Issue #340: In Which Superhero Fatigue Increases
I wrote about Trails Through Daybreak (2024) a few weeks ago, but I haven’t even gotten a chance to play it myself. I still need to finish Trails into Reverie (2023), the preceding game in the series. I started it when it came out in July of last year, which seems to totally fly in the face of my recollection that I’ve played it recently. But, no, the magic of Infinite Backlog reminds me that I put the game down for nearly 13 months.
It’s a testament to the game that I still remember the plot. I even remember a few scenes like they were just yesterday. But it got me thinking, why did I step away from the game for so long? Of course, I did have a dissertation to finish. But I managed to beat some other games between July 2023 and August 2024: Octopath Traveler II (2023), Alan Wake II (2023), Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (2024), and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024). How did Reverie fall through the cracks?
I think there are a few reasons. Reverie has the unenviable task of wrapping up the plot of six games released from 2010 until 2018. As a result, it is structured similarly to Trails in the Sky the 3rd (2007). The 3rd and Reverie both take the player through a lot of unrelated vignettes outside of the overarching plot. In both games, they have felt like a chore. Picking up Reverie again, I’ve started skipping them.
Playing Reverie last year, I was using a guide to avoid missing some optional content. On this segment of the playthrough, I’ve abandoned it. I just hate accessing a guide from some website on my phone or tablet. It’s annoying. I have to turn the screen off and on, I have to reload the page to get past a banner ad, the browser crashes and I have to navigate back to where I was in the guide. It really makes me miss the physical strategy guide. I guess there’s just not really a market for them anymore, but I would buy them if I could. JRPG strategy guides do more than shepherd you through challenging segments or expose optional gameplay. They had awesome art assets from these games I so enjoyed. Those vintage Prima and Bradygames guides go for big bucks now. If someone started producing physical strategy guides for these kinds of games again, I would be preordering them.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is “at a bit of a low point”
I took the occasion of Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) release to watch, finally, Logan (2017). There are a few reasons I hadn’t seen it. I don’t think of myself as a big fan of the X-Men movies. I am generally reluctant to see movies that look too devoid of color without certainty that this is a thoughtful, significant choice for the film. And I really didn’t find the description of the movie’s successes as very appealing. My recollection was the film was hailed as a “real movie” that just happened to star superheroes. That sentiment comes through in some contemporary reviews that call describe it as a film that “transcended the superhero genre to become a tragic western” (Joseph Garcia, Dynamic Duel Podcast), “transcends its label” (Brian Eggert, Deep Focus Review), “redefine[s] what a comic book movie can and should be” (Kristen Lopez, Culturess), and is “a grown-up movie that’s a drama first” (Jason Bailey, Flavorwire). Forgive me if, as someone who generally enjoys experimentation within a formal structure, these descriptions don’t sound terribly appealing. But they are also largely incorrect in how they describe Logan. Logan is unapologetically both a superhero film (in the generic and derisive sense) and a franchise film. There is nothing about Logan that makes sense without decades of prequels. And neither Hugh Jackman nor Patrick Stewart’s performances are strong enough to feel meaningful without their long tenure in the roles front of mind.
Director James Mangold also makes an effort to offer a meta-commentary on what superhero movies offer. I like the attempt, but Logan doesn’t follow it through. In the film, there are a series of X-Men comics supposedly based on some version of the in-universe superhero team. Those comics have given Logan himself, “The Wolverine,” a legion of fans even as he avoids the limelight. Logan hates these comics, deriding them as naive and not representative of real life. He seems, too, haunted by the heroism they display, seeing himself as falling sort of the idealized version of history they present. Despite Logan’s dour attitude about the comics, Mangold’s film doesn’t come across as one with the kind of contempt for the source material Bryan Singer displayed at the helm of the X-Men films starting in 2000. Thus, it’s difficult to square how the comics are presented and what the film expresses at the level of form. Logan, perhaps, accepts the proximity of himself to his comic depiction with his heroic sacrifice at the film’s conclusion. But is that it? Is Mangold’s message “if you think naive comic books are bad, they’re actually good”? I once again have to ask for forgiveness feeling burned by an interesting postmodern gesture culminating in a simplistic point.
I don’t think that didactic posture to superheroism and the superhero archetype is what Mangold is trying to get across with Logan. The formalism melds that of the superhero film and the western and leads to some potent questions regarding what the superhero film is, exactly. Is it a time-confined series of films beginning with Superman in 1978 and will have some as-yet unknown conclusion, as was the case with film noir? Is it a genre, with consistent formal qualities that are necessary conditions determinative of a generic description? Or is it a motif, simply calling upon a filmmaker to include one of a few visual or plot elements regardless of what genre they’re working in? I think there are good arguments to be made for all three, and I appreciate that Logan attempts to weigh in on the question even if it doesn’t move the needle in resolving it.
Another of Logan’s strengths, contrary to how critics describe it, is just how effective it is in utilizing the cinematic history of the characters. I said I don’t think of myself as a big fan of the X-Men movies, but Logan made me feel like one. Another metacritical element of the film is its position in a failing “cinematic universe,” one that has suffered economically against its Marvel Studios competitors. At that level, the movie is incredibly effective. The tragedy of the death of the X-Men at the hands of Charles Xavier and Logan’s unwillingness to be a hero — mirroring Hugh Jackman’s commitment to retiring from the role in 2017 — is impossible to read as anything other than an allegory for the questionable creative and economic decisions that led to Logan as the concluding capstone (though not the final film) of Fox’s attempt to adapt the X-Men. Even knowing Patrick Stewart reprised his role as Charles Xavier in 2022 and I was about to go to the theater to see Hugh Jackman’s return to the role of Wolverine, I felt a genuine sense of loss as the characters were melodramatically put to rest both for the purpose of the film’s plot as actors in the roles.
All of the self-examination is sustained by the things the critics liked about the film. Namely, effective filmmaking and genuine drama. The father-son relationship between Xavier and Logan is convincing and a new dimension to how the two relate. All of the familial allegories of the film landed for me. And the performances are extremely strong. So there’s certainly some heft to this movie that other superhero films aren’t able to deliver. But nobody would mistake The Dark Knight (2008) for anything other than a superhero film, despite its enduring quality. Logan, while a lot worse than The Dark Knight in my view, deserves the same legacy as a superhero film that delivers something meaningful for the genre (or series, or motif, or whatever).
Taking an Eraser to Tragedy
I was happy to have seen Logan before watching Deadpool & Wolverine, because the latter picks up immediately from the conclusion of the former. In fact, the opening sequence of Deadpool & Wolverine involves Deadpool using Wolverine’s adamantium bones as makeshift weapons to kill a bunch of time cops — a bit more clever meta-commentary than Deadpool’s direct address fourth wall breaks. This scene is genuinely funny and well choreographed as an action set piece. But the movie is all downhill from here. It gets its humorous hits in, but the movie itself is a total mess. In an attempt to get audiences cheering, it brings back unpopular characters (Jennifer Garner’s Elektra), forgotten characters (Wesley Snipes’ Blade — not forgotten by me), and characters that never made it to the screen in the first place (Channing Tatum’s Gambit). The reception to these characters has been enthusiastic, to my surprise, but I don’t think they deliver the same payoff as the appearance of beloved contemporary characters (think The Avengers: Endgame) or long lapsed legacy cast (Spider-Man: No Way Home). It’s a new twist on the same strategy to create buzz and if the marketing department is satisfied, that’s probably all that matters for a film like this. Still, the cinematic logic for the characters’ inclusion is unsatisfying.
That logic is also what draws Deadpool back to the site of Logan. Deadpool & Wolverine is part of a tradition of texts that rewrite a tragic end. There have been plenty of examples of this in recent memory1, and perhaps there are more in less recent history that I’m ignoring. Like Logan, this doesn’t really work at the level of diegesis, but makes sense only considering the financial failure of Elektra (2005) and Blade: Trinity (2004) that brought unceremonious ends to the tenure of Garner and Snipes in the titular roles. I’m not very interested in or moved by a plot that laments the supposedly tragic end of an actor no longer in a role when they turned in a terrible performance in a worse movie.
That’s about all there is to Deadpool & Wolverine. They expect an audience to wax nostalgic about movies that nobody ever gave a shit about and be happy enough to see Hugh Jackman slicing people up in yellow and blue. But as a contrast to Logan, though the appearance of the Wolverine costume is awesome, a movie needs more than adequate, comic accurate, costume design to be successful. Logan has the drama that Deadpool & Wolverine lacks, with the more recent film even more reliant on franchise history and audiences’ investment in actors’ employment status. There is probably some movie magic to examine regarding how Deadpool & Wolverine seems to have accomplished the remarkable feat of getting audiences to feel like they care about characters and actors they haven’t thought about in a while — maybe ever — but I didn’t have that experience as a viewer. Tatum’s Gambit was funny, though.
Deadpool & Wolverine doesn’t seem to me like it is going to pull the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s proverbial ass out of the fire creatively or economically. The film has made them a ton of money, but it doesn’t build anticipation for any of the forthcoming films, like Captain America: Brave New World (2025) and Thunderbolts* (2025), that look destined to underperform. To do that, you would have to meaningfully change the status quo for the heroes in a way that makes audiences want to see what new twist will be brought to familiar heroes. In their comic book publications, however, Marvel has done exactly that.
Modes of Storytelling
In 2024, Marvel has reinvented the Avengers twice, in two different alternate universes, once for a limited series and once for an ongoing serial. In Avengers: Twilight, Chip Zdarsky explores a downtrodden, humiliated Avengers in the style of the retired Justice League in DC’s Kingdom Come (1996). Twilight can’t escape the feeling of being a retread of Kingdom Come, even at the level of art style which is very similar.
I haven’t finished Twilight yet, but I haven’t really enjoyed what I’ve read so far. I much prefer the more recent The Ultimates, a reinvention of the “Ultimate Marvel” version of the Avengers with a complex multiversal plot justifying their existence. In short, an evil version of Reed Richards (from, you guessed it, a destroyed alternate universe) escaped imprisonment in the main Marvel Comics continuity (known as Earth-616) and created a new “universe” wherein his machinations have resulted in Marvel superheroes narrowly missing their origin.
The premise, established by Jonathan Hickman in an event last year, and picked up by Deniz Camp as the author of this year’s Ultimates, has accommodated a few series: Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men, and Ultimate Black Panther, all in the alternate superhero-lite Marvel timeline. In this line of interconnected “Ultimate” comics (a return of a lapsed Marvel line), the authors take a wide range of approaches in diverging from familiar histories for the characters. Black Panther is only moderately different from its other adaptations, X-Men, so far, barely resembles an X-Men story full of original characters, and Spider-Man is the most interesting among these three because it posits a scenario where the origin of Spider-Man occurs with Peter as a happily married man and father of two. The aged superhero is a bit of an anomaly, the origin of a superhero so often coinciding with their coming of age.
But The Ultimates is the keystone to the new cycle of comics. And among them all is the through line: are heroes born or are they made? The question of nature versus nurture is hardly a new one in superhero comics, but the answer for The Ultimates is a good one: it depends. The villain, The Maker, is the twisted perversion of Reed Richards who emerges as an ultimate evil because of his experiences. His backstory shows what it takes to turn a hero into an absolute villain, or have a hero’s view distorted enough that their heroism is in fact harmful to a wide range of people. On the other hand, the Peter Parker, Tony Stark, and Reed Richards actually from this new continuity aspire to heroism despite the different circumstances under which they live. These kind of alternate stories invite readers to look at established characters very differently. Not to mention that there is something comfortable, to me at least, reading into a world of comics that doesn’t have the labyrinthine backstories of Marvel Comics’ “Earth-616.”
How Does Representation Matter?
Even though this new set of Marvel Comics reinvents hero’s backstories, their costumes, their relationships, it leaves their appearance largely intact. So far, there have been no changes to the identitarian facts of the characters. Bruce Timm’s new reinvention of Batman, Batman: Caped Crusader (2024), takes a wildly different approach. In this animated series, Batman and his supporting cast are mostly similar to their most well-recognized counterparts. Bruce Wayne still dons the cowl after the death of his parents, Jim Gordon is still the police commissioner in a corrupt Gotham PD, Harleen Quinzel is still a therapist-turned-supervillain. But there are differences, both in how the characters develop and who they are. Harley Quinn, an original creation of Timm’s from Batman: The Animated Series (1992), now has no connection to the Joker. Characters genders, races, and ethnicities are also changed: Oswald Cobblepot, The Penguin, is now Oswalda. Commissioner Gordon, and his daughter Barbara, are Black.
The changes Timm makes are fascinating. They are mostly unassuming. The fact that The Penguin is now a woman doesn’t really have any consequence for her presence in the show. The series’s first episode seems like it would have unfolded the same regardless of the character’s gender. It seems that way for Commissioner Gordon, too, with no extended commentary on racism or attention drawn to his race in particular. The only time it seems to come up is in the series’s fourth episode, “The Night of the Hunters,” where the mayor harangues Gordon and says he was only appointed to the job of police commissioner to generate “good press.”
Generally, it seems like The Ultimates puts familiar characters in unfamiliar scenarios, whereas Caped Crusaders takes characters that are made somehow unfamiliar (Alfred looks different despite still being old and British, and Batman’s costume, while not that unusual, has some distinctive elements) but takes them through some conventional Batman storytelling. This is even true at the level of appearance — despite the fact that it’s at the level of appearance where a character’s difference is most legible. Caped Crusader is extremely rigorous in its recreation of the art deco style from Timm’s 1992 animated Batman. It remains to be seen what the overall effect is of having all these reimagined characters in the familiar context. I’m three episodes shy of having finished the season. But, if I had to hazard a guess, it seems to me that Caped Crusader is making a case for a certain kind of universalism inherent in the Batman stories, drawn out by the demographic and identitarian changes to the characters.
Franchise Fatigue
If you examine places where people go to talk about superhero movies, as I occasionally do, you will run into a truism: “people don’t have superhero fatigue, they have bad movie fatigue.” This idea, colloquially recognizable as “cope,” seems incredibly naive to me. On the one hand, superheroes exist in a lot of mediums. In this segmented essay, I’ve talked about Batman: Caped Crusaders which is a cartoon TV series, a bunch of interrelated Marvel comics, and Marvel films produced by different studios. So, as the response of “bad movie fatigue” recognizes, the notion of “superhero fatigue” is specific to the medium of film.
The idea of “bad movie fatigue” is self-evidently hilarious. It tells more than it means to. First, it suggests that audiences have a certain tolerance for bad movies, that they can become fatigued by an abundance of them. Second, it at least opens the possibility of the superhero movies in question being the bad movies that have so fatigued audiences. In other ones, “bad movie fatigue” and “superhero fatigue” may be the same thing. In at least one reading, they describe the same change in audiences: they have become more discerning, and are less satisfied by a subpar film that might have been, at least, novel at some prior point.
The idea of “bad movie fatigue” is also ignorant of a filmmaking landscape where a number of things are true. First, superhero movies are making less money as an aggregate. Some are historical flops. From my prospective, these failing movies are only slightly worse than the highly successful ones that preceded them. Second, audience attitudes toward new superhero films are different. There’s enthusiasm for some films, like Deadpool & Wolverine. But Deadpool & Wolverine, in some of its fourth wall breaking humor, point to the predominant attitudes toward superhero films: disinterest or hostility. All of this leads to an interconnected and difficult to quantify point. Superhero movies do not have the “cultural footprint” they had even five years ago.
Because the audiences for cartoons and comic books are smaller, they are not subject to the fatigue that impacts motion picture viewers subjected to repetitive texts. Likewise, to avoid precisely the problem of fatigue, authors within these mediums constantly reinvent characters and revise stories in significant ways. Deadpool & Wolverine is also a revision of this kind. It gives Wolverine a different ending to his story, or “reboots” it, to the taste of comic book fans such as myself who prefer the bright tones of spandex costumes to the supposedly more “realistic” looks prevalent in superhero cinema. But the economic risk of filmmaking is high. It necessarily regresses to the mean of movies that fatigue rather than inspire. The era of the superhero film may not be over, but my guess is that it will end within my lifetime. The qualities that are determinative of whatever aesthetic category the “superhero film” describes are very powerful and require a visionary to transform into something truly enduring. Deadpool & Wolverine has more in common with stage magic than cinematic achievement. Its trick can’t be repeated.
Weekly Reading List
Lots of heat this week.
I really enjoyed writing about Trap (2024) last week. As a postscript to that, this video gave me a new appreciation for Shyamalan’s process.
Lip Cream is one of the greatest bands of all time. The set recorded here is ridiculous. There’s just nothing better. The Death Side set, about thirty minutes in, is awesome too. This is history right here.
I found a lot of things about this video by Ah Lecks to be frustrating. A grating voice and irritating youtuber humor chief among them. But he did a ton of research and does some great analysis of Takehiko Inoue for what amounts to a nearly feature length documentary. I don’t agree with all the conclusions here, but it’s worth taking a look at.
This video, documenting every sample found in all the DDR games released until 6th Mix, is totally ridiculous. When I say every sample, I mean every sample. It even goes over what synthesizer presets the menu sounds are taken from. It is truly exhaustive, and Nifara822’s channel has similar videos for other rhythm games. This is not only awe-inspiringly impressive, but will also be a reference text for me to revisit.
Until next time.
I’m thinking of works such as Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation (2004), Shin Evangelion (2007), and even Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)