I really love Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Not least of all for his introduction to that book, the seductively titled “When Ideas Have Sex”. Ridley himself does a really good of explaining the introduction in his 2010 TEDtalk. But the broad strokes of the argument goes something like this.

Sex is really great (well, yeah) for a species, since it allows for an individual draw on the genetic anomalies as such as dominant genetic tradition. Those rare few who seemed to have a natural immunity to HIV (for real, hit Google for this one), need not be isolated and eventually rendered extinct. Instead their genetic material can form part of the greater human genome.

Then Ridley poses a shocking question. One of those questions that are obvious, or should be obvious, but you really have no idea why you’ve never asked it before. Ridley’s question is simply, how is it human beings came to be so successful a species? How successful, you may well ask if you failed to notice homo sapiens sapiens’ domination of the biosphere. Well, as successful as this. Human beings are the only species, the only species…to demonstrate an increase in prosperity even as there’s an increase in population size.

So the question for Ridley is this: is sex a useful metaphor for understanding cultural growth and success? And if so, what’s the cultural analog for sex? Ridley reckons it’s exchange. Because exchange always renders specialization. And specialization always signals the production of technological complexity well beyond the scope of individual capacities.

“Put my clarinet beneath your bed till I get back in town…”, Tom Waits, ‘Tango Till They’re Sore’

I’m a couple of hours from now, I’ll have some time in hand and I’ll reread Hell & Back, a Sin City love story. Specifically I’ll want to read Wallace’s trip that happens around chapter 6 (chapter 7?) because I believe very strong that this is the very culmination of a project that Frank Miller earlier in his Sin City series. Not in the original series of Sin City yarns, those very first episodes that were published in Dark Horse Presents. But a project begun in Family Values, a project about independence, and about freedom.

The freedom here isn’t necessarily the usual kind of freedom we imagine from this period in comics history. Very shortly after Miller penned those very first Sin Cities, the episodes that would eventually be collected into the sleek, luscious volume, the Hard Goodbye, top tier Marvel artists would break out on their own to establish Image Comics. Titles like Spawn, WildC.A.T.s, Youngblood and later on Witchblade and the Darkness would leverage significant commercial success. It seemed just as we were beginning to see the first generation of internet millionaires (“I remember when a million was a million”, Tom Waits croons out on his triple disc album Orphans), we would also begin to see comics millionaires. That was the very first time the idea seemed a plausible one, an achievable one.

But the dream of that quickly died.

Those searching for the more traditional Marvel Black Widow in The Avengers will be disappointed. This film, with the help of Scarlett Johansson, beats the imperturbable superhero out of Natasha Romanoff. But something entirely new, possibly better takes its place.

The protagonist that appears in countless of Marvel pages, Natasha, traditionally throws away her sentiment and sticks to accomplishing her mission. A cold, hard killer, in a cruel world. Between the pages of The Black Widow: Deadly Origins Natasha promises to avenge the death of her keeper, Ivan who is murdered in a failed mission. As an orphan in Soviet Russia (trained to be a spy since age ten) she learned to mentally stick to every mission with grace, control and poise.In The Secret Avengers #20, Natasha gains valuable information and resources from her allies and enemies alike without giving away the purpose of her mission.

Some of the obvious difficulty is for Gen-X comics fans is coming to terms with the not only the sense of self-exclusion (Gen-Xers saw firsthand comics’ move from newsstands and notionally still being a mass medium, to the ethereal boutique culture of comicbook stores), but also the sense of postmodern reinterpretation of beloved icons.

Tim Burton’s Batman coming on the heels of Frank Miller’s Batman (which graced the pages of The Dark Knight Returns) was separated in time by Mike Barr’s Batman (the Batman of Year Two and Full Circle and the like) and Jim Starlin’s Batman which saw the murder of Robin in A Death in the Family. These very powerful, very different visions of the Batman served only to emphasize one idea—that the Batman himself was malleable and benefited from the artistic visions of various writers, as much as from the diverse visualizations of artists.

John Byrne’s reboot of Superman would only serve to underline this point. Following on from the Crisis on Infinite Earths megaevent of 1985, Superman offered a more coherent Superman than the various Batman depictions, but nevertheless offered Superman scarcely recognizable in comparison with the Superman that culminated in the Alan Moore story, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?. Between 1986 and 2000 Gen-X and fans of other generations saw Superman grow his hair, unmask to Lois Lane and eventually marry her (deleting the Lois-Clark-Superman love triangle), we saw Superman kill (just preceding the events of Exile in Space), we saw Superman die (the suspiciously usefully titled, Death of Superman), and we saw Superman’s archnemesis Lex Luthor elected to the White House (President Lex), and eventually push Superman from the pages of Action (in Paul Cornell’s “The Black Ring” of 2010).

A little while ago, I began to appreciate Jeff Lemire’s entirely new take on Animal Man. The traditional “freedom” narrative is this. Get on the two-lane and go. Greil Marcus was formative for me in this, absolutely necessary reading. It was his reading that saw that inner struggle with freedom in Bob Dylan, and read that struggle as choice having a geography. Either you go Back East where it’s safe and you know how things work. Or. Or you Head West, and make a stand in a new world, and a new kind of living.