Netflix's new series Marvel's Jessica Jones, one of the more binge-able new shows of the year, isn't a marquee property like The Avengers that can get even the non-comics-inclined amped up months in advance. Before its premiere, not many people had ever heard of the main character, a minor player in the Marvel Universe with a notably unspectacular career as a superhero. In its relatively small-scale way, though, it's helping to bring a new energy to the whole superhero genre, which is starting to flag after a blockbuster decade.

Ever since Christopher Nolan's Batman series, a grim and gritty sensibility has ruled the superhero movie genre the way it did in comic books after Frank Miller's 1986 reimagining of a more troubled and violent Batman in The Dark Knight Returns. On the surface, Jessica Jones seems to fit right in with the trend. The lead protagonist, played by Krysten Ritter (you probably best know her as Jesse Pinkman's ill-fated girlfriend on Breaking Bad), has a bad attitude, a drinking problem, and a closet full of hoodies and Travis Bickle-style army jackets. The line between "good" vigilantism and violent retribution is crossed repeatedly. Every character eventually reveals themselves to be at least a little fucked up in the head.

Like the Nextflix adaptation of Daredevil, Jessica Jones takes a more personal tack than most comics adaptations, and imagines what it would be like if an actual real-life human tried to be a superhero. The show doesn't question comic book logic–some people just have super-strength and bulletproof skin and that's that–but it does tend to ask some interesting questions of the way comic book universes work. When superhero teams have their big swashbuckling, city-flattening battles, what happens to the civilians who are left to pick up the pieces? What would happen to your head if your mind really was hijacked by a bad person, like in one of the oldest and most widely used tropes in comics history?

The answer to both questions is a lot of PTSD. Unlike the vast majority of superheroes who've been mind-controlled by villains over the decades, Jessica Jones doesn't just brush it off. The violation of it echoes through her head loud enough to drown out nearly everything else in her world.

Jones fights as many emotional battles as hand-to-hand ones, but the show never sinks to the level of melodrama. She handles having superpowers like the average person might, which is to say: not so great. It's easy to care about Jessica Jones as much as the other characters on the show care for her. You want her to defeat her nemesis and clear the name of another woman whose life he destroyed because it makes for a great story, but also because you want her to get some closure on the horrible things she's gone through. The show has drawn widespread praise for its frankly adult treatment of the superhero genre, with plenty of drinking, swearing, and sex, but its secret ingredient is what's been drawing kids to comics from the start: hope.

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