The Art of Snapping or Maybe Cyclops WAS Right.....

I'm apologizing in advance because I have to talk about Ghostbusters II for a second. In Ghostbusters II, Bill Murray and company had to fight a demonic overlord trapped in a painting who was dumping slime into the sewers that turned all of New York into assholes who are awful to each other for no reason (though I'm still not sure how he did that from inside of a painting). Basically, he meant to take over the world by turning NYC in the center of all evil. In other words, Dallas. Watching this movie as a kid has clearly affected my state of mind now because it is my genuine belief that comment sections online are basically the focal point of all digital evil on the World Wide Web. Having said all that, sometimes, when I'm on the internet reading articles and I'm feeling very adventurous, I'll put on my hazmat suit and dive into random comment sections. Why, you ask? Because fuck it, that's why?

Anyway, one of the biggest criticisms I've read this year in comment sections and message boards is about the direction in which Marvel has taken Cyclops and it got me thinking about why. I mean, Marvel's whole thing is that their characters tend to live a little closer to the human condition of the everyman while a lot of DC characters tend to be more static archetypes. Even though Uncanny X-Men is, thus far, serving a purpose similar to Dark Avengers from a few years back during the "Dark Reign" event, Cyclops didn't " go bad" necessarily.

You're Scott Summers. You haven't looked anyone in the eye since you hit puberty. You've been raised by a kind, well-meaning man who wishes for peace between humans and mutants while training you to fight giant robot death machines since you were 15 years old. You're basically the quintessential All-American captain of the football team for mutantkind. As time goes on and you grow into an adult, people from the future you've been taught to fight for come to the present day and basically tell you that you eventually fail. You watch your wife (who is basically your high school sweetheart) silently fawn over your hairy, homicial teammate. That same wife died, came back to life as a world-swallowing space god, died and came back to life and died AGAIN. Eventually, the race of people you're sworn to protect are magically dwindled down to barely enough to reach full capacity at Chick-Fil-A. Now, you're an endangered species living an island that's pretty much a reservation. At some point, that same world swallowing space god possesses you and you convince yourself that you're righting your dead wife's wrong by healing the world. Then, it drives you power mad and you kill Charles Xavier, your only father figure, in cold blood and you're thrown in jail. Cyclops didn't "turn evil." He snapped. Plain and simple.

It's not even a new phenomenon in Marvel. Take the Ultimate Universe, for example. Early on in Ultimate Spider-Man, Nick Fury confessed to having a file on Peter Parker because with everything that had happened to him and his family over the years (father killed in a Hulk attack, father's best friend's son becomes Venom, Uncle Ben, Norman Osborn, etc.), he was the most likely to snap and become the next big supervillain. Of course, Ultimate Peter Parker didn't snap. In fact, he went on to die in the service of not snapping and being exactly the kind of guy Uncle Ben wanted him to be (although I can't help but wonder if that's because Black Fury also said "When you turn 18, you're mine"....turns out that guy's a lying piece of shit in EVERY dimension). Meanwhile, Ultimate Reed Richards had endured equally fucked up circumstances (piece of shit father, being responsible for unintentionally wiping out another dimension, turning his best friends into a monster, his girlfriend being an indecisive ass, Doom, etc.) and, while nobody was looking, turned into the next big supervillain, almost wiping out humanity at least twice. You don't necessarily like or forgive the character for it, but you get it.

The same thing applies for others like the Norman and Harry Osborn, whose Green Goblin incarnations are completely about regular people just plain losing it in the face of bad shit happening. Brian Michael Bendis' run on Daredevil, which has turned out to be one of the most definitive eras in DD history other than Frank Miller's, is entirely the story of what happens when Matt Murdock has pretty much the worst time of his life (unable to cope with his girlfriend's death, secret identity outed to the press, Bullseye's return, declaring himself Kingpin of Hell's Kitchen, disbarred and thrown in prison, etc.) and being utterly unable to cope with the black hole his life had become.

You see it in real life all the time. Kanye West's evolution is pretty much the best real-life example I can think of when I think about what a hero-to-villain transformation looks like, but that's a whole other post.

Have you ever known someone before a relationship and seen them AFTER a breakup? After the death of a loved one? Post-traumatic stress is more present in America than its probably ever been. Often times, soldiers come home from war changed by their experiences and understandably so. Their job is literally to get shot at so you don't have to. Now, compare that to "superheroism." People who get shot at and attacked by all kinds of unthinkable supervillain shit every single day are bound to be deeply affected and changed in the wake of what they've seen.

No, seriously....WHY hasn't Marvel made
these shirts? You're leaving money on the
table, Marvel.

Having a major character go through a major change like that isn't necessarily always a perversion of who he or she was meant to be. Sometimes, it's the next logical step. It's evolution. Sometimes, people just snap. Comic book characters shouldn't have to be immune.