Why Comics Are Conservative
Capes and Cowls are as American as the Constitution.
Superheroes are America’s ‘indigenous monomyth’. Personifications of Winthrop’s insistence that the nation be God’s ‘City on a Hill’. A pantheon preceded by founding fathers and frontiersmen, who charted the lands and ideals they protect. They followed the post-WWI sentiment of the transformative power of history’s ‘Great reformers’. Their justification for international and extra-legal action is always to protect individualism. Their medium is contingent on free-market capitalism, legitimising property ownership as collectible entities. Superhero comics are pedagogic cultural arbiters of American exceptionalism.
Superman was the progenitor of the archetype: a populist post-Depression power-fantasy version of Sun Gods and Biblical wilderness-wandering prophets, dropped into a modern Metropolis by two second-generation Jewish immigrants. He fought Axis Powers, filmed the first atomic blast, and battled mind-controlling intergalactic invaders alongside his successors Batman, Wonder Woman, and the Justice Societies and Leagues of America.
Marvel was, too, born of Cold War concerns. The Fantastic Four’s participated in the Space Race. Spider-Man and Hulk were empowered by radiation. Captain America, propagandistic relic from the States’ battle against fascism, was resurrected from Arctic mummification to face the new collectivist threat: the USSR.
But golden ages wane like golden hours. Storytelling was neutered by the Comics Code Authority: a self-imposed regulatory effort to avoid federal government censorship. Now-discredited psychologist Fredric Wertham excoriated comics to Congress for exposing children to criminality and perversion. Britain’s Communist Party advocated similar censorship efforts. Overnight, Batman went from pulp detective to Adam West’s campy, questionably-dressed crimefighter.
Sporadic titles continued to push boundaries. Horror was sustained through gothic series like Swamp Thing. O’Neil and Adams showcased poverty and addiction in Green Lantern/Green Arrow. Mike Barr’s Outsiders saw a ‘dread avenger’ Batman batter communist cults and Nazi revivalists. But most 50s to 70s stories were absurd, sanitised, and incongruous with continuity.
Sales slumped to implosion in 1978, causing cancellation of twenty-four titles. DC finally decided to innovate beyond Comics Code guidelines, targeting matured tastes of an aged-up audience through the new graphic novel format. With Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, Batman became a Paul Revere figure: rounding up rioters from horseback in a Gotham allegorical for pre-Giuliani New York, and fighting for individualism against an inhuman Superman. Satirical caricatures of Nixon and Reagan highlighted emerging value disparities between libertarian and establishment factions of Republicanism, and how heavy emphasis on foreign policy had neglected domestic concerns of urban working Americans.
From ’85 onwards, conservatism became indistinguishable from superheroism again. Continuity was consolidated by Crisis on Infinite Earths, where a superpowered Uncle Sam unified heroes and villains from all nations and multiverses to fight for life and liberty against the Anti-Monitor’s deindividuated demons. Traditional heroic virtues were made the centre of this new universe in John Ostrander’s subsequent series, Legends. Cooperation possible through the American ethos spawned an international Justice League, including Soviet defector superhero Rocket Red in its ranks to combat the alien insurgents in Invasion!. Superman acted as Presidential confidant in Cosmic Odyssey. Blue Beetle read National Review [Justice League #22].
After decades of domestic political discontent — from Vietnam and Watergate, to a Carter administration recession and rising crime in New York — patriotism soared up, up, and away with the election of Ronald Reagan. With a cowboy in the Whitehouse, America’s postmodern monomyth experienced a renaissance, with a restoration of superheroic values. Sales were up again by the time Berlin’s Wall came down.
Coinciding with this reboot, the Nietzsche of comics, Alan Moore, deconstructed the superhero genre with Watchmen. Its story of amoral vigilantism, urban decay, and villains with utopian ambition instigated a reexamination of moral paradigms superhero comics had presupposed for half a century. Based on Charlton Comics characters (now adopted into DC Comics continuity), Watchmen disillusioned many from superheroic ideals, with its apathetic Übermensch Doctor Manhattan, vagrant radical Rorschach, impotent “glory days” protegee Nite Owl, and sadomasochistic black-ops agent The Comedian. World peace became predicated genocide and lies, as Ozymandias manufactured an extra-terrestrial threat President Reagan proposed mankind would unify to fight. Moore instigated an ideological paradigm shift, which advanced the medium’s literary prowess at the expense of the concreteness of its ethic. He showed how power corrupts, but neglected how absolute power was wielded for good by a man from Kansas.
Since Watchmen, nihilism, cynicism, and what I’ve coined “The Murder-Suicide of the Silver Age” has pervaded modern comics. Stories reflect editorial’s attitude that ‘heroes shouldn’t have happy personal lives’. These polarising tales involve subversive retcons, shock deaths, and character assassinations: from Hal Jordan’s heel-turn in Emerald Twilight, to lobotomies in Identity Crisis, and the undoing of Wally West’s triumphant return in Heroes in Crisis. They’re then often reversed in top-selling “redemption” events, like DC Rebirth’s scapegoating of Doctor Manhattan for the recurrent removal of hope and optimism from stories.
This tonal shift is correlative with criticism of America’s foreign and domestic policies, its “world police” imperialism, and its covert spying on its citizens. Superman died at the height of opposition to Reaganomics, became a dictator in Injustice during Middle Eastern intervention, and was accused of irrelevancy after the 2016 election. HBO’s Watchmen sequel accused America of systemic racism. The Boys season 2 conflates patriotism and Nazism. Discourse surrounding superheroes turns cynical when citizens doubt if political processes are of, by, and for America’s people.
The superhero blockbuster also politically transformed these characters. Iron Man’s original incarnation had him build his first silver suit to escape a Vietnamese prison camp; the 2008 movie made his captors a Middle Eastern terror network, funded by American weapons manufacturers. In The Dark Knight, Batman and Lucius Fox develop and debate a privatised version of surveillance software used by intelligence agencies through the PATRIOT Act. Both form and contexts transmogrify the circumstances of superheroes, subjecting their values to scrutiny by the anxieties of their times.
This trend, correlative with intersectionality’s long march through cultural institutions, renders the industry unsustainable. Unsellable books alienate fans, bankrupt retailers, and render physical print unprofitable. Movie popularity doesn’t equate to increased comic sales. Characters become more profitable as commodities than narrative entities, and so the integrity of their continuity is neglected by new, politically motivated writers. Heroes’ legacies are desecrated to introduce “diverse” successors. Look at DC’s Future State event: a non-binary amputee Flash, and black American Batman… Identity politics on parade; and this is the toned-down version, from the wholesale replacement originally planned in the aborted 5G initiative.
There’s hope for a conservative comic renaissance. Avengers: Endgame saw many of Marvel’s headliners go the way of the Dodo, and COVID-19 caused delays for new releases. DC are poised for box office dominance. Zack Snyder’s Jung/Campbell-inspired storytelling redeemed a nihilistic Batman and Wonder Woman through Superman’s Christ-like death and resurrection. One can only hope progressive writers and artists veer from identity politics and reverberating vitriolic partisan rhetoric with another sales implosion, before AT&T place the final nail in DC’s coffin with the cancellation of print. Whether or not my warnings are ignored by editorial, it’s apparent that, for the industry to survive, comics must reclaim and hold true to American ideals, despite the assault our epoch presents on their principles.