Real Life Politics in Comics

Marvel does the superhero infighting and clashing with authority way more than DC does though.

Indiana is quite right, though; again, since the 90's anyhow a lot of heroes have been downright hostile towards other heroes encroaching upon their territory. This is, again, a sea change from older stories, where such events were frequently positively welcomed (I just recently read a team up between Batman and the Teen Titans from 1970, and you should see the smile on Batman's face when the Titans show up...).

I think in the cases of Aquaman and Wonder Woman, I prefer the "bridge between two worlds" portrayals a whole heck of a lot better than the "We're so much superior to the rest of you, surface dwellers/ man's world" portrayals.

edited 20th May '17 2:37:42 PM by Robbery

I'm not saying it doesn't happen but Marvel is a lot more guilty of it than DC. Even with DC, I only really mostly see this with Batman and too a lesser extent Superman. The bridge between two worlds portrayal is pretty common with Diana and Arthur. Even when Atlantis is hostile towards the surface world, that's not something condoned by Arthur. Namor on the other hand is more often than not leading the charge.

Eh, that can still work without the secondary identity being secret. Wonder Woman works just fine with Diana Price being her personal, rather than secret, identity.

Batman and Captain America does something interesting here. Batman and Captain America immediately recognise each other and relish the prospect of teaming up to fight Nazis. Bruce Wayne and Steve Rogers, on the other hand, don't get along so well, at least until the truth emerges.

Ukrainian Red Cross

I always liked this Cap story as far as politics went. And it had an awesome fight!

edited 21st May '17 4:17:21 AM by lalalei2001

The Protomen enhanced my life.

"Eh, that can still work without the secondary identity being secret. Wonder Woman works just fine with Diana Price being her personal, rather than secret, identity."

And with Wonder Woman, it actually does work better if she doesn't have a secret identity. I remember Joe Quesada's announcement from some time back that Marvel heroes would subsequently only have secret id's where secret id's made sense for the character. It doesn't really make sense for Iron Man or Captain America to have secret id's, but it makes loads of sense, given his character and life, that Spider-Man would, for instance (the fact that he wore a mask, as opposed to the very public celebrities The Fantastic Four, was a big issue in early Spidey stories, and one of the reasons civilians gave for not trusting him).

Over at DC, it really doesn't make a lot of sense for Aquaman, Wonder Woman, or, I'd argue, Green Lantern to have a secret id. Aquaman and Wonder Woman are foreign royalty, and ostensibly ambassadors. The Green Lanterns are ambassadors too, of a sort, and representatives of an alien authority. For Superman and Batman, though, the secret id makes sense. If the only reason you give a secret id to a character is because "super heroes have secret id's" then you don't need to give that character a secret id.

edited 21st May '17 11:52:22 AM by Robbery

@windleopard

As I told you in the other thread, whoever said that is an idiot.

To be a superhero is to spit on authority. That's the be-all and end-all of that title. You embody strength and justice more than a bunch of sniveling worms in suits ever will.

Plus, as many comic book stories show, a superhero who works for the government is nothing more than a talking WMD. Whether it's The Dark Knight Returns or Marvel's Supreme Power, the Man wants nothing more than to use these people as weapons in their little wars.

Peter, you don't want to use your amazing Spidey powers to help Uncle Sam? Well, I hear you have an Aunt May. Be an awful shame if anything happened to her...

Letting private citizens with supernatural abilities and advanced weaponry run loose is not a good idea either. And we've seen how disastrous this is even in main continuity.

edited 21st May '17 2:50:15 PM by windleopard

Per my Catch-22 comment, there's a very slim area of operation where superheroes might be more useful than a well-trained and equipped squad of soldiers. The idea that the gubmint has nothing better to do than employ emotionally unstable spandex fetishists is the epitome of self-aggrandizing caused by fans-turned-writers.

Instead, superheroes act outside the law when the law itself - or rather its application - is inadequate. The sniveling worms in suits aren't unable to handle criminals, but they are unwilling, which is where superheroes come in to pick up the slack. Problem is, traditional superhero methodology ultimately always defers to said worms, which is why I prefer the consistency of the Punisher approach.

Within a legal framework, superheroes can work well enough as special agents of the state, not unlike James Bond or Ethan Hunt; or as bounty hunters given mandate to deal with equally flashy supervillains. Sure, it's not as self-congratulating as taking on the Man, but at least it doesn't ramp up pointless drama that never goes anywhere.

(For that same reason, I'm not too impressed whenever a cape gets on a soapbox, particularly if he's a popular public figure like Superman or Captain America - if they're so hyped up about how the world is supposed to function, maybe they should run for office and put their money where their mouth is.)

All in all, unless they're willing to handle the original reason for superheroes acting outside the law - the corruption of legislative and judicial rather than executive authority - writers might as well revert to the campy family-friendly ways of yore, rather than milk drama out of the modern bull.

edited 21st May '17 2:16:36 PM by indiana404

I seem to remember a couple stories where Cap ran for president. Superman had Lex Luthor run for president and win, but before the authors could do anything really evil with him 9/11 happened in real life, so he became (mostly) a regular president who got impeached for supervillainy without really doing anything devious in the meantime. I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Luthor#President_of_the_United_States

http://comicsalliance.com/ask-chris-251-president-lex/

"Incidentally, if you go look at Wikipedia, the official reason for Luthor being impeached is listed as “abuse of the super-steroid Venom,” which, while not quite as illegal as attempted murder via skull-shaped space station, is still a pretty hilarious thing to imagine happening to the President of the United States."

The Protomen enhanced my life.

There was an Elseworlds annual where Superman became President of the US. They got around the "native born American" bit, given that this was the Byrne era and he was technically born when his birthing matrix opened on Earth, thus making him born on the Kent's farm in Smallville.

Actually, it does make sense that the gubmint would want to corrall the mentally unstable spandex fetishists, if not to combat crime than for other, more ambitious humanoid WMD purposes. Particularly if they see other governments doing it.

edited 21st May '17 10:23:37 PM by Robbery

I've heard that brought up before.

So did he actually run for president as Superman? How would that work, since Superman isn't a natural-born citizen of the United States? I can buy the ridiculous handwave that he came out of an artificial womb, but I don't believe Superman is a citizen of the United States, what with Superman lacking a birth cert, social security number, and passport.

Clark Kent does have all those things, but since he was an abandoned baby, the US laws that apply to his situation mean he would be considered a natural-born citizen anyway, so there's no need to bring in birthing pods.

Ukrainian Red Cross

In an age of drone strikes and untraceable biological agents, a humanoid WMD is a liability, not an asset. If anything, corralling the spandex brigade might serve no ulterior motive than just reducing the inevitable collateral damage, in effect decreasing the proliferation of walking WMD's in the world. Which might be another core reason why the capes are anxious about it - superheroes typically define themselves by their physical traits, including in terms of their social self-image, so if civil authority were to restrain or, perish the thought, copy these abilities, it would take away much of their identity. Thing is, this attitude ties in uncomfortably well with the notion that they're more concerned with their status in the world, rather than what they accomplish with it. You don't see the Punisher getting riled up over people wearing Jolly Roger t-shirts and exercising their Second Amendment rights; guy's got more important things to do.

Essentially, modern superhero comics have started revolving around the idea that power is inherent in the person - hence why even mid-level superheroes and supervillains are supposed to be stopped only by their similarly powerful counterparts, rather than, y'know, a guy with a gun. For that matter, even purely technological enhancements like powered armor and gadgetry are regarded as all but intrinsic to particular people, rather than as tools that just about anyone can use. Thing is, as real life technology rapidly catches up to what used to only be the province of the masked musclemen, more and more inane excuses arise as to why they should retain their place in the world.

Politically speaking, the closest analog to the situation described is the decline of feudal knights in the age of gunpowder-enabled standing armies. I kinda wonder if a superhero story is even possible in a more gun-happy region like the Southern US - at most, it would be rather short.

edited 22nd May '17 1:50:21 AM by indiana404

One of two things would happen in that comic.

1. The supervillain would easily outmaneuver the gun nuts, probably manipulating them into causing more damage than he alone could do.

2. Potentially relating to 1, the superhero would have to save the day and step in to show how much better they are than a mob with guns.

Again, superhero comics rely on hero worship. Theoretically, even "peak humans" like Captain America could be subdued by a huge mob of NRA goons. But who, apart from right-wing militia nuts, is going to say they want those NRA guys with their illegally modified assault rifles to keep us safe?

The fact of the matter is, those guys could easily be viewed as bad guys or, dare I say it, terrorists. Most terrorism in the US isn't from Muslims, it's from those same militia types.

So, yeah.We don't want to believe that our protectors are Billy-Joe down the street with his AK-47. We want something larger-than-life. We want Steve Rogers, who punched Hitler. Even the Punisher, who is by most accounts "just another guy" with a fairly unremarkable and believable origin story, transcended being part of "the masses" when he took up the identity of The Punisher. He became a symbol.

edited 22nd May '17 5:38:49 AM by Nikkolas

You have no idea.

The problem with larger than life characters is that they ultimately belong in larger than life stories. Half the fun in comics is found simply in the world where epic adventures happen on a daily basis, and the superheroes themselves aren't all that unusual in-universe.

To contrast, I notice an unreasonable amount of anxiety around the arbitrary distinction between superheroes and civilians - with a number of non-comic projects like The Incredibles and Sky High building their plots on what should be the unspoken necessary weasels of the genre. It's kinda like how Johnny English and the modern Get Smart differentiated between the suave James Bond style spy and the common agency peon, even though the Bond films are meant to glorify the espionage business as a whole. Hero worship is fine and dandy, but when it starts existing for its own sake, it becomes an exercise in circular logic - "look how great this guy is, even though we keep giving him New Powers as the Plot Demands and had to make sure everyone else is a complete moron just to maintain that impression for more than five minutes". Not exactly inspiring, I reckon.

@112: i believe that Superman revealed that he was Clark Kent in that particular story, and so he had a SSN and birth certificate, etc.

I remember in Alan Moore's Superman/ Swamp Thing team up back in the 80's, he called the South the only part of the US without any indigenous super humans. This was pre-Crisis, so I'm thinking it was Metropolis and Gotham on the East Coast, Central City in the Midwest, and Coast City on the West Coast. No mention of the Pacific Northwest...

Okay, I know you seem to feel that most superheroes are deranged nutjobs who act from monomania rather than any sense of public duty or benevolence, but the line most comics writers take most often is that the hero, regardless of whatever personal angst they may have, is in fact acting out of desire to help, or protect, others. That's something any government could work with, or at least try to manipulate. Otherwise they're just highly dangerous loose cannons and the official situation would most likely resemble classic X-Men with governments either actively seeking to control/oppress or destroy super-humans (or develop into Genosha-like states, where the super-humans are actively enslaved and exploited). And, as many have commented about the X-Men, eventually that just gets old.

As far as the "drone strikes" bit goes, that depends on how vulnerable the super villain in question, or his technology, is to conventional weaponry. Remember, too, that in pretty much every super hero reality, there are far, far more people using whatever powers they acquire to become thieves and terrorists rather than heroes. Possibly something like 10, if not more, to 1. In such a case where you have super-powered crooks who laugh at conventional weaponry (and police departments famously have trouble getting the funding to keep up with the type of armament criminals use now), one can see the advantage on having a few super powerful allies, if only because it might be deemed more advantageous in the cost/benefit analysis (better to risk one superhuman freak than, say 6 real people in a SWAT team, regardless oh what kind of Flash Gordon weapons they may have). I remember a bit from Marvel's Ultimates that showed two soldiers giving an injured Tony Stark a pep talk during an altercation, and after he flew off to confront the enemy, looking knowingly at each other and saying "better him than us."

edited 22nd May '17 7:53:02 AM by Robbery

There is of course another option - giving superpowers to the SWAT teams themselves. And on the larger scale, having governments simply produce their own superhumans.There's only so many times that lucky accidents and lost prototypes can be milked as excuses to maintain exclusivity. Like you said, the hero-villain ratio is already one to ten, and most supervillains tend to field their own evil armies anyway, so the dangers of superpower proliferation can't be used as an argument in good conscience. Instead, the only thing to be lost is the ability of the capes themselves to impose their operations on governments nationally and globally, which itself is a far cry from the civil minded heroism they're supposed to embody. The only thing they lose is relative power, which - as the Punisher and other low-key heroes demonstrate - is hardly necessary for their stories anyway. In terms of popularity, Spider-Man and Batman lead their respective universes quite consistently, and they're hardly ever mentioned as threats to national security... well, Batman is, but he in turn is monitored by Waller & co., so that's a nice little equilibrium there.

That works better when you plan on ending a series. By itself, you're just getting rid of the superhero genre.

@Indiana, I'm not a big enough Punisher fan to swear to it, but other fans have told me that a great many writers portray Punisher as someone who will dissuade (sometimes lethally) civilians trying to follow in his footsteps if he encounters them. Wasn't that also the path he took with the new female Punisher, at least at first?

By the by, ever read the mini-series Conspiracy? I believe it was the first thing Andy Diggle ever wrote for Marvel Comics, and it's all about how shadowy government forces actually had a handle on the super-community all along (even letting the Hulk run free was nothing but a blank check for them to test out all kinds of WM Ds)... until the last quarter or so tie themselves into a knot establishing the guy who explained all this might've just been a lying nutcase all along, because, after all, Status Quo Is God.

Sounds like an interesting read. Though I'm generally just partial to S.H.I.E.L.D., specifically portrayals that don't have them be secretly corrupt and manipulative all along.

Like I said, it's a necessary weasel that shouldn't be turned into a plot point in the first place. Superheroes work well enough as private specialists responding to emergencies or called on for tricky cases, no jurisdiction friction necessary. The moment they start fighting with official institutions directly, well, that is where the superhero genre goes out the window, in favor of the straightforward cyberpunk that some writers appear to actually be more interested in. (Really, going from the blurbs, the second Marvel civil war appears to be a riff on Minority Report, with the pro pre-crime faction as the good guys.) What's so bad about them just sitting tight whenever there are no supervillains to fight anyway?

There's nothing bad about stopping non-superpowered crime either, but you don't seem willing to see that without putting a sinister lense on everything you don't like.

It's more like bringing hammers to kill flies. yeah, you might kill the fly but you also did a lot of damage to the room and probably got more people killed than if you'd just used a fly swatter or a can of Raid.

edited 23rd May '17 7:29:08 AM by windleopard

Quite. Given the subject of superhero accountability was touched upon, however inconclusively, in both companies' major films last year, I don't think interpreting any criticism as some sort of animosity holds any water anymore.

As for non-superpowered crime, I'd say the real downfall of traditional superhero mentality came Post-Crisis, when major supevillains like Lex Luthor and the Joker were made effectively untouchable legally. Suddenly, rather than fixing minor problems within the system, the system itself became the problem. As a setting, that's great for cyberpunk stories where the heroes are overwhelmed underdogs barely scraping by... but not so much for superheroes with the physical or financial resources of entire nations. Consequently, when superheroes shun legislative authority, openly clash with executive authority, yet somehow always defer to judicial authority, it's only fair to ask just to what extent they actually have any respect for the law or the needs of the general public, rather than just looking for excuses to fight the gubmint or even one another more often than they do any villain, superpowered or otherwise.

edited 23rd May '17 7:49:31 AM by indiana404

Like I said, all you've ever seem interested in doing is getting rid of a genre you don't like. It's fine to discuss unfortunate implications every once in a while, but It makes discussion very uninteresting when that's all you talk about. I keep wondering why you bother with superheroes.

edited 23rd May '17 8:28:52 AM by VeryMelon

I've disagreed with indianna in the past, but I do feel there are some liberties that can be taken with the superhero genre that don't completely alter it. I mean, Civil War isn't exactly looked at with fondness by a lot of people and yet one could say clashing with authorities is what superheroes do. Even X-Fans have grown tired of the continued narrative of X-Men against the World. Meanwhile, The Avengers and Justice League International have somewhat decent relationships with world governments.

Besides, this thread is about discussing politics in superhero comics.