Adam Graham's Blog: Christians and Superheroes - Posts Tagged "marriage"

In my final post responding to thoughts in Frank Miller'sinterview in Men Without Fear.

Miller expressed frustration with comics' tendency to have heroes pair off with normal people. "Why is Superman with Lois Lane? Why isn't he going with Wonder Woman. She can match him." He argues that Superheroes should be as operatic with their love lives as they are with their fighting and then he goes to explain his work was with introducing Electra.

For better or for worse, DC seems to have taken him up on that offer with Superman and Wonder Woman sharing a long kiss in the new 52 version of Justice League with Superman unattached with his marriage having been retconned out of the series and Clark and Lois being just friends.

However, I think the reason that we traditionally see superheroes dating "normal people" is that it makes them more identifiable with humanity. If you're Superman, in particular, this is important because the concept of Superman can be scary or unrelatable if you think of him as some Greek God having a relationship with another Greek God.

I think that in addition to that, there can be some normalcy in a life defined by the unusual in having a normal woman to go home to. Of course, the operatic quality is not limited by a partner not having superpowers. If you watch the last two seasons of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, you'll see a lot of tension and drama in that relationship and in trying to get married and stay married.

Plus all Superhero marriages and relationships generally don't go well. Think Green Arrow and Black Canary, Ant Man and the Wasp and that ongoing cat and bat game between Catwoman and Batman. It's just not a good situation. The big exception to this is the marriage of Reed and Sue Richards.

We'll talk more about marriage in our next series on some of the recent comic marriage dissolutions with the New 52 from DC and One More Day in Spider-man.

The earliest superheroes were not married and for the most part, romance wasn't on their mind. Superman, Batman, and the like were more concerned with doing the hero thing. The same could be said of the Green Hornet, the Shadow, the Lone Ranger, Sherlock Holmes, Nick Carter, and many characters from the same era.

They were single minded in their pursuits. In the case of superheroes such as Superman, it was a single minded pursuit of justice and crime-fighting that left little time for romance.

Some of this lack of interest in the opposite sex probably fueled some unjustified charges of homosexuality against some comic book characters.

However, romance of sorts came to comics. As Superman waged a never-ending battle against the forces of evil, Lois Lane waged a never-ending battle to get Superman to marry her. This happened in the comics and on TV but all turned out to be a dream. Those annoying wake up calls didn't stop Lois. She even got her own comicbook in 1958 that pursued that goal.

It was mostly playful stuff right of a sitcom with Lois Lane much like Sisyphus constantly rolling a stone uphill only to have it roll back down saw her schemes go awry.

The Fantastic Marriage

In 1960s, the Superhero world changed for with the introduction of the Fantastic Four. The Fantastic Four were first and foremost a family team from the beginning. They had amazing superpowers but they were real people as well. Like any family, they fought and had personality conflicts but beneath it all, they cared for each other. The team was made of Reed Richards, his girlfriend Sue Storm and her brother Johnny, as well as ex-football star and pilot Ben Grimm. They are hit with Cosmic rays and become (respectively): Mr. Fantastic, The Invisible Girl (later Invisible Woman), The Human Torch,and the Thing.

While Sue's affections wavered during the course of their adventures with her crushing on Sub-mariner and Ant Man, she did end up marrying Reed in Fantastic Four Annual #3.

Lee had really captured the need for human companionship and marriage even among superheroes and he used it a lot in his work. It also occurred in the FF as Ben Grimm's rock hard personality is softened by the loving blind woman Alicia Masters. Not every romance story worked as well.

Other Superhero nuptials occurred in the 1960s including the Flash to Iris West in 1968, and another two superhero wedding between Marvel characters Yellow Jacket (aka Hank Pym) and the Wasp (1969).

However, as Stan Lee took a break from the torrid pace of writing, one character who had been on the road to matrimony was thrown off of it. Marvel killed off Spider-man's love interest Gwen Stacy because they didn't know what to do with the relationship other than marriage, which they weren't ready to pursue.

Other marriages weren't made to last as Superhero divorces started to occur. Hank Pym struck his wife in anger culminating a series of events that had him drummed out of the Avengers and leading to his divorce from the Wasp.

Other marriages broke up, but just as in the real world, marriages continued to happen. After years of heartache, heartbreak and frustration, Spider-man proposed to Mary Jane Watson leading to the marriage in Spider-man Annual #21, a marriage that fans would come to love and one editor at Marvel would come to hate. (More on that in the next post.)

Finally, Superman himself got married. There had been Superman marriages before but in the twisted continuities of multiple alternate Earths and various characters on Earth One and Earth Two in the pre-Crisis DC Universe, it really is hard to track who was married to who.

The series tracked with Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman which was built on the growing relationship between the two characters. In the TV series, Clark was portrayed as a virgin who saved himself for marriage. While a lot of crazy stuff went wrong in the TV show, one has to admire their dogged determination to get married despite clones, witches, and all these sorts of obstacles.

There are three big superheroes that have the highest name recognition: Superman, Batman, and Spider-man. By the mid-1990s, whatever craziness happened in the rest of the Superhero world, two were quite happily married in the comic books. However, that wouldn't last for long.

To be Continued....