When I decided to Examine a bad superhero comic, I knew that I had to pick a title written by J. Michael Straczynski. The only superhero comic I read with regularity– out of a perverse nostalgia & the fact that my mom reups a subscription every Christmas– is The Amazing Spider-Man. Having now read six years of J. Michael Straczynski’s run, I knew that this was one man who would not fail me.

As of late, Straczynski has been scripting the new Thor. Issues #1 and #2 are standard material– 44 pages of a bloated origin story that Jack Kirby and Stan Lee would have done in 8 panels. But this is nothing unusual– it’s the state of the genre in 2007. Expanded storytelling with pointless devices like eyebrow arching “humor” and “character development” amidst splash panels, impossible anatomy and nonsense narration.

Thor #3 is when the ol’ Straczynski magic appears. Nothing in the world could have prepared me for this issue, possibly the second most offensive comic book that I have ever read.

Thor, having Willed himself to Power and recreated his city of Asgard, is looking for the other Nordic Gods. He flies to post-Katrina New Orleans. Here, he laments that he was too dead to save the city from Katrina and then wonders why the other Marvel heroes did nothing. He then encounters some residents of New Orleans.

Did no one in editorial think about the tastelessness of a giant ARYAN SUPERMAN going to a disaster area where African-Americans in the Lower Ninth Ward were traumatized to a degree far higher than any other segment of the population? And then have this ARYAN SUPERMAN use his visit as a platform to wonder why super heroes aren’t super? Also, check out that crowd scene on the porch– a groundbreaking twist on the DC/Marvel white guilt complex that usually manifests itself whenever Daredevil beats on street thugs and the gang is de facto multiracial.

After Thor’s sobfest, Iron Man shows up and they fight. They damage the city. Thor goes back to the dude who was yelling at him. The dude turns out to be a Nordic God. Thor takes him home.

Just so everyone’s clear, let me break that down: an Aryan Superman visits a ruined city with a large African-American population that apparently only has three black people in the whole place. He gets sad. Then he and his old buddy wreck the place just a little more. Then he takes an angry white man back to his GIANT, UNINHABITED FLOATING PARADISE.

But there I go again, trying to shoehorn logic onto a story that is nonsensical and worse yet, cheapening and offensive. Not only is the disaster of Katrina trivialized, but by the story’s constant appeals to a literal Deus Ex Machina, this comic obscures the basic truth of Katrina and gets the underlying story wrong. The hurricane itself was not the major problem. The problem was that the storm waters breached subpar levees, sending flood waters into the city.

The people of New Orleans didn’t need a quasi-God to fight the rains. They needed their government to do its job.

I’m not from New Orleans, and I’m not African-American. I wouldn’t dare to presuppose that I know what it means to have been black and been in Katrina. But I was on Manhattan for 9/11 and I saw WTC #7 collapse 500 yards in front of me, and I can assure you that at no point did I think to myself, “Jesus Christ, what this city really needs right now is Doctor Doom to be here crying.”

Mainstream comics have given birth to an oddity– creators embarrassed by the medium in which they work. You can smell it coming off the pages– all these hackneyed attempts at relevance, at realism, at engaging with the real world, at metaphor for greater social ills, and as commentary on the perfidy of the sitting government are symptomatic of individuals consumed with shame. Shame, I suppose, that they have to write about dudes in capes fighting other dudes in capes. Yet for all their apparent superiority, they remain funnybook writers with no new ideas, apparently no clue as how to write plausible characters, and ultimately nothing to say.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I love genre (any genre) work more than I care to admit– there’s something deeply satisfying about a writer who isn’t playing a daft superiority game with his material and is willing to work within its conventions. This is why, for instance, the first X-Men movie was great, or why Grant Morrison’s run on Batman and All-Star Superman have been so satisfying. Morrison likes what he’s doing and it reflects in his work. Not everyone can be a Morrison, obviously, and superheroes are basically exhausted, but at least I understand someone who grew up reading Spider-Man and now wants to write the character, even if they’re only pushing out rehashed fanfic.

It’s hard to imagine Walt Simonson sending Thor to New Orleans, or Spider-Man and a weepy Doctor Doom to Ground Zero. These are the tactics employed only by a writer desperately trying to convince both the readership and himself that there is Meaning in the Work. This is a mind sussing out the deeper resonances of a one dimensional commercial archetype warped beyond its original context. A nostalgia act, a U2 cover band with the faint hope that, in the end, all those nights of “Mysterious Ways” and “Veritgo” will somehow mean something. Even big hairy Alan Moore fell victim with his Killing Joke, but at least he recognized it:

“But at the end of the day, Watchmen was something to do with power, V for Vendetta was about fascism and anarchy, The Killing Joke was just about Batman and the Joker - and Batman and the Joker are not really symbols of anything that are real, in the real world, they’re just two comic book characters.”

Listen, I don’t blame people who feel above this crap: it is embarrassing. But there’s a solution which doesn’t involve trivializing multiple American atrocities.

It’s called getting a job.