12 Problems Superhero Comics Never Address

Marvel/DCReading superhero comics is all about a suspension of disbelief. You can't pick up an issue of, say, Green Lantern with any level of incredulity, or you won't make it past the first page. A guy with a magic ring? Who uses it to police space? And he's kind of a douche? And he's friends with aliens? And he's got a beautiful girlfriend? Boy, is this unrealistic! Let me put this childish fantasy down and have a jolly old time watching The Wire, or reading depressing non-fiction, or whatever it is people like that do. All the more for those of us who do have an, admittedly, immature sense of wonder. Superhero comics do ask a lot of us as readers, but we're more than willing to oblige. Sure, there's a multiverse. Of course it can be fractured by somebody punching it. Totally makes sense that the Hulk always manages to keep his trousers on when the rest of clothes explode! Just as it makes sense that Emma Frost would dress like that. There's enough that we accept when reading a funnybook that we should probably be getting paid by the Big Two for doing half their jobs for them, explaining away inconsistencies and errors with our vast knowledge of flexible timelines, alternate realities and good guys being mind controlled by bad guys. Still, there's a lot of stuff in our comic books that is never dealt with, but really should be. Things that don't have an in-universe explanation, aspects of their internal logic that don't quite add up (shaky though it is in the first place), or just parts of the superhero ideal that don't make a lick of sense if you stand back and think about if for five seconds. Here are twelve such things that superhero comics never address.

12. Why Does Everyone Hate Mutants?

Marvel ComicsHere's a specific one to start with, because we were trying to explain it to an observant non-comics fan the other day and really couldn't come with anything suitable. And writing about comics is our job, so you know if we can't come up with an explanation, something is seriously wrong. Or it's about an Avatar book because, really, who reads those? Looking at the Marvel Universe, we have any number of superheroes, who have gotten their powers from any number of sources: there's the science experiments (Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Hulk), the almighty endowed (Thor, Doctor Strange), and the rich guys with tech (Iron Man and affiliated armour-wearing people). Aside from the swaying public opinion of Spidey, thanks to that dastardly J Jonah Jameson, for he most part the world's non-superpowered civilians treat these lot as heroes. The X-Men and their mutant brethren, meanwhile, are hated and feared and have a large percentage of the population angling for their eradication. Eh? How are they any different from all these other costumed freaks? Well, they cause a lot of damage, sure, but it's not like the FF have never levelled a few square blocks of New York. Their powers are weird? Have you not seen The Thing? There's literally no reason the American people can accept the Avengers as a bunch of do-gooding heroes and then reject the X-Men as horrible genetic anomalies when they do the same things, wear similar costumes, and actually get their powers in similar ways, all told. It makes zero sense, and it's never been adequately explained, so far as we can recall. And we can recall pretty well. Not to a mutant degree, promise, don't burn down our houses.