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Too Many Dystopic Futures

If you want to make a comics fan suffer, particularly a Marvel comics fan, and more particularly an X-books fan, you might consider inflicting upon him another tale set in an alternate future gone wrong. Once an occasional backwater story confined to tales central to time travel, these pieces eventually became the sources of ongoing characters (such as Cable, X-Man, and Bishop), long story arcs, and the occasional miniseries. Plus, of course, the series that featured characters from such settings would, of necessity, interact with the places in elsewhen that spawned them.

Various developments can generate these futures. A supervillain might ultimately tip the balance away from the established order. An environmental crisis might throw the productive aspects of the global economy into ruin. A superhero might go bad and set up a cult of his own worship, perhaps taking a few lessons from the likes of the Emperor Caligula, who at one point commanded statues of gods within the Roman Empire to display no face other than his own. Or an election could go terribly wrong, meaning a either some genuinely evil character might tip the balance of power towards hysteria, or just someone who really exists but whom comics writers view as a threat to global stability might move into higher office. In the end, a similar pattern results: Blight overtakes the cities, piles of rubble accumulate, concentration camps and human abbatoirs appear, survivors clad in rags pick through the ruins looking for rats to eat, forests turn to deserts, humanity becomes enslaved, all hope dies, and possibly armies of something (soldiers, sentinels, zombies, vampires, mutants, or whatever proves handy) roam the surface of the earth in a generally predatory way.

Such images sold more than a few books about the predictions of Nostradamus, and occasionally moved the works of later authors, such as Paul Erlich, whose Population Bomb predicted that Britain would perish by famine before 1985. And, over the years, such images have sold more than a few comics. A dystopian tradition connects "Days of Future Past" from the X-Men to Universe X today. But the time may have come and gone to pursue such ideas. The dystopia has become a burden to encounter.

Some Perspective on the Problem

To understand properly just how much the overuse of a concept can steal little bits of pieces of joy from our lives - and, regardless of how much you began with, enough erosion can ultimately take it all away - let us consider an example from the world of music.

In the movie "The Wedding Singer," one character bears the name "George" (played by Alexis Baldwin). This character borrows concepts of wardrobe and grooming from popular musician George O'Dowd, who once sold many records as "Boy George" with the band Culture Club. A recurrent gag in the movie centers around what happens when the singer of the band - Adam Sandler's character - takes a break from the gig for a bit too long and leaves George at the microphone singing "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me," and, after finishing the number, singing it again. The gag worked in context of those of us who remember the mid-1980s, when airplay saturation-bombing made certain songs the trigger for instantaneous despair. Too many radio stations had played it too many times, relentlessly, until each new replay became an affront, an insult, a blight, a threat. It matters little whether one began liking or disliking Culture Club; hundreds of iterations later, few folks, even those well-disposed to an eccentric Motown-themed clothes band, could stand to hear it again.

If you have read more than a dozen comic books, you probably feel this way about stories that feature dystopian futures.

The Straw That Broke the Camel's Back

Anecdotal evidence does not prove the existence of a cliche. Nonetheless, consider what I encountered in a week of picking up material. Prodded by enthusiasts who had wanted to redeem the Earth X series from the bad opinions which its follow-up, Universe X, seemed to spawn, I had purchased and read the trade paperback version of the former series. That work, for those unfamiliar with it, deals with an earth essentially ruined in many ways by a universal mutation of humanity. At the same time, I had picked up a Thor annual because it featured Tom Grummett art, and promised something visually upbeat. Within this annual, an Asgardian spirit - The Silent One, or something like that - showed Hercules, Thor, and Beta Ray Bill worlds ruined by the cults of god-worship, thereby demonstrating a dystopic future they needed to avert. In the pages of the regular Thor book, furthermore, Thor and the derivative superhero Gladiator (whose convoluted lineage I described here) fight it out, with this version of Gladiator coming from a future somehow doomed by Thor - from the visual provided, this future fit the pattern, with starving, rag-clad humans wandering the landscape in search of rats to eat, while the ruins of the cities and giant statues of Thor loom in the background. And, in the middle of reading all this, my Avengers Forever trade paperback, ordered way back in October of 2000, arrived in early March 2001. This work begins with the Avengers of a dystopic future engaging in casual genocide against those worlds that refuse to acknowledge their rule.

Without trying hard to achieve such a result, I would consider four hits within such a small window rather suggestive of a persistent and pervasive cliche, an overused concept that not only does not go away, but which seems to enjoy such replication throughout superhero comics that it can come and seek the reader.

Once an idea achieves such saturation in comics, we have an excellent justification for calling for a moratorium on such stories, and, perhaps, might question the editors who let yet another one pass. Stan Lee, after all, in the early 100s of Fantastic Four, realized that the latest Thing-gone-bad story represented one too many in an age where readers might have read two others in the eight previous years of the series. Prior to that point, he says, he had counted on readership turnover in cycles approximately three years long to spare readers the burden of reading the same kind of story over and over, and vowed to avoid doing more Thing-gone-bad stories (a problem he solved mainly by ceasing to write the title soon thereafter). However, Lee had a point; with fans remaining consumers for longer and longer stretches, a burden attached to writers not to bury their output under the same old tired premises. In effect, Lee declared a title-specific moratorium, and proved to have more forward vision than many might wish to admit.

Precedents and Legitimate Uses

I might, perhaps, reach too far when including the Earth X and Universe X material in my protests of the onslaught of such material. The future-gone-wrong theme can provide a valid setting where such remains central to the concept of characters.

Nor does such usage confine itself to Marvel Comics pieces. DC had features like "Atomic Knights" and titles like Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth and obscure experiments like Hercules Unbound which took place in the ruins of the world we know. Where an ongoing series commits to this setting, rather than brings it in as a menace to present-day heroes, or uses it as a source of time-traveling threats, we have something more solid. Stable settings do not propagate the way wrecked timelines do.

If we look for a seed for the propagation of interminable bad-alternate-future stories, though, we might, with some credibility, blame Marvel Comics for the story "Days of Future Past." This well-executed piece from the dawn of the 1980s became a seminal tale in that it spawned all manner of alternate-future stories, to the point that alternate-futures as cliches can evoke discussion of X-books before anyone mentions Marvel Comics' mutant franchise titles at all.

Cliches That Spawn Sub-Cliches

With the dystopian future already worn past the point where anyone really wants to see such stories any more, sub-themes sometimes occur. We have, in the Destroyer Hero, one such resonance that occurs again and again.

In Avengers Forever, Busiek and Stern explored the role a single hero or heroic sidekick might have as a catalyst for a great ruination not just of one but of multiple worlds by acting as a focus for humanity's expansion as a conquering power into the worlds beyond our own solar system. The fallen hero as a central cause of destruction notion occurs also in pieces like Kingdom Come, and, perhaps, the tiresome arc going on currently in Thor.

In other cases, the bad future finds the cast of heroes from present-day comics generally still around, albeit in some new forms, but their dedicated efforts nonetheless fail to arrest the progress of some crisis with a strong moral aspect. Since this cliche-aborning provides a central concept both to Kingdom Come and Earth X, we can see in Alex Ross a vector for its propagation, and can probably expect second- and third- generation resonances of this idea within the next five to ten years, until, perhaps, readers begin to sue for clemency.

Admissions of Guilt

Editors and writers already knew how out of control the alternate-future business had gotten. DC more or less signed a confession of industry-wide guilt in the fundamental concept behind Zero Hour: Crisis in Time; whereas Crisis on Infinite Earths cleaned up a tangled mess of parallel realities, Zero Hour centered on the related problem of divergent, yet ongoing, alternate timelines that had become, like the alternate universes of "Earth-Sequencenumber," a kind of storytelling cancer.

The much-maligned Joe Quesada, as well, had seemed to act on a recognition of the overuse of divergent timelines that feed into dystopian futures in his decision to cancel Mutant X, one step in a projected ambitious cleanup of the X-titles into something more manageable and comprehensible. That he left Cable alone, a related concept with similar baggage, suggests that the execution of this cleanup program may not live up to its initial ambition. However, the implicit acknowledgment this involves remains welcome, even to those of us who held no great animus to the X-Man title.

Sinners Returning to Their Sin

In spite of increasing comics-reader awareness of the recurrent and cumulative abuse of a particular idea, the notion of a wrecked future timeline that interacts with our own, pre-disastrous one, I have to suspect that the forces that led to the propagation of the idea will continue to have some influence, said effect manifesting as more examples of the same in the years to come.

An idea, after all, tends to propagate by stimulating the imagination. Something inherent in the idea does stimulate creative processes (though not necessarily particularly original ones). Not all minds, furthermore, become equally blunted by overexposure; often, too, the simple desire to take a much-misused idea and polish it into the treatment it deserves can inspire writers to walk a well-worn path again.

At a much more abstract level, though, we might need to look at a model of ideas called meme theory to fully comprehend how an idea persists. In a post-Renaissance culture, we might tend, through wishful thinking, to assume that ideas originate and spread through a culture based on a process akin to natural selection, which weeds out invalid notions and only allows ideas that have passed multiple tests of truth to spread.

However, meme theory thinks of an idea as something akin to a gene, as conceived by thinkers like Richard Dawkins. The gene, in Dawkins' model, exists primarily to replicate itself, and the expressions of this gene, rather than representing its purpose in creating bodies, really mean no more than an instrument to this central end of making more copies of itself.

A meme, then, we can recognize as an idea that propagates in this fashion. Rather then surviving and spreading because of its success in tests of truth, it simply has the ability to propagate. It spreads from one mind to another - with minds providing a medium for memes, just as organic matter serves as the medium for genes and resulting life - because it sticks in the mind, not because readers necessarily want to see the notion replayed, ad infinitum, through countless comics stories.

And, of course, the pattern of the history of the twentieth century provides much raw material for someone who might incline to imagine a future where wrong turnings put an end to what we know as "progress." Given the numerous ways in which concentrated power wielded by small numbers of human beings showed that we had learned what we, as a race, could do much, much faster than we might come to understand what we should do, a century which showed whole nations (or even empires) becoming little more than self-admiring abbatoirs provided much opportunity to project our own failings forward.

The great gap between technological and moral progress remains with us, and as long as it does, we might expect the imagination to invent a future populated with details of the consequences of the mismatch.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 243. Completed 28-MAR-2001.