Mythology: The Avengers
By Martin Felipe
July 5, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Now this Avengers success is but the first installment of what some of the lazier entertainment writers are dubbing “Superhero Summer,” followed with the recent Spider-Man reboot and the upcoming Dark Knight finale. I call the writers lazy because anyone paying attention will remember last summer’s Thor/X-Men/Green Lantern/Captain America sequence. For that matter, with the exception of a Punisher here and an Electra there, superhero movies have been dominating our big money-making blockbuster lists going all the way back to 2000’s The X-Men. In fact, one could point to the prior successes of Tim Burton’s Batman or Richard Donner’s Superman, but for the purposes of this column, I’ll stick with the Marvel superheroes.
With The Avengers showing Hollywood how it’s done, it occurred to me that I had not yet delved into superhero mythology on these virtual pages. Let me preface what is to follow with the disclaimer that I love superheroes as much as any boy, and was a comic nerd in my own right growing up, so please do not take what is to follow as an indication that I dislike costumed vigilantes.
Still, from a mythological standpoint, the superhero-verse is more of a hodgepodge than a cohesive universe. I know that pretty much all of the origin stories follow the classic Campbell Hero’s Journey, that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s that the so-called Marvel Universe began as a bunch of individual stories that quickly evolved into a collective.
The current Marvel Universe as we know it really launched in the early ‘60s with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Fantastic Four. The success of this foursome led to other well known heroes like Spider-Man, The X-Men, and The Hulk, as well as to second tier folks like Iron Man and Thor. Marvel even started dipping into their pre-Fantastic Four past, resurrecting older heroes like Captain America and Sub-Mariner.
Then, before long, the characters stories started intersecting, appearing in one another’s books. Over time, a bunch of separate hero mythologies evolved into one massive super universe. As a fan of these guys, I enjoyed the huge web of crossover continuity in the increasingly intersecting universe. Yet, it nagged at me a bit. There seemed little cohesion.
To make a comparison to another famous mythology, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth is a closed universe, designed to operate within its own rules and history. Compare this to C.S. Lewis’ Narnia. Tolkien himself criticized his pal Lewis for drawing a little of this and a little of that to create his through-the-wardrobe fantasy kingdom. Narnia isn’t a world governed by internal structure but rather by whatever fantastic flight of fancy Lewis wanted to toss into the mix.
Marvel’s Universe is a lot like Narnia. Conceived as a bunch of stand-alones, it has become a genre melting pot. To take just the Avengers as an example, you have horror (The Hulk), science fiction (Iron Man), military propaganda (Captain America), and Norse mythology (Thor) all jumbled together into a patchwork, genre-blended super team. And yet, despite it being populated with characters that, by rights, should belong in separate mythologies, it all works.
There has been much labeling of The Avengers as a so-called “super hero mash-up”, a glib label at which I had at first bristled, but in time, have come to embrace. It really is an appropriate descriptor when you break it down. The idea of the mash-up in music is to combine disparate music into something new, a blending of songs that shouldn’t go together, yet somehow do. And this is what The Avengers is. Oh, there’s still friction, of course; there’s no logical reason why Thor should be eating shawarma with the likes of Captain America, for example, yet it works.
It’s not like the crossover potential of the Marvel Universe is limited to just The Avengers, of course. The comics have a long tradition of combining all of their hero stories, great and small, into a single cohesive whole, with intertwining continuities. In time, this undertaking gets increasingly complex, throwing a little Spider-Man in with a bit of X-Men, sprinkled with some Daredevil and Hulk. For that matter, Marvel has even mixed with DC Comics from time to time, making the mythological disparities that much more muddled. The movies will likely never grow quite this complex, what with multiple studios claiming rights to different characters.
Yet, despite the success, both financial and creative, of these super mash-ups, it can’t help but nag at me that these characters are thrown together, not because they belong that way, but because it would be awesome. I agree. It is awesome. But it also seems like a minor cheat. It would also be awesome if somehow Tolkien’s Legolas were to join forces with Buffy The Vampire Slayer to battle Lost’s smoke monster in Gotham City, but would it be right? I don’t know, maybe it would. Maybe the resulting awesomeness would justify the disparity of combining all of these separate universes.
Which would mean I’m just being nitpicky. But am I really? Isn’t putting all of these guys together kinda similar to pitting Jason against Freddy, the Alien against the Predator? The quality of those experiments is certainly debatable, but when you break it down, they’re just gimmicks. Entertaining, perhaps, but gimmicks nonetheless.
However, Lee and Kirby aren’t joining the creations of other folks, they’re joining their own worlds together, worlds they conceive individually, but feel are close enough that they are really a part of the same collective world. So it’s really nothing like the Buffy/Tolkien crossover I envision, more like when Stephen King has all of his characters from different books running into one another.
So I guess it does work, the awesome Avengers ends justify the scattershot means. After all, I could watch Tony Stark, Bruce Banner and Steve Rogers bickering like a bunch of brats all day, then spend the next day watching them kick bad guy ass together. These are characters that have little narrative business in the same room, and the sparks that fly speak to this. But those sparks are part of something new, something we can’t find in any of their individual stories. And the bad guy ass kicking is beyond what they all accomplish solo. Mash up the different stories, I guess. When the results are this effective, what seems like a gimmick proves to be inspiration.