Miller vs. Millar: A Rant About Cynical Superhero Storytelling

Recently Ragnell's been on an highly entertaining twitter tear about Mark Millar's writing in the Ultimate Universe, and it got me thinking that I pretty much agree with her. Especially about the part in an interview where he talks about what-if an Ultimates member was cowardly enough to call in sick when up against a strong villain and uses that as a selling point (without the key heroic factor of showing up at the last minute to help anyway.)

And it got me thinking that, as much as I make fun, I would much rather read anything by Frank Miller than I would anything by Mark Millar.

I think part of it is simply because Miller's so open about his particular narrative quirks. You know what you'll get: macho, gritty monologues, weird yet effective visual effects, and prostitutes-prostitutes-prostitutes.

But the biggest difference between them, I think is that Frank Miller's works tend to be about horrible people being heroes. Where Mark Millar's work tends to be about heroes being horrible people. There's a difference.

In Sin City, or even All Stars: Batman and Robin, the former of which I can stand and the latter of which I dislike with a passion, the characters are pretty much horrible people. Marv. The prostitutes. That version of Batman who basically tosses a kid in a hole and makes him eat rats. They're all horrible people who do awful things.

But ultimately, they end up being the heroes. And I find a strange sort of optimism in that. It's the idea that in the right circumstances, at the right time, even the most horrible, immoral, and monstrous person you know, even THAT guy could be a hero.

Mark Millar's the opposite for me in that he seems to like to take heroic characters and deconstruct them to the point where they lose what makes them heroic. In some cases, what makes them human. Civil War could have been a very effective story in others' hands. Civil War as written by Ed Brubaker perhaps. Or JMS. Certainly a lot of other writers did a lot of work to return Tony Stark, for example into an even remotely viable hero. Cap comes across somewhat better in Civil War (no interdimensional prisons at least and less torturing of former teammates with sonic disabling devices), but even so he spends most of the series as though sailing on a tsunami of steroid rage.

At least Ultimates has the excuse of being a parallel universe. Even so, the Ultimate Universe is a parallel universe where the whole point seems to be, but for a few exceptions, that none of the heroes are remotely the moral and upright people you think they are:

Wolverine screws jailbait and ambushes his teenaged rivals to die in Antarctica. Hank Pym's an abusive monster. Captain America's a jingoist caricature. Cyclops executes captured prisoners. Xavier doesn't fuck up his child army's lives because of privilege, cluelessness, and preoccupation with grand goals, but as deliberate parts of his plans.

And in particular, his treatment of the female characters is to strip them down to one core point in their characterization:

Jean's got the love triangle (and weirdly inappropriate thing with Professor Xavier). And without that, she might as well not even be the same character. If anything, she's more like Rachel (with the self-centered teenaged rebellion and all) than Jean and even that's only if you discount Rachel's better parts.

Storm goes from being exalted for her powers in her youth (an important counterpoint to most of the other X-Men in 616) to being a car-stealing hoodlum. Yes, Storm did have her time on the streets, but it doesn't define her. And for that matter, so did Scott Summers, but it gets underplayed and completely eliminated from HIS backstory while it suddenly makes itself the core of hers?

Jan gets the worst of it, as she goes from the woman brave enough (or foolhardy enough) to go to her father's young colleague and demand super-powers to save or avenge him, to being an abused wife who's mutant power is the core of her husband's research and discoveries. Not only is that an insult to Hank, as it takes his genius achievements and grafts them on to her, it doesn't even do it in a way that benefits her. This isn't Sue Storm the Scientist (which worked very well, to give credit where it's due), Jan doesn't gain anything from this.

When Jan first appeared in the pages of Ant-Man's Tales of whatever comic (I can't keep 'em straight, but you can read it in Essential Ant-Man), she immediately stirs things up. She's pro-active, and determined, and while self-absorbed and a bit shallow, she's an immediate dynamic effect in Hank's quiet, contemplative and somewhat passive world. You knew it from the moment she stared down Hank and demanded he give her powers. Now the powers are inherent to her, but what does that really mean except that now, instead of getting them through determination and will, she gets them through an accident of birth to then be exploited by her husband.

I think there's a notable difference between the idea of Ultimate Universe, which was meant to be an ongoing universe full of the potential but none of the baggage of the 616 universe, and All Star Batman and Robin. ASBAR isn't, in my opinion, meant to be a deconstruction of Batman as a heroic figure so much as it's a stylized alternate universe which features a version of Batman in a traditional Frank Miller world. That Batman, like Marv, is a monstrous hero in a dark, crapsack environment. Moreover, it has two other features to recommend it: 1) It's not an open universe meant for long term superhero storytelling, and 2) Miller HAS proven himself capable of writing true superhero fare with things like Batman: Year One. He has stylistic quirks, but they don't always end up overpowering the theme.

It's sad because there was a lot of potential awesomeness in the idea of starting fresh as in the Ultimate Universe Iron Man, Spider-Man and Fantastic Four started really strong. Even X-Men had potential at first (though I'd say X-Men Evolution or the first two movies did it better) and if Ultimates had been a starting point to take them to a more heroic standing (like in Ultimate Avengers, for all its faults) then maybe that would have worked too.

But instead it ended up a story about how all these characters that should have been heroes really aren't. It's a cynical corpse of a superhero universe (not even going into what LOEB does to it later, let's just say there's an elaborate necrophilia joke set-up that even I think is in too poor taste to blog). It's fine for some readers who dig that sort of thing, but honestly?

I'd rather go read Sin City.