Myth and Metaphor

All stories are metaphorical on some level, and the symbolic significance of a figure like Captain America is impossible to ignore. However, not all characters are created metaphorically equal--just look at two recent summer "blockbuster" events: DC's Sinestro Corps War and Marvel's Civil War, and the difficulty in translating characters to metaphors becomes obvious.

The Sinestro Corps War was widely regarded not only as a blockbuster event done right, but it was also able to smartly pose questions regarding the lengths one is willing to go fight enemies that gain their strength from fear (or if you would prefer, terror). In the finale, the Guardians of Oa authorize the Green Lantern corps to utilize lethal force in their battle with the Sinestro Corps, leading Sinestro to quip that while he has lost the war, he has won the larger, ideological war, because "the universe will fear Green Lanterns." The story worked both textually (as in, it was an engaging story) and subtextually (it brought up a lot of interesting questions to think about regarding the nature of fear, terror, and order).

In contrast, Marvel's Civil War worked in neither respect, mostly because of the rampant mischaracterization of many of the long-established characters of the Marvel Universe. Captain America’s refusal to register with the government is on flimsy ground, as is Spider-man’s decision to imperil everybody he loved by unmasking. Sally Floyd's rant to Captain America in CW: Frontline 11 shows just how much the writers of the series missed the point:


Reading this diatribe, one wonders: Just what the hell is she talking about? He's freakin’ Captain America! He punched Hitler in the jaw! He fights for freedom and justice and the American Way, not Youtube and Myspace and Nascar! However, this rant shuts post-Civil War Captain America up, forcing him to concede that perhaps he has lost touch with what Americans want.

What metaphorical significance one could draw from the conflict of freedom vs. security was muddled by more than a few "wait, what?" moments in characterization (Spider-Man unmasking, Captain America joining the anti-registration movement, the use of the Thor clone, the building of a Gulag in the negative zone etc.)

However, to give the writers a bit of credit, it's much harder to write metaphors with characters who are already established as people (as they are in the Marvel Universe), rather than myths in themselves (as they are in the DCU). It's much easier to mischaracterize a Marvel character than it is a DC character; while Marvel Characters are much more context specific in their actions (for example, how much of a dick Iron Man is depends on how much pressure he's under, how violent Daredevil is depends on how recently his love interest met some horrendous fate, Whether spider-man sells his marriage to the devil or not depends on how human and fallible the writer is trying to portray him as, etc. etc.) as long as Batman is fighting a war on crime (broadly defined), Superman is fighting for truth, justice and the American way, and Wonder Woman is doing something exemplary (who even knows what her deal is anymore?) one allows these characters a fair amount of leeway when it comes to their methods and actions--While both Superman and Reed Richards are paragons of virtue and morality, it didn't seem mischaracterization when Kingdom Come Superman rounded up a bunch of superpeople and put them in a gulag after a massive disaster on American soil.

Thus, it is precisely because of Marvel characters' humanity that they are such poor tools for metaphors--you can't write anything with weighty subtext without thinking about how the character would act in the situation, rather than what the character represents. In contrast, DC characters, being ideals in of themselves, lend themselves perfectly to allegorical writing, as their character traits always come secondary to their heroic ones.

This also explains why their "What if" stories are usually inferior to DC's Elseworlds: One isn't going to come up with a very compelling "What if Steve Rogers was born in the USSR," story because, if he did, then he'd cease to be Steve Rogers. (This is, of course, directly opposed to the superman story Red Son). Bruce Wayne can be the libertarian force against tyranny that he is in Batman Year 100, the the jet-setting super-spy he is in The Demon's Head, or the grim detective he is in Year One, because Bruce Wayne isn't a person as much as he is Batman, the myth and the metaphor.