You can tell it's a down day for me when I'm looking to a guy called "Mr. Cynical" for an emotional pick-me-up.

But Michael Paciocco's Mind can always be counted on to reaffirm everything that I know to be right and true, and to do so in an amusingly bitter fashion.

The Initiative: STILL MADE OF FAIL lists all the ways in which Marvel's own stories have conclusively disproven Marvel's own claims about the rightness and effectiveness of superhero registration, but my latest favorite has to be his pronouncement of Plot Devices that Need to Go Away #5:

SUPERHERO EMO

Why does it have to go away?

Because at this point, it's become as laughable (if not more so) than the angst-free superheroics that preceeded it. Because the entire point of the superheroic ideal is one of uplifting against impossible odds and doing good. Because every extra bit of angst takes away from the belief that people can improve themselves and make the world a better place. Because people who do right should have some reward in fiction, because lord knows it is all too rare in reality.

Much more, all of it just as apodictically accurate, to be found by clicking the link ...

Actually, while the comic versions have gone the opposite direction, I was happy to see the film Iron Man to have some gravitas without being drenched in emo. We need a hero who seems to have fun playing with toys, especially since even James Bond has to be all dark and haunted as he jet sets around the world to luxury resorts and drives insanely expensive cars.

In retrospect, I don't think the Iron Man film had enough gravitas. The " fun playing with toys " aspect of the character falls apart in any interpretation considering the fact that his toys are responsible for more death and destruction than almost any individual super-villain. If Spider-Man is constantly ashamed of unintentionally setting in motion the chain of events that killed his uncle, imagine how Tony Stark, a man whose day job included manufacturing land mines, would feel. I realize that it was a summer action movie, and wasn't meant to be a total downer ( though the Dark Knight proves that you can dark superheroes successfully, even to summer movie audiences ), but the Iron Man armor is as much a symbol of everything wrong Tony did with his life as it is of everything right.

But then again, almost all good superheroes have incredibly tragic backstories. Batman watched his parents murdered when he was a child. Spider-Man, in addition to his origin tragedy, barely keeps his professional and personal lives together due to his compulsion to do the right thing. The Hulk had an abusive childhood that manifests itself in a destructive form he must constantly try to keep in check. The X-Men is a collection of pariahs who have been an analogy for almost every form of bigotry humanity has come up with. Daredevil; no comment.

I'm not saying that superheroes should descend into wangsty territories, but unless you're writing on the level of 80's Saturday Morning Cartoons, it's nearly impossible to write these characters in a light-hearted fashion and have it be convincing.

There's so much wrong with these paragraphs, but let's just focus on this:



Considering they are two different personalities, I imagine he would feel just fine. As the movie showed, Stark realized his inventions were responsible for hardships in the world, and he decided to do something to fix things (becomes Iron Man). He doesn't have mopey about it.

Plus, designing weapons doesn't automatically make you the moral equivalent of Dr. Mengele, since those guns and bullets can be used to protect lives as much as take them.