DR. OCTAVIUS AND THE HOUSE OF EMPATHY - Greg Rapier

If you are a fan of the Los Angeles Lakers, I probably don’t like you. It’s just how I’m wired. As a fan of a prodigiously bad team—the Sacramento Kings, who haven’t sniffed the playoffs in an NBA record 16 years—I can’t stand the aura around that team in LA. Bandwagoners? Welcome. Stars? Always. Entitled? Youbetcha. 

I used to work the concession stand at Kings games to raise money for my church’s youth group events, and whenever the team played the Lakers, our tips doubled. Those obnoxious, often-drunk, purple-and-gold-wearing (insert your favorite insult) exhibited more generosity than the home team. I hated it.

In the early 2000s, the Kings had a real chance at winning it all. Only problem was the Kobe-and-Shaq Lakers. During one playoff series, the Lakers’ coach Phil Jackson described the city as a Cow Town with semi-civilized fans. Our response? Bring cowbells by the busload and ring them directly into his ears. That’ll show him. 

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Sports taught me about good and evil. Then movies like Star Wars. These days, comics. These big broad stories tell sweeping narratives everyone can get behind. The world is made of heroes and villains, light and dark, good and bad, and it’s up to us to choose on which side we belong. 

These metanarratives shape us and give us direction. They help us frame our futures, presents, and pasts. Lead us into history. They also damage us as people. Turn us against one another. Gamify things like politics. Map simple narratives onto complex issues. When we start seeing one another as enemies, we struggle to see each other as people. Three-dimensional human beings with complex pasts, passions, and struggles become flattened into caricatures lacking any real depth. Republicans become evil. Democrats Godless. And Lakers fans? The Bible says pretty clearly they are the enemy.

This world has an empathy problem. We villainized and cartoonified our neighbors, stripped them of their dignity, dimensionality, and humanity. We’ve turned real-life people into the most basic of villains.

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Thirty’s a weird age to pick up your first comic. Feels like the sad midlife crisis of someone who dies of a heart attack at sixty because, I don’t know, they spent too much time reading comics. More than that, it feels childish. But ten months into a global pandemic with a newborn baby at home and many, many sleepless nights ahead of me, I figured I could use a new hobby—something light and digestible, consumable even through a haze.

Spider-Man has this nemesis named Dr. Otto Octavius. He’s a brilliant scientist slash narcissistic psychopath with mechanized tentacles. You’ve probably heard of him. He appears in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 and the recent No Way Home movie. He has this run of comics where he straight-up murders Spider-Man. Then, through a conceit that only makes sense in the comics, he inhabits Peter Parker’s body and mimics his life. He sleeps in Peter’s bed, dates Peter’s girl, even dons Peter’s suit. Then, he discovers something about Peter. All these years, Spider-Man has been pulling his punches—the guy he just murdered never wanted him dead. In fact, Spider-Man actively fought to keep him alive. The revelation breaks him. So he vows to take up the mantle and become a ‘Superior Spider-Man.’

The Superior Spider-Man ran 33 issues from 2013-2014 and cataloged Doc Ock’s struggle to atone for his sins and find something like redemption. His willingness to stretch morality makes The Superior Spider-Man more effective at eliminating crime but also gives him a nastier edge. The Superior Spider-Man doesn’t pull punches, for example. 

Does this version of Spider-Man ever become an unabashed hero? Not fully. But as readers spend the better part of two years inside Doc Ock’s headspace, learning his fears, his struggles, and the deepest longings of his heart, something else happens. He stops being a villain.

He becomes human.

Comics do this all the time. Magneto—the bad guy in the X-Men movies—just completed an arc in the X-Red comics where he quite literally sacrifices his life to save the earth. Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther works so well because the villain Killmonger dies teaching the titular hero the importance of sharing. These stories—the best ones—maintain their footing in the world of good and evil, but they sidestep reductive answers for something more nuanced, human, and true.

This happens outside of comics too. My son—now two years old—watches The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse most mornings. Pete—the traditional villain in the old Disney cartoons—plays an antagonistic role in the show. But instead of villainizing Pete, Mickey and the gang seek to understand him, and by the end of most episodes, he’s forgiven and brought into the fold as part of the larger team. Encanto does this as well. Another movie my two-year-old likes. It has no traditional villain and gives each character a vital role and purpose no matter their level of giftedness. Even characters as shunned as Bruno are treated with dignity and respect.

            What does it say about our culture that preschool-level entertainment depicts the world with more dimensionality and nuance than most adults’ streaming watch lists and Facebook feeds? Or that the villains in (childish) comics maintain more humanity than people we call enemies in real life? Most parents teach their kids to empathize, and our children’s media does the same. So, what’s changed? At which age do we squeeze all the empathy from our media diets? And why? Since when did the term adult become synonymous with unempathetic? 

Perhaps we can learn to be kids again. And perhaps cartoons and comics can help us. The best of these know the real world isn’t shaded in black and white and that real people aren’t flattened caricatures, but complex, often contradictory beings, each a unique cocktail of hopes, fears, vices, loves, and regrets. They know that Laker fans sometimes tip really well. And that Kings fans are insufferable when given a cowbell. They know villains can be lovely, and sometimes lovely people can be downright awful.

My son reminds me of this daily. He knows it in his bones. At some point, I suppose I forgot it, same as most of us. But what was learned can be learned again. One page, one panel, one cartoon at a time.

Greg Rapier's work has appeared or is forthcoming at places like Dream Pop, The Nervous Breakdown, Five on the Fifth, and Fathom. He has degrees in English and film and is working on his doctorate in creative writing and public theology (Yeah, that’s a thing).