Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Our Trouble with Trouble
by Travis Hedge Coke
What makes us so nervous about Trouble? A young adult romance comic by written by Mark Millar, penciled and inked by Terry and Rachel Dodson, Trouble is and is not the story of Peter Parker, our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, being conceived and born. Trouble serialized when Mark Millar was a megastar of comics, the Dodson’s quite beloved, between the blockbuster Spider-Man movie directed by Sam Raimi and it’s first sequel, and during a time when every new comic Marvel published was being designed for a trade paperback collection. Despite all this, the initial collection was canceled and no rerelease or collection came for seven years.
I like Trouble. It is a solid coming of age romance melodrama.
At the time and today, it feels like nobody likes Trouble.
From the moment the first cover images were solicited, there was backlash. There is often backlash, though. New comics frequently receive off the cuff or little-informed criticism based on a cover, a solicit blurb, a misinterpreted interview, an artist putting their foot in their mouth, questionable plot; anything can set someone off. By 2011, though, the vibe on Trouble had little changed. The photo covers brought ire immediately, declared pornographic, despite largely being headshots of (presumably) clothed representations of the teenaged cast, doing things like, having a head, standing, or – at worst – looking over the tops of sunglasses.
It is in 2011 that Corey Blake said the comic had “Pedobear written all over it,” in an article he headlined, Mark Millar’s Trouble: Pedophilia Marvel Style.
I am not a Mark Millar fan. He wrote or cowrote what is sometimes my favorite single issue JLA story, cowrote a couple things with Grant Morrison I like, and his Superman can be fun. 1984 interests me for how mechanical it is, but makes those mechanisms work. He broke my heart with The Authority and later, in the same run, annoyed me enough I started to note to avoid his work if I have to pay for it.
During the Covid pandemic’s first year, I would up in the hospital doing a reread for an article, and my doctor wrote out a note that I should not be required for work purposes to read Millar comics. The article was not entirely negative and its title would have emphasized what i think is the strongest thing about The Ultimates and Ultimate Avengers (I would have called it, The Ultimates: A Porn Parody).
I think The Ulimates is pornographic. You redo “character flies into someone’s ear to irritate them” with “they flash their quart inch breasts at them,” you are doing so to elicit a crass sexual response. And, that is alright.
Trouble is no pornography, though. There is no salacious sexualization or eroticization in Trouble. Or, no more than regular for a commercial comic.
Trouble is less eroticized than any single 1990s issue of X-Men or Uncanny X-Men.
These criticisms against Trouble amount to, “[T]eachers are giving them tampons instead of pads and making that decision for them. We’re going to have a whole generation of women that are worn out before they even give birth. Save something for marriage. Just one thing.” To Don’t Say Gay bills and prohibiting discussion of menstruation in public schools.
In Trouble, “Some years ago,” four teenagers get summer jobs in the Hamptons and find romance and melodrama. As you do when you are a teenager a little bit away from supervision.
Being the early 00s and set vague decades before that, there are jokes about Vietnam, about one of the two brothers being secretly gay, the two girls swipe booze and assure their parents they will regularly attend church. Condoms exist, but there is a mystique. Mark Millar is a billboard model in shorts, and the lettering uses capital and lowercase, a fashion at Marvel for a brief time.
There is a joke about girls who have penises in the first few pages, though they call them, “john thomases.”
And, that is as racy as it gets. Homosexuals and trans women exist. Some people have john thomases. Pregnancy exists.
We are not even pushing up against VC Andrews here or the Beatrice Sparks fraudulence, Go Ask Alice.
The worst drugs are common hooch and chocolate candy. The triumphant love scene is close ups of kisses.
Christianity, middle road conservative tv broadcast standards, and the moral causality of common churching lay over the entire enterprise like a warm family blanket your grandma made. After school special. Public information film. A very special episode of Spider-Man’s parents.
It is incredibly sweet. Trouble takes optimism and naivety and spins them around enough to get everyone dizzy and worried about hitting the floor. It is not pro teenagers acting out or willfully ignoring they might. Characters react to pregnancy as if it is a causal curse for not only having sex but having sex before marriage, too young, and with someone else’s sweetheart, but there is no evidence this is anything other than their immature speculation that these are related. It relays real fears genuinely held by teenagers, adults, and other people.
The art and writing come together to present smart, deft characterizations of relatable, believable people. It might be the deftest and subtlest that either Millar or the Dodsons have done anywhere. Each person – May, Mary, Richard – burst with characterization and individuality. Side characters and walk ons all feel like people. They have lives when they are not in a scene. You can tell.
May, alone, considering if she should have an abortion, runs through the facts and feels with an imaginary devil and angel on either shoulder, while facts from pamphlets she has been reading intercede. “[I]t’s facial features are forming and its eyes have retinas and lenses now.” That a seven week old fetus may be “forming” facial features is a matter of technicality, and a seven week old human fetus is about ten millimeters tall, or less than half an inch. The sort of factoid a medical pamphlet would drop in, however, and which would affect a character with May’s background.
Along with comics like Sentinel and X-Men: Misfits, Trouble presaged the boom DC Comics would have with its young adult market graphic novels, but unlike most of those, superheroes enter not at all, but in implication. Easy to read Trouble without thinking of Spider-Man, especially if the mix of names do not set of nerdish flags. I could not even say, surely, if any of the movies have given Spider-Man’s supposed birth parents names.
It is not a secret origin of Spider-Man, in a way that matters. It is an illumination on what maybe made Peter Parker who he is, but it is May and Mary and Ben and Richard who matter. This is May Parker. The kind of person she is. Who she was, who she will be.