Portrayal of the mentally ill in comics

Well, yes, some heroes are definitely still breaking the law. I was speaking in generalities.

I think it's best to proceed on a case-by-case basis. While the Bat-family has pretty much become a non-sanctioned paramilitary force, guys like Spidey or Daredevil can still fit the good samaritan mold. The Web-slinger himself gets a lot less flak for not finishing off his foes precisely because in a lot of cases he physically can't. Most of them are vastly more powerful and durable, and his webs are good for short term detainment, not so much for cracking skulls.

Bats, on the other hand, leads a privately-funded war on crime against people with significantly less resources, yet the only casualties seem to be innocent bystanders, all while he deliberately keeps the actual criminals alive and able, literally acknowledging their Joker Immunity. More often than not he has the full ability to end the whole thing, actually putting innocent people's lives before his personal needs, which is, y'know, the mark of a hero. Yet he chooses not to, by extension making him just as great a threat to the people of Gotham as the madmen he fights.

edited 26th May '13 3:54:50 AM by indiana404

I fully agree that there is no general ruling. "All criminals should die" is as ill-conceived as "nobody ever dies, even unrepentant serial killers". Ultimately, it comes down to a question of how much force can be considered justified in the situation you are in; there is a reason that police are allowed to authorize lethal force in handling a suspect, but there is also a reason why it has to be authorized rather than just being a general leeway granted to all officers.

Superheroes, ultimately, take it upon themselves to act as law enforcement, but without any of the oversight and administration that being a police officer entails. This means they also take it upon themselves to determine how much force is justified in dealing with a purse-snatcher, a bank robber, or a serial killer who's escaped prison seven times. They are, by their nature, vigilantes, and because they don't have any measure of oversight in their activities, the consequences for how they choose to approach a given situation - be those consequences "you shot a guy in the face for stealing a book, you evil shit," or "that guy you refused to kill nineteen times just murdered seventeen people again" - fall on their head.

It's a problem that has its actual roots beyond the Fourth Wall, not in universe, and so it'll never go away as long as ongoing superhero comics stay going, mo matter how much readers who won't stop whining about the subject because they can't suspend the disbelief, and would be better reading other types of comics, keep whining on it.

Ultimately it matters little if Batman starts killing the Joker or Spider-Man starts killing the Green Goblin or whatever; as long as the Joker and the Green Goblin keep making money, they'll keep bringing them back. Kill the Joker one thousand times, the plot will kick him back in one thousand and one. So congrats, you've sold Batman's moral code for the sake of a solution that still achieves nothing.

That's the way this system is built. You certainly are free to dislike it, and you may have your good reasons why other things might be more your cup of tea, but it's pointless to get worked up over it.

...I'm not sure who's getting worked up over it, especially to the extent that you need to invoke No True Scotsman.

I'm not talking to you.

...Except you just talked to him. Just pointing that out...

edited 26th May '13 8:09:55 AM by kkhohoho

Napoleon must have been speaking in a general sense.

This.

I still take issue with the tone and attitude displayed. "Anyone who disagrees with me should get out of my fandom," is a another pet peeve of mine.

Ultimately, you're introducing fourth-wall reasoning to a three-walls discussion for the purpose of trying to shut down the discussion, and then making claims that anyone who doesn't like that reasoning should just go find a new fandom because you're sick of having them in yours.

I am not sure if he had that tone.

"You certainly are free to dislike it, and you may have your good reasons why other things might be more your cup of tea, but it's pointless to get worked up over it."

It's actually this part that bugs me.

Well... In that case I understand where you are coming from, but I am not sure he was intending that.

But it's true. It's the same song of old time readers who have outgrown that nest but keep wanting to coze up on it, and they want the nest to grow with them instead of using the perfectly serviceable nests next branch (oh dear this metaphor). It's the same thing that keeps popping over and over in the Internet to the point you grow sick and tired of it.

It's not a question about my medium, it's a question of yourself making yourself a disservice sticking to something that, by its mere format and the needs of the market (and as long as that market itself doesn't change, neither will the publishers' actions to keep it pleased, sadly or not) is doomed to stick to some basic conventions as long as it keeps going. You're perfectly allowed to dislike that, but understand it won't change and the reasons aren't in universe. At this point it's like asking why Wile E. Coyote won't call for fast food. The impossibly long format of ongoing personal developments presents a dychotomy, because even with a sliding timeline, a fan who has been there for decades will feel the characters themselves have too. At that point questions like 'why won't Batman kill the Joker?' and 'why won't Peter Parker achieve lasting public recognition at anything?' pop up, because people is trapped at an uneasy middle point where no one can agree on which elements of the status quo to keep.

There is no easy solution to this, and some might argue there is actually none at all. 'The more things change the more it's the same', and publishers are torn between the illusion of change and not alienating readers by changing the setting and premises too starkly. That includes the villains, of course. At which point do you stop the threat escalation? When it's enough? Half the time we aren't complaining this villain is too ineffectual and 'lame', we're complaining on him being too disgusting and dangerous to live. Make the hero triumph against them all the time, and people will say they're boring and invincible and there's no tension or drama. Make the hero suffer losses to the villains, and people will say they're incompetent for allowing the bad guys live and the comic is getting pointlessly dark. It's a very fine balance, and there always will be a major segment of the fandom who will think you have screwed up, and will repeat it ad nauseam.

edited 26th May '13 8:52:05 AM by NapoleonDeCheese

[This post written before I was aware of the above post. Just an FYI.]

I think the man has a point; he just could have used a bit more tact.

The bottomline is that A-list villains who keep on killing innocents and trying to take over the world are going to keep on doing so because they're too popular to be killed off, (or at least killed off forever,) and if the comic wishes to keep on going, it needs to keep those characters around so that the majority of the readership keep on reading and buying comics. This is especially important these days, when the majority of the readership is fans who have been reading comics for a while now. And of course, this also means that the Superheroes will continue to not kill monsters like the Joker, even though some would say they should. It's an unfortunate situation, but one that may forever continue to exist so long as The Big Two are still in buisness.

edited 26th May '13 8:52:50 AM by kkhohoho

When it comes to unkillable villains, I go by a simple rule of thumb: Joker Immunity, Black-and-White Morality, Darker and Edgier - pick any two.

In short, if you want to have the Joker as a recurring villain, have him do something that doesn't warrant a death sentence in the first place. His initial retool from a Monster Clown into a borderline Harmless Villain was precisely due to complaints that him not getting killed was making the Bat look impotent. And that was back in the 1940's.

Alternatively, take a page from Nolan's book, and give him some sort of moral grounding, however twisted - he'd make the perfect foil in an Order Versus Chaos conflict. Imagine if he whacks some mobsters on a whim, ironically saving the lives of their otherwise victims, where all Batman could do was delay their deaths. "A better class of criminal" indeed.

As it stands, however, the vibe I get from Batman comics is a horrifyingly straight-faced "evil will always get away, because good is dumb" - not an inspiring message, I feel.

I feel like this is becoming less and less of an issue as comics are moving to longer, arc-based stories and away from oneshots. There's a much grander variety of where a villain is between Story A and Story B than there was back in the day, because the kind of villain that would merit a death penalty is usually either popular enough that he has plot defining where he is and what he's doing right now rather than just twiddling his thumbs in a prison cell waiting for his next writer, or he's unpopular enough that he can actually be killed off without much consequence.

Examples:

• Massacre appeared for two stories. In the first, he went to jail, to highlight Peter's refusal to take a life. Had he never made a return appearance, that would be the end of his character, and that would be fine. If he stays in jail, it's not a problem. Then he returned for his second appearance, and Superior killed him. Now he's dead. He's a C-Lister, so he's not looking at a resurrection any time soon. There's a decent enough chance he'll just stay dead and gone.

• By contrast, Carnage. Carnage is a B-lister. Between his last appearance before his recent revival and the first arc of said revival, Carnage was "dead" in a fashion that leaves plenty of opportunity for survival. Then he returned for an arc, then vanished into the "Villain is free and out there plotting something" Zone until his next story. At which point, the heroes were able to take him into legal custody and he moved into the Prison Zone very briefly, after which point an external force escaped him from prison for his next arc, and now one of the heroes has rendered him a brain-dead vegetable, while still leaving the door open for Carnage to return for his next story.

The point? There are actually a wide variety of ways to deal with a villain you want to keep available for future storytelling. The Prison Escape, at least to me, is starting to feel like a Dead Horse trope as writers are starting to find more and more creative ways to shuffle their defeated villain offscreen without falling back on the old standard of, "and then he went to jail until he broke out three days later." Moreover, with the slowed down pace of storytelling, villains just do not return with the same pace as they used to. Instead of the Green Goblin breaking out of jail six issues (3-6 months) later, it's five or six storylines (which can mean 2-5 YEARS until his next appearance).

The problem there, though, is that while it may be that long between his appearances in Spider-Man - a villain that popular will usually show up in some other title in the meantime. The sheer number of titles for popular characters, notably the number of Bat-titles, put a damper on those methods.

Still - look at the heroes with weaker rogues' galleries, like Iron Man. Iron Man has, if anything, benefited from the fact that he has no standout popular villains, and has transitioned well to arc villains that don't need to be repeated (Mallen, Zeke Stane).

Marvel in general manages to sidestep the triple threat issue with its A-list villains, mostly by giving them more interesting motivations and methods of operation. Magneto is a supremacist, but he's willing to fight on the X-Men's side when the occasion calls for it. Doom may be a megalomaniac who hates Reed Richards with a passion, but he's also the godfather of his child, and an effective ruler in his own right. The Kingpin is a brutal mobster, but he also keeps the New York underworld in check. Spidey himself has managed to come up with an even "superior" take on the matter. And most of the rest tend to be amoral mercenaries not actively targeting innocent bystanders. Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting a peculiar "soap opera family issues" vibe whenever they get it on with the heroes, which is actually more entertaining than playing the whole thing for serious drama.

Conversely, DC is a bit too packed with unrepentant career criminals utterly at odds with the heroes, fueled by the tired "insanity as motivation for evil" cliche. Save for Catwoman, Bizarro, and some of the Flash's Rogues, they don't have this kind of dynamic interaction with the capes, so the conflict remains at the basic "when will they get their lights punched out" level. That's why guys like the Joker get complaints - not because they're insane killers, but because they never grow beyond being insane killers. Because the only way of dealing with them is with violence, and that violence is never enough. In contrast, I almost squeed when the Flash simply asked the Trickster to turn himself in after a long day - now that's a dynamic that doesn't get old.

To be fair, for all his flaws, Geoff Johns has managed to give Sinestro a lot more depth in that sense than he used to have. Same thing with Black Adam, although I don't know if the reboot has undone that or not.

It better not. Black Adam is one of my favorite DC characters, but only because of Geoff John's work on him. If he's just taken back to a straight villain, there'll be... I don't know what, but something will pay.

Um, original poster here. Off topic conversation much?

Anyhow, I would also like to point out another comic featuring a mentally ill person, Polarity. In it, this hipster in New York discovers that the medication which have been keep his Bipolar disorder in check have also been suppressing his superpowers, so he decides to go off his meds and experiment. I would strongly not recommend actually doing this in Real Life, for common sense reasons.

Polarity is written by the front man for the band Say Anything, who also suffers from bipolar disorder, so he kind of knows his stuff. Just thought I'd point this out and keep the the conversation on topic.

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edited 26th May '13 8:58:19 PM by XRay

Well, the scene I was referring to did involve the Trickster literally going off his meds, with a pretty realistic excuse to boot ("Better off without'em. Take'em if I start feeling down"), and the Flash actually treating him with the necessary kindness and compassion as befit the occasion. The also present Batman and Orion, on the other hand, immediately go for the violent solution, which'd come off quite disturbing had the Flash not stopped them. It showed exactly what kind of interaction would ensue between an actual mentally ill person, and a well-meaning good samaritan.

I can think of another example of a villain actually reacting to his own insanity as to an illness - when the Riddler realizes he's been leaving riddles even if he didn't mean to, and promptly seeks out medical attention himself, going legit afterwards. I'm not sure however if that's survived the reboot, pity if it didn't.

My point is, in this day and age, portraying insane villains as suffering from actual mental illnesses gives off a very creepy vibe of Unfortunate Implications when the hero comes along to break their bones. Beat The Snot Out Of Your Mentally Handicapped looks about as heroic as Cure Your Gays, especially coming from one just as certifiable paranoid sadist with a bat fetish.

edited 26th May '13 10:29:53 PM by indiana404

It was on topic. The 'topic' had evolved from what it originally was as the poster's went on and on. If you wanted to keep the original 'topic' intact, you really should have been more active in the thread.

Point taken, sir. But still, I'm curious what the troper community has to say about this issue. I have a special interest in it myself, in that I suffer from a mental illness.

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