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Trouble Bonus Episode
🕑 Added 2021-02-18 02:39:09 +0000 UTCThanks to our patrons for helping us hit this goal and giving us a chance to talk about the disappointingly bland but also quite notorious Trouble by Mark Millar.
And thanks to Sean Dillon (https://twitter.com/deathchrist2000) for writing a nice little essay about it:
The problem with writing about Trouble is that it’s not in the slightest bit interesting. Much like Jupiter’s Legacy, it’s an example of Mark Millar trying to come off as a writer who didn’t write a scene where A) a penguin gets raped in prison because he was looking at kiddie porn, B) a magic baby prevents her own abortion by entering another woman’s womb, or C) Nemesis. Unlike the various Jupiter books, however, there’s never a moment where it threatens to be in the slightest bit interesting.
Instead, it sticks rather neatly in the banal, uninteresting space where you find forgettably passable works like Earth 2, The Flash, and the majority of Dan Jurgens’ bibliography, rather than the typical works you’d expect from someone with an almost herpes like persistence as Mark Millar.
However, this has the unfortunate consequence of making writing about Trouble extremely boring. Even going into the art or lettering feels like talking about the artists doing work that’s not singing to their passions or even the angle you’d want to discuss them in. I mean, the Dodsons do the work you’d expect of them, but this isn’t their best work. It doesn’t feel like their hearts are in the work. Even their other Spider-Man work with Mark Millar feels like it has more passion in it. I considered simply listing 101 writers who would do this premise a lot better, but that wouldn’t really be talking about Trouble, now would it.
The fanboy part of me would probably go on a tangent about how much this “ruins” the characters of Aunt May and Uncle Ben, but I honestly rarely care about those sorts of thing unless it’s something truly egregious like Superman punching a child refugee to defend President Donald Trump for a horde led by a scary brown man, The Avengers perfectly fine with Captain Marvel being whisked away by her rapist, or Lois Lane being a Republican. “Aunt May and Uncle Ben were horny, somewhat sh**y, teenagers” isn’t enough to grind my gears.
There is, however, the subject of adding sex to the Spider-Man mythos. It’s certainly not like it wasn’t absent from the character before. This is, after all, a guy who shoots white fluids out while saying “I love you” in ASL. Not to mention the various kinky actions that Peter gets up to with Gwen, MJ, and Felicia before the writers inexplicably decided to make Peter a virgin. Read the college era of Spider-Man, and it’s abundantly clear that he f**ks.
Of course, what Trouble does that keeps this from working, well, it feels too chaste. Contrast this with the work of, say, Grant Morrison. Morrison’s work is full of openly sexual moments, both textual and subtextual. There’s a confidence in Morrison's work with sex that (while not always great) feels like they can explore this angle of life like a grown up. Mark Millar, by contrast, can only have this confidence when he’s acting like a thirteen year old edgelord who just discovered the concept of rape. When you strip away the edgelordiness from Millar, all you’re left with is a dull, vaguely passable book that most people would ignore if it didn’t have Spider-Man’s mom in it.
