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Well I think the interesting thing about Kal-L is that basically he's on a big nostalgia trip himself - "the past was much better than now - it was all golden and lovely, and then it all went so horribly wrong - why can't the present be like the past". I think you have to view that as an older person's nostalgia taking over from reality - perhaps the nature of the world has changed, perhaps things have got more complex or at least more visibly so, or perhaps they've just got less comprehensible to people in their sixties / seventies? That's the way of things, surely? It's pretty clear to me that these are not views shared by a large proportion of the comic book audience - but it's also pretty clear that JSA represents a kind of back to core superhero values book that seems completely against all the odds to have caught people's imagination in a positive way. So I think they're rediscovering the idea that people in capes fighting amazing threats can just be cool and interesting in and of itself and that people are quite happy with the idea of losing themselves in it. There's probably something interesting to open up there about the zeitgeist of the times or a desire for simpler morality or that younger people are feeling more positive and more 21st century about their ability to effect change or something. At least, I hope that's what's going on...
I saw John Le Carré speak the other day and he said that the end of the Cold War meant a tremendous opening up of opportunity to remake the world and change things for the better and that people for a while afterwards were quite nervous and confused about the whole thing, after decades where nothing could really change - we were at the mercy of inexorable forces outside our control. He said that if he was angry about anything since the end of the Cold War it was that people weren't taking up this mission to change the world for the better, or - more specifically - that some people were and that they seemed to be the wrong people. He wanted people to look around them and see the possibilities that had manifested over the last ten years or so as the direct Cold War fallout started to clear and see a world of manifest possibility in which we could each of us make a difference again. I thought that was pretty bloody exciting and interesting and really wanted to feel that possibility again. The world that Kal-L is talking about is a world of good and evil, but let's remember (even if he's not) that the past he's talking about is a world of World Wars and racial tensions and Holocausts and oppressed minorities, just as much as it's a world of mom and apple pie. He's focusing on the good stuff alone and ignoring the bad. I'm hoping the end of this plotline will be about looking to the future in a positive way, aspiring to the best we can be, fighting the challenges in moral and honourable ways. Reinventing the world of tomorrow. That would be neat.
Finally - the whole Booster / Beetle honour thing. It might sound deflating after the passion of the previous paragraph, but Booster Gold was never a pompous superhero, he was a life-loving superhero for the most part, excited by the possibilities of the world and trying to work out how to be a good person in it. He was flashy, cool and - frankly - kind of beautiful. It was all about escape and freedom with a gradual attempt to reconcile it with a bit of responsibility, but in a lighter and less angsty way than even Spiderman did it. When I talk about his dignity, I mean he felt like a two and a half dimensional person with hope and an innocence and some flaws who had occasional serious life problems who was then reduced first to being a traitor in Millenium and then to being the butt end of jokes in JLA. Beetle too - this was a man who started a huge and highly successful technology company, created a whole range of revolutionary tools and ships, got by on his wits and his physical training and who had a sense of humour. But he wasn't a joke! He was a brilliant, self-trained fun-loving superhero - with more technical smarts than Batman (a flying bug, for god's sake - it didn't even have wings) and all the repartee of a superhero at their best. In no way am I about dragging them down and making them into pompous, stolid, harrassed, angsty heroes. But I'd like them to be taken seriously as, well, men - even if they are men who have fun with being superheroes. |
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