Last week, I made an appearance on the “Jerry Agar Show” at the Triangle’s news-talk station, WPTF-AM. Although the topic was legislative politics, somehow we drifted into a discussion of superhero comics and their political overtones.
Afterwards, I got a lot of phone calls and emails about the very-serious topic. So I’ve decided to reprint below the piece I wrote last year for Carolina Journal on the subject. I hope you find it entertaining:
The Implicit (and Welcome) Politics of Superhero Comic Books
Carolina Journal
September 2001
As a pop-culture phenomenon, the comic-book superhero is back in an upswing. Yes, I know that such things — westerns, girl groups, spy thrillers, etc. — come and go. Their fate is hardly linked to that of civilization itself (except for disco, the persistence of which might well have signified the End of Days).
Still, I can’t help but look forward eagerly to the latest comics fad, which is being driven largely by film. Last year’s moderately successful X-Men convinced Marvel Comics that motion pictures offered the key to its rejuvenation in the coming decade, much as the X-Men and Spider-Man television programs rebuilt the company in the early 1990s. So, not surprisingly, it is following up with a major studio release of Spider-Man this fall, to be followed over the next two years by another X-Men installment and movies based on the Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, the Fantastic Four, and Iron Man.
Over at DC Comics, where the Batman movie franchise quickly (arguably by the middle of the first film in 1989) degenerated into idiocy, executives are reportedly putting together a more serious Batman film and trying to rekindle interest in its Superman series, which also got really silly really fast.
Why care about superhero comics? Because, with few exceptions, they are an unabashedly right-of-center cultural force. Many superhero characters and story lines advance principles of justice, individual rights, and skepticism about government power that should warm the heart. Here is a rough classification of the implicit politics of the genre based around its major characters and creative periods.
The Golden Age
Traditionally classified as beginning with the publication of the first Superman comic in 1938 and ending in the late 1940s or early 1950s, the Golden Age of superheroes introduced many of the characters with which the general public is most familiar, such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Captain America. This was a time of war, both hot with the Axis powers and cold with the Soviet Empire, so the stories tended to be simple and patriotic.
Even so, you can clearly observe some differences among individual characters. For example:
• Batman is a paleo-conservative. He has a dark, somewhat pessimistic view of human nature. He literally fights crime in the dark, and has no super powers other than his intelligence, which suggests a limited view of man’s malleability. He works closely with the Gotham police, at least at first, and tends to spend his time protecting private property against robbers and thieves.
Furthermore, in civilian life Bruce Wayne is a man of inherited wealth, a globe-trotting education, and impeccable taste who runs a major corporate conglomerate — and indeed, in later stories, is revealed to be a defense contractor. In his spare time, Batman probably reads Forbes, National Review, and Russell Kirk.
• Superman, on the other hand, is a liberal, albeit of the 1930s variety. A newspaper reporter (I could rest my case there), his alter ego Clark Kent is constantly investigating the business titans of Metropolis and second-guessing the clueless police department. His nemesis is ultimately revealed to be the evil Lex Luthor, like Wayne an industrialist and defense contractor.
Another clue to Superman’s implicit politics is that he is just too darn powerful. The character began life as a strong, fast young man who could “leap tall buildings with a single bound.” Before long, however, he was flying around (inexplicably), burning things with his eyes, freezing things with his breath, and getting pretty close to invulnerable. It seems that Superman’s powers, like those of the federal government during FDR’s New Deal, just wouldn’t be kept within rational bounds. Kryptonite, a creation of the Superman radio show rather than the comic book, was a kind of a cheat; it gave him an apparent vulnerability, but it was really about as challenging as Wendell Willkie.
Like another liberal character of the time, the Green Lantern, Superman began to meddle in the interplanetary politics of his day without ever being elected by anyone he purported to represent. Still, Clark Kent, particularly in his earlier days as Superboy in Smallville, Kansas (to be dramatized this fall in anew television series on the WB), reflects traditional small-town American values. He’s a busybody, but you know his heart is in the right place. He’s Arthur Schlesinger, not Tom Hayden.
Other Golden Age characters offered contrasting political archtypes. Wonder Woman was a feminist who likes to tie people up with a magic lasso that made them tell the truth (she was the creation of William Marston, who in real life was the inventor of the lie detector and a man of somewhat strange personal proclivities). Hawkman was an enigmatic monarchist, a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian lord. Captain Marvel was a freedom-loving character who rivaled Superman in sales during much of the 1940s — until DC filed a mostly bogus claim of copyright infringement and eliminated Superman’s major competition through government intervention.
See, the Kryptonian was a liberal.
The Silver Age
Beginning in the late 1950s DC and Marvel were reinvented with new characters and new takes on old characters that provided story lines with more depth and creativity. This so-called Silver Age lasted until the 1970s.
The most interesting Silver Age characters came from Marvel, which under a previous name had published second-tier comics featuring Captain America, the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, and other characters in the 1940s and early 1950s. The company’s first coup was the Fantastic Four, who gained their powers from cosmic radiation. They represent the old idea of the four elements: fire (the new Human Torch), water (the stretchable Mr. Fantastic), air (the Invisible Girl), and earth (the rock-like Thing). They were the first superhero team to have to deal with real life: earning a living, paying the rent, coping with fame, and avoiding eviction for constantly tearing up their offices in Manhattan’s Baxter Building in battles with intergalactic invaders. As they were mugged by reality in a variety of ways, it is safe to say they were at least unconscious conservatives, albeit of a family-values variety.
Their sometime allies, the Avengers, were conservatives, too. For one thing, they included super-patriot Captain America, profit-seeking scientist Henry Pym (Ant-Man and Giant-Man), industrialist Tony Stark (Iron Man) and the Mighty Thor, a god who smashed bad guys with a hammer (’nuff said). The Avengersactually lived in an apartment and headquarters provided by Stark — who was yet another defense contractor, by the way — and ran afoul of various federal (and thus unconstitutional) law enforcement agencies over the years.
Other Marvel characters of the ’60s can be properly called libertarians. Spider-Man and the mysterious Dr. Strange, in particular, operate well outside traditional governmental authority, with the former treated as at least a bungler if not worse by the powers-that-be. “With great power comes great responsibility” is the oft-repeated lesson that Peter Parker learns on receiving his powers (from the bite of a radioactive spider) and then refusing to use them to stop a criminal who later murders his beloved uncle. Not surprisingly, these characters were co-created by artist Steve Ditko, an Ayn Rand devotee who later went on to create more explicit libertarian characters such as The Question and Mr. A.
Daredevil, one of the first disabled superheroes (he is blind but employs a kind of radar sense), is such a committed civil libertarian that he captures bad guys by night and then defends them in court by day as attorney Matt Murdoch.
The popular X-Men, which began in the Silver Age but really arrived in their current form in 1975, exhibited a number of libertarian traits. They are powerful mutants, the harbingers of a new kind of man referred to as “homo superior,” and yet they are trained by their mentor Charles Xavier to control themselves and to respect the rights of others — even those out to enslave them. The X-Men are at war both with a tyrannical government and with the fascist Magneto, whose seeks mutant domination of the Earth. A key theme of the X-Men saga is the need to restrain power; Professor X, meet James Madison.
Eco-Terrorist Heroes Fall Short
From the Silver Age onward, attempts to create superhero characters and stories with a liberal bent never seemed to pan out. Underwater characters Aquaman (DC) and the Sub-Mariner (Marvel) were often cast as radical environmentalists, but this limited rather than boosted their appeal. Namor the Sub-Mariner often played more the villain than the hero, in fact, as more law-abiding superheroes reined in his eco-terrorism.
In the early 1970s, a book teaming up Green Lantern and Green Arrow (another rich Batman-like character) tried to do “relevant” material on poverty and race relations, but the series didn’t sell. About the same time, Wonder Woman shed her Amazon accoutrements, became a flower child, and just about faded from sight (television brought her back with statuesque Lynda Carter and 1940s-era stories).
The 1980s brought a grimy and gritty take on the genre, starting with the pathbreaking Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and including The Watchmen, an dark update of the old Charlton Comics action heroes of the 1960s that take its name from Juvenal’s ancient question: “Who watches the watchmen?” Then comics took another popular turn in the 1990s as animated series introduced Batman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men to millions of new fans. One landmark ’90s series, Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, turned The Watchmen on its head. The latter asked what it would be like if superheroes actually lived in our world. Astro City asked what it would be like to live in theirs.
I don’t know how long the latest upswing of superhero comics will last, but I hope it will be a while. As long as the new movies feature lots of action, computer-generated-effects, and a complete lack of liberal sentimentality, they’ll do well. Remember: once the movie Superman stopped fighting supervillains and become an environmental wacko and nuclear-freeze peacenik, it was all over.