While I definitely found Crime
SuspenStories to be one of the most interesting comics we’ve read, aside
from The Mysterious Underground Men,
I was a little disappointed by the simplicity of the characters depicted. There
is no moral grey area in these stories – people seem to go seemingly without
cause from being kind, decent people to being irreversibly immoral. They don’t
commit acts that are just a little questionable; they go big with murder and
deceit. While the reader is generally persuaded to sympathize with the
protagonist, these stories seemed to do the opposite: I rarely felt sympathetic
for the protagonist, although this might just be because I quickly learned that
the protagonist was almost always going to commit some heinous crime and die
shortly after. However, the stories don’t focus very much on the character’s
personalities, or do much in terms of character development, which probably
contributes to this disconnect between the reader and protagonist. Overall, I found
myself not very horrified or scared by the rather predictable endings – the protagonist
always seemed to deserve their brutal demise, with no question of what was
right or wrong in the story.
I also agree that I felt the sense of morality was very clear cut in these comics. I was often surprised at how quick characters who seemed relatively normal would jump to extremes like murder without much feeling of guilt or sense of the consequences beforehand. I especially felt this way in "Death's Double-Cross" when Ronnie was quick to suggest murdering his twin brother without much hesitation or any clue to what his relationship with his brother had been like before. One comic that I did feel slightly sympathetic to the murderer was in "A Moment of Madness" because his actions were outside his control which made it feel very Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
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ReplyDeleteI agree with your comment about the black and white morality in the sense that the criminal consistently gets what he/she deserve, but I think the morality of the comics becomes less clear when we look at the standards set forth by the Comics Code Authority. Here, they mandate that the villains must meet their ends through the legal system-being lawfully tried and convicted. In Crime SuspenStories, the villains are vanquished by other criminals, creating this perpetuating system of crime overriding crime, and it is here that the morality of the stories can be called into question.
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree, but I'm okay with it. We're getting stories that are 6-8 pages long, and the audience of CrimeSuspense Stories wants the theatrical plots and gruesome murders that take enough time to set up without worrying about portraying Johnny in a relatable way. Superman and Wonderwoman were very similar in terms of clear cut morality, and I think that is the way many comics were written until the 70's. And if we were able sympathize with a character that turns psychopath, I think these comics would have more controversial than they already were. Would they better if we had some character depth and understanding of motives? Absolutely, but that's demanding a lot out of an older comic that was still making leaps and pushing at the boundaries of comics.
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