smoke-in-the-wind asked:
I know dc has sort of already tried this a few times, but if you were to create an Ultimate Universe (the early 00s one) style interpretation of the DC universe, which characters would you deconstruct (like hulk or hank pym) and which would you reconstruct (like spider-man)?
artbyblastweave answered:
I’m not sure who, if anyone, I’d take to the woodshed in the way they did Bruce and Hank. But in a more positive direction, I think Ultimate Superman writes itself.
One thing that the Original Ultimate Universe caught basically infinite shit for was that Spider-Man was the only likeable hero out of the entire roster- everyone else was a jingoistic government stooge, a sellout, an ineffective moron, a vindictive moron, or involved in whatever label you want to stick on the clusterfuck that was the Ultimate X-Men. Certain commentators treated this as something that happened by accident- like somehow Spider-Man was the only character to slip through a net- but this was actually a very deliberate thematic and political choice. The early Ultimate Universe in particular was undergirded by a running theme of the ways in which the heroes were compromised and made dirty by having to exist in a world that was remotely politically realistic. Captain America was unexamined in his patriotism in the way that a guy unpaused direct from the end of world war 2 would realistically be; likewise the celebrity and proximity to power of the classic Avengers lineup was characterized as insidious and complicit in the crimes of the Bush Administration even as they embark on flashier superheroic exploits. The Fantastic Four’s dimension-trotting adventures were explicitly underwritten by their work building new ways for the Military to kill people in the Middle East (paraphrasing a direct quote.) The X-Men were a hotbed of moral compromise, seediness and occasional bouts of ethically-dubious psychic-assisted ass-covering, with the repeated drumbeat from multiple writers that they were letting their own narrative about being feared and hated overwrite their awareness of how their entire enterprise was a complete circus- itself a metatextual commentary on the out-of-universe observation on the fact that, for all they bloviate about being oppressed, a significant chunk of their lineup consists of cishet white people with supermodel good looks:
As shown here, a consequence of all this is that Spider-Man, despite not changing much in his characterization from Baseline Peter, came out looking like a paragon. His early-career anger and sense of put-upon-ness is significantly more justified in this continuity because the entire world actually is out to get him; he got his powers through gross negligence by a military industrial complex contractor, he spends his time constantly beating the crap out of more of their runoff, and American Intelligence is circling him like a hawk waiting for an opportunity to headhunt him and sicc him on their enemies. Bendis narratively tied this to his youth; he’s able to be a hero in the classic mold because the world hasn’t dragged him down yet. The forces arrayed against him, of which there are many, haven’t found a way to pin him down and make him sell out. Everybody is expecting him to sell out. Kingpin has a whole speech about it; Jameson’s hatred of him is expressly tied to the fact that he lives in a world where skepticism of good intentions is generally pretty justified. But Peter remains, fundamentally, an outsider- in a way that feels contrived in mainline Marvel but incredibly well-earned in this context- right up until the forces aligned against him actually do get him killed. Accounting for comic book time, poor bastard only lasted a couple years before the bottom fell out and his lifestyle caught up with him. Only the good die young.
So. Superman. The parallels here are obvious, right? Superman, like Spider-Man, wants to do classic Superhero Shit. He’s not overtly political and he isn’t ambitious. He wants to go out and save people, he wants to stop people who’re trying to hurt people from hurting people. He’s the nicest guy in the world and he can eat guns and it’s almost impossible to make him do something he thinks is the wrong thing to do. But if you live in a world remotely like ours, having that level of power and using it to go out and help people and save people means that you fall somewhere on the scale between weirdo and enemy of the state, and the bad guys you have to stop from hurting people work for the duly elected government, or they run the economy, and the guns you have to eat belong to the cops and the military as often as they do bank robbers in white striped shirts. Putting a nice guy who wants to do the right thing into a setting with a remotely appropriately cynical outlook on politics is basically an instant deconstruction without you having to do anything extra to the hero himself, it’s like throwing a sodium bomb into a bathtub.
This sequence from Batman vs Superman is one of my favorite pieces of superhero media that exists, and any Ultimate-style spin on the character would be extrapolated directly from this. The Snyder take gets some flak for taking itself too seriously, being too dark, yadda yadda yadda, but Superman himself is very pointedly not the site of any of that darkness. Superman is just Superman. He spends this whole sequence doing Classic Superman Shit- no violence whatsoever, just rescues- and the talking heads won’t stop picking him apart, looking for the angle, looking for the catch, looking for a lever to get him under control. Tyson trying to make him into some kind of existential harbinger of Man’s insignificance in the universe, juxtaposed against a mother in a flood zone crying tears of joy because God didn’t send boats or a helicopter but spraypainting Superman’s logo on the roof actually paid off. Lex wants him dead in this version mainly because a guy this powerful being this nice makes him insecure.
What really sells this for me is that Clark is visibly aware of, and deeply uncomfortable with, the immense impact he’s having on everyone- he’s asking all the same questions about the implications of his own existence as the talking heads. He doesn’t know either! But there are still people in burning buildings and flood zones. Someone’s gotta do something, and he’s someone, and he can do anything. And he is, of course, dead by the end of the movie.
If I was an making Ultimate DC Universe…well, I’d probably need to do a lot of research into Regular DC first. But one crucial difference between Spider-Man and Superman is—and bear with me for a moment—power level.
Spider-Man is generally framed as an underdog. Sure, he can stop trains bare-handed and jump up skyscrapers and bench-press a jumbo jet, but he consistently fights supervillains who are even stronger than that, or who have powers that hard-counter his spider-powers. He can’t just punch his way out of problems; he almost always has to use his head, find some weakness or clever trick.
Superman isn’t averse to using weaknesses or clever tricks, but quite often, he doesn’t have to. He’s generally treated as the most powerful guy on Earth. Most of his famous supervillains are either physically weak masterminds like Lex Luthor (whose schemes can’t be countered by Superman’s powers, until he puts on a robot suit) or apocalyptic monsters. Doomsday is strong enough that Superman doesn’t need to hold back against him, and that parity is terrifying enough that people call him Doomsday.
Peter Parker in Marvel’s Ultimate Universe is a little guy who can choose to be a cog in the system, or fight it and get crushed. When he takes a bullet to protect someone, he bleeds.
But Clark Kent isn’t an everyman superhero; he’s the superhero. The archetype, the paragon, the gold standard. When he takes a bullet, he has to make sure it doesn’t ricochet into a civilian. He can’t fight the good fight until “his lifestyle catches up with him”; he’s faster than a speeding bullet, the lifestyle isn’t.
Which isn’t to say he’s omnipotent. If Lex Luthor never puts on a robot suit, Superman’s powers can’t counter any of his schemes. In the socioeconomic or political arena, Superman is at best a celebrity. He can punch tanks, but if Lex Luthor gets elected president and makes himself a dictator, Superman is less capable than Tom Cruise. What’s he going to do? Punch cops and soldiers until they let him be dictator?
If Ultimate Spider-Man is a story about an earnest superhero who can’t survive in a politically-cynical world, Ultimate Superman should be a story about an earnest superhero who can survive a politically-cynical world, but can’t change it. Or at least who struggles to change it, despite his immense strength.
demilypyro
