Via a recent article in The American Prospect, a discussion on the political values of superhero comics. Julian Sanchez notes that, depsite the overtly liberal themes of recent comic series like Marvel's Civil War, there are some conservative subtexts that are inescapable when dealing with super powered heroes and villains.
The "Civil War" storyline may provide the clearest illustration of this. The Superhero Registration Act is a straightforward analogue of the USA PATRIOT Act; the rhetoric of its opponents could have been cribbed from an ACLU brief. But under scrutiny, their civil libertarian arguments turn out to hold very little water in the fictional context. The "liberty" the act infringes is the right of well-meaning masked vigilantes, many wielding incredible destructive power, to operate unaccountably, outside the law -- a right no sane society recognizes. In one uneasy scene, an anti-registration hero points out that the law would subject heroes to lawsuits filed by those they apprehend. In another, registered hero Wonder Man is forced to wait several whole minutes for approval before barging into a warehouse full of armed spies from Atlantis. Protests about the law's threat to privacy ring a bit hollow coming from heroes accustomed to breaking into buildings, reading minds, or peering through walls without bothering to obtain search warrants. Captain America bristles at the thought of "Washington … telling us who the supervillains are," but his insistence that heroes must be "above" politics amounts to the claim that messy democratic deliberation can only hamper the good guys' efforts to protect America. The putative dissident suddenly sounds suspiciously like Director of National Intelligence Mitch McConnell defending warrantless spying.
The problem of modern terrorism -- how to deal with small groups of individuals who can wreak the kind of destruction that once required an army -- is familiar territory for comics, as is the idea that heroes often inadvertently create their own worst enemies. Yet attempts to directly address the problem of blowback from military action exhibit the same sort of ambiguity. In the second volume of Marvel's Ultimates (2004–2007) -- a reimagined version of the classic Avengers superteam -- the heroes are being used to carry out covert military missions abroad. Their foreign interventions prompt governments hostile to the U.S. to send their own superteam ("persons of mass destruction" wryly dubbed "The Liberators") to invade Washington. After the inevitable victory, The Ultimates decide they must operate independently of the U.S. government, but the lesson remains that "the world needs looking after," presumably by the same mostly American heroes.
Of course, despite some lip service to Allen Moore's The Watchmen, Sanchez doesn't examine the more subversive takes on Superhero comics, which not only reject the neo-Con strongman argument, but also the softer liberal arguments about power and responsibility balanced with freedom.
The most overt example of this is Moore's V for Vendetta which is explicitly anarchist and pro-terrorist,
glorifying Guy Fawkes as an embodiment of freedom over against institutional tyranny. V for Vendetta was Moore's reaction to Thatcherite Great Britian, and the movie adaptation was a clear response to the Bush/Blaire "War on Terror"/War on Truth. But a terrorist hero is a tough sell in a post-9/11 world, however intriguing the dramtic premise might be.
On the other hand, John Ridley's The American Way takes a different approach, imagining a group of costumed super heroes being co-opted by the American government in order to promote the "Big Lie" of an genuinely free America. Things come to a head
over the issue of Civil Rights, when the Southern branch of the group breaks off in order to support segregation. (Ridley, by the way, is also responsible for the absolutely hilarious "Undercover Brother."
What these comics share is a surface acceptance of certain super hero comic tropes, but rather than falling into the trap of framing conservative arguments in the trappings of liberal rhetoric, they call the rhetoric itself into question. The super heroes, far from being morally superior, are in material ways morally inferior, but without the contraints necessary on their power to present its abuse.
This, of course, is precisely what Sanchez is objecting to in series like Civil War. Why then ignore the more boldly subversive attempts to read politics into the genre, like Ridley's and Moore's.
Honestly? Because I had a limited word count. My original draft had several paragraphs examining "critique books" like Watchmen, The Boys, Squadron Supreme, Miracleman, the early part of Morrison's run on The Authority, etc. etc. The editorial judgment call there, and I think this was correct, was that in a few thousand words, it wasn't going to be possible to effectively lay out the main idea vis a vis the mainstream books and also do any kind of meaningful discussion of the critique books in a way that would be intelligible to a non-comics audience. But hey, if someone wants to commission a follow-up piece, it's half written.
Posted by: Julian Sanchez | February 20, 2008 at 11:15 AM
Fair enough. I don't want you to get the idea I didn't like the article, because I did. I just thought that the other angle was worth addressing. Heres' hoping someone commissions that follow up from you!
Posted by: Scott Paeth | February 20, 2008 at 11:18 AM