7. Who Tidies Up?
Marvel ComicsAnd it's all well and good asking who pays to get all this carnage straightened out, but who are the poor souls who actually do it? In the mid nineties Marvel had a short, humorous series called Damage Control, about a fictional construction company who dealt exclusively in buildings that had been destroyed in fights between superheroes and villains. It was pretty fun, but they're still just one company, and they're limited as to what they can do. Considering the amount of superhero comics published in a month - and the amount of destruction caused within - you'd need a lot more than one plucky group of entrepreneurs to get everything in the sort of ship shape we usually find it by the next issue. Those are a specialised bunch, too. In all likelihood most of the rebuilding work done after one of these huge, catastrophic battles would be handled by regular builders and contractors, who are probably more used to building suburban homes or putting up prefab retail outlets. We're sure they'd jump at the chance of something more substantial, but it's asking a lot for some run-of-the-mill construction workers to be constantly resurrecting a city that's been pretty well destroyed. And anyway, sometimes it's not just a city that gets messed up. Sometimes an entire state gets teleported to the Negative Zone and back again, or the planet gets taken over by Darkseid and afterwards everyone has to try and return things to normalcy. That's a rebuilding project that encompasses entire principalities or the whole planet. Who the heck deals with that? Because we have never seen Black Canary in one of those yellow hard hats or Hawkeye pushing a wheelbarrow full of rubble. So what's the deal?