Marvel Ruins: An Exercise in Cynicism

There are some works that do read as though the people behind them have an axe to grind not just with readers but the characters themselves.

A clear example of this is “The Boys” by Garth Ennis. Much has been said about the mean-spirited portrayal of superheroes in The Boys comic which found a way to make every superhero a homosexual(derogatory), a drug addict, an abuser, or completely pathetic.

But before The Boys, there was Marvel Ruins and it in many ways was what its successor couldn’t be by virtue of using name-brand heroes not pastiches.

In the beginning, there was darkness.

Marvel Ruins was created as a parody of Marvels, which was understood as a “lighter” story even though it delved into darkness on its own merit. But while Marvels was a celebration of what made comic stories good, Marvel Ruins sought to show audiences exactly how bad these universes could be.

One thing you cannot take away from the series. As a whole is, the art style is immaculate. It really does convey a true sense of despair, disgust, vileness, and sickness.

Illustrated and Colored by Terese Nilsen, Cliff Nielsen, and Chris Moeller. It is a story that truly is carried by its art. It just blows the writing out of the water. Even if there was no dialogue in the story, you can still feel the visceral sense from the illustrations coloring the paneling that this is a world of just bleak antipathy.

Plot?

The story takes place in an alternate timeline to the mainline Marvel universe, and can be best summarized as “everything went wrong“. This isn’t a few bad breaks, this is a universe governed by Murphy’s Law.

Ruins is framed as a story being researched by the Daily Bugle reporter Phil Sheldon. He goes around meeting with various characters and learning of how things got so bad.

Marvel is often derided for its playfulness with scientific reality. After all, well, Marvel is willing to explain its universe. It doesn’t take too long, for it to very clearly be disassociated from any sort of real science, even if it is able to touch upon some things. Ruins instead plays it the other way where the scientific experiments as ridiculous as they are, fail badly. This is most notable in issue 2 where the Fantastic 4 being hit with radiation in outer space doesn’t grant them superpowers it instead kills them.

The bleakness of this universe is heavily implied to be traced back to that one incident because, for a long time, the Fantastic 4 were the first family, not just of Marvel but of comics themselves. Able to introduce and start long-running publications for so many characters. Most notable of which is Spider-Man who got his start in a Fantastic Four comic.

So maybe things would’ve been better even for unrelated characters if they lived?

While the story just sort of delves into darkness and depressing endings for characters, we know and love or twist them into the most horrid forms of themselves. Whether this is Bruce Banner, just being a mass of pulsating tumors, or Jean Gray being a prostitute who is killed by Nick Fury before he kills himself. The Avengers being blown up by the US government. Wolverine, being poisoned constantly and dying constantly from the adamantium skeleton he has. Johnny Blaze committed suicide, setting his face on fire. The Silver Surfer ripped his own chest open. What purpose do these deaths serve? Well it’s a bad universe isn’t it?

This is a dystopia from the world of Marvel. But it is unlike the world of Marvel. It is a world without hope. It is a world where every horrible thing that could go. Wrong does go wrong? Characters who are briefly mentioned such as Daredevil, for example, are killed as children because of the nature of their origin stories.

Many characters are just quickly written into being cultists or cult members. The black panther party is named dropped only for T’challa to be imprisoned due to his affiliation with them. Which is the best possible story related to him? If only because he doesn’t immediately die. Galactus a physical God in the Marvel cosmology, himself is dead.

This is a universe that makes no sense.

So, what does it say? What does it say when Bucky Barnes is a cannibal fascist in Oklahoma? What does it say when NorthStar and Aurora are fused at the elbow and her brother is dead? What does it say when the Enchantress is an adult film star? Things are bleak? Isn’t this sad?

In the end, what remains?

A question oft debated is the point and purpose of Superheroes as characters and as a genre. There’s been endless discourse about the fascistic nature of “heroes”. It is not a stretch to say some of the more grounded heroes operate like extra-judicial police and that they’re framed as always in the moral right shows a deference to the idea of Justice being a matter of the right people having unquestioned power to stop bad people. Ruins disregards that sort of analysis in its opening issue with the Avengers being killed by a missile by the U.S. government to stop their California secessionist attempt.

We don’t learn much about the politics of the Avengers or their goals. Just that they were revolutionaries, in the French sense of the word, and that they’re dead.

You can’t delve deep into the nature of a story like this. A story where every character dies for no real purpose outside of shock.

Where every character is at the mercy of an unknowable God that is the Government. To bring the Marvel universe to heel this universe exists to remove what makes a superhero comic, a superhero comic. This instead becomes a story about disease, about failure, about what if everything was awful?

The allusions to politics that exist in the story don’t really give life to any sort of coherent ideology. It is a story that exists to say” Man. Wouldn’t this be messed up if it was real?” And yeah, if this was the main line universe of Marvel, no one would read it outside of those with a bile fascination.

However, it doesn’t draw any conclusions from that edginess. It’s a world of evil and wickedness, reminiscent of Berserk, where the God of the world is evil. This is a universe within Marvel. Where everything went wrong, everything was bad. Any heroes that did or do exist are dead, dying, or evil.

So what is this article meant to say?

With a story like this, it would be easy to say, don’t read this book. But, nobody read the book and it’s decades old at this point. That’s not the goal. The interest in this story is more than that. If you only take one thing away from this story, take away from is the question of, “How dark is too dark when we look into a story?”

Many jokes were made in the 2010s about grim dark edginess. But when we think of “edgy” there’s still ironically a sense of hope behind those characters and stories. A character has agency, A story has a purpose. At a fundamental level, we can read and digest and discuss these elements even if the story has a metatextual purpose there’s still something for us to grasp. Misanthropic, nihilistic works such as the video game, Hatred, for example, still have, at their heart, something for you to finish the story for. Whether it is a high score, to see the end of the story, or even just to see the comeuppance against their villain protagonist but, Ruins doesn’t have that.

Ruins is filled to the brim with story after story after story of, “This bad thing happened and then this other bad thing happened”, and it repeats itself and repeats itself and repeats itself and repeats itself and it lulls you into this apathy towards the story. Because how can you care about anything if you know the next page is only going to be worse?

What do you think? Leave a comment.