everyone has a different “first run” of their favorite super hero or team, the place where the comic journey starts for them. Some people are only ever animated show watchers. Some, just movies. And lot of comic purists will have beef with movie and animated show only viewers, really underestimating just how overwhelming venturing into comics as a universe is. When you have to use a reading guide just to follow a narrative, you’re adding an extra layer of difficulty onto your entertainment. When you have to read multiple series at a time just to get all the angles of the story, comics tend to self-gatekeep.
So what’ll happen is people coming in from one form of media will have a completely different understanding of a character or story than people coming in from a different angle. A fan of Wolverine is going to have a completely different concept of the character depending on whether the actor is Hugh Jackman, Steve Blum, or Cal Dodd. Whether he’s written by Claremont, Remender, or Millar. Nicieza, Bunn, and Duggan all bring a slightly different version of Deadpool’s humor, which is different still than how Ryan Reynolds portrays him. I’ve read the entire Venom canon backward and forward, and that poor guy gets put through the tonal ringer depending on what Marvel editorial wants to do with him any given year. If you’ve only seen his three movies, though, you just love those gay little weirdos, as well you should. (Read the Costa run (2016))
It’s because of the most recent Venom movie that I’ve been spending even more time in spaces around that particular IP. Before the movie came out, there was a lot of discussion about the character of Toxin, the symbiote grandchild of Venom, because he was teased at the end of the second movie. I hadn’t realized how popular Toxin was as a character among general fans. This was fun, but also a bit confusing because of why it appeared Toxin was so popular. From what I could glean, a cool design and supposedly high power level were the main draws.
Now, these are comics, so a cool design is eighty percent of the draw of any given character, honestly. But of the various symbiote spawn in the direct Venom lineage, Toxin is one of the more interesting ones, right from the circumstances of their birth. They have this complex parent-child relationship with their first host Patrick Mulligan in a story that explores the true burden of heroism and the ethical intricacies of “right vs wrong.” When they later bond with Eddie, it starts an examination of the of the true relationship between host and symbiote, namely, who is actually the monster, here?
When talking about the new movie, however, fans are more inclined to merely focus on the presence of the character and little else. Not whether the character would be cogent in the narrative so far or whether they’d get enough screen-time to examine their motivations. They just sort of want him to be there. They argue over whether an on-screen symbiote is Toxin or not based on design alone, ignoring the underlying “who” of the character. And from a comic reader of the IP, you’re left with this weird feeling of “did you actually read the comics? Do you actually know this character?”
But what this all points to is the different ways individuals will approach the same media, and it’s all technically accurate. Toxin is both a bitchin’ design and a complex metaphor for the concept of nature vs nurture. All versions of Batman exist at once. There is no one true Batman, rather interpolations of him through time and medium.
So this adds a very interesting barrier to critically analyzing the content. How do we get to the point where all members of the conversation are working from the same information and preconceived notions?
But then we have an additional complication, a quality that comics share with things like video games and romance novels.
The societal expectation is that comic book media isn’t worthy of anaylsis. We’ve slotted it toward the bottom of a hierarchy that presupposes certain mediums are simply more intellectual than others. That certain content is inherently more critically complex. The general public gets this sort of passing glance at comic book storylines through movies and cartoons, and applies those expectations to the entirety of the medium. We’re still having the “graphic novels are reading” fight, sometimes.
So I’ll see people come into comics for the first time and first be overwhelmed by just how much there is. They never realized just how physically big and long these narratives were. Then they’ll get into the story and be surprised at how touching or poignant it is. They’ll run into something that’s sort of shocking that requires a few levels of context to understand, then be surprised that comic book writing is willing to go that far for the sake of exploring a progressive narrative (whether it’s handled the best or not).
But I think even within the comic book community, we don’t expect more complex analysis from each other. I’ve been fighting for my life on TikTok and Tumblr explaining to the symbrock shipping community that the romantic implications for Eddie and Venom’s relationship actually goes way beyond “tee hee mpreg.”
We won’t see this more complex critical analysis, though, until we set the expectation that everything is both worthy and capable of it.