The Politics Of Superheroes

Another group who could in no way be called fascist are the X-Men - they're forced into superheroics by their circumstances, in some instances even directly reacting against forms of fascism.

Robin Hood=Miraclewoman King John=Kid Miracleman Richard the Lionheart=Miracleman

It's that ambivalent attitude toward the notion of absolute power, no matter how justly wielded that gives MM it's political interest. Hell, most of AM's work is basically variations on that theme, except when he's getting all snake-god tarot kabbaleh.

flying = above mankind, and (if winged) angels

x-ray vision = voyeuerism, big brother state

great strength = primitive/bestial (often anyway, especially when separated from other powers and paired with disfigurement)

speed = ?

rubber body = creativity, genius

etc.

Granted, the Dooms and Luthors of the funnybook world often stand to enjoy significant personal gain from the social changes they spearhead, but who's to say that a world under Doom might not be a better world? The folks in Latveria seem happy enough.

Friendly fascism, indeed!

The Master is beloved! See issues 246-247.

(I typed this as Dr Fat, that wd be a good superhero too)

(or to put it another way, justice is always a "myth" of justice)

a history of (american) loner justice-bringers prior to superman wd also be interesting actually: the lone ranger? the phantom? ie they are sorta COWBOY/FRONTIER spin-offs --- does the idea go back to fenimore cooper and leatherstocking? (or john paul jones and PIRATES!!?)

given that the US probably has the most elaborated interrelationship of law, LAWYERS and social structure of any extant polity, maybe we cd theorise that superheroes function as an emotional-intuitive reaction against the failures of law to deliver justice?

Again, I urge you to read Concrete. Concrete tries to "good" (left-wing "good", that is) things, but often fails - otherwise it'd be impossible to identify with him.

given that the US probably has the most elaborated interrelationship of law, LAWYERS and social structure of any extant polity, maybe we cd theorise that superheroes function as an emotional-intuitive reaction against the failures of law to deliver justice?

Hmm, maybe. Law and violent action, though, aren't polar opposites, nor the only two ways of bringing "justice". What about social security? Do superhero comics deal with the "failure" (or, rather, insufficient coverage) of the welfare state in the US? I wonder what a superhero comic in a Social Democrat country would look like... There aren't any Finnish superheroes.

A left-wing superhero would be one who uses his powers for community work, building things, trying solve the causes of crime before crime happens, etc..

"QUICK! TO THE BAT-FAX!" - hobbes

and in some versions -- tho not i think that one -- he is a nobleman in disguise, just like zorro

Um, well, there may be some pretty obvious historical explanations for that.

I wonder what a superhero comic in a Social Democrat country would look like... There aren't any Finnish superheroes.

This looks like a job for... The Committee! Delegates, Convene!

The reductiveness of saying that superhero comics are about solving crime through gloved fists and spandexed leggings is that nothing is ever solved. There's always some new crisis upcoming -- it's infinite, you could say.

Jesus-Man
The Incredible Moses
God-Man
Sun Wukong

also hercules (not to mention xena: warrior princess)

didn't sir lancelot have the "strength of ten"? the round table = justice league of merrie englande

??? Real vigilante action in the US was mostly, if not entirely, mob action-- think the KKK and lynchings. Now think of what happens in the first Action Comics story-- Superman defends the rule of law against vigilante action of that real life ilk. Now tell me again about superheroes and fascism? Those two nice Jewish boys from Cleveland created the comic book superhero to fight Hitler, after all.

maybe we cd theorise that superheroes function as an emotional-intuitive reaction against the failures of law to deliver justice?

Yeah, right on, mark-- Siegel and Schuster's original Superman was about as left-wing/socialist and hopeful as you could possibly want a superhero to be. Tuomas, I suggest you read their earliest stuff if it's available to you-- I'm not at all convinced about this talk of ""justice"" and ""heroism"" being uniquely right-wing American myths, which almost seems to have its source in some sort of weird Sergio-Leone-esque European misreading of cowboy myths. (And you're not saying that heroism and justice don't really exist, right? Because then I think I am going to have to go all Ditko on your ass if so-- Nietzsche be damned.) Doesn't this proto-"fascist" stuff about one dude knowing the real way the world should work and trying to impose it on everyone else go all the way back to Plato-- who was a European, last time I checked? This is why they killed Socrates in Athens, is it not, b/c a misreading of his bullshit led to a tyrant temporarily destroying their democracy, using just such a justification? I think sourcing back to Beowulf and other abyss-confronting type heroes for the origin of the superhero is a lot more likely an explanation-- this is certainly what people like Grant Morrison are trying to do with the concept nowadays, anyway. Concrete is not and has never been a superhero-- he's just Paul Chadwick in disguise, not a mythological world-beater in any way.

The whole idea of a vigilante fighting against crime is inherently right-wing.

Dude, this is totally off the mark, I think. Superheroes, in American comic books anyway, became super-policemen pretty quickly-- and even in the cases where they're not, it's pretty clear that they're supposed to be the ones who really should be deputized to act as moral agents under the circumstances-- e.g., Spider-Man and his constant problems with authority misunderstanding him. And I don't think you understand right-wing thinkers at all. They're not at all trying to solve the problem of crime itself by caging criminals-- they think they're defending themselves and the society in which they live from an inevitable and unquenchable threat: i.e., the problem of evil. Ever hear the phrase, "there's a few bad apples in every bunch"? It's liberals who think they can "solve" crime for all time by attacking what they see as its socioeconomic origins, no?

??? Real vigilante action in the US was mostly, if not entirely, mob action-- think the KKK and lynchings.

I was talking about the myth of the vigilante hero, not real-life vigilantism, which obviously is a different case. That's why Rorshach is such a powerful satire; with him, Moore asks the question "What sort of ideological basis would a real-life superhero have?". I.e. , what kind of world-view would make one patrol the streets and mug criminals? Obviously, if super-heroes would exist in real world, most of them would probably need some sort of right-wing ideology to justify their actions.

Now think of what happens in the first Action Comics story-- Superman defends the rule of law against vigilante action of that real life ilk. Now tell me again about superheroes and fascism? Those two nice Jewish boys from Cleveland created the comic book superhero to fight Hitler, after all.

I think sourcing back to Beowulf and other abyss-confronting type heroes for the origin of the superhero is a lot more likely an explanation-- this is certainly what people like Grant Morrison are trying to do with the concept nowadays, anyway.

Okay, perhaps we need to to differentiate between three lineages of superheroes. First, there's the idea of a superhero as an upholder of social justice, protector of the poor, etc. This lineage dates back to early Superman - and further away, to Zorro, Robin Hood, Jesus, etc - and it could be interpreted as left-wing. I think the Superman of today still holds some remnants of this idea, but mostly he's moved to the second category. This category is the superhero as a mythological/allegorical hero, fighting against abstract "evil". This is the superheroes who fight against cosmical or mythical villains rather than "real" crime; Thor is probably the best example (fittingly based on an old god). This idea goes back to Lancelot, Hercules, many of the mythical European heroes. Both of these, however differ from the third strand of superhero, which is the superhero fighting against crime in a "corrupt" society. This lineage begins with Batman, and it's harder to find antedecents to it (Western heroes?), since it reflects a rather modern view of society. This third type of superhero is what I call "inherently right-wing". It was probably a bit unfair to say most superheroes represent this idea, but a lot of them seem to do so.

Concrete is not and has never been a superhero-- he's just Paul Chadwick in disguise, not a mythological world-beater in any way.

Concrete is a character who has superpowers, and tries to do good in non-violent, socially constructive ways. If you define "superhero" as a "world-beater", I guess he isn't one, but you could still call himm a hero.

And I don't think you understand right-wing thinkers at all. They're not at all trying to solve the problem of crime itself by caging criminals-- they think they're defending themselves and the society in which they live from an inevitable and unquenchable threat: i.e., the problem of evil.

There are different sort of right-wing thinkers... I've read right-wing texts that say criminals should be locked up to keep them away from "proper" people, that crime should be punished in a clear, visible and hard way to make potential future criminals to scare away from it (isn't this exactly what Batman does?), that the police need more resources to fight crime more effectively, etc. I wasn't saying that superheroes (or, in my new definition, superheroes of the third strand) represent all right-wing thinkers, but they do reflect certain right-wing ideas.

i can't quote it exactly but william hazlitt -- a brit lefty critic of the early 19th century -- argued that all poets were secret royalists, bcz poetry REQUIRED strong bold singular and attractive characters and disdained coverage of ordinary people and ordinary life (he adored poetry and considered this a complicated internal contradiction that the left would have live and work with, a tendency they would have knowingly -- and publicly? -- to counterbalance in themselves)

i still think at the root of tuomas's poisition is a generalised fear of the IDEA of power (rather than much of a will to categorise types of power) (also tuomas appears to believe that "right" and "left" exist as qualities PRIOR to and DISTINCT from the actual contents of political opinions)

(which is truer in life maybe bcz ppl draw themselves up behind extant battleline,s but is meaningless in fiction since eg batman's votes would only count in florida and ohio wouldn't count in a real-life election)

DKR is way stronger satire than watchmen; the latter is particularly weak on the wider day-to-day politics of the world that moore's imagining (AM has a tremendous fondness for conspiracy theory, an admittedly high-fun substitute for wonkish attention to POLICY detail, but basically a quasi-left internalisation of libertarian wingnut fantasy politics, that cedes the game before it even starts) (ok yes yes this is a pet peeve of mine, and a bit off-topic)

Admittedly he should have given up his web fluid formula years ago though from a patent point of view.

This would be one of the positions Ellis explores in Planetary, yes?

what kind of world-view would make one patrol the streets and mug criminals?
the superhero fighting against crime in a "corrupt" society

I don't think you need a "right-wing" ideology to do this-- what about V For Vendetta? Maybe you could differentiate between "Sephiroth" and "Qliphoth" manifestations of this will to fight corruption-- the latter being the Rorschach types that are fighting "corruption" only in their own heads (which I've come to think is too unfair to Ditko, at least-- didn't Moore say in interview that Watchmen was the result of a bad mood he was in during the '80s (that unfortunately infected the rest of the industry)?). On fear of the idea of power clouding your judgement in this case, Tuomas, I think mark is OTM-- I don't think giving in is the appropriate response to violent provocations, for one thing. I don't think your trinary theory of superheroism holds up to scrutiny-- I think the first and third types you deliniate are two sides of the same coin at best-- and maybe a better way to think about it would be by types of evil that superheroes can confront-- social/metaphysical (the problem of evil, righting injustices) vs. natural/metaphysical (death, confronting the abyss). Maybe you're right about Concrete, and he's just a very gentle and humanistic conception of a superhero. I still don't think Superman has ever been right-wing though, even when he was busy being "Superdad" back in the day. Elseworlds conceptions of Superman the tyrant/right-wing dupe are, like Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan (who's really just a critique of the static comic book convention Supes got imposed on him b/c of real life contingencies-- defender of the status quo b/c he can't leave the comic book page to change it. to see what Superman would have really done during World War II if possible, check out that Life feature Siegel and Schuster did where he ends it in a day-- that's the real Superman myth at work, however näive), his paranoid antithesis, viewing what he does solely through the lens of power and fear of power. "Making the world safe for human development" I don't see as a solely "right-wing" value or a misuse of power. "Unlucky the land that needs a hero" indeed.

Re: Watchmen vs. DKR: Yeah, now that you mention it I can see how that applies to AM. This goes back to the fear of the idea of power thing, no? Is that the ultimate justification of anarchy, anarchists' fear of anyone being able to exercise power over them? I think you're right about the satire and it's partly AM's fault for being a fish out of water when it comes to American politics. The eternal Nixon made no more sense than did the military's exclusive reliance on one untrustworthy agent as a prop for their power (ha ha critique of nukes and violence except not really THAT applicable as a characterization of the institution). The eternal Reagan of DKR however, was perfectly apropos-- this wound up being prescient IRL re: Bush Jr. Tyrants have to have some lever for their power-- Nixon just doesn't cut it as a demagogue b/c he has no "better myth" he can offer people in the world of Watchmen.

His reasons behind being a superhero (with Grebt Power comes Grebt Responsibility) if a much more leftish view: and it his initial attempt to use said power for personal gain that does him wrong.

Yeah, exactly-- he feels "compelled" as in Watchmen except not in a dark paranoid sense-- he feels compelled to do what he does out of humanism and his discovery of his moral duties. He does for others what they can't do for themselves-- he's not imposing on people when he saves them from being killed by Dr. Octopus.

Something I wanted to throw in at some point and forgot about-- Judge Dredd's an interesting figure to think about in this context, isn't he? Superman's nihilistic antithesis is a separate character, but Dredd seems to be both a critique and a celebration of the concept of the "philosopher king", sometimes one more than the other depending on the story. Rightist or paternalist?

(part of the dynamic of this = napoleon! uk leftists in the early 19th century were very torn abt napoleon: hazlitt wz secretly quite pro boney cz he felt he represented what remained of the progressive forces of the french revolution...)

wordsworth became a royalist and a tory w/o actually changing that much: the history of romanticism (and gothic) is i think how it started as a radical and avant-garde anti -classical (= anti-status quo) move but got caught on the hook of the GLAMOUR of rockstar princes etc

eg byron wz a genuine leftist politically -- viz his speeches in the house of lords -- but the "byronic" as a strand in fiction increasingly veered towards i. the draculoid and ii. big red pimpism, which are in the end both non-left impulses i think

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OMG, AWESOME NEW WORD: cinemappearance

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