Who's Your Daddy?

While there is something satisfying about calling violent criminals "mutants" during a time when Marvel's X-Men were in their ascendency, the Mutants are not simply a nod in the direction of the Marvel/DC rivalry.  When ordinary denizens of the Marvel universe hate and fear the X-Men,  their prejudice is unfounded; Miller's Mutants, though not literally the result of genetic drift, embody an older generation's fears of an incomprehensible, horrifying youth that have come to take their place.  By the 1980s, decades of moral panic about teenagers had intensified to such an extent that the 1950s depictions of "juvenile delinquents" looked tame, if not positively adorable.  In a decade scarred by the Reagan Era War on Drugs, the institution of mandated sentencing, fear-mongering over the crack epidemic and "crack babies," and a highly racialized media frenzy about violent, drug-related street crime, urban youth of color were framed as prone to violence, a problem allegedly exacerbated by the absence of father figures in their lives.

If anything, Miller's portrayal of violent youth gangs is not just reflective of the anxieties of his times, but borderline prophetic:  three years after Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was published, the vicious gang rape of a white woman in New York's Central Park would take the discourse of racialized crime to frightening new heights.  The five Black and Latino teens wrongfully convicted of the crime were said to have been engaging in an activity called "wilding", which consisted of random acts of violence against total strangers. Wilding (which turned not not to be a real phenomenon) was to be a key element in the rising moral panic over urban crime.

The primary antagonist in Book Two is ostensibly the adult leader of the Mutants, but the main focus of the story is on the children and teens who follow him.  "The Dark Knight Triumphant" is a mini-novel of, if not education, than mis-education by the media, failing social institutions, and deadbeat parents.  As is often the case in this graphic novel, the chapter approaches the primary moral questions by alternating conflicting examples: bad teens inspired by the Mutant Leader and the incipient heroism of the new, self-declared Robin. Carrie Kelly was introduced in the previous installment, in which Batman saves her from a Mutant attack. Now, while the news announcer reports on an anti-Batman petition "citing him as a harmful influence on the children of Gotham," Carrie puts on her new Robin costume for the first time. While the announcer reports that Jim Gordon has just shot and killed a 17-year-old Mutant who had attacked him in the chapter's first pages, Carrie makes her way out the window and onto the ledge.  Her parents, never actually seen on panel, lament what they see as another in a long line of instances of police brutality.  They are ex-hippies who watch TV and reminisce about Woodstock and Chicago, only occasionally remembering that they have a child.  When Carrie nearly dies in her attempt to climb down the building, who is to blame? Her stoned, irresponsible parents? Batman, for inspiring her? Like all the teens in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, she is not just choosing her own adventure; she is choosing her own father figure, and the pickings are slim.

In one of the many television broadcasts punctuating the chapter, Harvey Dent's psychiatrist, Dr. Bartholomew Wolper, explains that Batman is himself responsible for all the crimes he fights, thanks to his anti-social actions being popularized by the media.  Wolper (who, among other things, is an obvious parody of anti-comics crusader Dr. Frederic Wertham), is a proponent of the outdated "media effects" theory, which presumes passivity and vulnerability on the part of the media consumer:

Just as Harvey Dent--who's recovering steadily, thanks for asking--assumed the role of ideological doppelganger to the Batman, so a whole new generation, confused and angry...

--will be bent to the matrix of Batman's pathological self-delusion. Batman is, in this context--and pardon the term--a social disease...

Like Wertham, even as he draws spurious conclusions, Wolper is nevertheless on to something. His interpretation of Harvey Dent, while not exhaustive, is far from incompatible to Batman's own assessment of their relationship ("A reflection, Harvey"), while Batman: The Dark Knight Returns clearly supports the premise that Batman is having an influence, pernicious or otherwise. Yet, here, too, the argument is stacked in Batman's favor.  The Mutants are not just needlessly violent predators; their crimes show them to be nihilists whose worldview leaves no room for the future. One Mutant randomly kills a subway rider by planting a bomb in her purse after feigning to steal; the Mutant responsible is not a character at all, but simply a function, while the woman, Margaret Corcoran, gets an entire page of narration putting the reader in her head. She is an overworked, impoverished mother who has just found ten dollars that she intends to use for her son's art supplies rather than medication for her own pain.  Now her children are orphans. In another scene, a group of Mutants is holding a baby for ransom; one holds a gun to the children's head telling Batman "I'll kill the kid--/believe me, man, I will--" before Batman takes him down.  Batman may be fighting the youth of Gotham, but it is to protect an even younger, more innocent generation.

The chapter ends with a bloody, gruesome battle between Batman and the Mutant leader in a mud pit, complete with the over-the-top violence for which Miller has become famous:

Batman: You don't ...get it, boy...

This isn't a mudhole...

It's an operating table.

And I'm the surgeon.

[He breaks the mutant leader's leg]

Caption: Something tells me to stop with the leg.

I don't listen to it.

It's a case of terribly overwrought dialogue that would be perfectly at home in a B-grade action movie, but the metaphor clarifies Batman's purpose: his physical fight stands in for his attempt to cure the Gotham body politic.  In fighting the Mutant leader, Batman is showing his impressionable young (Mutant) audience who is the better father figure, and who is most deserving of emulation.  He has already won over young Carrie without even trying, and in any case, as a law-abiding teen (and a girl, to boot), she was never part of the demographic most linked with the panic over urban youth crime.  The Mutants, on the other hand, are almost exclusively male, and their submission to an alpha male leader fits the classic late twentieth-century paradigm of feral young men desperate for a father figure.  The scene of Batman kneeling over the Mutant leader's prone body is juxtaposed by one of the book's ubiquitous television screens, this time with a young man who appears to have Batman's symbol tattooed onto his face: 

The Mutants are dead---mutants are history. This is the mark of the future.  Gotham City belongs to the Batman.

[...]

Do not expect any further statements. The Sons of the Batman do not talk. We act. Let Gotham's criminals beware.They are about to enter hell.

Wolper immediately cites this speech as evidence that he was right all along:

Just as I predicted--the Batman has infected the youth of Gotham--poisoned them with an insidious excuse for the most violent anti-social behavior.

If we strip Wolper's words of their value judgments, he is right:  Batman has "infected" Gotham's youth.  Their switch of allegiance to Batman validate's both Wolper's media effects model (passive viewers are transformed by what they see) and the absent-father paradigm for gangs.  The Mutants/Sons of the Batman have no values or evaluative capacities of their own, and will follow the strongest man to win their attention.  Their very name indicates the centrality of masculinity to their group formation:  there do not appear to be any Daughters of the Batman.

Next: Batman and Sons

Fighting Crime or Curing Crime?

Appropriately enough, Batman's reemergence is paralleled not just by the return of his greatest foes (Two-Face, the Joker), but also by an ongoing debate on the possibility of rehabilitation. Indeed, it is the initial focus on Two-Face that helps establish the impression of a full-fledged ethical dialogue about superheroes and supervillains; if anyone is well-poised to bring up two sides of an issue, it is the scarred and schizoid Harvey Dent.  In a brilliant page that starts whose very composition emphasizes duality, Two-Face is reintroduced in a complex grid: the first row consists of four panels, while the second row has five, because the last panel showing the door to Two-Face's room is bifurcated down the middle. When we actually see a completely bandaged Harvey, the same bifurcation splits his body into two separate panels, with his surgeon at his right shoulder and his psychiatrist at his left.  Two different medical discourses have come together to cure him in body and mind, culminating in a series of three more sets of bifurcated images focusing on his face, before his face at last fits in a single, final panel, obscured by the mirror in which he sees his post-surgical image.  The panels themselves convey Harvey's putative cure and reassumption of a singular self.

The media reaction to Two-Face's cure is, naturally, divided, with Commissioner Gordon expressing skepticism about the end of Harvey Dent's criminal career, and Bruce Wayne, who sponsored the treatment, arguing for the virtues of medical and psychiatric intervention and, above all, a second chance.  Here Batman's dual identity mirrors Harvey's own: as Batman, he fights and imprisons Two-Face, and as Bruce, he tries to rehabilitate him.  But Batman's very return to the public stage causes the Joker to wake up from his decade-long catatonia, a fact that implicitly supports the view of Harvey's psychiatrist, who insists that Batman provokes the manias and obsessions of the members of his rogue's gallery.

Both Batman's supporters and detractors clearly recognize that his return is, at the very least, an incitement to debate.  In the first of several excerpts from a Gotham television stations regular on-camera debates between two pundits (one is a man named Morrie, while the other is an obese Lana Lang from the Superman comics--Lana was a journalist in pre-Crisis DC continuity), Morrie calls Batman a "social fascist," to which Lana responds: 

Then why do you call him psychotic? Because you like to use that word for any motive that is too big for your little mind? Because he fights crime instead of perpetrating it?

Morrie: You don't call excessive force a crime? How about assault, fat lady?  Or breaking and entering? Huh?

The set up is a parody of the long-running Sixty Minutes segment "Point Counterpoint" (as well as an homage to Saturday Night Live's own hilarious parody), so the animosity might be expected. But Lana is the cooler head here, as Morrie's name-calling ("fat lady") indicates. Their debate launches a four-page examination of Batman's violent methods and their repercussions, with an ambulance-chasing lawyer insisting that Gordon release his client, who he insists is not a criminal, but a victim of Batman's "criminal assault" on his person.  We know (and Gordon certainly knows) that the man is guilty, but Batman, in ignoring procedure, has left Gordon no other choice but to let him go.  This only gives Batman access to the criminal once again.  The man crashes through a window trying to avoid Batman, shouting "I got rights." Batman's response is that of the classic vigilante who knows that the system does not work:

You've got rights

Lots of rights.

Sometimes I count them just to make myself feel crazy.

But right now you've got a piece of glass shoved into a major artery in your arm.

Right now you're bleeding to death.

Right now I'm the only one in the world who can get you to a hospital in time.

Miller immediately follows this monologue with another "both sides" response to Batman: first from a supporter, who hopes that he "goes after the homos next," and then from a detractor, who calls for the rehabilitation of criminals before admitting he would "never live in the city."  While the book's thrills most obviously come from Batman's extreme actions, the first issue still appears relatively even-handed in its depiction of the pro- and anti-Batman debate.  But the issue's conclusion metaphorically previews the resolution of the debate.  With Harvey Dent as the antagonist, the entire installment has focused on dualities, from Bruce's  and Harvey's dual identities to the opposing views on superhero vigilantism.  Early on, the book seems to promise that the dichotomy between good and evil can be resolved in favor of the good, with Harvey's surgery restoring his face to its previous, unblemished form. But in the end, we learn that Harvey sees the exact opposite when he looks in the mirror: a monstrous face that no longer includes a scar-free half.  The beauty of Two-Face as a villain rests in the promise that a dichotomy can be momentarily resolved (by flipping a coin), but endlessly deferred (as represented by Harvey's divided face). By contrast, both Harvey's surgical cure and his delusion augur an ultimate end to dualism:  one side is going to win. By the same token, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns will play with dualism over the course of four chapters, but in the end, will come down firmly on one side of the coin.

But beating Two-Face has limited utility in determining Batman's value to society after a decade's absence.  The first and third chapter are replays of Batman's greatest hits:  fighting Two-Face and the Joker. The Joker in particular only returns because Batman did, leaving open the possibility that the hero's only significant role in his declining years is to clean up the messes that survived along with him.  They are baroque, fanciful villains from a bygone age, with costumes, a gimmick, and little resemblance to how crime was portrayed at the time Miller made The Dark Knight Returns.  The even-numbered books highlight a new kind of menace, one that resonated with the anxieties of the 1980s:  the ultraviolent youth known as the Mutants.

Next: Who's Your Daddy?

Destruction or Deconstruction?

If, as Rick Hudson argues, Watchmen is the "exemplary Menippean and dialogic text with the graphic novel" medium (that is, using the characters and the plots in which they find themselves as a testing ground for trying out competing ideas),  Batman: The Dark Knight returns is something different. The multiple points of views, examples, and arguments are not so much in dialogue with each other as they are like motifs in a symphony: recurring, evolving, and combining and recombining as point and counterpoint in the service of the larger overall theme. The titles of the four books that make up the collected edition sketch an arc that, while formally accurate,  is deceptive on the level of theme and ideology.  The odd-numbered books have titles whose relevance is indisputable:  "The Dark Knight Returns" and "Hunt the Dark Knight, " respectively.  They are descriptive rather than evaluative; both the returning and the hunting are definitely happening. But the even-numbered books are another matter: "The Dark Knight Triumphant" and "The Dark Knight Falls."  In terms of both the actual events and their ideological ramifications, these titles could just as well be swapped:  In book two, Batman both falls (to be rescued by his new Robin) and triumphs (he beats the Mutant leader), while in the last book, he "falls" (throwing the fight against Superman and faking his own death) and triumphs (living to carry on his crusade outside the unrelenting media glare).  By the end, Batman has also both lost and won the larger questions about the appropriateness of vigilantism as an alternative to failed institutions: he has lost, in that, in the face of state persecution, he has been forced to abandon the life he built for himself over the course of four decades, and he has won, in that the book ultimately reinforces his world view.

Rereading The Dark Knight Returns from the beginning, but decades after its first release, reveals both the source of the book's reputation for a relatively even-handed presentation of the morality of vigilantism and the heavy thumb Miller puts on Batman's side of the scale.  Before TDKR, Batman had never been presented as quite so broken. On the very first page, he miraculously survives a race car accident in a scene whose narration stresses Bruce's insistence on flirting with death, while his dream about falling into the Batcave when he was still a little boy demonstrates a history of trauma that actually predates his parents' murder. The set piece is an iconic sequence that intersperses the slow-motion shooting of his parents that precedes multiple images of his mother's pearl necklace being pulled by the gunman until it snaps; the necklace is repeatedly interpolated with images of adult Bruce's horrified face and tight close-ups of TV news anchors reciting the latest urban atrocity. The visual metaphor is clear:  Bruce, like the pearl necklace, is on the verge of snapping.

Visually, the entire first book conspires to show just how hemmed in Bruce is by his current life.  During the race car scene, we only get a partial picture of various parts of his face.  After turning off the television that inadvertently brought him back to the scene of his parents' death, Bruce knocks a statue off a pedestal while walking across a multi-panel grid showing the storm brewing outdoors.  The statue crosses over four different panel boundaries, while Bruce himself, racing forward, is more than a single panel can contain. When he does finally don the Batman costume for the first time in a decade, Miller continues to play with the contrast between confining panels and Batman's body, but where before, the emphasis was on constraint, now we have the first inkling that Batman is "too big" for the panels that tell his story. When Miller at last shows us Batman's entire body in a full-page spread, the hero again exceeds his borders--larger than life, he dwarfs the television screens that appear along the right side of the page.

The point is that, while the first book does a remarkable job reminding the reader that Bruce is essentially damaged goods, it is in the service of ultimately reinforcing the legend.  Many of the best superhero comics of the 1980s have been labeled "deconstructionist," usually alluding to a misunderstanding of what Deriddean deconstruction was all about. The assumption is that "deconstruction" is a synonym for "destruction," and "reconstruction" is the opposite.   Deconstruction works in contrast to mere destruction: it breaks things down, shows their internal contradictions, but builds them back up again while incorporating an awareness of the shaky foundations on which it is built. Deconstruction incorporates reconstruction, but with a critical difference.  This is what Miller does with Batman.  The process always leads to a reaffirmation of Batman's greatness.

Next: Fighting Crime or Curing Crime?

The Politics of Reading against Your Own Politics

Nonetheless, one need not read The Dark Knight Returns anachronistically to conclude that the book does, in fact, come down on the side of a politics that at least flirts with fascism.  In and of itself, this would be an interesting finding, but what really makes The Dark Knight Returns  such an intense and complicated reading experience is how the book gets there. Miller's first big Batman story is not a straightforward apologia for vigilantism, and to the extent that it veers towards fascism, it does so in such a circuitous way, involving so much debate and dialogue, that one could easily be left with the impression that The Dark Knight Returns manages to maintain itself suspended between two opposing points of views. My point is not that Miller is trying to write a fascist work, or even held fascist beliefs, but that the composition of The Dark Knight Returns leads the reader down a path of normalized fascism, even if the process might be inadvertent or barely perceptible. In doing so, The Dark Knight Returns not only interrogates the issues central to the superhero genre, but also serves as a case study in the capacity of an adventure narrative to make readers and viewers at least temporarily occupy political subject positions that they might otherwise find abhorrent.

The greater the contrast between one's personal politics and the ideology inherent in a pleasurable narrative, the easier it is to notice.  For me, that moment of understanding came when hate-watching Fox's long-running TV drama 24 (2001-2010, 2014).  24 gripped its viewers with a novel format and even more novel conceit: every one-hour episode was equivalent to one hour within the narrative itself, advancing a plot that unfolded over the course of one twenty-four day (and one twenty-four episode season). Before each commercial break, a digital clock displayed the time while the screen subdivided into four smaller screens, each showing different characters in different situations, as if the television were a security monitor.  But it also encoded a politics that justified both the televised representation of total surveillance and the secondary status of human and legal rights.

Yes, I want this show guiding the Supreme Court

The hero of 24 was Jack Bauer, an on-again, off-again agent for the U.S. Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU).  Though the show was supposed to take place in a world of our own, Jack had two outlandish, but unacknowledged superpowers: the ability to make anyone do what he wants in the heat of the moment by shouting a command twice ("Drop your weapon! DROP YOUR WEAPON!") and the magical good fortune of owning cell phones that always got perfect reception. He also had an unwavering sense of purpose: if the only way to get the information needed to prevent a terrorist attack was torture, then so be it.  Jack and his colleagues repeatedly torture suspects (not all of them guilty), and even are themselves subjected to torture (Jack most of all).  While experts generally agree that, aside from the crucial moral questions torture poses, it is also rarely effective at producing reliable intelligence.  Yet on 24, this is not the case:  again and again, the day is saved thanks to secrets elicited through violence and threats. In 2007, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cited 24 in justification of so-called "enhanced interrogation":

"Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent's rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand."Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. "Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so.

"So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes."

Scalia's citation of a fictional television drama to justify his legal opinion was shocking, but the content of his opinion was not:  no one really expected Scalia to turn into a defender of individual human rights in relation to the U.S. state security  apparatus. Politically, Scalia was 24's ideal viewer, in that he came to the show ready to believe in the efficacy and legitimacy of torture.

But 24 was not just a niche show for neocons; it was a hit with a broad fanbase.  What did it mean for liberal viewers to watch 24?  The inherent discomfort was not that the show portrayed torture in a positive light, but that, unless the viewers were actively resisting the narrative every step of the way, for the sixty minutes they were watching 24, they were trapped in a compact with Jack Bauer.  Because Jack was right, and because torture did work, the only way to enjoy 24 was to assent to the admissibility of torture within the confines of this particular narrative.  The problem was not that Antonin Scalia was a fan; the problem was that being a fan meant temporarily being Antonin Scalia. We root for Jack Bauer to torture the perps because we know that this will stop a bomb from going off or a president from being assassinated.  In a court of law or a philosophical debate, one can come up with countless scenarios in which a suspect is tortured, and many of them will not lead to torture's justification. But 24 is a fiction whose scenarios are specific, limited, and framed precisely in the best possible terms for making torture acceptable. 

This problem is not limited to 24, obviously, but it is firmly connected to questions of genre, and certain adventure genres rely on tropes that lean politically rightward.  Is anyone really going to advocate for gun control during a zombie apocalypse, when the people who survive are precisely those who have access to guns?  Or for putting Batman in jail when Gotham is overrun by ultraviolent criminals?  In stories about heroes fighting crime, the deck is usually stacked in favor of a conventional notion of what, exactly, constitutes a crime and what might be an appropriate punishment.  Even when a superhero comic does call into question some of the more dubious aspects of our criminal justice system, or, for that matter, the appropriateness of putting on a mask and taking justice into one's own hands, the readers, creators, and owners of these characters all share a vested interest in seeing their adventures continue.  Whatever our personal politics, when we read Batman, we want to see him beating up the bad guy. Even Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, whose future setting frees it from both the confines of continuity and the necessity of leaving open avenues for endless storytelling, only flirts with killing off its main character.  It ends with Batman very much alive, and available for more stories in the future.

Next: Destruction of Deconstruction?

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fascism

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fascism

After his initial run on Daredevil, Frank Miller went to DC to produce (among other things) the four-issue miniseries that would bring him his greatest fame: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986).  Written and pencilled by Miller, with inks by Klaus Janson and stunning colors by Lynn Varley, The Dark Knight Returns continues to exert an outsize influence on the superhero genre. Of the big three graphic novels to break into the media spotlight in 1986, this was the only one to focus on a familiar corporate property.  Though it was not part of the official DC continuity, it redefined Batman for a generation, giving rise to an in-continuity interpretation of the character as an emotional stunted, misanthropic manipulator who drives everyone away.  The aesthetic of the book (combined with the influence of Watchmen) spawned an entire era of "grim and gritty" comics, with little room for anything lighthearted. The Dark Knight Returns has been adapted as an animated film, served as the inspiration for elements of Christopher Nolan's cinematic Batman trilogy, and eventually established an entire Frank Miller subcorner of Batman continuity that included Batman: Year One and multiple unfortunate sequels (Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again  (2001), Batman: The Dark Knight III - The Master Race (2015), and Batman- The Dark Knight Returns - The Golden Child(2019)), as well as a bizarre, unfinished prequel series drawn by Jim Lee: All-Star Batman & Robin: The Boy Wonder (2005-2008). [1] The world of The Dark Knight Returns has also been established as one of the multiple earths in the recent iterations of the DC Multiverse, appearing in the last issue of the Dark Nights: Metal event (2018) as well as an anniversary issue of the regular Batman comic (Batman vol 3 135; legacy number 900).  And on top of all that, it directly inspired a storyline in the 1980s that ended with the death of the second Robin, Jason Todd. [2]

The Dark Knight Returns is also very much a product of its time.  On the surface, this is a statement that says nothing: what artistic production is not a product of its time?  But Miller's graphic novel was the most successful comic book embodiment of the discourse surrounding urban crime in the 1980s. I am not making the claim that The Dark Knight Returns accurately reflects actual crime during this particular period, but that it is dedicated to reproducing "urban crime" as an idea or story that haunted the American media with only a limited basis in reality. The Dark Knight Returns is not a dystopia, but it is a comic book representation of a then-current understanding of urban life as a dystopia in the making. Watchmen is also invested in the question of crime, but in a manner that allows no one understanding of criminality to dominate (Rorschach, the Comedian, and Captain Metropolis all understand crime differently, while Dr. Manhattan barely understands it at all).  Fittingly, it is Rorschach who is the product of a particularly dark understanding of crime and the city; his origin, after all, is rooted in the murder of Kitty Genovese.  But as important (and as mythologized) as that murder was, it was not a current event by the time Watchmen was published.  The Dark Knight Returns does not bother to go back decades to make its case; the criminal blight in Gotham City is, to borrow the catchphrase of the Law and Order franchise, ripped from the headlines.

“No thank you, I do not want to dance the Batusi right now”

The Eighties preoccupation with senseless urban violence, feral youth gangs, and lone (white male) citizens taking justice into their own hands also makes it the perfect time for the superhero comic to reconsider its relationship to crime, justice, and vigilantism.  Over the course of the character's history, Batman had alternated from grim fighter against street-level crime to sci-fi action hero to wacky camp icon. Starting in the 1970s, multiple creators had begun the job of returning Batman to his less fantastical roots, first Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams (primarily in the main Batman title), then Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers on their brief, acclaimed Detective Comics run in 1977-1978. Since then, the street-level Batman was the dominant version. But after all this time, what did that mean? When Miller first took over Daredevil, he declared that the action took place in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, an area first featured as a Marvel crime zone in Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes's late 1970s series Omega the Unknown. Gerber and Skrenes were quite pointed and specific in the establishment of Hell's Kitchen as a neighborhood worthy of its name, but the kind of crime that took place in Miller's Daredevil was either timeless or deliberately retro (Miller's noir stylings meant that some of the gangs looked like they stepped out of a time machine).  Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was the first time that Miller seriously engaged with crime as it was imagined to exist in the 1980s, even if the setting was roughly twenty years in DC's future. [3]

By having Gotham descend into criminal chaos in Batman's years-long absence, Miller is able to use his version of Batman's home town as a crucible both for Eighties notions of criminality and for the question of vigilantism.  Establishing where, exactly, the book lands on the vigilante question is a matter of some controversy, partly because of Miller's clever and complex narrative structure.  Much of the action is commented on by a running Greek chorus of television screens, featuring experts and ordinary people sounding off on the appropriateness of Batman's actions.  The result is a sense of actual dialogism: the vigilante question is engaged from multiple points of view, potentially leaving room for the readers to draw their own conclusions. In the decades since the book's publication, there is a temptation to assign a right-wing argument to The Dark Knight Returns, due to Miller's belligerent, xenophobic turn after 9/11.  Such a reading is unfair, in that it assumes a kind of crypto-fascism on Miller's part  and does not allow for the possibility that his views have changed over the years. 

Notes

[1] All-Star Batman has survived primarily as a meme, thanks to Batman's initial conversation with Dick Grayson in the Batmobile:

Dick: Who the hell are you anyway, giving out orders like this?

Batman: What, are you dense? Are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think I am? I'm the goddamn Batman.

[2] He got better, but it took a long time.

[3] An exception might be made for the two-part Daredevil story co-written with Roger McKenzie, involving schoolchildren on Angel Dust.  But this was just an Eighties variation on a decades-long tradition of scary stories about one demonized drug or another.

Next: The Politics of Reading against Your Own Politics

Deny! Deny! Deny!

Secret identities have been willingly and unwillingly revealed in comics for decades, and in nearly all cases (eventually, even Daredevil's), a writer comes along who finds a way to put the genie back in the bottle.  But Bendis did something new: not only did he continue to explore the effects of Daredevil's outing throughout his entire run, he even ended it with Matt in prison.  Two things made Bendis's approach to the secret identity question unique:  first, the development of a real-world media context, and second, an eye towards the legal ramifications of Matt's new status.

When Daredevil's secret identity was leaked to the Kingpin in Born Again, the threat was less to his secret than it was to his ability to function in the world.  In classic supervillain fashion, the Kingpin, rather than going public, or simply having Matt Murdock killed, initiated a slow, methodical program for dismantling every aspect of Matt Murdock's life. In the aftermath, the next fifteen years of Daredevil stories would see Murdock and Kingpin in a kind of detente, with the Kingpin keeping Daredevil's secret identity to himself.  But Bendis brings a down-to-earth perspective to secrecy that rarely overlaps with the superhero secret identity trope:  secrets tend to get out.  As reporter Ben Urich, who at times functions as Bendis's authorial mouthpiece, puts it when Daredevil asks, "You think someone knows who I am?": [2]

You mean somebody else? /Other than me? /Oh--and the Kingpin? Foggy? Karen? Spider-Man? Elektra?/../ And every girl you ever make goo-goo eyes at...

<...>

Listen, Matt, my whole career as a reporter is based on one simple principle: people talk./ Maybe the cat's out of the bag. (Daredevil vol.2 30, Bendis with art by Alex Maleev).

Sammy Silke, an upstart in the Kingpin's organization, is livid that Matt Murdock is always off-limits, and even more livid when he realizes that not only is Matt Murdock Daredevil, but a significant number of the Kingpin's men are aware of the fact and refuse to discuss it ("Does this strike anyone else as vaguely insane?" (Daredevil vol.2 30).  Silke does eventually out Daredevil, but not as part of a successful scheme; in fact, he shares the information in the aftermath of the total failure of his coup attempt.  Apprehended by the FBI, Daredevil's secret identity is the only card he can play. Even then, the FBI leadership declines to go public; another leaker gives the story to The Daily Globe.

Devastated, Matt contemplates admitting the truth, but his partner, Foggy, makes clear exactly what is at stake by framing the question in terms closer to the real-world context of the media and the law:

Foggy: "Oh Matt--

Come clean?

What are you talking about?

Matt Murdock tries cases as a lawyer...

... and as Daredevil, he's a vigilante?

Working either side of the law?

This means Matt Murdock defrauded the American justice system by faking a trial against Daredevil.

And that's just the most recent example.

Matt--you can't.

You can't come clean.

You can't come out.

First? You'll get disbarred.

And then...then you go to jail. (Daredevil vol.2 33)

The initial resolution of this dilemma is a brilliant step forward for superhero comics, complicating the philosophical underpinnings of the genre while simultaneously exposing one of its greatest ethical weaknesses. Foggy explains the plan of action:

We deny! Deny!  Deny! 'Til we're blue in the face.

I saw we get up on the highest tree and we scream: Liars!

We sue everyone in sight until their heads spin off the top of their bodies.

We're going to own that dishrag of a paper.

What is this? Is this news? What they did? No.

In resolving to fight the story as lawyers, they undermine the simple dichotomy of truth vs. falsehood. What matters is not simply the truth, but what people believe, and, more important, what the law determines.  The courts will adjudicate the veracity of the argument, based not on actual truth (to which they have no direct access) but available evidence combined with a persuasive narrative.  Technically, this strategy would only be legal if Foggy didn't know his client was lying, but, again, one would have to prove his prior knowledge in court. 

Daredevil or DareTroll?

It's a dirty, compromising set of tactics, one that suggests that the contrast between the ethics of law and the ethics of vigilantism might not be so clear-cut.  There is nothing heroic about it. It sullies both the law and superhero vigilantism, because it also reminds the reader of a basic fact about superheroes with secret identities: they are liars, and they are lying constantly.  The fact that one of those identities is an attorney only makes matters worse.

For the next several years, Matt Murdock's secret identity as Daredevil will be an open secret, something assumed but never proven, until the police finally get a sample of Daredevil's blood. At that point, Matt Murdock is disbarred and imprisoned, and it will take an improbably set of plot twists for the next writer, Ed Brubaker, to get him out and clear his name, and an even less probable plot twist for Mark Waid to have Daredevil's secret identity forgotten by the entire world.  But that is not the point.  Just as no dedicated comics reader could really believe that Superman was permanently dead when Doomsday killed him in 1992, few would have expected Daredevil's public identity to be maintained as the status quo (indeed, the most remarkable thing about the Bendis, Brubaker, Diggle, and early Waid runs was that it lasted for fifteen years).

Bendis is the first  Daredevil writer to take the law/vigilante question seriously, and he succeeds by letting the two genres intersect in a fashion that makes sense for each.  The Law proves more flexible and subject to manipulation than earlier writers had allowed, while the superhero genre learns to function in a gray zone that complicates the usually binary proposition of the secret identity. We still root for Matt; he is the title character, and his glaring character flaws make him appealing to follow. Bendis brings the secret identity drama close to the "real world" than ever before, and the result obliges readers to make the provisional peace with the attenuated morality of both of Matt's professions.

Next: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fascism

Nothing to Lose

When Miller returned to the title nearly three years after completing his initial run, law became important through its near-total absence. Having discovered Daredevil's secret identity, the Kingpin uses every lever available to him to dismantle Matt Murdock's life, piece by piece, including having him disbarred.  For the first time in the series' history, Matt is no longer an attorney. He suffers a complete mental breakdown, losing control in both of his identities.  Born Again (Miller's second Daredevil run) does not suggest that it is specifically the loss of his license that drives him to the brink (it is only one in a series of humiliations, culminating in the bombing of Matt's brownstone), but it is an appropriate bookend to the story's resolution.  Matt's entry into the law was motivated by his father and his father's death; his "rebirth" comes when he is rescued by a nun named Maggie, who turns out to be his previously unmentioned, presumed dead mother. Now we learn that she visited him in the hospital right after his accident, and he felt the cross dangling from her neck.  He feels it again at the convent where she revives him from his injuries and illness.  Before this point, Matt was never depicted as specifically Catholic, thought his Irish descent made Catholicism a reasonable guess; now, it is his Catholic faith that sustains him.  He has moved from the law of the father to the grace of the mother, and no longer needs the legal profession (it will be years before his license and status quo ante are restored).

Karen Page, the former secretary/girlfriend whose addiction-fueled confession of Daredevil's secret identity set the entire process of Born Again in motion, is tormented by guilt while Matt helps her through heroin withdrawal.  But Matt, who has already come out on the other side of his life-changing ordeal, does more than forgive her:

--"Nothing," he'd said, Matt did, when she told him what she'd done--

--"I've lost nothing!"Matt said, and laughed like a boy" (Daredevil 232, written by Miller, with art by David Mazzucchelli).

That "nothing" that he has lost includes his career, and by extension, an entire avenue of storytelling that has been a part of Daredevil since the first issue: courtroom drama. Not only will Matt no longer have to balance the competing needs of lawyering and vigilantism, but the comic itself has liberated itself from an ethical minefield based on a generic mismatch. Superhero comics generally do a bad job with courtroom drama (Daredevil included), for a variety of reasons, the most obvious of which is that the creators (and, presumably the readers) don't care as much about it as they do about spandex costume drama.  That is just as well, because the two genres are fundamentally at odds: courtroom drama  relies on the importance of procedure. This does not meant that the creators or the consumers value legal procedure above all else; the soap opera component of most television law shows makes this proposition laughable.  But the law is to courtroom drama what the stanza is to poetry:  a set of clear and predictable limitations for creators to rely on, exploit, and use creatively.

The pleasures of the superhero vigilante story come from indulging in the opposite impulse.  Vigilantes circumvent the very procedure that can be the object of fascination in the legal drama; they are guided not by the law, but by justice. Each approach has obvious flaws: proceduralism can let the guilty go free, while vigilantism, when taken to its extreme, can become mob justice or even fascism.

Matt can and must appear in a courtroom, but for Daredevil, the courtroom is his kryptonite. Silver Age comics constantly flouted the legal system, with superheroes testifying in their costumed identities, or having shapeshifters pretending to be one of their identities so that they could both appear in the same place at the same time.  Small wonder that, when Spider-Man reveals his secret identity to the world during the Civil War crossover, the ramifications are more than personal. As Peter Parker, he has made a living photographing Spider-Man for The Daily Bugle.  The newspaper's publisher, J. Jonah Jameson, follows up on his quite reasonable second impulse (his first was to faint from shock): he sues Parker for fraud.

One of the long-term ramifications of Born Again was the tacit understanding that Daredevil the comic is at its best when Matt Murdock is at his worst.  After Miller, the best writers to take on the book have responded to the Miller challenge: how can I destroy Matt's life more than Miller did?  Not long after Brian Bendis began his run, he found the answer: outing Matt Murdock as Daredevil.

Next: Deny! Deny! Deny!

Punchable Villains and Billable Hours

Early on, Lee and his collaborators establish a pattern for Matt Murdock's double life: in the third issue, "Daredevil Battles the Owl, Ominous Overlord of Crime!" (Lee and Joe Orlando),  the Owl contacts Matt to hire him as his attorney; Matt agrees, but investigates and eventually defeats him as Daredevil.  For the purposes of this particular story, Matt's double identity is rather typical superhero comic fodder; the contradictions of law and vigilantism never actually materialize.  But things get more complex and more interesting in the following issue ("The Unbelievable Purple Man!"), when Lee and Orlando introduce a villain with the power to control people's minds, Zebediah Killgrave.  As Lee's description of him indicates ("the most off-beat, far-out, ding-dong , rootin-tootin' crackerjack super-villain you just ever did see"), Killgrave is still a far cry from the terrifying sociopath known to readers of Aliasand viewers of Jessica Jones decades later, but he does pose a set of unique challenges for both Matt and Daredevil. Killgrave is not simply a villain; he is a person who is entirely immune to all rules of human interaction, let alone the law. He robs a bank by simply asking for the money; his powers of persuasion do the rest. When he is arrested, and inevitably hires Matt Murdock (apparently Marvel's only defense attorney) as his lawyer, the judge notes Killgrave's claim that no crime was committed: "The money was freely given to him!" 

Killgrave, The Purple Man: More proof that even the campiest comics character can eventually be updated and made terrifying

Thus Killgrave is a challenge not just because he can control people's minds, but because the use of his powers makes the law irrelevant--the perfect opponent for a lawyer who puts on a costume in order to skirt the letter of the law he has sworn to uphold.  Matt is stymied at every turn; Killgrave's powers mean that his day in court will only happen if he feels like it, and that no one in the legal system could successfully judge his actions. As Daredevil, he is somehow able to resist Killgrave's brainwashing, but is boxed in by Killgrave's habit of throwing innocent, mind-controlled civilians in his way (including his secretary and love interest, Karen Page).  The only way Daredevil succeeds is through the combined expertise of both his identities:  Matt the lawyer comes up with the idea of secretly recording Killgrave's casual confession of his crimes, but it is Daredevil who is in a position to trick Killgrave into incriminating himself.  In addition, his immunity to Killgrave's mind-control makes more sense thematically than it does on the level of plot:  a villain whose powers are rooted in his purple skin meets his match in the embodiment of blind justice.

When Frank Miller redefined Daredevil in the early 1980s, he did not put any particular emphasis on Matt Murdock's legal career.  In his initial run on the title, Miller treated Matt's work as a function of his secret identity. The contrast between vigilante hero and attorney at law was not of particular interest when the writer/artist was so busy expanding Daredevil's world to include ninjas, the Kingpin, an old mentor (Stick), and a former lover-turned-enemy (Elektra).  Miller deepened the character of Matt Murdock significantly, but his focus was on the man's emotional and psychological damage.

The one minor exception was a one-off comedic issue, "Guts" (Daredevil 185, with art by Klaus Janson).  The issue starts with Matt breaking the fourth wall, telling the reader that he cannot be Daredevil all the time: "Crimefighting alone won't pay the bills./ Lawyering will, though. So by day, I'm Matt Murdock, attorney at law."  This story will be about his law partner Foggy. Fat, clumsy, and silly, Foggy had always been played for comic effect, and here the joke is that Miller is applying his noir aesthetic to the adventures of the least noir character in the Daredevil stable.  Foggy is investigating a case of corruption that puts him in danger repeatedly, unaware that each time, Daredevil is saving him from behind the scenes. Again, it works because Foggy is always a figure of fun, but also because it shows the absurdity of placing a lawyer--an ordinary lawyer— in conflict with gun-toting criminals and mammoth-sized Kingpins.  None of it makes much sense--the Kingpin somehow doesn't recognize Foggy as an attorney rather than a gun for hire, but that is part of the point.  Foggy the lawyer is trying to be the protagonist of the wrong genre.

Stupid Humor Rule #113: Fat people always have to be shown eating. Because that’s all they do

Next: Nothing to Lose

Fighting (for) the Law

Chapter 3:

The Law vs. Justice

Fighting (for) the Law

Superheroes with secret identities tend to have day jobs that complement their more unusual activities: reporters, mild-mannered or otherwise, are well-poised to hear about a crime in progress, scientists of all stripes bring useful knowledge and even more useful gadgets to the fight against supervillains, and rich playboys have a great deal of time on their hands (and even greater financial resources to spend on their costumed adventures).   

There is, however, a small subset of superheroes whose fight against crime at first glance looks like an extension of their professional work, but actually functions as its antithesis:  lawyers and police.  Like military service, law enforcement is more likely to be part of a hero's backstory than their present: DC's Guardian and Marvel's Misty Knight are both former cops who are no longer constrained by police regulations.  Some superheroes exercise their powers as part of a science fictional law enforcement agency, which also tends to give them more leeway than ordinary earth cops (the various Green Lanterns; some versions of Hawkman, Bishop of the X-Men). 

Only a few actually combine ongoing police work with superheroics: Dick Grayson (Nightwing) served in the Bloohdhaven police force for a brief time; Barry Allen (The Flash) is a forensic scientist with the Central City Police Department; various versions of the Spectre (Jim Corrigan) continued their detective work even after becoming the Spirit of Vengeance, and, more recently Renée Montoya has combined her costumed activity as The Question with legitimate police work, even rising to the rank of Gotham City Police Commissioner.  It's unsurprising that so few superheroes are in the police force, since the contrast is not particularly exciting: who wants to read a story about a doorman who moonlights as a security guard?

Lawyers are also far from overrepresented among secret identities, but they have had more staying power. At DC, Kate Spencer has alternated between being a district attorney and a defense lawyer while also killing criminals as Manhunter.  Image Comics in the 1990s published the adventures of Shadowhawk, who was a lawyer before he put on a costume. At Marvel, Jennifer Walters has been the rare character to maintain both a legal career and a heroic identity (She-Hulk), but this is often in the service of imagining what the practice of law would look like in a world of superheroes (while usually maintaining a much more light-hearted tone than in the standard Marvel fare).  The most famous, and enduring, lawyer/superhero combination is Marvel's Daredevil (Matt Murdock), whose legal career has been a defining feature since his introduction in 1964.

Of course, no one was reading Daredevil to learn about the practice of law (or at least, let's hope not).   Rather, the law existed as a counterpoint. Though it would take years to be more fully developed, primarily by Brian Bendis, the conflict (or at least, contrast) between the law and vigilantism is a running theme of Daredevil.  Initially, it is hampered by Lee's haphazard representation of the legal system. Not only does Matt attend law school as if it were a four-year undergraduate program right after high school, but the issue ends with Matt and his law partner Foggy agreeing that they should not take an accused murderer's case because "from the police report [Foggy} was convinced he's guilty!" (as if guilty defendants did not have the right to counsel).   

In addition to being an attorney, Daredevil is also blind. Not the first blind superhero nor the last (DC's Doctor Midnight preceded him by decades), the combination of his disability with his career is a bit too on the nose ("Justice is blind"). He needs both of these details to make him stand out as a new character; the marketing for the first issue is at great pains to compare him to Spider-Man. The cover proclaims: "Remember when we introduced...Spider-Man/ Now we continue the Mighty Marvel Tradition with....Daredevil!!", while the splash page, showing Daredevil leaping against the backdrop of the cityscape, appeals to the instinct of the budding comics collector:

Remember this cover? [over a picture of the first issue of Spider-Man] If you are one of the fortunate few who bought this first copy--you probably wouldn't part with it for anything! / Now we congratulate you for having bought another prized first edition! This magazine is certain to be one of your most valued comic mag possessions in the month to come!"

Apparently, justice is also color blind

Daredevil has to be enough like Spider-Man to to capitalize on the wall-crawler's appeal, but also different enough to warrant his own series. Lee and co-creator/illustrator Bill Everett do this not only by making Matt Murdock a blind lawyer, but by giving him an origin story that mirrors Peter Parker's own.  Where Peter was an unathletic bookworm, Matt was pushed into serious study by his father, developing his athletic abilities in secret. Uncle Ben was Peter's model for power and responsibility (his costumed career), while Jack Murdock was the driving force behind Matt's civilian identity. 

Peter's origin contains three important turning points: gaining his powers, failing to stop a crime (and thereby inadvertently causing his uncle's death), and resolving to use his abilities for the greater good.  Matt instinctively acts to prevent a tragedy, pushing a blind man out of the path of a runaway truck and losing his sight to a radioactive cylinder that hits him along the way. Since the radioactivity grants him heightened senses, the origin of his powers overlaps with the demonstration of his refusal to stand by and watch (something he will literally never be able to do again). The determination to be a costumed superhero comes when he loses his father, like Peter's loss of his Uncle Ben, but again with a twist:  Peter is honoring Uncle Ben's wishes and memory, while Matt, by resorting to physical violence, is only honoring his father's wishes in the breach.

Matt's entire life is defined by this double bind: his father's injunction to avoid violence in favor of school and, eventually, a middle-class profession, and his lifelong need to act, to intervene, and to set wrongs right.  As a result, Daredevil is a walking, swinging, embodiment of Lacanian theory:  his actual father's explicit limitations on his individual agency turn into a neurotic manifestation of all that he is supposed to repress (his physicality, his heroism).  He dons the original (hideous yellow and red) Daredevil costume in response to his father's murder, and any satisfaction gained by inadvertently causing the death of the man responsible is haunted by the fact that he is doing exactly the opposite of what his father wanted.  The irony is intensified by the fact that Jack Murdock's decision not to throw the fight (despite the Fixer's instructions) is motivated by Matt's presence in the audience; Jack had strayed from his own principles, but redeemed himself for the sake of his son.  Matt can never be fully redeemed; the double bind imposed by his actual father then gets transferred to his professional life: every night he patrols as Daredevil, he is violating the law he has sworn to uphold (even if it is in the name of the justice to which the law is supposed to aspire). [1]

Note

[1] Miller complicates the scenario in his retelling of Matt Murdock's origin and early years, Daredevil: The Man without Fear (illustrated by John Romita, Jr. 1993-1994). In addition to shoehorning the retcons he made during his first Daredevil run (Elektra, Stick), he includes a scene of domestic violence. Still a little boy, Matt runs home to brag to his father about winning a fight with a bully. Mike smacks him, and Matt runs away. The captions convey his thoughts: "Dad hit me. / It was wrong. / Dad was wrong. / And if even Dad can be wrong, then anybody can do bad things. Anybody at all. / The only way to stop people from being bad is to make rules. Laws. /Somewhere in a long and lonely night the boy's course is set. / He will study the rules. / He will study the laws." The narration of the scene, along with the image of Matt staring out into space, echoes the origin of the other corporate superhero on whom Miller would make his mark: Batman.  But it is almost a parody, in that it is the origin not of Daredevil, but of Matt Murdock, attorney-at-law.  Where Bruce Wayne swears to uphold justice as a vigilante in response to his parents' deaths, Matt Murdock resolves to study law in response to his father's violence. 

Next: Punchable Villains and Billable Hours

Second(ary) World Problems

It stands to reason that, as superhero comics grew more complex and skewed more adult, their ethical framework would start to wear thin. Developing out of an artistic practice of literal caricature, the early superhero comics were never intended to function as anything like a realistic representation of the world that produced them.  Discussing the comics form, Scott McCloud calls cartooning "amplification through simplification," a phrase that could just as well apply to superhero comics' approach to content and theme.  The Lee/Kirby/Ditko innovations of 1960s Marvel brought the genre a few steps closer in line to the "real world," but picking up any Marvel comic from, say, 1963, and reading the dialogue aloud would demonstrate that several steps still remained.  This may sound like a value judgment, and to some readers and critics, it would be. My point is rather than a growing awareness and dissatisfaction with the disjuncture between the world of Marvel and DC and the proverbial "world outside your window" would push corporate comics in the direction of increased realism and, as we see in the case of the drug-themed comics of the 1970s, "relevance."  Yet this "realism" ages just as quickly as do the hairstyles and clothes. An unfriendly reader will find at least as much to mock in an O'Neil/Adams "Hard Travelin' Heroes" Green Lantern / Green Arrow story as in an issue of the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four.  Jumping ahead to the twenty-first century , Brian Bendis's Mamet-inflected, hypernaturalistic dialogue is another likely candidate for retrospective snark. 

Certainly, there is no reason to make a fetish of realism, as though verisimilitude were the single determining criterion for assessing or enjoying a work of art. Nor is a fictional world's resemblance to the "real" world essential for making a point about justice, ethics, behavior, or metaphysics, as any number of works of fantasy demonstrate.  The problem for superhero comics comes when the gap between the allegorical fantastic and the faithfully representational becomes just narrow enough that the exploration of an ethical problem cannot be satisfying according to the demands of either mode.  Superhero comics can fall into the ethical equivalent of the Uncanny Valley. Here, though, the problem is not a visual depiction of something human that is still un-human enough to provoke an uncanny response, but rather a setting or exploration of an ethical problem that is neither fanciful enough to be allegorical or fabulous nor mimetic enough to feel like an adequate vehicle for tackling a significant, real-world question.  Mutants can be rounded up in concentration camps in nightmarish dystopian futures as a story about the horrors of genocide, but Dr. Doom cannot stand at the ruins of the Twin Towers and shed a tear through the eye slit of his iron face mask.

As a vehicle for addressing real-world problems, these superhero comics fall into another trap: perhaps less an Uncanny Valley than an Uncanny Foggy Moor.  Here the gap is between earnestness and camp. Lex Luthor, Captain America, Ultimate Captain America, Ms. Marvel, John Hawksmoor (of the Authority), Ultimate Thor, the Squadron Supreme's Nighthawk, have all been American presidents in one continuity or another. The Kingpin, Luke Cage, Green Arrow, and Mitchell Hundred (Ex Machina) have all been mayors, Iron Man has been Secretary of State, and the pre-Crisis Batgirl went from librarian to congresswoman practically overnight. Just how seriously are we supposed to take this?  Batgirl's 1972 congressional campaign is another patently ridiculous attempt to portray youth culture, but later examples, such as Green Arrow's stewardship of Star City and Luke Cage's time as mayor of New York, make more of an effort at credibility.  Grant Morrison's "President Superman" may well be the best compromise: he and those around him take his presidency completely seriously, but, since he comes from an alternate Earth, readers are not expected to follow the month-by-month adventures of a president who repeatedly sneaks out of the Oval Office to repel alien invaders or knock asteroids out of a path towards our planet.

That’s Congresswoman Batgirl to you, sir

When Marvel made New York City the setting for the adventures of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and virtually every other superhero they published, it was an innovation. It made National (DC), with its Metropolis, Gotham City, Central City, and Star City,  look staid and old-fashioned for its unwillingness even to pretend to be engaging with our world. Over the years, however, DC's creators and editors leaned in to the advantage of their fictional settings. The familiar adage that Metropolis is New York City by day and Gotham is New York by night made sense for Superman and Batman, and eventually allowed each of the cities to be developed in directions that would have been impossible for a believable, if fictional, New York.  For a time, Metropolis was infused with future tech that made it literally the "city of tomorrow," while Gotham suffered a cataclysmic earthquake that cut it off from the rest of the world and turned it into a post-apocalyptic No Man's Land.  New York would occasionally be used, but some creators instead took further advantage of the opportunity to create new fantasy cities that would have their own character and facilitate their own particular type of storytelling:  when James Robinson and Tony Harris created a new Starman in the aftermath of Zero Hour, they situated him in Opal City,  designed to host the mystery and nostalgia that informed the storytelling. At their best, DC's fictional cities facilitate their own chronotopes:  a story in Gotham would not unfold the same way in Metropolis.

Here, as in so many other cases, Watchmen shows a possible way forward.  Moore and Gibbons positively revel in the derivative nature of the world they created:  as a distorted version of a commercially unsuccessful superhero universe (Charlton) that itself could credibly be called a variation on DC core concepts (the street-level hero, the god, the martial arts girl), Watchmen is more of a tertiary than secondary world.  The fears that grip the population are the same as those that animated so much of the political discourse of the time: the book was serialized in 1986, the year in which it also took place, and global nuclear war was an ever-present, if low-level, possibility.  But Moore and Gibbons allowed their world to be substantively changed by the presence and actions of its protagonists, with American winning the war in Vietnam and Nixon somehow still in office twelve years after his real-world resignation.  The themes of Watchmen did not require the readers to accept that it took place in a reasonable facsimile of their world, but the logic behind the plot and the characters' actions did not strain credibility.  Though unfolding in the medium of comics and steeped in the lore and traditions of the superhero narrative, Watchmen tapped into the kind of world-building familiar to readers of high-quality science fiction:  suspending disbelieve is possible and desirable because, once the reader accepts the novum (i.e., the thing that makes the work science fiction rather than mimetic) the rest of the world falls into place.  The superhero comics discussed in this chapter labor under the burden of multiple, proliferating nova, with simply too many fantastic and generally inexplicable elements to make them a believable secondary world.

The odds, then, are stacked against a corporate superhero comic adequately reflecting or representing a "real world" problem.  Creators have to reckon with the limits of the permissible, which, depending on the time and circumstances, can be a matter of industry self-regulation, company policy, or the spoken and unspoken expectations about the contents of comics.  The seriality of these comics could, at least in theory, work in favor of ethical exploration, but the inevitable changes in creative and editorial teams and the sheer accumulation of detail and lore (continuity) are significant, and almost inevitable, obstacles. Finally, the tension between the fantastic, sometimes campy elements of superhero comics (the costumes, the rhetoric, the tropes) and the seriousness or scale of the chosen problem is a tonal challenge that, if not insurmountable, must at the very least be daunting. 

It is a historical accident that most mainstream comics make no use of lower case lettering; when the quality of printing and paper is low, the upper case is a guarantor of legibility.  But it is also emblematic of the problem:  regardless of subject matter or attempted tone, these comics shout at the reader at the top of their voice. One could say the same about opera--like so many aspects of medium and genre, it is as much a feature to be used as a limitation with which to grapple.  Like the borders of a comics panel, the bombastic character of superhero comics is so ubiquitous as to be nearly invisible to the reader, or it can be used more playfully in a manner that one cannot help but notice.  And, like the panel border, it can be all the more noticeable in its occasional absence, a reminder of what readers have come to expect without question.  The corporate superhero genre functions within the invisible borders that separate it from the world that produced it, with results that are usually appreciated best when the reader has tacitly assented to the creative dissonance on which the comics rely.

Next: Chapter 3: The Law vs. Justice

Move Fast, Break Things

The use of mind control is a glaring moral failing, but it also highlights the limitations of the superhero genre.  What is left for superheroes to do if there is no one else to fight?  Since the Adventures of Superman radio series (1940-1951), the Man of Steel's job has been described as a "never-ending battle" (initially for "truth and justice," but by the time the show moved to television (1952-1958), it was "truth, justice, and the American way"); this is a phrase that can be applied to the superhero genre write large. Superhero stories are generally serialized; there can be no end to the battle not just because crime continues in the "real world," but because the corporate imperative to maximize profit and the public appetite for more stories makes true endings inimical to the storyworld. In attempting to solve their world's problem, the Squadron becomes the problem, not just because they are curtailing freedoms, but because the rules of the genre require that they have someone to fight.

Resorting to brainwashing also highlights the basic problem with both superheroes and this particular attempt to change the world:  the Squadron is either unwilling to, or (more likely) incapable of reflecting on their own ideology.  As heroes, the fought "crime," upheld the status quo, and therefore were subject to being mislead when their leaders proved corrupt.  As utopian dreamers, they have not bothered to develop a theory or working model of society. They act like technocrats, and in the absence of anyone above them to provide guidance, they can only see the most obvious problems.  This is one of the few points where their approach converges with that of Watchmen's utopian schemer, Adrian Veidt.  Veidt prides himself in following Alexander the Great's approach to the Gordian knot:  it is to be simply severed rather than unraveled.  The metaphor has its appeal, but it carries with it a fundamental denial of complexity.  Veidt should be smart enough to know better; the Squadron, despite the presence of scientific geniuses in their ranks, does not have the wherewithal to realize that they are leaving basic philosophical questions unasked and unanswered.

Poor Tom Thumb! He creates a totalitarian mind control device, and what is the thanks he gets from his teammate? A bigoted slur

The fundamental cluelessness of the Squadron Supreme makes them frustrating, but it an integral part in making their miniseries work, just as the book's indebtedness to continuity, while making Squadron Supreme a difficult reading experience for the uninitiated, allows it to stake a claim that Watchmen cannot.  Though both books started as twelve-issue series, Watchmen deliberately departs from the traditions of serial superhero storytelling.  As ambiguous as its final panel is, the book nevertheless comes to a true conclusion. Watchmen deconstructs the serial superhero comic in a format that lends itself to a beginning, middle, and end.  Squadron Supreme, though telling a more or less complete story, has to address the conventions of the superhero as part of Marvel's neverending narrative flow; even the book's sequel, whose title (The Death of a Universe) promises finality still manages not to provide a true ending to the characters' adventures.  

The Squadron may have started as a parody of the Justice League, but it morphed into an ongoing satire of two key elements of the superhero genre:  the hero's lack of engagement with the systemic questions that frame their adventures, and the expectation that the hero will always win.  The Squadron Supreme exists to lose, and to lose again and again.  Were it not for the seriality of their adventures, any given Squadron Supreme story could function as the superhero equivalent of tragedy:  not only does the Squadron collectively suffer from a tragic flaw (their political and philosophical naivete), but by the stories' end, the body count has reached near-Hamlet levels.  The Squadron Supreme miniseries abruptly tries to change its tone in the very last panel, moving from the morgue to the delivery room for the birth of Arcanna's baby, but the shift is too little, too late. There is little room to assert that Squadron Supreme has a happy ending, or, for that matter, that the team itself has any prospect of an optimistic conclusion to any subsequent adventures.  If Sophocles, instead of writing the plays that survived to our day, had written a series of Oedipus dramas that each somehow ended with the title character once again putting out his own eyes, the result would have prefigured the saga of the Squadron Supreme.

Next: Second(ary) World Problems

A Magnificent Failure

The failure of Squadron Supreme is also its brilliance, because it is turned into a theme at various points throughout the book.  This is also where Gruenwald's continuity obsession pays off: yes, we have pages of exposition and summary in the first issue, but it is in the service of establishing just how bad things have become on the Squadron's world.  Despite Gruenwald's own never-ending fannish enthusiasm, Squadron Supreme excels at bringing the jaded sensibility of fan who finds that superheroes are in decline.  The first issue does a remarkable job of transforming a metafictional superhero malaise into the condition of the superheroes themselves.

Defeated even before the series began, the Squadron spend much of the first issue continuing to fail.  Hyperion tries to stop the team's orbital headquarters from tumbling to earth, but manages only to steer it away from populated areas. In case the reader missed the metaphor, Hyperion and his colleagues make it crystal clear:

Hyperion: Maybe it was meant to come crashing down on our heads....like everything else has come crashing down on the Squadron lately.

Whizzer: I know what you mean, pal. The satellite, the world--we've all seen better days.

It doesn’t take a giant metaphor to hit you over the head…. oh, wait

The rest of the Squadron is no better off. Power Princess, Nuke, Captain Hawk, and Arcanna try to stop a food riot, but only make things worse. Golden Archer, Lady Lark, Nighthawk, and Tom Thumb manage to put out some fires caused by exploding gas mains, but they know that similar disasters are playing out all over the country. When the Squadron finally assembles, both Hyperion and Nighthawk lament that this situation is "all our fault," with the Whizzer confirming that the rest of the world is in even worse shape than the United States.  The despair is palpable, and the book is slipping dangerously away from superhero territory and into the direction of a Democratic focus group during the Trump administration.

What they need is what the best superheroes provide: inspiration. So it falls to Power Princess, the Squadron's stand-in for Wonder Woman, to argue that the heroes are thinking to small. She grew up in a utopia; why can't the Squadron turn the rest of the world into a paradise?  Hyperion quickly agrees, and soon the entire Squadron votes on a "Utopia Project" that is not content with merely stopping the bad guys:

Hyperion:  We should actively pursue solutions to all the word's problems---

---abolish war and crime, eliminate poverty and hunger, establish equality among all peoples, clean up the environment, cure diseases and---

---even cure death itself!"

“Right on!” “Boo, death!”

It's an astonishing leap--just three pages ago, the Squadron was whining about the hopelessness of their situation, and now they're going to put a stop to death.  Only Kyle Richmond (Nighthawk), still technically the president after being controlled by the Overmind, makes an impassioned argument against the plan. [1] As the team's version of Batman, he is the sole non-superhuman in the Marvel version of what has come to be called DC's "Trinity" (Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman), so it is only right that he be the voice of the opposition.  But the scene is clumsy and rushed.  In the previous chapter, we saw how Moore and Gibbons used each of the Watchmencharacters to embody a philosophy (Existentialism, Objectivism), but even in the scenes that make their views most explicit (the first and only meeting of "Crimebusters" and Dr. Manhattan's final confrontation with Rorschach), they never speechify or even truly debate.  But a more charitable reading of the speed with which the Squadron leaps into the utopia program points to the deficiencies of the superhero genre:  these characters are simply not designed to refrain from taking action, and will always choose intervention over introspection. 

In trying to think big, the Squadron Supreme (the team) displays an astonishing lack of imagination; whether or not Squadron Supreme the miniseries does as well is an open question. Their ideas are bold, to be sure, but hatched too quickly and never really thought through. Much of the plan is to transplant the idea and technology of Power Princesses homeland, Utopia Isle, in the broader world. But in its form, the plan looks more like a repetition compulsion: not only are the Squadron taking over the world (again), but the key weapon in their arsenal is also their Achilles' heel: mind control.  Instead of simply fighting the bad guys, they will use advanced technology to turn them from adversaries into team mates.

At this point Squadron Supreme could have turned into a dystopian nightmare about the rise of an irresistible form of fascism, but that would have required the book to broaden its focus to the general populace. Ordinary people are only of interest to the narrative to the extent that they intersect with its super-powered protagonists:  they are necessary in the first issue in order to establish how bad things have gotten, but, otherwise, they show up (less and less frequently) as the Squadron's friends and family. Small wonder that Hyperion becomes functionally blind halfway through the series; his multiple forms of advanced vision have never allowed him to perceive the most basic facts that are in plain sight. Equally ironic is the cause, a fight with his evil, extradimensional doppelganger:  the Squadron is its own worst enemy.

Note

[1] Amphibian also votes against it, but, unlike Nighthawk, he agrees to defer to the will of the majority.

Next: Move Fast, Break Things

Plot Cancer

If Squadron Supreme suffers in comparison to Watchmen, it is at least in part a question of each work's relationship to its own time.  And this is even while making allowances for Gruenwald's preoccupation with continuity as a legitimate artistic choice.  The real problem is that, despite appearing within a year of each other, they read as if their production were separated by decades.  Watchmen set the standard for superhero stories going forward; for good or ill, it changed the verbal, visual, and thematic vocabulary of the genre.  Squadron Supreme, by contrast, is a perfect example of how comics were made before Alan Moore's influence.  Thought balloons are everywhere; the main characters tend to explain their motivations out loud,  the art is unexceptional, and the minor characters are written and drawn as if they are just waiting around for the protagonists to interact with them. 

When the young hero Nuke (an analogue to DC's Firestorm) is worried about his parents, who are dying of cancer caused by exposure to his radiation, he visits them in the hospital.  Dressed in identical robes and sporting near-identical short hair, his mother and father actually share a room there.  As is typical in mass culture at their time, they just have "cancer" (no organ is specified, no stage is named), and when Nuke asks them about their status, his mother answers, "They want us to continue chemotherapy for a while longer, son."  In other words, they function as one patient in the hospital, with one chemotherapy protocol.  My point is not that this is bad medical care; nobody was reading Squadron Supreme to learn about oncology. Rather, their disease, suffering, and hospitalization only exist to the extent that they have an impact on Nuke.

Nuke's parents' cancer is not without value to the story. It is a step in the direction of "real world" problems being taken up by superhero comics, starting with the basic acknowledgment that a character whose powers are based entirely on radiation might be a danger to those around him.  Their illness also raises a question that haunts the genre: if the world is populated by supergeniuses, why haven't their discoveries led to significant technological and social change?  Why not use those superbrains to cure cancer?  Marvel brought up the same question just three years earlier in Jim Starlin's The Death of Captain Marvel, when Rick Jones challenges Reed Richards, Hank Pym, Hank McCory and other superhero scientist to cure Mar-Vell of the disease that is killing him.  In Squadron Supreme, Nuke begs resident genius Tom Thumb to work a similar miracle, setting him on a convoluted path involving an intelligent female super-ape who falls in love with him, a tyrant from the far future, and Tom's own (ironic!) death from yet another case of unspecified "cancer."  The race for a cure is a dead-end; the miracle elixir Tom gets from the futuristic tyrant won't work in our time, and Nuke actually precedes Tom in death: his guilt over his parents' demise send him off the deep end, prompting a fight with his teammate Dr. Spectrum, who accidentally kills him.

As this brief summary of only a minor plot thread shows, Squadron Supreme leaves a high body count: Tom Thumb, Nuke,  Nuke's parents, Golden Archer, Pinball,  Nighthawk, Foxfire, Blue Eagle, Lamprey, Power Princess's husband, and Hyperion's evil counterpart from the Squadron Supreme.  In addition, Ape X is comatose, and Thermite is in critical condition with a "10 percent chance of recovery."  The book ends on optimistic note (Arcanna gives birth to a son),  though the 1989 follow-up, Squadron Supreme: Death of A Universe dispenses with Inertia, Professor Imam, and the Overmind (don't ask), even if the book failed to deliver on the total annihilation promised by its title. The world of the Squadron Supreme kills off characters with a What If? level zeal (though at least their deaths have consequences as part of an ongoing set of stories). 

No, no, no! The parents are supposed to die during the origin!

With all these caveats and complaints, and given how many other examples there are of superheroes trying to solve the world's problems, what makes Squadron Supreme worth considering?  As is often the case with interesting comics that have never managed to rise to the status of universal acclaim, the flaws are as revealing as the strengths.  Where Watchmen, despite its apocalyptic sensibility, charts a future for superhero comics though an unusually complex relationship to genre (simultaneously digging deeper into superhero tropes while also looking beyond them), Squadron Supreme is an exploration of the superhero as a dead end.  The superheroes themselves are at a loss, turning to their utopian project out of desperation; the storytelling, which does not push the conventions of mainstream comics forward even an inch, feels particularly leaden in the context of a plot about breaking with the status quo, while at this point in publishing history, Marvel Comics, with the exception of X-Men, Thor, and Daredevil, has shown precious few signs of inspiration or innovation since Jim Shooter drove out most of the company's best talent by the end of the Seventies. The format of Squadron Supreme, a twelve-issue "maxi-series" was new for its time, but even as it experimented with publishing models throughout the Eighties, Marvel was largely conventional when it came to content. The Squadron Supreme do not just fail to save their planet; they fail to show that there is much life left in the superhero concept.

Next: A Magnificent Failure

Earth's Mightiest Punching Bags

Though it has its share of admirers, the Squadron Supreme miniseries  (September 1985-August 1986) was the victim of unfortunate timing, sandwiched between two DC projects that were destined to gain the industry's attention: Crisis on Infinite Earths (April 1985-March 1986) and Watchmen  (September 1986-1987).  Set on an earth parallel to that of Marvel's main continuity, it shared the multiversal preoccupations of Crisis, but on a smaller scale.  Like Watchmen, it reexamined the superhero's role, but in a much less nuanced fashion.  And like both, it featured heroes who were variations of previously established characters:  Crisis's multiple earths included multiple iterations of Superman and Batman; Watchmen was originally pitched as a story about the heroes DC had recently purchased from the defunct Charlton comics, transformed into new characters for the purpose of the story; and Squadron Supreme was a longstanding variation on DC's Justice League.

In Marvel's hands, the Squadron would always have to be in some way inferior to the Avengers; after all, the Avengers were the home team. [1] But the Squadron was more than just Marvel's answer to DC's most famous superteam; over the years, the Squadron grew from a parody or set of in-jokes into an unusual type of foil for the Avengers: not just opponents (though they were that, too), but a political cautionary tale.  This would seem to be an unlikely evolution, since everything about the Squadron initially pointed inward towards hardcore comics lore, rather than outward, towards the world of the readers. 

The Squadron Supreme was not even directly based on the Justice League; it was a variation on a group of supervillains introduced in Avengers 70 (November 1969) called the "Squadron Sinister." Created by Roy Thomas and Sal Buscema, the villainous squadron was an answer to that most fanboyish question, "Who would win in a fight: the Avengers or the Justice League?" The answer, of course, was predetermined; if even the Squadron Supreme would never win, a team of bad guys never had a chance. The original Squadron Sinister consisted of Doctor Spectrum (Green Lantern), Hyperion (Superman), Nighthawk (Batman) , and the Whizzer (the Flash).  This team had a relatively limited impact on Marvel's main continuity; only Nighthawk became a character in an ongoing series (The Defenders) after renouncing his criminal past.  

Thomas returned to the concept in Avengers 85 (February 1971), when the Avengers end up on the home world of the Squadron Supreme, a team of heroes who just happen to be identical to the villains whom they battled just over a year ago in real time. Naturally, a fight breaks out; not only does this always happen whenever two superheroes meet for the first time, but the Avengers mistake this earth's heroes for the Squadron Sinister.  The Squadron Supreme only became a vehicle for political commentary when they returned for the "Serpent Crown" storyline that ran from Avengers 141 (November 1975) through Avengers 149 (July 1976), written by Steve Englehart. [2]. That this was Englehart's doing should come as no surprise; his run on Captain America  (a book he had just left) included the previously-mentioned "Secret Empire" storyline whose villain was Richard Nixon in disguise. [3]  Here the Squadron are reintroduced as "sell-outs" working for Roxxon, the company Marvel uses any time they need an evil corporation as a heavy (Englehart introduced Roxxon in Captain America 180 (December 1974). [4]  

Face it, Tiger: you’re a loser

When the Avengers journey to the Squadron's world, they not only can see how it has gone wrong, but they are in a position to rub the Squadron's noses in it.  At the end of the story, the Beast disguises himself as that world's president, Nelson Rockefeller, and tells Hyperion that his team has lost its way, and that Rockefeller's government is corrupt.  The Beast's disguise is almost immediately exposed, but the truth of his words hit home.  The movement back and forth between mainstream Marvel and the Squadron's world allows the political satire to be kept at one step's remove from the world of the Avengers, which, unlike the Squadron's, will not have to embark on the long work of rebuilding democracy after an oligarchical coup. But the interplay between the two dimensions also lets the satire target two different worlds: the "real world" and the one that the Squadron's is modeled on: that of DC comics.  After all, while Marvel occasionally told stories of alternate worlds in the 1970s, "multiple earths" was very much a DC thing.  Compared to Marvel, DC was the stolid, traditional comics company whose heroes were "squares," and who questioned the established order even less frequently than their Marvel counterparts.

Perhaps inadvertently, Englehart's reintroduction of the Squadron Supreme established a pattern for them that Kurt Busiek would finally lampshade in his Avengers/Squadron Supreme Annual '98: the Squadron is a team of weak-willed naifs who are conned again and again.  To be fair, Busiek has the Avengers speculate that something about their home universe makes them unusually susceptible to mind control, and, knowing the writer's facility for making connections with previous continuity, the explanation is probably sincere.   But it also doesn't take much to imagine that, after the Avengers send the Squadron back into the multiverse, they indulge in a collective eye-roll about how easy it was to make them feel better about their inability to resist a bad idea.  

Such disdain would have been well-justified. In the interim between The Serpent Crown Saga and Busiek's story, the Squadron demonstrated a stunning capacity for screwing up.  In a sequence of Defenders stories they turned their world into a fascist dystopia nominally run by Kyle Richmond (Nighthawk), but actually controlled by an alien entity called the Overmind (in turn the vessel for an entity called Null, the Living Darkness).  Gruenwald's Squadron Supremeseries takes place in the aftermath of that particular disaster.  Cleaning up after Rockefeller's corruption was one thing, but the Overmind had used the Squadron to take over the world.  How could they recover from that?  Gruenwald's Squadron comes up with a terrible answer: to take over the world again, but this time as good guys.

The series gets off to a slow and difficult start, with several pages of the characters recapping the events of The Defenders to each other for no one's benefit but the reader's.  Unlike Watchmen, which existed in a world created entirely for the purpose of telling one specific story, Squadron Supreme was bogged down in continuity right out of the gate.[5]. But to Gruenwald, continuity was always a big part of the fun. Gruenwald's obsession not just with comics lore, but with making all the lore fit together, was over the top even by fan standards.  Before becoming a professional writer, Gruenwald published a fanzine called Omniverse that was dedicated to exploring the nuances of continuity. He brought this same sensibility to his comics work, creating The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe (1982-1984), a fifteen-issue illustrated guide to the company's characters and events.  His series Quasar (1989-1994)  deployed his esoteric Marvel knowledge as the building blocks of storytelling; there was hardly a cosmic character who failed to at least make a cameo over the course of the series' 60 issues.

In 1988, he scripted an 11-part series of back-up stories about the High Evolutionary, a frequent Marvel antagonist whose complicated backstory was Gruenwald catnip, and, together with Ralph Macchio and Peter Gillis, he wrote a series of back-up stories in What If? centering around Jack Kirby's Eternals. Fresh off finishing off Roy Thomas' extended sequence of Thor comics that brought Kirby's characters into Marvel's main continuity, he and Macchio (and eventually, Gillis) set out to tell the characters' history in such a way that thoroughly (and permanently) integrated them with the rest of Marvel lore.  The principle behind these stories appears to be narrative economy:  they united three disparate hidden communities of super-powered beings into one common point of origin.  The Celestials created the Eternals, and their experiments on primitive proto-humans were what inspired the Kree to develop the Inhumans (Kirby's earlier creation). Early in their history, the Eternals suffered a schism, resulting in an offshoot moving to the planet Titan, where they became the ancestors of Jim Starlin's Thanos and Eros.  These were not necessarily bad ideas; in fact, they resulted in many good stories. Unfortunately, none of them were by Gruenwald, Macchio, or Gillis. [6]

Forty years later, it's easy to fault Gruenwald for the sheer nerdiness of his preoccupations, especially now that there actually is a market for comics/graphic novels that can be picked up and read on their own.  While the book's entrenchment in decades of Marvel storytelling is a distinct obstacle to Squadron Supreme functioning as Marvel's Watchmen (i.e, as the book you can give to non-comics readers to show them why comics are good), we should at least be aware that we are judging the book by standards that it had no interest in meeting. Squadron Supreme was designed to reward the efforts and enthusiasm of the dedicated Marvel reader, in a fashion that required the recognition of continuity. 

Even if the Squadron was composed of second-stringers derived from a Justice League template, they were a familiar Marvel fixture.  It is one thing to watch an entirely new set of characters deviate from the run-of-the-mill superhero story, but it is another to see heroes you already know take over the world in order to build a utopia.  As an established team on an established alternate Earth, the Squadron's actions felt far more consequential than an issue of What If?  (or an "Elseworlds" story, DC's later designation for non-continuity stories about established characters (or variations on them).  The Squadron's world was "real" within Marvel continuity, but not essential: it was possible and permissible to radically change their status quo without having to undo everything that happened by the story's end.  In fact, this had already become the  main rationale for Squadron stories starting with Englehart's Avengers:  their world is supposed to be subject to radical change.  And, unlike in Watchmen, the consequences could continue to be explored in subsequent stories. [7]

Notes 

[1] Kurt Busiek and George Perez introduced a clever metacommentary on the home team dynamic in JLA vs. Avengers, the miniseries that could final dispense with thinly-veiled proxies of each company's rivals.  Things worked better for each team in their home universe.  Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely took the idea further, essentially embedding the rules of the superhero genre into the nature of DC's multiverse. In their Earth 2 graphic novel, when the Justice League tries to clean up the alternate earth dominated by their villainous counterparts (the Crime Syndicate), they discover that they simply cannot win in this other world, which exists for the triumph of evil.

[2] Issues 145 and 146 were a two-part fill-in story that had nothing to do with the ongoing plot.

[3] See my Marvel in the 1970s for an extended discussion of this storyline.

[4] Writers in the 1970s often began plotlines in one book, only to develop them on the next book they would be assigned. The Serpent Crown storyline gave Englehart the opportunity to wrap up threads from his run on Amazing Adventures (starring the Beast and featuring Patsy Walker) and Captain America.

[5] Even worse, it was continuity based on a comic not many people were reading.  J.M. DeMatteis' run on The Defenders had many bright spots,  but it was not exactly a bestseller.  Assuming familiarity with the Squadron's last appearance would have been short-sighted.

[6] These historical stories were pleasant enough reads for the die-hard Marvel reader, but their payoff would only come later, especially when Kieron Gillen was writing The Eternals.

[7] There is some continuity that is too much even for Gruenwald.  At the end of the Defenders storyline, Kyle Richmond's body is inhabited by the mind of his mainstream Marvel counterpart. The Squadron Supreme makes no mention of this fact.

[19] Or at least, unlike Watchmen as originally conceived. DC's decision to continue the franchise against Alan Moore's express wishes changed all that, but only after decades had passed in real time.

[20] Amphibian also votes against it, but, unlike Nighthawk,  he agrees to defer to the will of the majority.

Next: Plot Cancer

This Is a Job for....Procedural Democracy?

The superhero is, among other things, a fantasy about noble vigilantes who can fight crime more effectively than the representatives of our political and judicial institutions (see Chapter 3).  While they are normally constrained by a generic conservatism that requires the maintenance of the status quo, mainstream superhero comics have occasionally taken the opportunity to imagine a hero who aspires to make systemic change, either from within (by running for office) or from above (by taking over entirely).  Given how obsessed American culture is with celebrity, and the occasional successful celebrity candidates for office, a superhero president makes a certain amount of sense.  

Especially after the election of former movie star Ronald Reagan. For Captain America's 250th issue, which came out four months before Reagan's victory, a team of four writers (Roger Stern, Don Perlin, Roger McKenzie, and Jim Shooter), working with artists John Byrne and Ed Hannigan, confronted the hero with a growing popular demand that he run for president.  After giving it several pages of thought, Cap unsurprisingly declined to run.  On the face of it, it was a very Silver Age-style idea dragged into a more sophisticated time (Captain America's identity was still a secret; how was he supposed to campaign for president?).  But the explanation he gives on the final pages is a surprisingly apt summation of the problem his presidency would pose for superhero comics:

[The president] must be ready to negotiate--to compromise--24 hours a day to preserve the republic at all costs.

I understand this... I appreciate this...and I realize I need to work within such a framework. By the same token...

...I have worked and fought all my life for the growth and advancement of the American dream, and I believe that my duty to the dream would severely limit any abilities I might have to preserve the reality.

We must all live in the real world.... and sometimes that world can be pretty grim. But it is the dream...the hope...that makes the reality worth living.

The writers pose the question in terms of political process vs. idealism, but they might as well be talking about the real world vs the superhero genre.  The superhero acts in a realm that rarely requires subtlety, compromise, or the dreary back-and-forth of proceduralism.  Fittingly for a Captain America comic, this problem is exacerbated by the peculiarities of the American system.  In a parliamentary system that grants executive power to a prime minister and ceremonial authority to a president, electing Captain America might be more feasible.  But then we wouldn't be talking about Captain America or the "American dream."  Still, superheroes are more compatible. with heads of states (or even figureheads) than they are with actual chief executives. [1] 

Really, what could go wrong?

Captain America is not alone in flirting with the presidency; a Silver Age story has Jimmy Olsen dreaming that his pal has ascended to the oval office, while the Armageddon 2000 crossover included a possible future with the Man of Steel as president. In Final Crisis, Grant Morrison introduced DC readers to Earth 23, where a black man named Calvin Ellis is both President and secretly Superman.  This "President Superman" would subsequently be brought back on multiple occasions.  Mainstream DC continuity could not make room for Superman as president, but for years, Lex Luthor held that office in the DC Universe.

The fantasy of a superhero attaining the highest office in the land by means of free and fair elections is the desire for a perfect synthesis of vigilante romanticism and democratic proceduralism.  In this scenario, we can keep our democratic institutions while secure in the knowledge that the man (and, let's face it, we're usually talking about a man here) at the top is not just competent and honest, but a paragon of humanity. It is the ideal fusion of the head of government, head of state, and man of steel.  It is also unsustainable, not just because of hard-bitten cynicism about how politics actually work, but because the heroes who take on the country's leadership are not designed to bear such a burden with any kind of plausibility. [2] 

But why should we expect a superhero to be content with the slow, demeaning process of a presidential campaign?  The average superhero's career is premised on the desire to work outside the system, to cut corners, and to mete justice more effectively that any legal executive power might manage. Seizing power is a classic supervillain move; villains tend either to rob banks, murder indiscriminately, or try to take over the city/country/world, and it is usually up to the hero to stop them. Yet there is an easy homology between fighting crime as a vigilante and taking control of the government in order to improve people's lives.  [Find name] draws a parallel between the detective story ("Let's solve a crime") and utopia ("Let's solve all crime"), one that easily maps onto the superhero ("Let's stop a criminal" and "Let's stop all criminals").  Beyond the question of crime, the homology is based on a disdain for institutions in the name of the very ideals that the institutions are supposed to uphold: justice (by circumventing the niceties of the justice system) and peace (by beating up those who threaten it).  When the ethos of vigilantism is expanded to the scale of government, it could justify the seizure of power by well-meaning superheroes (it can also justify fascism, but that's for a later chapter).

The superhero government takeover has become such a familiar trope that it has even migrated from its comics origins to other media:  the "Justice Lords" scenario on the Justice League cartoon in which a version of the Justice League take power on a parallel earth after the death of the Flash ("A Better World," Episodes 37-38, November 1, 2003). The 2013 video game Injustice: Gods Among Us, which has Superman and his allies take over the world after the Joker kills Lois Lane, launched an entire franchise (more games, multiple volumes of comics, and an animated adaptation).  Compelling as these stories may be, they are based on an even more common trope: the superhero who goes bad.  Though in each case, the heroes who take over claim that they are making the world a better place, the impetus is personal loss. It's a scenario that makes the heroes briefly sympathetic, but it also represents a deliberate break from one of the most common superhero origin stories.  Bruce Wayne becomes Batman because his parents were killed; Peter Parker learns the lesson of great responsibility from his inadvertent role in his uncle's death. Even the original Ant-Man (Hank Pym) is motivated by the death of his first wife.  With the exception of the Punisher, who started out as a response to the eye-for-an-eye ethos of the Dirty Harry movies, revenge is rarely the right path for the superhero.

Of more interest, than, are those moments when the hero or heroes make the conscious, relatively unemotional decision to solve the world's problems by taking the reins of government.  This has happened on numerous occasions, but always either in a parallel world or timeline (Squadron Supreme), in a small, self-contained superhero universe (The Authority, Miracleman), or in a story destined to be reconned (Thor: The Reigning, as well as The Authority).  Just as the first volume of Marvel's What If? series served primarily to remind readers that the main continuity was the best of all possible worlds, these alternate world explore forbidden scenarios as cautionary tales.  It would be unrealistic to expect corporate comics to tell the story of a superhero takeover that was successful and benign; not only would this be politically unpalatable to anyone who believes in procedural democracy, as well as an implicit endorsement of fascism (no matter what the explicit policies of the superhero leaders happened to be), but it would also fall into the trap that awaits most utopias:  as a plot, it is a dead end. Utopias are generally inhospitable to the development of compelling plots, since all major problems have been solved. All that's left for the reader to do is to learn about the utopian world, but the result is less like a novel and more like a tour guide.  Gaiman's and Buckingham's follow-up to Alan Moore's Miracleman stories recognizes this limitation while pushing against its boundaries. At the end of Moore's run, the title character and a group of allies have created a paradise on earth after one of their former comrades tortured and murdered nearly the entire population of London.  Gaiman and Buckingham were taking their time (decades, in fact, due to the problems surrounding the book's publication) to explore this new world in a series of one-short stories. [3] The world may be more or less perfect, but the adaptation of the individuals who live in it is still idiosyncratic, contingent, and not always personally satisfying. [4]

In the mid-1980s, both DC and Marvel published 12-issues limited series that featured superheroes crossing the lines in order to save the world.  One of them, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, whose plot hinged upon a brilliant former hero's decision to end the Cold War through complex subterfuge, is widely recognized as a classic in the world of graphic novels.  The other, Squadron Supreme, written by Mark Gruenwald with pencils by Bob Hall, Paul Ryan, and John Buscema, is best remembered for the fact that, at Gruenwald's request, the first printing of the collected edition of the series used ink mixed with his own ashes after his premature demise.

Notes

[1] Marvel has repeatedly returned to the idea of a President Captain America, but always in stories or settings that are safely outside of mainstream continuity. Two different issues of What If? explore this possibility (What If vol 1, 26, April 1981 and What If, vol 2, 28), and not long before the Ultimate Marvel Universe was destroyed, Captain America became president of a fractured nation which he sought to unify.

[2] Exceptions are made for alternate universes and timelines, of course, but also for futures that may or may not come to pass.  Marvel has repeatedly returned to the idea that Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) will one day grow up to be president.  Kamala's presidency does not strain the superhero framework as much as Superman's or Captain America's (even taking into account that she is a brown Muslim Inhuman mutant woman with weird powers), because Kamala is still a teenager. Her future presidency is a statement about her potential rather than her actuality, and is also consistent with the overall optimism of Ms. Marvel's own comics.  In addition, the progressive character of Kamala's successful presidential bid (again, brown, female, Muslim, mutant,  Inhuman) counterbalances the populist and even fascist overtones of electing a superhero.

[3] The rights to the character now best known as MIracleman  are a saga until itself. The character was created by Mick Anglo after his British publisher lost the rights to reprint Fawcett's Captain Marvel (who is now best known as "Shazam"). To replace the Marvel family, Anglo barely changed them: Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel, Jr.l became Marvelman and Young Marvelman. In the 1980s, Dez Skinn hired Alan Moore to revive the character for his new Warrior anthology.  Moore completely revamped the character, turning it into the first of many deconstructions of the superhero archetype. When the stories were reprinted in the United States by Eclipse Comics, the name was changed to "Miracleman" to avoid lawsuits from Marvel Comics. Moore completed the story he planned and turned the book over to Gaiman. Gaiman and Buckingham produced eight issues of Miracleman from 1990-1991. Moore also gave Gaiman the rights when Eclipse collapse.  However, Todd McFarlane purchased Eclipse's assets and claimed ownership to Miracleman.  Lawsuits ensued, until it was discovered that Anglo was still alive and owned the rights. Marvel purchased the license from him 2009 and began reprinting the series, but only started publishing new material by Gaiman and Buckingham in 2022. Thus the gap between their first run on the book and its revival was 31 years. Subsequently, the allegations that Gaiman assaulted several women put an end to the Miracleman revival.

[4] At the same time, they are also setting up a major challenge to the new status quo that will probable lead to its downfall.

Next: Earth's Mightiest Punching Bags

Crisis at the World Trade Center

Perhaps the problem with these superheroic interventions is not just that the tasks are too great (even if they are); perhaps the insertion of these costume-clad figures of fantasy into an event that is actually happening is either simply in too poor taste, or too jarring to take seriously. When Dr. Doom stood at Ground Zero in the J. Michael Straczynski and John Romita Jr. special issue of Spider-Man that came out immediately after 9/11 (Issue 36), the tears welling in his eyes were not only ludicrous, but led to ludicrous fan discussions.  Putting a crying supervillain in this situation is, at minimum, tacky, but it also breaks the frame in an unproductive manner.  Fans and critics online repeatedly pointed out the absurdity of this moment; why would Dr. Doom, who has killed countless people and destroyed his fair share of major cities, care at all about this?  This is a sensible objection, but it is also symptomatic: with a single panel, the creative team got people to expend their mental energy on the possible reactions of a comic book supervillain to a real-life tragedy that had just happened. It is only a short step from "Would Dr. Doom cry over 9/11?" back to, "Who would win in a fight, the Hulk or Thor?"

Dr. Doom’s heart grew two sizes on 9/11

Even more than the Ethiopian famine, 9/11 is a case study in the incompatibility of superhero comics with real-world disasters; in Marvel comics, at least, 9/11 would have happened in the city that is home to nearly all the company's heroes. By "incompatibility," I do not mean to suggest that superhero comics cannot be serious or weighty, or legitimate works of politically-inflected art.  It is a question of genre, tone, and believability.  This is not exclusively a problem of superhero comics; when HBO's Sex and the City returned after September 11, the iconic shot of the Twin Towers was removed from the opening credits, but the producers wisely declined to make a "very special episode" about the event.  Executive producer Michael Patrick King was adamant that "the series should provide escapist pleasures, not debates about bin Laden over brunch." Even though the series took place in "the City," it did not have a way to address 9/11 adequately without becoming an entirely different show. 

Of course, no one expected Carrie Bradshaw and her friends to actually do something about bin Laden, or to provide disaster relief at Ground Zero.  Superheroes, on the other hand, should be expected to do precisely that. Which was the problem with Amazing Spider-Man 36 in particular and superhero comics involving 9/11 in general.  Just how many times have superheroes foiled terrorists and stopped airplanes from crashing?  How many buildings have they saved from total destruction? The only reason Marvel or DC superheroes would be unable to save the Twin Towers is that, in our world, they were not saved. Even setting aside the heroes' inexplicable failure, there is the question of continuity and tone. Entire cities have been destroyed in mainstream superhero comics, but with limited consequences.  When Green Lantern Hal Jordan's home town of Coast City is erased from the map, it sets him down the path of villainy, leading him to commit mass murder and try to reboot the timeline, but the rest of the country moves on rather quickly.  Coast City's destruction is only referenced when it is useful for the plot. Even worse, nearly everything about this tragedy is undone by later events; Hal was possessed by a fear entity called Parallax (don't ask), and Coast City is eventually rebuilt (although the original population remains dead). There is too much casual destruction and megadeaths in superhero comics for 9/11 to resonate properly.

Or at least as a current event and a recent trauma.  With the passage of time, 9/11 can become one of many horrible historic events that is assumed to have happened in the superhero comic's past, making it available as a referent.  Brian Vaughn and Tony Harris strike a delicate balance by making 9/11 a central part of the backstory to their WIldStorm comic Ex Machina (2004-2010), and it works because of the total control they have over their particular storyworld. Ex Machina takes  place in a New York that has always had the same superhero comics we have, but no actual superheroes.  The protagonist, Mitchell Hundred, is the newly-elected mayor of New York City who had a brief period as his world's only superhero, the Great Machine. Three years before the comic beings, Hundred used his ability to communicate with technology in order to prevent one of the planes from hitting the World Trade Center. As a result, one of the towers still stands, many lives were saved, and Hundred is able to capitalize on his newfound celebrity to successfully run for office.  But Ex Machina is set in an alternate universe, where Hundred, the forces behind the events that gave him his powers, and the partial prevention of 9/11 are the only crucial differences from our own world.[5] In the absence of the daily superhero attacks and mass destruction that menace cities in DC and Marvel comics, Vaughn and Harris have created a space in which a superhero comic can reasonably address the 9/11 attacks.

From World War II to the Ethiopian famine to 9/11, the common element of all these representational failures is literalism.  Literalism has never been the superhero genre's strong point; on the contrary, literalism is (figuratively) superhero kryptonite.  It is the thematic equivalent of one of the many useful formal observations made by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics.  McCloud shows the broad range of representational styles available to the comics artist, from the extremely cartoonish on one end to the photorealistic on the other.  The cartoonish figure is stripped down and iconic, with only a few lines needed in order to create a recognizable, and even unique face (like Charlie Brown).  The photorealist tries to represent the human figure as accurately as possible, something few comics artists actually attempt (the 70s art of Neal Adams, while still relying on a great deal of caricature, comes close, as does the art of Alex Ross).  McCloud argues that the cartoonish representation takes advantage of what he calls the masking effect: by avoiding excessive realism, it allows readers to project themselves onto the characters, to "be" them while reading.  Realistic drawing, instead of encouraging identification, turns characters into objects to be looked at.   [1]

By the same token, superhero comics that are explicitly about a recent, consequential event run the risk of either getting bogged down in extraneous detail, or getting the details wrong. Superhero comics successfully comment on current events by doing what superhero comics do best: operating in the realm of metaphor.  Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema's classic Secret Empire storyline in Captain America 169-175 (January-July 1974) was transparently about Watergate, but without pitting Steve Rogers against G. Gordon Liddy, or meeting with Deep Throat in a garage. [2]  At both Marvel and DC, there is a long tradition of publishing stories that comment on current events and hot-button political issues by transposing them into the superhero universe.  In some cases, it is a matter of the themes that are embedded into the books themselves: the X-Men franchise has always been a useful vehicle for examining xenophobia, racism, homophobia, and generalized intolerance thanks to the flexibility of the mutant metaphor. Tellingly, it is when the basis for the metaphor is made more explicit that it starts to fail: assertions that Magneto is the Malcolm X to Professor Xavier's Martin Luther King practically beg to be refuted.   It does not take a deep knowledge of history or even a highly developed racial sensitivity to realize that comparing Malcolm X to a (sometimes reformed) terrorist and mass murderer is problematic.   But the flaw in the comparison is not a problem with the X-Men's storytelling; there is no reason why a fantasy scenario cannot involve a leader who makes compelling separatist arguments while also committing murder.  The problem is equating him with a real-life historical figure who committed no such crimes.

Marvel has doubled down on its politically-inflected storyline in the twenty-first century. Civil War can be read as a response to the Patriot Act, Civil War II as an (overly) extended interrogation of profiling, and (the second) Secret Empire as a reflection of anxieties about the rise of fascism over the past decade.  But again, they work because their approach to these questions is not literal. As cathartic as it might be to see Captain America punch Donald Trump in the face, it would make little sense as a comic and be of minimal political value.  Moreover, the vagaries of comicbook time mean that every instance that fixes a hero or an event in a particular historical moment will cause continuity troubles down the line, from Batwoman being discharged from the military under the "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" policy to the Fantastic Four trying to beat the "commies" to the moon.  Curiously, even the solutions to these continuity problems end up serving as comments on American politics at the same time that the move the comics away from actual political events.  A number of Marvel characters had the Vietnam was as an important part of their backstories, from Tony Stark's capture by the Viet Cong to the Punisher's time fighting in the war. Marvel's solution has been to move all Vietnam-related personal histories to the fictional country of Sin-Cong. Sin-Cong itself has Marvel roots  that are long, but not deep; it was introduced in an issue of The Avengers in 1965, and mostly forgotten for decades. Now the assumption is that at any point in the recent past, Marvel's America was involved in a foreign adventure in Sin-Cong, which can account for all the previous Vietnam- and Korea-related origins (and, in a pinch for World War II).  Is there a better summation of American foreign policy than blithely assuming that at any given point, the U.S. can be assumed to be bogged down in an ill-advised foreign adventure?

Notes

[1] Overly realistic comics art can be so distracting as to make the comic seem less real, something most obvious in comics based on movies or television series; the Gold Key Star Trek comics (1967-1979) try so hard to render the actors recognizable that the result feels stiff and posed. By contrast, Georges Jeanty's art on Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight works brilliantly because he manages to distill the characters' look without working too hard to draw the actors.  The star of his comic was identifiably Buffy, but she was not Sarah Michele Gellar.

[2] The metaphor almost breaks when the leader of the Secret Empire turns out to be Richard Nixon, but, critically, he is never actually shown or named.

Next: This Is a Job for....Procedural Democracy?

We Are the World (of DC and Marvel)

Occasionally, both DC and Marvel would bring out a special, out-of-continuity comic in which the heroes addressed a contemporary disaster, with sales going towards disaster relief. The goals were noble, but the aesthetic results were, well, disastrous.  Particularly egregious were two comics put out by Marvel and DC in response to the mid-1980s famine in Ethiopia: Heroes for Hope (Marvel, 1985) Heroes against Hunger (1986).  It feels somewhat churlish to lambast comics created by the combined efforts of over forty different writers and artist (for each) on aesthetic grounds; this was hardly the recipe for creating the comics equivalent of Citizen Kane.  And did anyone really think that USA for Africa's 1985 charity single "We Are the World," which somehow had to accommodate everyone from Dionne Warwick to Bob Dylan (while leaving room for Dan Ackroyd and Willie Nelson) was God's gift to music?  This is the sort of creation-by-committee that, when combined with a tight deadline and a seriousness of purpose that lends to stultifying piety, can at best aspire for mediocrity.  It was as a mediocrity that "We Are the World" succeeded--it is an inoffensive, vaguely catchy pop tune that did the job it set out to do (raising more than $63 million in humanitarian aid).   Unfortunately, neither DC's nor Marvel's efforts in this regard managed to rise above the level of the awful.

On his late, lamented web site The Middle Spaces, Osvaldo Oyola posted a scathing (and hilarious) indictment of both companies' charity comics.  In particular, he takes each of them to task for their unadulterated Orientalism, beginning with the reduction of an entire continent to an "Africa" consisting exclusively of arid, famine-stricken deserts (the Marvel comic doesn't even specify Ethiopia), continuing through a level of casual racism and sexism that led Oxfam to refuse to work with Marvel on the project, and ending with the way in which each book reinforces a sense of fatalism and hopelessness about "Africa" even as they call for monetary assistance..  Oyola's article stands perfectly well on its own; for our purposes, though, it is worth looking specifically at the question of superhero involvement in "real-world" problems, and in that regard, I would only add that Oyola's criticism of the comics applies so well to Eighties rhetoric of African relief that these comics are actually an accurate representation of an important aspect of the world that produced them.  This would then be the only thing about their combination of superheroes and the real world that really holds together. 

Well, that, and the useful reminder that while teamwork is admirable among superheroes, writing and drawing by committee can bring on a crisis of infinite pedestrianism. DC's Heroes against Hunger was plotted by Jim Starlin (with an assist from Bernie Wrightson), and features an unlikely team-up of (pre-Crisis) Superman, Batman and Lex Luthor as they try to save "Africa" from starvation.  As Oyola notes, there are some gestures in the direction of real-world politics, mostly put in the mouth of a foreign aid worker, but the comics fails both as a superhero story and as a real-world inspiration.  Early on, Superman has to admit that he can't refresh the entire continent's topsoil by himself, acre by acre; soon, he and Batman discover that an alien called "The Master" has secreted himself underground to feed on the "entropy" resulting from African suffering.  They can defeat him (not that much in the story would make us care about him), but they remain helpless in the face of famine. Even visually, the comics reminds us of the book's shaky underpinnings:  Superman's and Batman's full-body spandex outfits, and Luthor's purple-green armor, have no place in panels surrounded by admittedly stereotypical images of starving Africans.

Marvel's Heroes for Hope had one thing going for it: rather than spend time explaining why a particular set of individual characters was involved (as DC did), it focused on their biggest hit, the X-Men, and was co-written and co-edited by the two people most embedded in the franchise at the time: writer Chris Claremont and writer and editor Ann Nocenti. [1] The X-Men were better suited for this sort of thing than most characters, since their remit usually included the exploration of xenophobia, guilt, and redemption. One of its leads, Ororo (Storm) spent years living as a "goddess" in Kenya; another, Magneto, is both a Holocaust survivor and reformed terrorist/freedom fighter/mass murder; and a third, Rachel Summers, grew up in a dystopian timeline in which the mutants who survived genocide were enslaved, and in which she had been brainwashed to hunt down fellow mutants who tried to escape.  Suffering, high death rates, and tragedy were baked in to the franchise.

Don’t worry, Africa! We’re here to save you!

And yet it could never work. Even if we set aside the tone-deafness, misery porn, and casual racism Oyola rightfully condemns, the problem remains that this is a superhero comic, and superhero comics need villains and fight scenes. Even for the most praiseworthy of causes, no one wants to read 48 pages of superheroes distributing food and medicine or lobbying congress.  So instead they face the allegorical embodiment of famine, at times referred to as "Hungry," who arranges psychodrama set pieces for each of the individual X-Men before taking over Rogue's body and become a grotesque, tentacled monster for the X-Men to physically fight and temporarily defeat. Along the way, many stirring speeches are given, lessons are learned, and nothing really changes.

Note

[1] Bernie Wrightson, Jim Starlin and Jim Shooter are also given a "story by" credit at the top of the page, along with Claremont and Nocenti. Sixteen other writers are credited with specific pages.

 Next: Crisis at the World Trade Center

Drugs Are Bad, m'kay?

"Relevant" superhero comics also tried to address the question of illegal drugs.  This proved to be a problem, because the Comics Code would not allow any depiction of drug use, even for the purposes of condemning it.  Stan Lee and Gil Kane insisted on publishing a Spider-Man story involving a pill-popping Harry Osborne (Amazing Spider-Man 96-98, May-July 1971), while O'Neil and Adams revealed that Roy Harper who fought at Green Arrow's side as Speedy (!), was a heroin addict in two Very Special Issues called "Snowbirds Don't Fly!" (Green Lantern/Green Arrow 85-86, August-November 1971).   These issues are celebrated for forcing the Comics Code Authority to relax a number of its policies (thereby ushering in an era of innovation in the 1970s), but as stories, they are more instructive in their failings.  Both drug abuse and racism make for poor super-villains.  What is a superhero supposed to do about heroin addiction--punch it in the face and throw it in jail? 

You will believe a man can fly

The moralizing of superhero anti-drug stories is intense, but it is par the course:  mass media messages about the dangers of drugs in the 1960s and 1970s rarely left room for nuance.  But the problem goes deeper than that.  When it comes to drugs, the entire superhero genre is on very shaky grounds, since so many superheroes got their powers from...drugs. Ralph Dibney drinks an exotic fruit extract called Gingold to gain the flexibility of the Elastic Man. The final part of Steve Rogers' transformation into Captain America involved drinking a super-soldier serum, and another drug in the 1970s inadvertently enhances his super strength.  With the benefit of hindsight, the most egregious example is DC's Hourman. Created in 1943 by Ken Fitch and Bernard Baily, Hourman was the secret identity of chemist Rex Tyler, who invented a pill called "Miraclo" that gave him super strength and speed for exactly one hour. Decades later, it was revealed that both he and his son, Rick (the second Hourman) struggled with Miraclo addition. The superhero junkie would receive his apotheosis when The Sentry, created by Paul Jenkins, Jae Lee, and Rick Veitch in 2000, was revealed not to be just a naive boy who used a scientist's secret formula, but a drug-seeking schizophrenic who wanted to get "higher than a thousand kites" (Sentry 8, 2006). 

By the time the Sentry's origin was revealed, the superhero comics industry had reached a point where engaging in this kind of parodic deconstruction of the genre's tropes was already old hat.  For the most part, drugs and addiction were simply woven into characters' narrative arcs as an ordinary fact of people's lives rather than an example of a metaphysical threat:  Carol Danvers' and Tony Stark's alcoholism, for example, may have initially been depicted in a melodramatic fashion, but they ultimately became familiar character traits (at least in Stark's case; Danvers' personal history is too complicated to go into).  Roy Haper's struggles with addiction were treated with more subtlety once they were an element of his past history rather than his present struggle. [1]

 Note

[1] At least if we exclude J.T. Krul's and Geraldo Borge's 2010 miniseries Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal, which most readers are only too happy to do.

Next: We Are the World (of DC and Marvel) 

Why Superheroes Didn't End World War II

 Could this be a job for Superman? Marvel answered the equivalent question in the affirmative, introducing Captain America with a cover of him punching Hitler in the face, months before Pearl Harbor.  Captain America could be involved in World War II because, even though he was a super soldier, there was no expectation that he could turn the tide alone. Instead, Captain America was an aspirational figure, a useful symbol in a mobilization campaign.  Superman is another matter. Even at his 1940s power levels, the Man of Steel could have been a game-changer. Throw in the Green Lantern, the Flash, Doctor Fate, and the Spectre, and the war could have been won in days rather than years.

Good people on both sides, I’m sure

At the time, the future DC characters tended to restrict their adventures to the home front. Decades later, in the 1980s, writers explained that the Justice Society (the Golden Age DC superheroes on what was then Earth-Two) was kept out of the war in Europe by the magic Spear of Destiny, which was in Hitler's hands. This is an obvious deviation from actual history, but it was made in the service of keeping the overall shape of World War II consistent with its development in the real world.  [1] 

 The very fact that it took forty years for someone to bother to explain why DC superheroes didn't liberate Europe and prevent the Holocaust is a testament to just how much the culture and expectations around superhero comics had changed in the interim. [2] It is unlikely that contemporary readers (including a significant portion of the armed services) were wondering why Superman wasn't singlehandedly ending the war, or, for that matter, why Wonder Woman, one the few DC heroes whose origins were linked to the war, met such limited success in her fight against the Nazis.  It would only be with the rise of tighter continuity, the development of fan culture, the participation of former fans as writers and artists, and the changes in Americans' social consciousness that superheroes could reasonably by imagined having the capability to change the world, not to mention the obligation to try.

 This is also why modern Marvel comics were in a better position than their competitors to begin incorporating real-world social issues in their heroic fantasy adventures.  Marvel as we know it begins in 1961, with the Civil Right Movement well underway, the counterculture only a few years off, and The Feminine Mystique published just two years later.  Stan Lee and John Romita Sr. gave the Daily Bugle a Black editor (and foil for J. Jonah Jameson) in The Amazing Spider-Man 51 (August 1967), just a year after Lee and Kirby introduced the Black Panther in Fantastic Four 52.  Marvel's women would only start expressing feminist views after Lee stopped writing (his female characters had a tendency to simper), while the counterculture would be depicted with varying degrees of cringe throughout the decade.  A few years later, at DC, Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow would kick off a movement for "relevance" in comics, with the "hard-traveling heroes" confronting environmental pollution, racism, overpopulation, and addiction.  This run introduced John Stewart, the first Black Green Lantern, who later went on to star in DC's animated Justice League series.

 Half a century later, most of these stories read like Exhibit A in the case against having superheroes confront social issues. Perhaps the nadir was the now-infamous "I Am Curious (Black)," Robert Kanigher and Werner Roth's story of Lois Lane's attempts to report from Metropolis's  "Little Africa" (a ghetto never seen before or since).  Shocked that the residents don't trust a well-intentioned white lady, Lois uses Kryptonian technology to transform herself into a Black woman for the day.  She is immediately accepted, and learns more about the struggle of African Americans.  The episode ends in one of the great liberal clichés of the 1970s:  when a Black activist is shot, only Lois has the rare blood type that can save his life. Even when he discovers that she is white, he still accepts her.  The anxiety here is a common one for white liberal race stories of this era: why won't Black people realize that I'm one of the good ones? And why do they have to be so angry?  

Yes, someone actually thought this was a great idea

Notes

[1] An issue of Marvel's What If? revealed that Hitler was incinerated in his bunker by the original Human Torch, an event that became part of Marvel canon.  Again, though, this was only a detail: Hitler still died on the date he did in our world.

[2] It was also a testament to writer Roy Thomas's lifelong commitment to the heroes of his very early childhood. Born in 1940, Thomas resurrected nearly all the major superhero properties at both Marvel and DC over the course of his career, retroactively creating World War II-era superteams for each (the Invaders and the All-Star Squadron, respectively).

Next: Drugs Are Bad, m’kay?

The Real World Problem

The failure, inability, or refusal of superhero characters to address systemic injustice can be (and has been) interpreted as a political bias.  On the whole, revolutionary firebrands do not find jobs at Marvel and DC, two publishers that, in addition to the usual financial self-interest one expects from any company in a capitalist system, have become firmly implanted in the corporate world over the course of their existence.  Though colloquially known as DC Comics since the 1940s, National Comics Publications only officially adopted the name in 1977, a decade after its parent company was purchased by Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. The March 1989 Warner merger with Time Inc. meant that DC became a subsidiary of Time-Warner, and for a a brief and perplexing period, AOL (2001-2003).  But throughout all its parent company's permutations, the reality is that DC has been under the Warner umbrella since 1967.

When Marvel publisher Bill Jemas ham-handedly attempted to revive the storied DC/Marvel rivalry in 2001, he called DC "AOL Comics." The slur never took off, no matter how much of his own corporate might Jemas put behind it (in 2002, he wrote Marville, widely considered one of the worst comics ever made; it began as a Superman parody with Ted Turner and Jane Fonda in the 51 century sending their son Kal-AOL back in time). But Jemas was living in a glass house. Marvel had gone through a series of corporate owners during the same period (the Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation, Cadence Industries, New World Entertainment, and, most disastrously, Ron Perleman's company MacAndrews and Forbes).  That last takeover ended in bankruptcy and the eventual purchase by Toy Biz, which formed Marvel Enterprises and hired...Bill Jemas. Since 2009, Marvel has been owned by the Walt Disney Company. 

I, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords

Clearly, then, neither DC nor Marvel are likely to become the comics publishing equivalent of the Weather Underground or Occupy Wall Street.  They are Wall Street, as well as Hollywood; Stan Lee was always desperate for Marvel to become a film powerhouse (which, as part of Disney, it now is), although it is DC that moved its headquarters to Burbank in 2015. But corporate self-interest is not the only (or even, I believe, the primary) reason for the inherent conservatism of Marvel and DC. The real problem is the rest of the world.

Even before Stan Lee insisted that Marvel superheroes live in New York rather than a made up analogue (such as Metropolis or Gotham), superhero comics had a complicated relationship with the world that produced them.  Obviously, New York has never been home to wall-crawling vigilantes, thunder gods, and mutants; and even if there were a city named Metropolis, it would not have been protected by a super-powered Kryptonian. But for the most part, the world of the comic book superhero had to resemble our world; indeed, one of the thrills of the superhero genre is imagining these powerful men and women coexisting with ordinary mortals like the readers.  In his first adventure, Superman stops a man from beating his wife and barges into the governor's mansion to prevent the execution of an innocent man.  The crimes and situations are familiar; the only truly fantastic element is Superman himself.

Superman was created in 1938, inaugurating a vogue for superheroes just one year before the Nazi invasion of Poland and three years before the United States entered World War II.  Now the real world itself looked different, dangerous, and incomprehensible.  Could this be a job for Superman?

Next: Why Superheroes Didn't End World War II