| Posted: 31 July 2018 at 6:21am | IP Logged | 10
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Banner fit Stan's "Everyman" model, seen elsewhere in Peter Parker, Hank Pym, Don Blake, even early Reed Richards. Brilliant but nerdy. "Worshipping from afar" the woman he loved. Experiencing that "some day I'll show the world!" frustration. (See the cover of AMAZING FANTASY 15.) When I was in my early teens I could relate to those guys. I was one of them, at least in my own mind. But there was no psychosis attached. Didn't need to be, to create fantasies of POWER. Just being human was all it took. *** As someone with mental illness problems virtually from birth, (particularly anger management), which is quite common among Gen X and Millennials (you can read about this everywhere), I related to Banner on a very different level. I related to his misery. And the Hulk's misery. And again, Banner isn't psychotic. Never was. Mental illness, to the degree that he actually had that (a shitty life doesn't equal being mentally ill) doesn't equal psychosis. A psychotic is someone who's SO ill that s/he's a that contact is lost with external reality. Peter Parker was "everyman" because he was working-class and had working-class problems and because of "the old Parker luck." The rest you mentioned? Not so much. Ben Grimm was more everyman than Reed Richards. Rick Jones was more everyman than Banner. And the big innovation in the Lee/Kirby/Ditko model of being a superhero was the idea that having super-powers didn't automatically make your life any better. Spider-Man, the Thing, the Hulk, the X-Men -- very different from the happy DC heroes. Even Daredevil was blind. To the degree that I identified with Marvel heroes it was because I was very, very unhappy. It went beyond nerdy-ness or what have you.
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