600
Woke superheroes rule
(sh.itjust.works)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
600 points (100.0% liked)
196
16501 readers
2533 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The popular DC / Marvel ones certainly do
I mean, Superman's nemesis is literally a billionaire who at one point was the president of the US. Captain America straight up quit in protest against Richard Nixon once. And of course there's the whole X-Men thing.
Comic books are books. The characters are as progressive or regressive as the writers make them, but there are many examples of superhero books leaning center-left in their context from fairly early on.
At their core, however, the classic superheroes work to maintain the status quo and support the existing power structures of when they're written.
At no point did Superman or Captain America stop American forces from invading a foreign country for example, or overthrow a medical insurance company.
Did you miss the part where I mentioned the entire "Captain America quits because he thinks he can't use that name while Nixon remains president" thing? Or the "DC makes Lex Luthor president during the G. W. Bush administration" bit? Captain America is such an easy mark for self-reflections on jingoism I feel he's spent more time repudiating right wing conceptions of nationalism than doing anything else. "Cap fights right-wing take on himself" is such a trope that when they adapted it into the recent TV show fans spent hours debating which of the evil fascist Caps they were doing, especially since they had already done another one of them in Daredevil. And by the way, the whole "they were actually experimenting on black people first and then erased that from history" bit from that show? Also from the comics, but more recent. From... you know, the Bush administration.
And then there's the X-Men, at least on their second run starting in 75, focusing on mutants as a pretty generic stand-in for discriminated groups, featuring a diverse cast and very much told from the perspective of the outsider. That went on indefinitely, all the way to having a (debatably handled) entire analogue for the AIDS crisis be a core ongoing plot thread for years. Alan Moore, who isn't particularly right-leaning, also spent a whole stint at DC in the 80s turning Swamp Thing into an environmentalist free-love counterculture icon. I say "turning", but the original run wasn't particularly "uphold existing power structures" either.
At the core, episodic media is episodic, so it tends to return to status quo both as a political statement and as a storytelling device. And of course, censored media, be it Hollywood movies under the Hays code or superhero comics under the Comics code were subject to strict limitations. But there have been pretty out there superheroes since day one (cue kinky Wonder Woman backstory here).
Again, books are books, and fiction often depicts the positions of its creators. People like to consolidate genres or styles into single ideologies, which is normally and obviously reductive.
You can chip away at counterexamples all day. Deconstructionist superheroes don't count. Pre-code outsider stuff doesn't count. Specific one-off statements don't count. Modern progressive takes don't count. What that gets you is that conservative comics are conservative, which is obviously true but isn't much of an analysis.
And you missed the point of asking what Captain America did to ensure someone like Richard Nixon couldn't get elected again. Or Superman with Lex Luthor.
Of course there are other examples of progressive comics, but the mainstay superheroes aren't seen leading revolutions or improving political systems. They're working against change.
Except when they aren't. Again, you can ignore all the counterexamples you want, nothing is keeping writers away from whatever subtext they want to give. Alan Moore wasn't any more conservative writing Superman than he was when having Swamp Thing take down corporate stooges in the name of "the Green".
And of course there's a TON of deconstruction happening for many decades. I've been holding back from pointing out The Dark Knight Returns presenting Superman as exactly what you claim because Batman as libertarian revolutionary isn't exactly an example of progressivism, but "Bats goes fash" isn't a one-off. At one point he destroyed the world by giving in to global surveillance.
Oh, and Wonder Woman killed the head of a US spy agency just after that. On live TV. Nerds are still arguing about that one. Also about that time the Amazons invaded the US because they were torturing Wonder Woman as a terrorist. I'm not sure I count that one, though, because they copped out with "the bad guy orchestrated everything" eventually.
Seriously, I promise, comics are weird and have been going for a long time. Writers are gonna write all sorts of stuff. I know it's reassuring to boil it down to archetypal stuff, but yeah, no, people have been messing with these characters for the better part of a century from every angle.
Didn't Alan Moore end up going off to write his own comics, with blackjack and hookers, because he never managed to reconcile the constrictions of the big publishers with his own political views?
Sorta, kinda. To be absolutely clear, he published a full on anarchist manifesto under a DC label, as well as Watchmen itself, which ended up being the ultimate deconstructionist take on superheroes (and does start from a heroes-as-keepers-of-the-system take, but goes way past that eventually).
And, again, it's not like he was pretending to be a conservative while he was doing superheroes.
Again, writers are writers. They write. It's not like there's a sign on the Marvel and DC bullpens saying "status quo defense only". Again, except for that chunk of time where the US government literally did that. But that's a different story, and there was a ton of cultural and countercultural pushback before, during and after.
So, short version is "yes, with a but"
Yeah. The "but" being he published plenty of countercultural, left-leaning content under a mainstream publisher brand and in the superhero genre.
So, you know, a pretty big "but" in this context.
Black Adam was free on Prime, so I said why not.
It was a bit hammy in the introduction but the Justice Society gets called right out for coming in to protect the US-coded mercenaries from Black Adam's murder spee and being nowhere to be found when Kahndaq was invaded by them in the first place.
Of course, Black Adam as anything but a nationalistic tyrant is some straight up bullshit, but whatever.
Anyways, point is, I want more superheroes fighting imperialism.
Superman was created as an anti-fascist, and needs to return to his roots, not let a tornado kill his dad.
Superman's real weakness was his lack of weaknesses. It made his physical character development non-existent so they were left with writing him into social situations. Superman is a MacGuffin, Clark is the main character.
Superheroes fighting false information online would be nice. Or forcing public healthcare through government. Etc etc.
Turning reactionary villains into woke antiheroes is based. We need to wokify comic books
The problem is that they undid his antihero phase by having him genocide a neighboring country, Bialya, the origin of the Blue Beetle scarab btw, then kept that genocide canon.
So now they've got a genocidal tyrant on the Justice League going "No, you don't get it, I've CHANGED, bros!"