The Four Color Media Monitor

The ludicrious left-wing American Prospect magazine talks about political themes in comic books, and very tastelessly too at that, if the first description given here of a book written by Warren Ellis called "Black Summer" is any indication:

A superhero killed the president this summer. Moments later, a shocked White House press corps watched as John Horus, his gleaming white-and-gold costume still soaked in blood, explained why. Because "the war in Iraq is illegal and predicated on lies," because "our people and theirs are dying for corporate gain," because of the "use of torture by our elected authorities," and because the president "stole the last two elections," the most powerful member of the Seven Guns could no longer "stand by while this administration commits crimes." In response, a terrified government imposed martial law, launching a nationwide manhunt for Horus' estranged teammates, whose reactions to the act ranged from horror to sympathy.

That bit of propaganda-by-the-deed launched acclaimed British scribe Warren Ellis' Black Summer, an eight-issue comic book miniseries from Avatar Press. And though heroes at industry giants DC Comics and Marvel have shown more restraint -- even after Superman's Lex Luthor won the Oval Office in 2000 -- the post–September 11 era has seen an explosion of politically themed storylines in mainstream as well as independent comics. While real-world presidential candidates invoke supercop Jack Bauer, of the TV series 24, as a guide to national security policy, a more nuanced debate about preemptive war, warrantless surveillance, and the responsibility that comes with great power is taking place in an illustrated universe.

This is truly disgusting. And it seems to be all that writers of Ellis' standing can think of writing about today, about how they oppose the American government's efforts to defeat an oppressive dictator like Saddam, while Che Guevara, I suppose, must be Ellis' idea of a real leader, is that it? I can guess that this book by Ellis is going to feature more than enough moral equivalence too. And the article itself seems to feature quite a bit of something else that makes me frown here:

In one sense, this is nothing new. The very first issue of Captain America (1941) showed the star-spangled super-soldier punching out Adolf Hitler, prompting criticism from both Nazi sympathizers and those who considered der Führer Europe's problem. Superman and Batman hawked war bonds while facing down monstrous racist caricatures of buck-toothed Japs. Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen -- works that transformed comics in 1986 by proving that illustrated tales of men in tights could be serious, adult art -- were both steeped in their Cold War milieu. (Moore took his title from the Roman poet Juvenal's famous query about political power: "Who watches the watchmen?")

Let me get this straight: what exactly have nazis who don't like that sock the great Cap gave to the fuhrer on the cover of his book (the article doesn't make that clear) got to do with this? Is this trash-can of a magazine trying something to make the skin of patriots and common sense folk crawl? It's certainly laced with moral equivalence, that's for sure, and it's truly disgusting. Personally, I find that cover a classic, and if they can't appreciate the idea of sending evil a message, then the American Prospect clearly has a problem. If opponents of nazism really did think there was something wrong with it, would the debut of one comicdom's most famous superheroes have been as successful as it was? Jack Kirby and Joe Simon are to be praised for drawing that famous cover, and the American Prospect should be ashamed of themselves for insulting it as badly as they do.

Then, there's the inclusion of caricatures of the Japanese at the time. Considering that Japan even before WW2 committed atrocities like the Rape of Nanking, why should it be surprising that anyone would lash back with that kind of a condemnation? Japan may have since come to terms with their crimes during WW2, and has remarkably reformed in the past six decades, but that still doesn't absolve them of the atrocities they committed or make the caricatures drawn at the time wrong. Simply put, they were asking for it, as were any Germans/nazis back then, and even Croatians who collaborated with the nazis.

Probably the most widely read of the recent crop of political comics has been Marvel's "Civil War," a massive 2006–2007 crossover story line spanning the company's main superhero titles. The story begins when the members of a young team of C-list heroes get a bit too big for their spandex and challenge a group of powerful supervillains living incognito in Stamford, Connecticut. The ensuing battle leaves more than 600 civilians dead, and public outcry prompts the hasty passage of the Superhuman Registration Act, which requires costumed heroes to be trained and licensed -- and to disclose their secret identities to the government. The "powered community," heroic and villainous alike, is riven by the act: Iron Man and the Fantastic Four's stretchable supergenius Reed Richards rally support for registration, while Captain America goes rogue and begins building a dissident underground. The stand-in for the conflicted reader in this debate is Spider-Man, who is initially so convinced of the wisdom of registration that he unmasks on national television. When he sees the extradimensional Guantanamo being built to house resisters, however, he defects with a dramatic speech about the folly of trading liberty for security.

Oh, so what good was Civil War then? It shows that, whatever attempts they make to mask it, the whole crossover story was meant as an attack on the war on terrorism, and Gitmo has been one of the symbols of this that the moonbats have been attacking. I think this is the part where Spidey was turned into an anti-war mouthpiece, and it was quite insulting to read about.

Ah, and look at what they do here: they even continue to confirm Identity Crisis' own anti-war allusions:

As the Abu Ghraib scandal unfolded in the news pages in 2004, the DC Comics universe found itself in the throes of Identity Crisis, in which it is revealed that a cabal of heroes affiliated with the Justice League superteam had been tampering with the memories of captured baddies to protect their own identities. An outraged Batman, who discovers that his own memory has been altered to cover up these acts, begins tracking superhumans via a vast satellite surveillance network -- which, naturally, falls into the wrong hands. Meanwhile, the Arab antihero Black Adam overthrows the tyrannical leader of "Khandaq," then kills the entire population of Bialya in retaliation for a terrorist attack on his country.

And I'm left wondering if that was ever a good idea to begin with. There's something to frown upon regarding that story with Black Adam, that's for sure. Not too surprisingly, they ignore some of the more disturbing things about IC, such as the misogyny that took place there, which makes one have to wonder if they think the metaphorical "blame-America/the victims" messages in IC made the misogyny that ran rampant in the miniseries acceptable no matter what. Another problem with this article, possibly the biggest of all, is that no questions are asked if DC Comics was doing the right thing to exploit and tamper with otherwise established characters for the sake of a political allegory as they did in IC, which makes me wonder if the writer really is a comics fan. Frankly, I doubt it.

And then, what have we here: they even take to saying nasty things about Michael Medved for showing the courage to do what Clark Kent would've done if he existed in real life: to inform the public about what garbage is in the output:

Perhaps the most interesting thing about these stories is why they fail. For as much as they seek to tease out the complexity and moral ambiguity of their themes, the authors of most of these tales clearly mean to convey a liberal or civil libertarian message. So much so that in 2003, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies released a screed titled "The Betrayal of Captain America," by right-wing pundit Michael Medved, decrying leftist infiltration of comics; that same year, professional bluenose Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center condemned Superman as a Ba'athist sympathizer. Yet when these stories go beyond leftish imitations of a previous generation's simplistic propaganda comics, the allegories tend to collapse under the weight of their own internal contradictions. There are, of course, openly conservative comics -- ranging from the ludicrous Liberality for All (starring a cyborg Sean Hannity!) to Bill Willingham's brilliantly layered Fables. But there is often a strong (if unintended) neoconservative subtext even in stories by left-leaning authors.

Ha! This magazine is just trying to pretend that they're "centrist", or not taking sides. But from what I know, The American Prospect is one of the most loathsomely leftist magazines ever to be published, and I'm not fooled by their filthy, crawling garbage. How dare they call Medved's research there a "screed"! And when they call Bozell a "bluenose" and say that a conservative comic like Liberality for All is "ludicrous" you know something's wrong.

It's true that back during the 60s and 70s, there were plenty of left-leaning writers around. But the difference is that at those times, they had more sincere ideas to offer like focusing on problems like racism, drug abuse, and also fighting communism in the Cold War. And during the 80s, there were some stories that involved fighting terrorism, even if it was only on a metaphorical level. (Incidentally, I don't buy into the whole notion that Willingham's work is "conservative", though I will have to say that assuming that he is "right-wing", he does not speak for conservatives like me, and I reject his trash altogether; his work on Robin and Detective Comics was throughly reprehensible. Conservatives and liberals come in many forms and views, and even amongst ourselves, we don't agree on everything. Conservatives will have their own differences of opinion between each other, as will liberals.) I think what needs to made clear is that liberals since then have gone down dreadfully in quality, and lost any solid direction. But this article doesn't even ask about that.

The "Civil War" storyline may provide the clearest illustration of this. The Superhero Registration Act is a straightforward analogue of the USA PATRIOT Act; the rhetoric of its opponents could have been cribbed from an ACLU brief.

What, those phonies?!? If the bozo who'd written this slop took a closer look, he'd see that the ACLU, as Jay Stephenson of Stop the ACLU for one can tell, is a phony outfit that seeks to undermine America's security more than it does to ensure that Americans will have their right to real freedom from the forces of evil that seek to make life miserable for many decent people.

But under scrutiny, their civil libertarian arguments turn out to hold very little water in the fictional context. The "liberty" the act infringes is the right of well-meaning masked vigilantes, many wielding incredible destructive power, to operate unaccountably, outside the law -- a right no sane society recognizes. In one uneasy scene, an anti-registration hero points out that the law would subject heroes to lawsuits filed by those they apprehend. In another, registered hero Wonder Man is forced to wait several whole minutes for approval before barging into a warehouse full of armed spies from Atlantis.

Is this supposed to be an attempt to pretend that they're agreeing with conservatives like me? Somehow, I doubt it, and the bolded part may be a clue to how something's wrong here. And while it's true that a fictional world filled with superheroes is really no place for politics like what Wonder Man has to face, they may have ignored another possible form of character assassination against Prince Namor of Atlantis: did Civil War depict him as spying on a country he'd long since mended fences with? Talk about wrecking a lot of good development since the Bronze/Iron Age of comics, when Namor had to wade through a lot of legal red tape to clear himself of his earlier actions against the world above water!

Protests about the law's threat to privacy ring a bit hollow coming from heroes accustomed to breaking into buildings, reading minds, or peering through walls without bothering to obtain search warrants. Captain America bristles at the thought of "Washington … telling us who the supervillains are," but his insistence that heroes must be "above" politics amounts to the claim that messy democratic deliberation can only hamper the good guys' efforts to protect America. The putative dissident suddenly sounds suspiciously like Director of National Intelligence Mitch McConnell defending warrantless spying.

Uh oh, I guess maybe there is something wrong here in some way or other, when the writer starts implying that the superheroes don't have rights to privacy. Or something like that. Ditto when he drags Mitch McConnell into the mess.

The problem of modern terrorism -- how to deal with small groups of individuals who can wreak the kind of destruction that once required an army -- is familiar territory for comics, as is the idea that heroes often inadvertently create their own worst enemies. Yet attempts to directly address the problem of blowback from military action exhibit the same sort of ambiguity. In the second volume of Marvel's Ultimates (2004–2007) -- a reimagined version of the classic Avengers superteam -- the heroes are being used to carry out covert military missions abroad. Their foreign interventions prompt governments hostile to the U.S. to send their own superteam ("persons of mass destruction" wryly dubbed "The Liberators") to invade Washington. After the inevitable victory, The Ultimates decide they must operate independently of the U.S. government, but the lesson remains that "the world needs looking after," presumably by the same mostly American heroes.

I can't claim to be an expert in figuring out everything here, some things are pretty darn complicated, but I think this does tell that Mark Millar, who'd written that disposable item, was trying to come up with something that villifies the US government for all the wrong reasons. And if there's anything ambiguous here, I figure it's the part about the world needing "looking after". But how?

These mixed messages shouldn't be blamed (solely) on the comics' creators, though. As John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett argue in their book The Myth of the American Superhero, the premises of the genre itself demand that "total power must be pictured as totally benign, transmuting lawless vigilantism into a perfect embodiment of law enforcement." The hero, possessed of moral clarity, solves problems by force, yet (usually) without killing. Evil is depicted as personal rather than institutional: The problem is not that power is wielded by a small elite, but that the wrong people -- supervillains -- sometimes get powers. And when the only tool you have is Thor's hammer, every problem looks like a supervillain. Super-heroes don't form PACs; they have slugfests, because the narrative of the superheroic redeemer demands that more prosaic means of conflict resolution -- diplomacy, say -- prove ineffectual.

Well that's just it! When you're dealing with violent criminals, including even tyrants like Ahmedinejad, diplomacy simply won't work, no matter what delusions the European Union's got. And here's where the article seems to take a turn for the worst:

The simplest way for writers to escape the embedded politics of superheroism, of course, is by ditching the tights entirely. Brian K. Vaughan makes this rejection explicit by having Mitchell Hundred, the protagonist of Ex Machina, abandon his costumed identity as the hapless Great Machine to serve his fellow New Yorkers as mayor. And there are many spandex-free depictions of war in comics. Vaughan's simple but moving Pride of Baghdad follows a group of lions freed from an Iraqi zoo during an American bombing. (The liberated animals are eventually shot by frightened Coalition forces.) Rick Veitch lampoons the romanticization of war in Army @ Love, in which a Huxleyan Department of Motivation and Morale entices soldiers to fight in "Afbaghistan" by making conflict sexy and fun. Others, such as Brian Wood in DMZ and Anthony Lappé in Shooting War, illustrate the old adage that "when war is declared, truth is the first casualty" by following journalists into spin-riddled battle zones.

Promoting anti-war metaphors now, are we? Yeesh. I knew this was likely to blow. And when was war ever "romantic"? For heaven's sake, nobody who's in favor of going to war with evil in real life thinks that war is fun! Of course war is hell! But it's gotta be done whether we like it or not.

Yet however much some writers may lament the popular identification of comics with superhero tales, it is no accident: Iconic characters demand a medium that deals in icons, and their privileged place in the American Zeitgeist has given them a mythic narrative power that storytellers are loath to forsake, even as they seek to tame the genre's fascist undertones. Some film adaptations of comic book tales -- notably Superman Returns, V for Vendetta, and the first two Spider-Man films -- have attempted to democratize their protagonist by creating populist moments in which ordinary citizens must band together to save the hero. But rather than conveying a message of democratic empowerment, these scenes typically have more than a whiff of übermench-as-embodiment-of-the-volk about them.

Which sounds like a cynical swipe to me.

Mainstream titles increasingly feature stories in which the traditional Manichaeism of the genre is countered by pitting heroes against each other rather than villains, emphasizing how evil can arise from well-intentioned efforts to use coercive power for good ends: "Civil War" falls into this camp, as does DC's Infinite Crisis (2005–2006), in which a group of erstwhile heroes discover that their scheme to remake the universe into a utopia has transformed them into monsters. Other titles, following in the tradition of Watchmen, create doubly allegorical worlds populated by close analogues of the classic DC stable of heroes, then use them to explode or detourn the tropes of conventional superhero comics.

I don't know what to say about the Watchmen (though I wouldn't be surprised if they were exaggerating whatever minuses it might have), but wow, what's this about Infinite Crisis? I should've known. It wouldn't surprise me if it were a demonizing attack on superheroes as doing more outright evil than good, though what it doesn't make clear is how the miniseries basically tore down the Golden Age Superman by depicting him in a twisted sense as something like a villain.

And the final nail in the coffin for this fuzzy article comes here:

The failures and successes alike show that if comics are to succeed as modern political allegory, comics writers cannot simply transplant real controversies into their fictional worlds. They also face the daunting task of inventing a grammar and a vocabulary for a new sort of superhero narrative -- one capable of telling us that, sometimes, great power comes with the responsibility to not use it.

In other words, they shouldn't be superheroes and shouldn't make any attempts to do good for the world, with or without their superpowers? That's a far cry from when Peter Parker almost abandoned his Spidey costume and career in ASM #50, which encouraged the Kingpin in his debut to start an all-out crime racket, thinking that he and his mob were free to run their reign around New York City, before Peter finally realized why it would be a mistake to abandon his role as our friendly, neighborhood wall-crawler, and began to take steps to stop the Kingpin's menace at the time. I can tell where this pretentious article is going, and much as they may try to pretend otherwise, they're simply tearing down on what superheroes stand for, which is good combatting evil, and which ought to include The American Prospect, which is decidedly the real life equivalent to J. Jonah Jameson's very own NOW magazine in the fictional world.

This is one of the most rock-bottom things I've ever seen, promoting the work of leftist moonbat writers like Ellis and Millar, who only see what they want to and may tolerate the real evil, that being Saddam, who's thankfully been done away with, and by his own people whom he oppressed.

Update: another person told me that when the writer argues that the stories fail, he means that it's because they ostensibly turn back to a "conservative" leaning! That's interesting, because not only does it confirm the magazine's left-leaning position even more, it also suggests some contempt some liberals have even for other ones. It can also be another way they could have of saying that the story isn't satisfying enough. In other words, when they don't find the material good enough for their tastes, they say that it's because conservatism is undermining it. But really, these things are anything but conservative - Identity Crisis didn't shy away from its blame-the-victim approach (the ending contained a political analogy from the Flash), and The Truth: Red, White and Black was pure race-baiting and Chomskyism to the very core. And let's not think that even Civil War was ever truly taking the conservatives' side no matter how it turned out. But the worst thing about many of these mostrosities is how they basically tear down the heroic ideals that comics writers of yesteryear worked so hard to promote, in ways that sadly may have what to do with the current writers' own political biases.

Trackposted to: Blue Star Chronicles, bRight and Early, The Bullwinkle Blog, Stop the ACLU.

Labels: moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics, violence