Deal With It! Disability In ASM 654.1
While the emphasis of our features here at PinkKryptonite are your favorite gay characters and authors, it's important to consider now and then, between all the gratuitous beefcake that our beloved medium provides, what comics do for minority voices in general. After all, Equality fails as a notion if it can't be extended to everyone. Rick Remender and Tony Moore's upcoming Venom series will feature Flash Thompson as the symbiote's new host, an amputee veteran who's lost both his legs. This week's Amazing Spider-Man 654.1 effectively served as a Venom 0 issue, and while Dan Slott's script will doubtlessly vary from Remender's upcoming portrayal, the comic provided two moments that will have piqued the interests of anti-ableists.
It's become a trope within hero comics to disable superheroes (lookin' at you, Hawkeye!). You can't blame the writers; Disabling a metahuman makes the danger real, it brings them down to a mortal level. Flash's situation is the polar opposite. As much as superheroism is already a practice in wish-fulfillment, Flash's usage of the Venom parasite restores the legs he had, on top of making him a military killing machine. He's the feeble Steve Rodgers turned ubermensch. Though a fair treatment of his disability shouldn't instill any sense of inadequacy in the character's private life, this is precisely the scenario we get in the Thompson home between missions. Flash attempts to lift himself from his chair to comfort his crying girlfriend, crashing to the floor and chalking up the mistake to mere forgetfulness. Forgetting about trauma and recovery? Readers can understand this as his acclimation to the Venom suit, but you'd expect Betty to show a bit more concern for his lapse. Slott may have intended this to show that Flash feels no different for his loss, but I felt the dismissal here was too casual to keep within reason.
Then during his second mission, the completely nonthreatening Flagsmasher staves off Venom with some oddly-placed bombs that blow away Flash's legs. Though Venom is capable of regeneration, the incident reasonably ignites a breakdown in the man under the armor, causing killer-ops Venom to go full-blown slack-jacked drool-monkey Venom and we're told (rather than shown) that the symbiote tears shit up (I'm curious to find out if sound-effects had to cover up the sites of carnage because the title has an "A" rating, or if Ramos was incapable of drawing jaw-meets-arm interaction acceptably). Dubious art aside, this is the aspect of Venom I'm itching to read about. Not a man fearful of living with a disability, but coping with traumatic stress at home while he continues to wreak havoc under US armor, less as penance and more as a continuation of duty. We're in able hands with Rick, and I'm thankful for this issue's delineation of what I want from the upcoming series. Venom #1 hits racks March 2nd.
Rubber Justice
Posted to Comics on 18 February 2011
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