(I haven’t done this for awhile; here’s one of the essays that I wrote for Comix Experience’s Onomatoepeia newsletter, from pretty much a year ago.)
There must be many benefits from living in the Marvel Universe, if you stop to think about it. Just imagine what it’d be like in such a world of wonder where gods walk the Earth, the existence of aliens is a proven fact, and New York gets destroyed every second week! You couldn’t turn on the television without watching news items about Tony Stark gladhandling George Bush on a daily basis, or look in the sky without seeing a SHIELD Helicarrier floating above you like some kind of oppressive metal cloud, but on the plus side, Marvel Universe Jon Stewart probably has awesome material for Marvel Universe Daily Show every night.
But it’s not all fun, games and carnage for the everyday folk of Marvel Earth; even though we know from years of comics that the employment world there is very forgiving to Scientists (Mad) and photojournalists for large metropolitan newspapers even in this internet age, think of all the other regular schlubs who have to make a living there in less glamorous careers. Who would want to clean a hotel room after the Absorbing Man and Titania had stayed there, for example? And can you imagine how few responses a Craigslist posting for “Research Subjects Wanted for AIM experiments - $$$!” would get? Join me now as I lead you through some of the least popular gigs available in the Marvel Universe:
* Construction Worker.
There are, of course, pluses and minuses to every job. For example, you may be hideously underpaid in your office job, stuck in a cubicle for eight hours a day in a dully-lit office without adequate heating, surrounded by people with long criminal records and with no hope of an upwards career path, but at least you can spend the day talking to people on MySpace (This may simply be the experience of everyone at my office, as opposed to a universal thing, but I’m sure that you can understand). That’s exactly the dilemma faced by the construction worker in the Marvel Universe: Yes, the amount of property damage caused by any large slugfest means that you will almost certainly have more work than you know what to do with. But, on the other hand, the amount of property damage caused by any large slugfest also means that you will almost certainly never be able to finish any job and know that said job will still be standing twelve months from now.
It’s this problem - called “The Banner Paradox” by those in the know - that has led to another problem for construction companies in the MU: lawsuits from the owners of those few buildings that have managed to see their fifth birthdays. Builders, you see, so sure that their work was essentially meaningless in a world where everything gets smashed or zapped or infested by alien symbiotes without a moment’s notice, started using sub-standard materials - and employing immigrants from other dimensions, where quality was seen to be some kind of sick dream as opposed to something to aspire to - in order to get things done quicker and cheaper than their competitors. After all, they figured, it’s not like the Sentry won’t be throwing Ultron through the fifth floor at some point in the next couple of years. For the most part, they were right. But for that small percentage of those buildings that weren’t destroyed, such corner-cutting proved very expensive indeed.
* Historians.
Picture it: You’ve spent twelve years of your life working on some ground-breaking new thesis detailing exactly why the Mayan civilization had formed those particular social structures that fascinated and confused all your predecessors, and then Reed Richards walks in the door and tells you that he’s travelled back in time and found out it was all a plot by the Mole Man, who’d accidentally discovered something called a “cosmic cube”.
‘Nuff Said.
* Gossip Columnist.
Sure, gossip columnist would have been a great gig back in Stan and Jack’s time: You’d have spent your days drinking cocktails surrounded by glamorous women and men in tuxedos, fighting those red commie bastards and writing things like “Just why is millionaire industrialist Tony Stark’s bodyguard Harry Hogan so ‘Happy’? Maybe it’s got something to do with Stark’s sexy secretary Pepper Potts… With a name like that, you just know that she likes a little spice, if you know what I mean.”
Hell, even in the ’80s, it would be an easy gig: “Just where have the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes gone? That’s the question being asked by Scarlet Witch and the rest of the remaining superheroes who didn’t disappear into that mysterious construction in Central Park last Saturday. Personally, we think it’s just a publicity stunt for the Raiders of The Lost Ark sequel on behalf of George Lucas and ET’s Steven Spielberg - How else to top melting Nazis in the first one?” If things ever got really slow, you could always make jokes about Power Man’s tiara or the Beyonder’s Michael Jackson impersonator status or whatever.
But nowadays, you just know that the Daily Bugle has been advertising this position for months, cycling in and out wannabe-Perez Hiltons who just can’t hack the danger. Never mind the constant threat of lawsuits coming from the US Government every time you publish a photo of some minor superhero from the Initiative falling out of a club drunk and with their underwear showing - or, in the case of someone like Dazzler or whoever, no underwear - because that would be the least of your worries. Think of how everyone would deal with Mary Jane Watson’s current situation:
“Supermodel Mary Jane Watson was seen stepping out of New York’s hottest nightclub last night with a mystery man - Could it be her husband, except she was never really married, although I seem to remember she was living with some guy who was Spider-Man except he wasn’t and oh crap, never mind.”
And that’s not even getting anywhere near what it’d be like dealing with all these Skrull replacements running around. You’d run some harmless (you thought) item one day about it being funny that Black Bolt was seen at a deli yukking it up with the cutie behind the counter, and next thing you know, there are several million green guys with pointy ears and nobbly chins pointing guns at you in the middle of the night and asking you how you discovered their plan hu-man, before punching things and declaring that nothing can stop them. How would you explain that to your landlord?
* Butler.
Every single day, all butlers hear is this: “Well, I’ve heard that Edwin Jarvis does this for Tony Stark,” or “Selina from the townhouse was telling me that Edwin Jarvis even ironed Wolverine’s underwear,” or “I bet you that Edwin Jarvis wouldn’t refuse to cut my toenails and then eat the clippings.”
Every. Single. Day.
Somewhere in the Marvel Universe, there’s a Butler-only message board online that’s devoted entirely to complaining about how perfect Jarvis is. “Even when he wore an eyepatch, his service was impeccable,” they’d write, “how is anyone supposed to compare to that?” And then they’d add lots of angry emoticons to emphasize the point.
* Cab-driver.
I was initially going to say that this was a New York-only no-no, before I remembered that the Earth in the Marvel Universe only consists of New York, some mid-western place where aliens can crashland, New Mexico where the Hulk can stomp around, and Latveria (which means Geography Teacher may actually be the greatest job in the Marvel Universe, considering. No, wait, they have the United Kingdom for Excalibur, don’t they? Of course, the Marvel UK is only really London, another generic nameless city, Edinburgh and Muir Island, so that doesn’t really count). And who drives cabs in New Mexico or Latveria? So never mind.
(Actually, do they have cabs in Latveria? Do they have currency there? Every time I see Latveria and it’s not the inside of Doctor Doom’s castle while he’s complaining about that accursed Richards, it always seems to be some gypsies riding around in horse-drawn carriages wearing rags. It’s as if Latveria is not only the poorest dictatorship in existence, but also the last one to recognize the importance of steam power, never mind everything that came afterwards. Do you think that’s down to Doom’s doing? He’s probably keeping all of that kind of thing away from his serfs before settling into his special Doomcrib to watch the latest episode of Real Housewives of Orange County on his special hijacked satellite signal. That or This Old House; he loves that Tom Silva.)
(But I continue to digress.)
Cab-drivers in the Marvel Universe have to have the worst insurance you can imagine. Even if their cab doesn’t get picked up and thrown by that day’s badguy fighting Thor, it’ll get ripped apart when it turns out that your passenger was Bruce Banner and he started haggling over the tip. And you just know that every single cab in the greater New York area has a special fund kept to one side to deal with fixing all the dents they get from Spider-Man jumping on top of them to get to the other side of the city “for an emergency.” Cheap-ass.
* Dry-Cleaners.
Everything was fine and dandy until the invention of unstable molecules. The class action suit against Reed Richards is still tied up in legal red-tape, and every single day it doesn’t get dealt with, more and more people start buying cheap bootleg unstable molecule suits from the Marvel Universe Macy’s and never have to deal with coffee spills or sexual stains ever again.
* Professor Xavier’s barber.
And no, not for the reason that you think. Yes, yes, I know that he’s always told you that he’s naturally bald, but seriously, you fell for that? Charles Xavier is possibly the most vain mutant ever to walk, then roll, then walk, then roll again, then walk, then roll, and finally walk once more, upon this planet we call home, and the bald thing? Merely a cover story to hide a hairline that’s been steadily receding since he hit puberty.
This, of course, hit teenaged Charles hard - He was young, and believed that he wanted to be in a rock and roll band, playing lead guitar and “thrashing,” if you will, long hair while kicking out whatever jams required kicking out at the time. Realizing that his dreams were forever stolen from him by faulty DNA, he decided almost immediately to go in entirely the different direction. If he could not be the most potent God of Rawk that had ever been seen, then he would become a cold, bald, intellectual type. They, he thought to himself, always seemed to get the chicks as well.
Thus it was that the boy who would become Professor Charles Xavier started the facade that he managed to keep from everyone who knew him. Every morning, around 6am, before anyone else was awake, Xavier would meet in secret with Javier, his schoolfriend-turned-barber, for a quick once-over with a razor. As the Xavier fortune grew, Xavier put Javier on retainer, and built him a secret apartment on the grounds of the School for Gifted Children, all the time the two of them meeting first thing in the morning for a session and occasional cup of imported coffee.
The problem came the first time that Xavier “died”. Javier, thinking that he could finally move out of Westchester and fulfill his dream of opening a salon in West Hollywood, breathed a sigh of both relief and sadness on hearing the news, and started packing his things… only to have to unpack them moments later when Xavier appeared at his door, and explained that it was an imposter who had died in his place. Same thing happened when Xavier was killed by the Brood, years later; Javier, breathing more relief than sadness, started packing up his belongings only to be interrupted by the newly-cloned Xavier, explaining that he had to stick around after all.
When Xavier was shot in the head at the end of Messiah Complex, Javier didn’t waste any time; knowing that Xavier was still comatose following the shooting, he didn’t even both to pack anything and instead ran from the school and grabbed the first cab to JFK Airport. Sadly, it was a cab that was picked up by former construction worker the Wrecker and thrown at Iron Man, who had just come from a deposition in a lawsuit he was in, suing the latest Daily Bugle gossip writer for making unfair comments about his relationship with Jarvis, the most faithful butler in the world. As the cab flew through the air, coffee went all over Javier’s one and only suit, and just before his sad stress-induced death, he thought to himself that he should have bought an unstable molecule suit.
…As you’d expect, over in the DC Universe, everything is much better. The only problem they have over there is that, every now and then, your job gets outsourced to an alternate Earth in order to cut costs. I hear that the Sinestro Corps is hiring these days, though…
Content © Graeme McMillan, 2008.
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