Heroes Remade

I started reading comic books recently. Every time I would walk into a Newbury Comics I’d wish that I was part of the comic-reading culture. So now I am. What’s it going to cost me, $3-$6 a month? Plus my habit of buying Pelican Shakespeares… that’s $5-$6 a month…

They’re both much cheaper than a drug habit.

Anyway, I picked Iron Man: Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. as my continuing series of choice. A writer of the series discusses it on CBR.com here. (This is where you’re saying to yourself, Uh, I thought this was a blog about Shakespeare. I’m getting to that.) I remember Iron Man from my youth, and the Iron Man I’m finding in this series is very different. He’s an executive, emotionally distraught, hard-nosed-politician Iron Man who makes tough leadership calls, manages budgets, investigates internal affairs, and negotiates national security policy. The Iron Man I remember as a kid used to blow stuff up with lasers. But I love this new Tony Stark.

Why is Iron Man doing this now? What is it that makes putting a well-known character in a brand new position that delights us so much? And what makes it work? If you created a television series about James Bond’s new position as a hot-shot lawyer in Los Angeles after he retires from MI6… would it fly? Or would we rather keep seeing Bond doing traditional Bond things?

Turns out this practice of reinventing recurring characters in the media is pretty old. (Here we go: the Shakespeare part of the post is upon us!) Queen Elizabeth asked Will to bring Falstaff back to the stage after Henry IV parts 1 and 2 were produced. So Will wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor. How did it turn out…? Rather than give my own personal opinion, I’ll let Wikipedia tell us how stodgy Shakespeare critics the world over have received the work:

Most critics consider Merry Wives to be one of Shakespeare’s weaker plays, and the Falstaff of Merry Wives to be much inferior to the Falstaff of the two Henry IV plays. That Shakespeare would so stumble with one of his greatest creations is puzzling, and a satisfactory reason for this remains to be found. The likeliest explanation, if the Garter Feast theory is accepted, is that the play was written hastily, to order for a special occasion, within severe time restraints.

That’s too bad. If I were to speculate (and may I point out that speculations compose a good 97% of what I write in this blog), I’d say the problem isn’t that Falstaff isn’t a reinventable character. Rather, his application to a romantic comedy simply didn’t fit his character.

Any well-written character should be at least two-dimensional. Sometimes we can hope for three. Let’s take the idea of dimensions literally for a moment, and not just as an analogy for how filled-out an idea can be. Let’s imagine for a moment that well-forged characters actually have two or three identifiable qualities, or dimensions, that justify their behaviors in the context of a story. Apparently Iron Man possessed not only an I-heroically-destroy-evil-with-lasers dimension, but also a confident-leadership dimension and, as Christos Gage mentions in the CBR.com article, an emotionally-troubled dimension. While the first, heroic dimension was prominent in the comics of my youth, those other sub-characteristics of Tony Stark allowed him to be placed in this new role of a troubled executive and have it work. Falstaff, however, probably didn’t have the right sub-dimensions to fit into The Merry Wives of Windsor. In Henry IV, his dimensions seemed to be:

• Primary: Coward.
• Secondary: Carefree lover-of-life.

But he was never really clever or ambitious enough to hatch the plan he hatched in Merry Wives, nor could he ever be capable of wooing well-to-do ladies of society. Perhaps his cowardice came into play in Merry Wives, but since cowardice was his primary dimension in Henry IV we’re left with a modification of an existing Falstaff rather than a reinvention of his role in the universe. Had Shakespeare chosen to take advantage of Falstaff’s carefree dimension and make him into a wanderer-thief running from the law, that might have worked.

Who knows.

What other role might you be able to play? Which of your three dimensions are you using most of the time now, and which of the other two could you put to use if you decided to reinvent your role in this world? What other things could you be doing with your life right now?

Photo by InfoMofo.