Marvel recently announced that their heroes would start acting like heroes again. So what were they doing, running crack houses?
After seven years of grim and grimmer story lines, including a superhero “civil war” that pitted Iron Man against Spider-Man and the death of Captain America, Marvel Comics will usher in a more optimistic “Heroic Age” approach in May.
“Heroes will be heroes again,” says Marvel editor in chief Joe Quesada. “They’ve gone through hell and they’re back to being good guys — a throwback to the early days of the Marvel Universe, with more of a swashbuckling feel.”
What does “swashbuckling,” which refers to pirates, have to do with heroism? Quesada went on to explain that Captain America, Iron Man and Thor would be working together again instead of acting like foes. Suddenly, WTF? appears over the scene like the Batsignal. How does working together make them heroes exactly? In the “Dark Reign” series of stories at Marvel last year, a bunch of Super-villains led by Norman (Green Goblin) Osborn had taken over the Avengers and were “working together,” trying to kill off the real heroes. Under the guise of helping people. How progressive. But that’s not very heroic.
The problem is, Marvel, like DC to a large extent, is run by and largely created by Progs these days. People who mostly adhere to the “progressive” worldview. There isn’t much diversity of political thought over at these companies. Progs tend to exclude those who don’t follow the party line. They feel more comfortable in a groupthink environment. And this leads to a kind of “bubble mentality” that comes with living in an echo chamber. In the case of Marvel it sometimes becomes unintentionally rank — with a lot of Obama worship — from Spider-Man teaming up with the Prez to Captain America saluting and praising him in the “Who Will Wield the Shield.” There sure wasn’t too much positive being said about Bush during his administration in comics, when they mentioned him at all. But Obama has been praised and venerated from the get go. Like his Nobel prize for just showing up, the comic world’s been awfully uncritical of a president who’s sinking faster in the polls than any president since Eisenhower.
But coincidentally or not, Obama’s first year in office is also the year of the Dark Reign, where villains took over as “protectors” of America and increased the corruption in all the government agencies. Isn’t that ironic, as Alanis might sing? The heroes were on the run, but now there’s a new battle called Seige where the heroes are fighting back against the ersatz heroes of Dark Reign. Hopefully, that will reset things back to “normalcy” in the Marvel Universe.
But that doesn’t get around the fact that ugly politics occasionally show up in their books.
Disclosure time: I know Brian Michael Bendis, the architect of the current Marvel plot-lines like Dark Reign and Seige, very well. I also know Captain America writer Ed Brubaker fairly well, having known him almost since he was a teenager (and Bendis from back when he had hair). I like them, so I’m not going to bash them or anything. But I do need to point out where their politics can be a problem. Bendis is pretty smart about keeping his on the down low. From what I’ve read of his work, and I’ve read a lot, it generally doesn’t creep in that much. Just a dot here and there like you’d expect from a Hollywood writer. Brubaker lives in the San Francisco Bay area. And occasionally he’s thrown in some lefty views in his work. He generally doesn’t as a rule. But his latest Captain America crosses the line and it needs addressing.
Captain America #602, the latest issue, features a stand in for Cap, who was once his sidekick, Bucky Barnes. Bucky was “dead,” but has been revived from being a long term Soviet sleeper agent. He’s supposedly on our side again. Bucky/Cap and his sidekick, the Falcon, head to Idaho to stop a rogue version of Captain America from the 1950s (uh oh: 1950s = evil!) who’s allied himself with extremists, apparently. (The ’50s Captain America is from a classic 1970s story by Steve Englehart.) So what do they see when they go to Boise to find him? Why, marching “teabaggers,” of course.
As the Falcon (a black character) describes it: “A bunch of angry white folk.” And they’re carrying signs protesting high taxes and socialism. So naturally, they’re a bunch of evil rednecks, right? I mean, there are no “black faces there” not even the minstrel kind. Here is how Brubaker explains the story.
I’m trying not to put politics in the comics necessarily, but it’s hard when you’re doing a comic called Captain America not to reflect the world around you to some degree. I’d been planning this story for six months and suddenly there were all these tea parties everywhere. Since the tide has changed in government and the Democrats are in charge, the people who were in power for eight years are out in the wilderness, and they feel like they don’t have a voice anymore. And we’ve got this ’50s Cap who doesn’t know what he’s going to do. As I was planning this story, Obama won, and people start having tea parties and carrying signs that say “Obama is a Nazi” and it’s like “Oh God!” So I’m dealing a little with the disgruntled part of America in this storyline. It gets to both sides of it because I’m trying to be fair and balanced. [Laughs] I never set out to mock people…well, I do in life, but not in my work. I think whenever you’re writing a character you have to try and see their side of the story sympathetically. So this ’50s Cap as a character is someone who I’ve always seen sympathetically because his viewpoint is not mine, but I can get into his head and see where he’s coming from.
Well, first off he’s using the false premise so many Democrats have about the tea parties. That it’s specifically anti-Obama. That it’s all Republicans. All White people. Not surprising if Brubaker watched the usual MSM channels because that’s the narrative they’re selling. The truth is that many have left the Republican AND Democrats to become Independents because they’re sick of the way both parties have acted in the last decade. They’re tired of the games both parties have been playing. The tea party movement is Independent. And its anti-tax message is all about holding the government accountable for wasting our resources. Some tea partiers consider the wars a waste of money, some consider bureaucracy a waste. Many are sick of the nanny state. Many are sick of being pushed around and told that they’re stupid by media elites. But this comic has it that they’re all White (it’s set in Idaho, hello?). The Falcon goes into some redneck bar as a tax collector to get the attention of the ’50s Captain America and quickly gets pummeled by all the rednecks in Caterpillar hats — because that’s what they do to his kind around there, or something.
Needless to say, the scene is another classic lefty trope. But as #602 is part one, and the set up for part two, we’ll have to reserve judgement to see how he shows the “other side” in the next issue.
The subtext of this story is what’s the problem. Here we have Captain America going after people who are protesting government policies and taxation, which is not only their right, they’re doing it peacefully. But because they are protesting the government of Obama, that demands Captain America try to stop them? What kind of hero is this? OK, yes, he’s really there for the 50s Captain America who wants to be a “revolutionary.” But he’s somehow tied to the “tea baggers.” Again, tea party people aren’t violent. They cleaned up after their Washington DC protest site unlike the Obama inauguration people. But hey, any chance to stick it to the protesters. Because protest is wrong, man. When Democrats are in power, anyway.
So, let’s look at this in overview. The American government has put psychotic criminals in charge of the Avengers (still ongoing at the time of this story apparently), but the Bucky Captain America is trying to stop a peaceful protest of the government because that’s wrong? In other words, he is defending a fascist state and oppressing the little guy. That’s heroism, man! Stick it to those “teabaggers.”
Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko, an Objectivist, famously asked a bunch of comic pros if they could define what a hero was, and they couldn’t. You have to wonder if he would get the same response from the comics writers at Marvel and DC today.
It’s a problem if these companies really want readers. They’ve alienated a lot of them since their last heyday, the early 1990s. Considering that this is a center-right country it’s really not a great idea to keep pushing politics that are increasingly unpopular. Better to not get political at all, or at least know what you’re talking about.
And if you want to write about heroes, know what the word really stands for.