In Marvel the genius hero (who’s been acting the fool) rarely gets any kind of comeuppance for said douchebaggery (e.g. current Hank McCoy). Do you think this more a reflection of the past decade of TV or does it go all the way back to Stan & Jack?

I’m not sure it’s even the past decade of TV as such; I think it’s something from a wider cultural perspective that stems from populist fear of intellectualism. It’s not just that geniuses are douchebags who get away with it, but that all geniuses are somehow douchebags, as if being smart somehow automatically negates empathy or emotions.

The lack of comeuppance is debatable; you could say that the geniuses being douchebags of recent years led to the destruction of the multiverse in Avengers, after all. But moral comeuppance? Yeah, they tend to avoid that, in part because there’s currency in creating stories where the game is always rigged against “us.”