Misery Loves Company

Or: "Someone's Having A Bad Day..."

Super-heroes have at times demonstrated they're like us in at least one respect:

They have their good days, and definitely their bad days.

In Sue's case, it was just a matter of not being able to find anyone in the city to help out the FF when the team was in a jam:

But what about the more personal failures that really hit home with a hero? They do tend to make for good splash pages--even if they're catching our heroes at their lowest moments.



Naturally, when you think of a hero with personal failures, somebody who ranks right up there is Spider-Man, who has loads of them:

Good grief, it's like a misery flowchart.

Tony Stark is probably a guy who can deal with flowcharts in his sleep (and probably does). Personal crises? Those have to be dealt with in the waking hours, just like for the rest of his peers:

Here he's learned that his former love, Marianne Rodgers, has gone off the deep end, and he blames himself for not being more responsive to her feelings:

Which works out well for us, because we get another full-page display of our hero channelling his grief, this time right into his desk:

And what of Tony's moral opposite, Captain America? Cap's usually so optimistic, you wouldn't think he'd spend quality time wallowing in his personal failures (or have that many to speak of). In his early days with the Avengers, though, he was constantly down in the dumps and blaming himself for the death of his former partner, Bucky. But there came a time when he couldn't even stand his own identity:

Since we've covered Cap and Iron Man, we might as well hit Thor while we're at it. But what kind of a bad day can a god be having? It must be pretty bad, when it gets to the point of one god crying out to another:

It'll be a cold day in Asgard when Thor has a desk to vent his frustration on, but will a high-rise building ledge do?

Somehow I don't think those umbrellas were made to withstand the impact of falling concrete, so we'd better quickly shift our focus from a god's frustration (and likely a lot of new patients for the nearest ER) to that of an alien--the Silver Surfer, who orbits our planet and whose bad days seem to all begin the same way:

The Silver Surfer--otherwise known as The Broken Record.

Finally, we come to someone a bit more human, but just as vulnerable to failure--Scott Summers, who, as Cyclops, faces a dark day indeed: the first death of a fellow X-Man, a death that happened on his watch.

And while there's no desk or building ledge at hand, there's a swath of woods just waiting to be demolished:

What do you say that, every once in awhile, let's at least have someone's bad day mixed in with a little comic relief.

That won't help the Frightful Four with their bad day, but you get the idea.