1. Who's The Real Hero Here?
I.
No matter how anybody tries, it's impossible to fix a text so that only one reading of it is possible. There's no story so tightly constructed and so carefully executed that readers can't draw quite the opposite conclusion from it than the creators intended, if, of course, the creators intended anything so didactic as a particular conclusion to be drawn from their work at all. All this we know.
But I sometimes wonder if any genre loads the dice in favour of particular readings as much as the superhero comic book does. The very nature of stories which tend to be concluded and closed by colourful, sympathetic and powerful figures, who've been driven to the extremes of suffering and loss by obviously dangerous and usually unpleasant opponents, means that we're strongly compelled to see things from the super-heroes' point of view. And when everything is often in the last analysis relying on a costumed character that we feel empathic towards, knocking seven bells out of a costumed character we're to one degree or another appalled by, the punch thrown from the apparent side of the angels tends to be the closing comment on whatever issue, large or small, sophisticated or banal, it is that we've invested our time and attention in.
This is, of course, I know you know, a dangerous thing.
II.We readers actively collude in this, of course. I well remember even in the '70s, when fan rage could only be transmitted through the relatively poorly-conducting mediums of letter-pages, fanzines and face-to-face conversations, that any attempt to not have the superhero's fists end whatever struggle was underway resulted in dissatisfaction and even that most quixotic of fan responses, rabid fury. When Don McGregor and Billy Graham had the Black Panther actually defeated by Killmonger after months and months of fighting and then saved by a small child, who unexpectedly knocked the arch-fiend off of a precipice, fans were not happy. It was as if they themselves had been emasculated by McGregor's deliberate decision to underline the key point that we can't rely on heroes to do our fighting for us all the time. When everyone's in danger, everyone needs to do their bit.
Well, it wasn't just T'Challa's status as " ... the man who won't cop out when there's danger all about" that seemed to have been snipped and tied off there. It was if McGregor had declared that not only didn't God and Santa Claus exist, but that they were also in their non-existence up to some very unsavoury activities indeed. And I suspect that the threat of the heresy of suggesting that all our problems can't be solved by just hitting people very hard still lurks worryingly under the thin sheen of relative sophistication that today's comic-books fans have pasted over themselves. Like naked Celtic warriors striding off to face the Roman war-machine confidently clad in useless-though-pretty woad, we seem to think we've cracked the problems of associating violence with virtue through an equal measure of cynicism, familiarity with criticism and what's supposedly an "ironic" engagement with the text.
But look, Daredevil just hit the Kingpin really hard and broke the big fat guy's knee!Hah! The Kingpin's bones are sticking out of his pudgy leg! That Daredevil's " .. a bad mother- (shut your mouth!)"
III.
And it doesn't really matter how Pyrrhic the victory, or how carefully we're shown that no single fight can right the structural inequities of the world or straighten out the tortured and contradictory drives of individual human beings, the woman or man in the costume still closes the story with a haymaker and a fierce kick, with gritted teeth and a buttock-clenching Herculean effort, with a self-serving weary mop of the brow to let us know that all that senseless and explicit violence really cost our poor heroic costume-wearer dear.
IV.The placement of the superhero in comic-book narratives as both victim, because all heroes must be persecuted and consequently driven largely against their will into thumping Stilt-Man or Angle Man or whoever, and also as avenging angel, means that we nearly always know who's side we're on, and what it is that we're definitely supporting.
Take the example of Daredevil, for example. Since Frank Miller started in 1979 to reconcile the inevitable contradictions in the character of a long-standing children's comic book hero by using them as evidence of a deeply-flawed personality, our Man Without Fear has been accumulating screw-ups and near-pathological flaws to the degree to which you'd hesitate to let him receive a delivery of recorded mail, for fear he'd maim the postman and begin a progression of disasters which would leave the United States quite without letters or parcels for a very long time.
Matt Murdock totters along an unsure line between dodgy vigilante and criminal fruitcake, accumulating angst-generating guilt that never can reform him, because that would mean that he'd have to make rational decisions informed by a careful judgement of his own actions and those of others, and where would be the fun of that? So, on and on go the screw-ups, the dead lovers stacked feet-up and heads to the wall in a desperate attempt to save space in Murdock's very crowded freezer-of-the-soul, the slaughtered innocent bystanders - nobody is innocent in a seedy, faithless world! - the shattered friends, the Beirut-in-the-1980's neighbourhood that's supposed to be being protected. It sometimes seems to me that the only thing Matt Murdock ever manages to save is the perfect sheen of very tight skin pulled over those splendid abdominal muscles of his.
And still he's the hero! The worse he screw-ups, the more his creators feel that he ought to screw up, and, so, it seems, the more his fans see this as sign of sophisticated story-telling and moral relativism and adult entertainment.
Which I'll conceed it can be.
But Daredevil still gets to be the hero, which he patently isn't. He's a berk in tights who shouldn't be being put in jail to illustrate how corrupt the "system" and the "Man" is, but because Daredevil consistently breaks the law and ends up hurting people who ought to be able to live their lives without receiving the trauma-causing end of his bully-club. Sorry. Billy-club.
V.Don't get me wrong. I love Daredevil. I have a little jar by the front door where I'm trying to save 50 pence pieces in order to be able the Brubraker/Lark Omnibus. At the current rate of capital accumulation, I'll be able to afford it in around November of this year.
And I think that the idea of a lead character who consistently makes catastrophically-stupid and destructive designs is a fascinating one. But we have to remember that no matter how often he's sold as a hero, he isn't a hero. Oh, yes, he often does heroic things, but that doesn't in itself make him a hero. There is a centrifugal force operating when costumes and super-powers and virtuous intentions combine, all pushing the reader's awareness away from the moral core of these stories. And no matter how much we're told that readers engage with Daredevil's stories with an awareness of his flaws, I doubt very much that he's viewed by the overwhelming majority as anything other than a sort-of flawed hero.
But there surely comes a time when all the accumulated grime of moral compromise, death-causing carelessness, selfishness and plain old-fashioned law-breaking should cease to constitute an interestingly ambiguous heroic figure and instead constitute a common criminal, a self-obsessed and callous skirt-chaser who can't keep it under his tights even as his wife suffers so in her sickbed, and who isn't so much a woebegotten Jonah as a consenting carrier of anti-Munchhausen Syndrome, whereby he's compelled to create as many real injuries for himself and as many others as possible.
There comes a time when a superhero is longer a super hero just because he has to over-come so many self-generated problems. There comes a time when that superhero becomes revealed to be an idiot, and a criminal idiot too.
VI.
Oh, but he's jumping off the skyscraper, and that man in the skull-mask is flying through the air on a scary looking jet thing, and there's concentric rings pulsating from Daredevil's head, and HE'S PUNCHING THE SKULL-MASKED MAN REALLY HARD!!! Hurrah!
And I feel it too. I do.
But it's not true. And by that, I don't mean that it's actually not true, because I get that just as much as you do. It's not true because the sensation of being powerful and safe and of the world being put to rights when DD violently shows how much of a man without fear he is distorts our perceptions until we can't help but get carried away with the sheer adrenalin "wow-wee" and "huzzah!" of it all.
It isn't as if Mr Bendis and Mr Miller and Mr Brubraker and Mr Diggle and all the other excellent caretakers of Matthew Murdock haven't given us all the evidence we need. It's that we don't really want to know. We are, in our far far more innocent comic-book reading way, the nice white folks who refused to pass the guilty verdict on the cops who beat Rodney King, and the nice black folks who refused to pass a guilty verdict on O J Simpson. We're the folks that refused to see that Elektra was quite psychopathically mad and in no way a force for good, even when Miller and Romita quite deliberately showed how utterly on-her-way-to-quite-insane she was.
But. But. But, she's wearing a costume and she didn't kill Foggy when she had the chance. She only killed lots of other people who we don't care about. She's a heroine. And Matt loves her. And they run over rooftops together.
Or to quote the estimable Mr J. Ohnny Rotten: "And we don't C-A-R-E!!!!"
2. A Necessary Digression Back To 1981
I.
I thought my girl-friend had something of a little crush on Daredevil, and I thoroughly approved. Anything to get her reading comics.
I'd offer her issues of "All-Star Squadron" and "Marvel-Two-In-one", and she'd look at me with that kind of fond pity that women give men when we're missing the point but trying hard anyway. And then she'd surreptitiously reach for my latest imported copy of Frank Miller's "Daredevil", which, I would reassure myself, is still certainly a comic book, as well a very fine one too, and therefore a very good sign that the superhero addiction was biting. Perhaps tomorrow she'd get a little more involved with the FF or the LSH or the JLA or the Amazing Whoever-It-Doesn't-Matter-Cause-He-Flies Man.
I knew from experience, didn't I? This was all a good sign. Nobody can't stop at just one comic book.
Can they?
II.Now, some 30 years later, I realise that J. barely noticed the Man Without Fear, who might have been " the Man Without A Head and yet still possessed of a strange halitosis problem" for all she cared.
The crush she had something of was for Foggy Nelson, which is quite a different thing entirely.
And if I had understood what was going on between my girlfriend and that completely imaginary character, I surely would not have approved. I'd have felt strangely uneasy and told her that this was absurd, that she was getting attached to the wrong unreal bloke, pushing her like some opinionated comic-book-dealing pimp into lusting after the bloke in the red tights with the two little dinky horns on his mask. And faced with her reluctance to read the pages of fist-fights with ninja archers and very large mobsters, faced with her preference for the panels showing Foggy Nelson missing his wife and Foggy Nelson being competent with Nelson & Murdock's clients, I would have felt rather insecure and threatened.
Why wasn't she attracted to the bloke with the radar senses and the rock-solid torso and that spiffing habit of bouncing off roof-tops and whacking really bad people? Why is it that she seemed so very much more interested in the fat guy, who rarely gets a break, who never pulls on a costume, who only seems to work hard and do his best for his friend? Which of them is a really important superhero - correct answer: Daredevil - and why is the best friend of Porkchop Peterson winning the battle for J's affections?
What do women want, I might have whinged, getting as close to Freud's mind-set as I ever had before and ever would again. What do women want if they don't want powerful men in scarlet tights bearing perfect stomachs and a strangely attractive burden of melancholia?
III.
Well, of course, some women do want those powerful men, clothed in scarlet tights or not.
But not all of them do, and certainly not all of the time.
IV.And though I'd have been horrified to have had this explained to me, J's affection for Foggy was actually a really good idea for J, if not for me, because it showed that her emotional radar where men were concerned wasn't entirely down and dangerously useless, despite her untypical affection for me. Because - and here in defiance of William Goldman I am indeed declaring that somebody, me, knows something - this all showed that somewhere in her fond-fuddled teenage mind there was the sensible intuition that I was an arse, and not to be trusted, and that Foggy was, and has remained, a much better man than me.
And that would have been true.
For I was actually far closer to Matt Murdock than I realised. Oh, not in the surface stuff, like stamina and strength and billy-club manoeuvrability. No.
No, me and Matt, you see, we're like this is just one particular fashion. I can be a right selfish fool too.
And it's Foggy that I should have been learning from, not Matt, not from the man without an ounce of common sense in his head.
3. Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain
I.Because our eye is constantly being taken by Matt Murdock, because of that costume and those feats of prodigious and balletic roof-jumping, and because of the big red logo across each cover with the title "Daredevil" declaring for all to see that this superhero is a very impressive thing, I don't think we notice as much as we should quite how fundamentally heroic Foggy Nelson is. The camera keeps following his best friend and sometimes-business partner Matthew Murdock, but the strange thing is that Foggy Nelson's life would be, in some ways, far more instructive and far more interesting.
So often Foggy is cast as the wearisome if compassionate voice of common-sense, as if this was a grind and an imposition on Daredevil's already frantic schedule of frankly screwing up. We're touched by Foggy's concern, but he doesn't understand, does he, that a man without fear's got to do what a man with fear's got to do. Which, of course, means getting people, and especially women, into death-threatening trouble, being a trouble-attracting target because of his bright-red costume, and causing Hell's Kitchen to get bombed and swamped with strangely-ineffective massed ranks of arrow-firing ninjas. Again.
Let's be sensible, Matt, says Foggy Nelson time and time again. And time and time again, Foggy's right. Phone the police, Matt. (The police can't help.) Phone SHIELD, Matt. (I don't know their number.) Phone the Fantastic Four, Matt, or the Avengers. (Aw, they don't want to be bothered with lil'ol'me.) Don't be an idiot, Matt. (Whoops. 'Nother dead lover, 'nother raised city block, 'nother policeman with serious facial injuries because Matt's just had to hit him really hard.)
II.If Daredevil really is a man without fear, then it might explain his reckless stupidity. After all, those souls who suffer a congenital insensitivity to pain tragically can't recognise when they're doing something dangerous, such as resting on a scolding hot pipe. They can't even know to keep twitching and moving their limbs to relieve everyday pressure. And they tend to die very early, worn out by the suffering caused through no fault of their own by an inability to feel and learn from that distress. So it could be with Matt. Put him in danger and he doesn't realise why he ought to be avoiding it. He might even seek it out in a desperate attempt to cause himself to feel fear, to overload his system so that whatever prevents him from being as clever as his IQ should determine burns out and he can look at the world as a rational, responsible person. For as the Wizard of Oz so sensibly declared to the not-so-cowardly lion;
"You my friend are a victim of disorganised thinking. You are under the unfortunate impression that just because you run away you have no courage; you're confusing courage with wisdom."
But of course, we know that Matt does know what fear is, which makes his position all the more untenable. Foggy, on the other hand, really really does know all about fear, and he doesn't have a impressive look-away-now reputation, gymnastic ability or radar sense to protect him. Yet still he stands by his friend, despite being stabbed, threatened with sais, and bullets, and really big men with the power to level buildings just through an Elvis-shiver of their shoulders. Foggy has had his livilihood threatened and indeed repeatedly taken from him. He's been shocked, blackmailed, bullied, sunk into a witness protection programme that wasn't very efficient on the protecting part of the deal. He's been kicked from one end of New York City to the other and back again, several times. He's suffered just about every affliction a male character can - if he were female, he'd probably be dead by now by as an offering to the Gods of Angst- and yet he still stands by his friend.
And if that sounds abit Tammy Wynette, then perhaps that helps us put a finger on something that's really still wrong with the superhero genre, despite a considerable improvement in the quality of gender representations in recent years. Perhaps Foggy is seen, albeit unconsciously, as being not quite masculine enough for us to notice the quiet nobility of his contribution enough. He fulfils a role which is traditionally feminine, the caring supportive almost-spouse who can be driven to distraction but never to disloyalty. He's abit soft, is Foggy Nelson, and rather out of shape, round where he should be sharp, soft where he should be hard. He's a girl, isn't he?
Which is a deeply worrying idea, because if we are, on some level, feeling that Foggy isn't heroic enough because he's not macho enough, then we really are continuing to get ourselves into a dysfunctional and insulting ideological cul-de-sac. Because Foggy isn't lacking in backbone or daring. We know that he visits Matt in prison despite his terror of what's happening there because he values his friend far more than his peace of mind or even his own safety. (That bravery and determination gets him stabbed, too.) We know that he'll fight when he has to, when it's right and appropriate. (I still recall with pleasure the time he protected Glorianna by hurling a bowling ball at her bag-snatching assailiant.) And he's brave enough to say that things that Matt, and we, don't want to hear.
For when Foggy temporarily cuts off Matt because his old friend has allied himself to the Kingpin, part of us feels that Nelson's being a killjoy. Oh, we recognise that somebodies got to say that Matt's being stupid and immoral, but the very idea that Matt is Daredevil leads us to see this unacceptable alliance as the equivalent of driving 32 in a 30 mph zone; we don't want to hear too much about any moral judgements when our supposed hero is in bed with the very bad guy. And the same stands for when Matt takes control of the Hand. Because the idea of Daredevil leading the Hand is a Fanboy "Yeah!!!" moment, because it's exciting, because t's so wrong that it's really wrong, we can't help but feel that the comic it's all the better for it. All those thrills of the good man gone bad with extra ninja gangsters too, and we even know that Matt can in the future suffer all the more from extra angst after he's thrillingly extracted himself from the whole stupid mess he never should have gotten himself into in the first place. But it's wrong, regardless of how much fun it brings the comic itself. Matt's wrong.
And Foggy's right. If we don't have due process, we don't have a civilisation, in the least ethnocentric sense of that word. Society is at its heart governed by law, by all of us facing the same rules and suffering the same penalties too. I don't get to have my neighbour's cat shot by local hard men because I don't like cat-poo in my snow-drops. If I do, my neighbour gets to hire someone to assassinate my dog, and, the next thing you know, my Mums' charcoal-fried in a mysterious house fire and it's Corsica circa 1870. Foggy's right. There were alternatives. There are nearly always alternatives.
And one of the alternatives is that Matt Murdock ought to go away and stop hurting people. Or even surrender himself and let himself be killed if it's a choice between that and taking control of a super-villain Mafia.
Because society can't function unless it's one rule for "us" and the same one rule for "them", whoever "they" are. And Daredevil is, and has been for a very long time, quite obviously in the wrong camp, in there with the "theys", with the criminal lords and the occult secret societies. Good intentions wouldn't cut it in court, as surely Mr Murdock would know, because the rule of law doesn't tend to care that much about what people mean when they consistently do such harmful things. Such motivations might stand as mitigating factors, but the first principle is "What did you do?"
Acting, for example, like a thinner Kingpin, ruling Hell's Kitchen in the name of the greater good as defined by Mr M. Murdock, might make for interesting stories. (Undoubtedly it does.) But it doesn't make for a healthy society. (As we know.) And being that way means that DD isn't a hero. (Mmmmm. What was that again? Can't quite hear you.)
And that's why we should have put down pretty much each and every issue of Daredevil for about the last 40 years and say "That Foggy Nelson. He's my hero. But that Matt Murdock. What a fool."
III.Of course, Foggy doesn't cut Matt out of his life, or at least, not as far as I know, for poor finances have left me without a radar sense of what has happened since Brubraker departed. (And if Foggy did slash his ties with Matt, I wouldn't believe it. Not anymore than I believed Foggy betrayed Matt just before Daredevil left for a sojourn in San Francisco, a rather coincidental bout of friendship-breaking faithlessness just happening to arrive just when Gerry Conway needed to break up the old status quo.) For if ever there was a character who embodied E. M. Forster's famous quote that "Given the choice between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I would have the courage to betray my country.", then it's Foggy.
Which means that's he's not entirely on the side of the angels either. If he believed in the law as much as he claims, he'd turn Matt in. But he doesn't, and he won't, no matter how much harm it does to him. It's not the chance that he's a moral paragon that makes him a hero. It's because he's brave and true, caring and nurturing, and also sensible, that least attractive quality for the perpetually adolescent to aspire to. He possesses the most unlikely heroic mix of backbone and brain, which must terrify any writer who wants to move his dumb characters around an exploitative plot for cheap effect. Matt'll jump through pretty much any stupid hoops you put up for him. Foggy's cleverer than that. He may be a tortoise, Matt may have been the star student at law school, but it's Foggy who eventually did the hard study and who really knows his stuff. And though he'll do whatever a writer demands, like some superheated material which does remarkable things when glowing and then inevitably returns to its original form, in the end Foggy Nelson will be what he is. A bloody good bloke.
Foggy works, you see. At everything including the restriction of his calorific intake, though he might not work there as hard as he ought to.
IV.So, I would contend, as is pretty obvious by now, that Matt Murdock isn't a hero, but a blithering selfish boy who causes far more havoc than he prevents. And I put to you that the real hero of Daredevil is Foggy Nelson, despite the fact that he's everything much of his audience would hate to be caught aspiring to when they're got their Daredevil-reading cap on; hard-working, caring, nurturing, constant, brave without power, self-sacrificing without any promise of an equitable return.
Matt Murdock isn't a hero. He's an escape fantasy for the irresponsible.
Foggy Nelson is the man. A real man. Which is, of course, a real good person.
And "J" could have told me that in 1981, if I could have listened, if I'd had the radar sense, or rather the common sense, to tell the truth from the foolishness.
But I was too busy dreaming of thwarting super-powered criminals and extra-dimensional alien invaders.
If anybody has any nominations for other supporting characters who are the "real" heroes of the books they appear in, please do let me know. Or why not tell me where I've got it all wrong? Good night & sleep well!
Further reading: To my mind, the two Frank Miller 'Daredevil' Omnibus Editions would be the best introduction, and sadly the most expensive ones to, to our hero Foggy. Get your library to order them! A fine & more affordable alternative to all those pages would be the paperback of "Born Again" by Miller and Mazzucchelli. Lots of fun if you like your fun miserable, grim & talky - not meant as a bad thing! - is the version of DD by Mr Bendis and Mr Maleev, and a nice balance between the two can be found in the Brubraker & Lark volumes. Beyond that, Marvel does a fun set of black-and-white Essentials volumes reprinting the first 125 issues. But sadly, "Foggy Nelson, Agent of O.r.d.i.n.a.r.y" has yet to be printed anywhere except in my mind.
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