Marvel Comics has built their heroes differently than their distinguished competition. This made a huge difference in the Silver Age, their more realistic characters appealing to readers in ways that DC heroes didn’t. Since then, the comic industry has changed, with Marvel-style characters becoming the standard at every publisher. There’s a complexity to their characters and this has led to them to dark places. Over the years, this has caused a lot of problems with some of the greatest heroes in the House of Ideas’ history. Some of these characters have become defined by the problems that the publisher has heaped on them, which isn’t the best thing in the world.
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Right now, there are heroes that most Marvel fans can look at and tell something is wrong with them. However, problems aren’t the end of the world; they can be fixed. These seven Marvel heroes have a lot of problems, but they can be repaired.
7) Reed Richards
Reed Richards is an amazing scientist and inventor, and has proven himself as a hero over the decades. However, Reed has been a problem for a long time. The 21st century have seen him vacillate between being old school hero Reed and pragmatic half-a-villain Reed, sometimes being devoted to his family and other times to saving the universe at all costs. It can be hard to make sense of the character sometimes, but all they would have to do to explain it is to make him autistic. Now, this isn’t some kind of all-new idea; people on the Internet have been asking for this for a while. Autistic Reed would make sense of the character’s different conceptions and would honestly make for pretty good mental health representation if done right. All of this is before we get to Stan Lee’s extremely misogynistic writing of the hero.
6) Professor X
Kitty Pryde once said, “Professor X is a jerk!” and it feels like writers in the 21st century have decided that is his canon portrayal. Xavier is all about the mutant race and his dream, but he’s no saint. He’s willing to do terrible things to make sure his people survive, including messing with the minds of his students and loved ones. At this point, the only way to fix the character is to either go all out and make him a complete villain or have him show up, apologize to everyone and go back to being the old Charles Xavier that fans had followed for decades. He’s such a hard character to like nowadays and something needs to be done about it.
5) Beast
Beast is in a weird place right now. There are two versions of the character – a clone with his memories up to his days in the Avengers and the current, evil Hank McCoy. While this can seem like the best of both worlds – an evil Beast and a good one – a lot of fans hate this whole thing. There’s honestly an easy way to fix this – just reveal that he’s possessed by Sublime. The current Beast has the white fur of the Sublime-possessed Beast from the end of Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men. It can explain away his worst actions and give us back the Hank we all know and love.
4) Hank Pym
Hank Pym was one of Silver Age’s Marvel early stars, but nowadays, there’s only two things he’s really known for – making Ultron and hitting the Wasp. Creators have been trying for years to change readers’ minds about the character and it’s never worked. The only way to fix Hank is to do something that Marvel will not do – make him a major character and let him save the day in an event comic. Give him some positive feats that the largest number of fans will see. Push him as the great hero he can be and give readers something else to think about when they think of him.
3) Cyclops
Cyclops has a reputation for being straight-laced and boring, but there’s one thing that he did in his life that doesn’t fit that – leaving his wife Madelyne and son Nathan to form X-Factor. Marvel has recently put out a What If… comic showing him staying with his family and destroying the Earth to save it. Basically, Marvel said him being a bad husband was actually a good thing. This was a massive mistake because it’s the opposite of what they should have done – just have him own up to being a terrible person. This is just one example of Scott being the worst and yet he never owns up to it. It’s about time that Marvel leaned into that. It would make him a more interesting character.
2) Spider-Man
Spider-Man fans online are some of the most miserable people you’ll ever encounter (seriously don’t go to the Spider-Man subreddit; it’s not a pleasant place), and they have been since “One More Day” dropped 19 years ago. We’ve gone far past where we could just undo that story and bring back the Peter/MJ marriage. At this point, the only way to really save Spider-Man is for Marvel editorial to back off keeping the character static and let creators allow him to grow. His biggest problem is that he’s stuck in the same place as a person because the editors think that people don’t want happy Spider-Man… despite happy married Spider-Man being the bestselling iteration of the character. Fans want Spidey to grow and change; Marvel needs to let him.
1) Starfox
There’s really no nice way to say this, but Starfox sexually assaults people and Marvel has been okay with it for decades. The closest the publisher has ever gotten to talking about it was an issue of She-Hulk, where they ended up sleeping together at the end and she didn’t know if she had actually given consent or he had used his powers. Starfox is one of the most problematic characters ever and the only way to fix it is to take him to task for what he’s been doing to the women of the Marvel Universe. The fact that Marvel Studios was just going to put him into the MCU will always be sort of mind-boggling and honestly would have been disaster if anyone looked into the character’s history and Marvel’s history of making light of his rapey tendencies.
How would you fix Marvel’s most problematic heroes? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
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