Iron Filings – It’s my lobotomy and I’ll cry if want I want to.

Marvel’s and the current writer of Invincible Iron Man, Matt Fraction, have come to the sad conclusion to reboot the image of Tony Stark as the hero for the next political cycle under the banner of Dark Reign by rebooting his brain.  As much this might sound like a warmed over episode of Star Trek this does not involve the actual removal of any physical whole or part of Tony Stark’s brain to reconfigure the outlook, motives and underlying software that would make him heroic to readers and, need it be said, moviegoers of this new era.

Make no mistake it is new era for not just Iron Man but for the nation as whole and its place in the world simply as a function of the new president and the shifting tide that brought him into office. I can’t say that it is an unwelcome change for aspects of the country and the perception of itself, which in the spirit of Iron Man, signifies progress itself.  Rather my objection lies in wondering what will be lost in terms of the fictional enterprise that is Iron Man with such a reboot of the character and what it says about the diversity of narritive of the superhero genre.

I sincerly believe that superhero stories are the “literature of ethics” based on the very simple predicate of the genre that it is about powers and power.  Through the devices of convention it heightens the capacity of its fictive individuals to effect the world in grand fashion on the most basic quandaries of philosophic ethics, the is-ought problem (also known as Hume’s guillotine) as articulated by David Hume.  The characters of such fictions have the ability as part of their powers to render judgement and establish the “as it should be” that would otherwise be deniedto average person a.k.a. the reader except in the smallest of interpersonal moral realtions or in collective actions such as politics.  Literature itself either seeks to establish something or explore something about the world that we live in as truth or being true.

The truth is that Marvel has grown quite uncomfortable with is the outgrowth, or rather overgrowth, of the established truths about the character that culminated in the storyline that became Civil War or for that matter lead a nation to war of choice.  At his most basic Iron Man is a character conceived in the Cold War climate of logical positivism and the consequentialist moral philosophy that guided the superpower in its struggle with communism.  As such he became a perfect expression of US power and attitudes about power for decades.  However as the last election showed the US itself is perhaps no longer accepting this role and its implications for itself anymore especially when viewed through the prism of the personal of an individual allegory. If America wants to be liked then it stands to reason it wants a character that is like-able for the same reasons that make a world superpower “like-able” or redeemable.  Forcing change, or democracy or for that matter even progress is still force and brings with it the negative associations of power as unreasoned, unsubtle and arrogant.

So what Marvel editorial and its talented but complicit hack have rendered as a solution is to delete the troublesome ideas that brought about our national nightmare and its attending allegory in superhero terms.  This means of course that leadership of the community of powers is not something that is commanded but will have to be rebuilt based on respect.  Mostly it has to do with the concepts of wealth and responsibility being rewritten and re-prioritized with large helping of underdog perspectives thrown into the new software that will be uploaded to replace the old Tony Stark.  It shouldn’t go without mention though that how this is done in the current Dark Reign storyline is by a process of simply getting dumber by choice.  I am not sure if the real message that Marvel wanted to send about the undercover truth it has found by way of this literary endeavor is what it intended but it remains that forgetting who you were is the best way to become someone else.

The past here however isn’t the real potential loss to comics various exercises in exploring the nature of power in the world and the moral systems that grow up to address it but rather coming to a singular and myopic conclusion to which all of them must conform to make truth uncovered palatable and saleable is.   The past after all is what this blog is really dedicated to give voice to as each and every issue then set out to entertain and explore what power and justice was at the time it was written.   The wholesale stovepipe reconstruction of so much of the Marvel Universe suggests that exploration is the least of the the concerns of editorial and staying in control of the message is as the way to make a buck.