Who's Your Favorite Superhero?
My favorite superhero? Easy.
Sort of.
For most of my life, I would have said it’s Spider-Man, no hesitation, no doubt. But now…? At this age and stage of my life, I think of it as the difference between watching baseball and playing baseball. The difference between imagining something and living something. The upper you crave versus the downer you need. Spider-Man is a superhero I enjoy. Certainly one I connected to and emulated in my youth; that was the whole point of him as a character, as a role model. But now? My favorite superhero is Multiple Man.
Jamie Madrox, aka Multiple Man, is a Marvel superhero whose primary power is the creation of duplicates (dupes) of himself, each with their own personality, sentience, often motivations and wants. These can give him the upper hand in a physical altercation by creating an army of himselves to overwhelm and punch bad guys into oblivion. But that’s really the most pedantic use of his powers.
Because once Jamie chooses to or comes into physical contact with one of his dupes, he can reabsorb them into himself, and in doing so he can acquire and attain their memories, their experiences, any gained skills or knowledge they may have acquired in their time away from Jamie prime. Create a self who goes away and learns taekwondo? Once that dupe returns to the host, Jamie knows taekwondo. Have a dupe chat with someone while Jamie prime is out of the room? Once it’s re-absorbed, Jamie (admittedly with some difficulty parsing through what are and aren’t his own memories) has complete knowledge of that conversation. He can literally be in multiple places at the same time, everywhere at once if he needed to be, while maintaining his singularity and identity at the end of the day.
Now, like any superpower, this one doesn’t come without risks or dangers. In order to spawn his dupes, Jamie must receive kinetic force. Sometimes this happens by his own accord, tapping a bootheel or snapping his fingers. Other times it is an unintentional effect: get punched in the face, a dupe appears. And because each dupe has its own personality, he can’t always guarantee that the ones that show up will be benevolent. Send a dupe to talk a citizen off a ledge, and there are equal odds that version of Jamie might be as silver-tongued as the original or a depressed variant that might talk the jumper into a nasty fall … or a malevolent Jamie who could take action into his own deadly hands.
The appeal for this character, to me, has always been his ability to live multiple lives. To travel every path, open any door, become any kind of person, and in doing so, become every kind of person. Myself, as a mortal constrained to the way that time functions for me, I can only live the one life. Every decision I make means a whole host of other realities are forever barred from me. Whether I pursue one career over another, one relationship over another, one lifestyle over another, I will always have wants and questions and curiosities and what ifs. Multiple Man does not share such concerns.
If Jamie Madrox falls in love, he can make a clone of himself to appease that desire. Maybe he, Jamie prime, can’t be with that person, but a version of him can. With the proper communication, it’s a win-win; he gets to be with them, they get to be with him. So it’s not the “real” one? What’s real? The more happiness in the world, the better.
If Jamie Madrox wants to become a lawyer or a priest or a gymnast or a monk or a surgeon or a stand-up comedian or a farmer or a sex worker or an MTA employee or a high school principal or a cult leader or a poet or a baker or a Twitch streamer, those “or”s all become “and”s for him. He can send out his dupes to the ends of the earth, acquire the skills, live the lives, and then re-merge into a greater sum than the whole of his parts. He can do it all. Be it all. While perhaps not immortal, he is effectively a man outside of time.
Me? I’ve got choices to make. I have if/thens. I have to close doors behind me, worse yet, leave some entirely unopened. I cant be in two places at once, let alone twelve, let alone fifty, let alone all of them. I can’t please everyone. Can’t satisfy the desires of myself *and* everyone around me. I feel like most of the time I don’t even have a conception of what my “prime” self is like, just the different versions of me in relation to those I’m around. I’m the me around strangers, the me around my mom, the me around my best friend, the me around my boss, the me around a rude person, the me around a crush, the me around my cat. What am I? What can I possibly be that is true all the time and always? Would being Multiple Man fix that?
Because again, risks and dangers abound. Risks to himself, sure, but more significantly risks to those around him (as is so often the case with great power and what must inevitably come with it). Notwithstanding the potential that one of his dupes’ personalities might be cruel or duplicitous or homicidal, there is the threat of confusion and unintentional deceit around every corner. How many of us have imagined having a twin we could have pretend to be us in order to get out of a difficult test or awkward situation? When these juvenile situations become adulthood circumstances, the “reality” (of this entirely fictional scenario, mind you) is probably not worth the pain.
In one of the most harrowing chapters of the X-Factor series (spoiler alert for a comic run from 2005 to 2013), multiple versions of Jamie drunkenly sleep with multiple female members of his crime fighting team. Which one did the prime sleep with? What are the consequences of having sex with a dupe? It’s unclear, but when one of his teammates becomes pregnant, it is determined that Jamie prime must be the father, and a child is born. And when Jamie first holds the child in his arms, it becomes reabsorbed back into his body. It was a dupe after all. Or the spawn of a dupe. It doesn’t matter. The trauma is done. Jamie’s lack of care over his powers has broken the hearts of those closest to him.
Actions have consequences. And a man with access to a preternatural number of actions must have to sustain an overabundance of consequences. He must create more than his fair share of heartache, of confusion, of fear, of mistrust.
Would it be worth it? To scratch every itch? To walk every path? I don’t know. That’s not a question I feel I can honestly answer right now. But the curiosity, the longing, that’s what draws me more to Multiple Man than to Spider-Man. Spider-Man knows what he’s about, in any variant, in any retelling. He has a compass, a guide, and even when that spirit falters or doubts arise, he is able to right the course and come out the person he is. Me? (And by this extension, Jamie?) What do I stand for? If I’m trying to be everything, how can I focus on anything? Without the ability to split myself into pieces, how can my energy reach every corner that I want it to? And when it can’t, what gives?
What if I’m a dupe?
I’ve lived so much of my life with a deep (if self-diagnosed) protagonist syndrome, framing everything I do as if I’m the main character in the story of life. And I feel that would be an incredibly difficult thing not to do with the powers of Multiple Man. The world revolves around me or I revolve around the world, it makes no difference if I have hands and eyes and ears and perspectives everywhere. It’s selfish, but it’s the only way I’ve ever known to be. I call myself an empath, but maybe what I really do is just see other people as extensions of myself. Is that bad? I don’t know. But it runs the risk of reducing them.. And that’s not good.
Someone once told me “You don’t actually love me. You love yourself and you love the parts of yourself that you see reflected in me.” Well, first of all, joke’s on you, I *don’t* love myself. And second of all…maybe they were right. I do love the parts of myself I see reflected in other people, because then I can actually see those parts. When it’s in me, it’s always shrouded by anxiety, fear, guilt, depression. It’s like the preference of living in a nice house with a shitty view versus living in an ugly house with a beautiful view. I don’t have to look at my own house, so who cares what it looks like? Well…all the rest of the people, I suppose. And there are so many more of them than me, so.
Multiple Man is my favorite superhero because of his complexity and his humanity and the way that my desire to be him runs right up against the razor’s edge of my self-destructive tendencies. When I come to the end of this chapter what new skills will I have learned? What new lives will I have lived? Or will I have just forced someone to carry me for nine months without anything to show for it but painful memories? There is always, I suppose, the potential for both. But this is one scenario where I am hoping to pick only the right path and to stick with it. To not crave being Multiple Man, but to content myself with Jamie. To define my prime. And to live the life I have, not the infinities I can imagine.
