“I’ve been talking a lot about syndromes that I’ve invented. Or not so much invented as noticed and name. I guess if I was inventing syndromes, I’d probably be too busy to write reviews of comics.
Is there such a thing as a good syndrome? One you’d want to have?
Anyway, Battling Boy, for me, suffers from what I like to call How I Met Your Mother Syndrome.
It goes like this.
The show How I Met Your Mother has some good laughs, and its success is almost certainly due to the cast. However, most noticeably, anyone who has watched the show will tell you that Ted, the main character, is the most boring guy on the show.
Sometimes it can work. I’m thinking of Far Bright Star, the Robert Olmstead book, where the most interesting character is probably the brother who is killing his way across the desert in search of our main character, a man who was captured and stranded, left to die in the middle of nowhere. Throughout the book, the stranded man is trying to survive, but he’s also haunted, knowing that somewhere out of frame his brother is making this ruthless search. He’s sort of cringing as he imagines what his brother might be doing.
But in HIMYM, it doesn’t work for me. The difference, as I see it, is that I can spend a couple hundred pages with the less action-oriented character. But 8 seasons of TV? That’s too much.
Same thing happens on the show New Girl. The one guy, I can’t remember his name, but he’s the guy who I would call the “main” guy as he’s the only real romantic interest for Zooey Howeverthefuckyouspellhername. And that guy? Most boring of the guys.
Battling Boy, to me, was the least interesting character of the others presented. I was more interested in hearing about his father. Or about the city’s old hero.
Okay, he’s not the LEAST interesting character. I’m sure there was a janitor or something in the background. A guy who worked at a factory or something.
This CAN change over the course of a story. Going back to sitcoms, the Simpsons is a great example. Early episodes, Bart Simpson was clearly the star of that show. And then, at some point Homer Simpson became the character with all the good lines, the funniest actions, and when it was a Homer-centric episode, nobody was pissed off.
For me, Battling Boy didn’t quite get there. The story of a superhero who is sort of just starting out and learning about his powers and the larger world? It can work. It has worked. But because it’s worked so many times before, I just need more in order to fall in love with the story and stick with it long enough for Battling Boy to take up the role of a character I care for.”