Monday, November 21, 2011

Incognito and It Feels Bad to Be Good


Reading Incognito, which was pretty not bad, DID remind me of a trend that I remember flaring up sometime during the 90's and which may never have gone away: Making bad guys into good guys.

For me, most memorable was Venom from the Spider-Man comics. It appeared that someone at Marvel had the following thought process:

A: People like this Venom character.
B: People ALSO like our superhero characters.
C: If Venom were a superhero, he would be liked EVEN MORE.

What he never got to was:

D: Perhaps being a villain is part of his appeal, and therefore his appeal would go away if he had to become a good guy.

Not to mention the fact that they always had to come up with some bizarre reasoning for bad guys to become good guys. Usually they were kind of tricked into it, and then there would be one of two lines delivered:

A: "Well, I guess I'm a good guy, but only because it's convenient for me today, so don't expect any continuity-changing shit to go down."

B: "Huh. You know, it just never occurred to me that doing good stuff would feel this good. Nobody ever gave me the chance to do good before. I hope this doesn't end in a misunderstanding with law enforcement that makes me default back to being a bad guy again really quickly and easily."

Yeah, this is what I wanted, Spider-Man who refers to himself in the plural. Real fun.


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