"Relevance"

I think we all know grown-ups read comics these days and maybe it'd be a good thing to have comics that stayed current with the news. In the same way that The Daily Show really does bring news to "stoned slackers" (as the moron Bill O'Reilly said), maybe comics can discuss/present very real issues?

Or, is it a problem for comics to stay current because it takes so long to get from idea to product? By the time an even occured, was interwoven into the story and released, would it be months and months old?

[Eh, sorry for all the politics and Bin Laden references. I'm currently read the 9/11 Commission Report and I'm freaking out.]

Thirdly, even as the wartime heroes fought Nazis (but not The Nazi), the current ones fight terrorism (but not The Terrorist). Obviously one reason for this is that Terrorism is considerably more of a hydra than the Third Reich (did wartime comics suddently switch to Hirohito?), and so if and when Bin Laden is caught, the fact that this won't be the end of the war is the sort of politics that DC/Marvel might not wish to get knee-deep in.

Fourthly, actual fighting is being done by a much smaller percentage of the population than 60 years ago. And they aren't as directly fighing terrorism (but we're back into politics there).

Though the fact that all three elements are relentlessly overhyped ("I bought this Dizzee Rascal CD and I'm neither 2 stone lighter nor black!") might leave comics writers with little to work with.

Back during WWII, comics would show Captain America or Superman beating the crap out of Hitler and it was something that kids read. Why aren't there any comics about heros finding Bin Laden and destroying him. Or have a bad guy pull off a mask and, oop, it's actually Bin Laden.

...isn't happening. The WWII comics, despite their good intentions, were short-sighted, jingoistic, and woefully reductive. Of course, that was the state of the industry at the time (from what I've read) -when you've a select few creators working on pages & pages of content every month, maybe just one writer/editor pulling it all together, subtlety & nuance go out the window. Never mind that the guys invovled w/ making those books were either Jewish or 1st-generation Americans from Europe, so they had a vested interest in getting their POV across, which just so happened to be the "right" POV for that time. Not to say that WWII was clearly black & white - gee, some stories about Captain America trying to liberate wrongly imprisoned Asian citizens would've been nice - but it was black & white enough for this to not seem so proletysing (sic) at the time.

After Vietnam (or even Korea), the public's awareness of the shades of gray in such things make such unashamed chest-thumping seem gauche and gaudy. I don't doubt there'd be a market (albeit small) for stuff like _American Power_, but it'd create a polarizing effect, not a unifying effect. If they struck early (sometime in the middle of 2002), the book would've had a better chance to succeed - right now, in this climate, after the Abu Ghirab scandal and the Bush administration's retrenching re: the liberation of Iraq, that book has no shot in hell of surviving, at least in the Direct Market.

Crisis on infinite xposts - Andrew, I've seen countless comic covers circa WWII showing CA & Supes & Batman punching Nazis & Japs & asking folks to buy war bonds. And I know with Kirby & Simon & Mr. Stanley Leiber at the controls, they had Captain America take down Hitler 8 pages at a time. But, yeah, like you said, comic publishers going pro-war NOW wouldn't be a saavy move, just as it WAS saavy for them to support the war in the 40s (when comics were decidedly mainstream), and question it in the 60s (when comics were decidedly counterculture). It's debatable whether these stances were predicated on personal beliefs or monetary motivations, or a happy confluence of both.

complete tangent:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/28/comedy.politics/index.html

xpost - I saw that Dan, but the scary thing is from the actual scores: Those who watched no late-night comedy shows answered 2.62 questions correctly. David Letterman's viewers answered 2.91; Jay Leno,'s 2.95; and Jon Stewart's (The Daily Show) 3.59. So only people who watched Jon Stewart shows did better on average than tossing a coin.

Wow. I assumed that they never actually beat Hitler (as opposed to Nazis/Japs) because then you have a comics world in which you've already won the war, which could be awkward if it came out in, say, 1943. That's what I meant by my secondly (though it actually loooks like I'm claiming that comic books are a tool of The Man).

Well, they "beat" him as much as any comic hero beats his nemesis - the battle's won, but the war rages on, Hitler escapes, blah blah blah.

And lest we forget the appearance of THE HATE-MONGERER (who was actually HITLER!) (or a clone) in _The Fantastic Four_ circa 1962/3.

i am superexhausted at the moment from getting up at 6am to factcheck the footnotes in my book today - ie the last bit to do b4 it GOES TO THE PRINTERS HURRAH - otherwise i wd remember more: the superheroine might be called elektra? she wear a red dress and is ninja-trained and there's lots abt child abuse also :(

Also hurrah!

the story is kind of a rip of "the deadzone"

Comics are written many months before they hit the shops, yes, so they try to avoid too much topicality, as it could all have changed by the time it comes out.

I think the point about the alleged 'mature readers' comics is an important one. Writers like Gerber or whoever in the late '60s and '70s wrote 'relevant' stories about social issues would tend to find themselves in the 'mature readers' lines these days. These things never played a big part in mainstream comics, except during wartime, where they could hardly be avoided - but that just became the source of most villains and threats, not the subject of any serious examination or genuinely topical stories in detailed terms.

A minor correction to your minor correction, kind sir!

Stanley Lieber was the teenage cousin of the wife of Martin Goodman, owner of Marvel (then Timely) Comics. He entered the family business in 1939, one year after the debut of Superman, in Action Comics No. 1 (a copy of which sold at auction in July for $46,000). Lieber's first writing for the company was a piece of prose in Captain America No. 3, a two-page text filler that qualified comic books for inexpensive mailing rates. He signed it "Stan Lee," he later recalled, "because I felt someday I'd be writing the Great American Novel and I didn't want to use my real name on these silly little comics." Lee worked with editor Joe Simon and one of the giants of the industry, artist Jack Kirby, of whom Lee once said, "He never drew a character who didn't look interesting or excited. In every panel there was something to look at." But within three years, Simon and Kirby, who had created the successful Captain America serial for Timely, left the company for the competition, DC Comics.

...

At age 20, Lee became Timely's editor and chief writer. With his literary aspirations and his youth, he resisted the typical comic-book heroes, with their bland invincibility and adolescent subordinates. Lee was an underdog himself, but he felt readily able to fill Simon's heroic shoes. Luckily for the industry, he had the ambition to match his imagination. His new pen name would become the most recognized in the history of comics.

ANYWAY:

Domestic issue stuff that qualifies (either as i) or ii), or both): Drugs R Bad (Harry Osborn does drugs; Speedy does drugs) (x-ref that w/ all the Golden Age heroes that rec'd powers FROM drugs) (x-ref THAT w/ modern heroes that use drugs to get powers, but have something HORRIBLE happen as a result), Guns R Bad (sweet crap how about seemingly every post-Marvel gothy hero origin EVER!) (& even the Punisher in a "do as I say, not as I gat" way), Wanton Exploitation of Atomic Energy R Bad (more prevalent in the monster funnies that ripped of 50s sci-fi praying mantis flicks), Male Chauvinism R Bad (example freshest in my mind = the introduction of The Valkyrie in Avengers as a man-hating feminist prone to spewing laughable pull-quotes that any self-respecting bra-burning free-willed ERA supporter wouldn't even THINK of saying aloud, especially when wearing a metal bustierre; cf. "UNHAND ME YOU MALE CHAUVANIST PIG!" *THWACK* *BIFF* *GROIN*) (she was actually the Enchantress in disguise, though, so, you know, that explains a lot).

Foreign policy stuff: Huck mentioned the LEX AS PRES thing (gee, was having Lex go off the deep end to torpedo Superman supposed to parallel real-life events, hmmmmmm?); there was also the Middle-Eastern nation of Qurac, which played a pivotal role in DC books post-Legends (circa 1987?), especially the Superman books and in some Suicide Squad-related shenanigans (in that SS-mega-crossover?); if there are any Marvel parallels, I can't think of any (Genosha?) - I almost think that Marvel let the socio-political content & thrust of the X-Men universe BE their only avenue to voice or touch upon any "mature" subjects.

And in Death of the Family (where they killed Robin), the Joker was dealing nukes to the Ayotollah! Which prompted a big letters page response about Shi'ites that totally went over my 11 year-old head, but not so much that by the time I started paying attention to the news (about 2/3 years later during Iraq War #1), I had a bit of an understanding of things that my non-comic-reading pals lacked.

I almost think that, while "relevant" issues are now the purview of the "mature readers" & underground comic world, the world o' spandex could (& should) offer some pithy semi-subversive political / social commentary nowadays simply because the burden is off of these books to be "serious" when it's called for (in a Pogo sort of way), assuming that the creators don't go off the deep end and get all didactic.

And the Galaxy's Greatest Comic still manages still manages to be pretty topical - the current Dredd storyline concerns a pro-democracy terrorist group which has hidden nukes all over Mega-City One, the first of which has just been set off.

Ouch.