Marvel is Liberal, DC conservative

I recall a fireside chat with some college friends. This guy, a friend by marriage, was telling me that he could never get into Marvel Comics. Sometimes you couldn't tell the good guys from the bad guys, he said. I am paraphrasing, of course, this is a memory through the fog of three or four decades. He told me that he preferred DC Comics because this line was more well-defined. It was this conversation where I first got the notion that Marvel is for liberals and DC for conservatives.  

This is true about DC Comics, at least most of them. Most of the classic DC Comics came out of the conservative 1940's and 50's. The first Superman comic, Action #1, was published in 1938. You knew where he stood, "truth, justice and the American way," as stated in the 1940's radio shows.  Lets face it, he is Christ-like, sent from the heavens. When he was fighting someone, you knew who the good guy and the bad guy was. In the universe of the comic, the cops  and media always supported him and feared his enemies. He was their savior and they stood by him. A well defined line between good and evil is a very conservative idea. Clear and concise.  It always bothered me that Superman fought crime and then as Clark Kent wrote about himself. This is a bit too fascist for me.  He wears red, white and blue and fights to preserve the status quo. Conservatives love this stuff. It never comes up that he is technically an illegal alien, literally. 

Most of the other major DC comics have similar motifs: Aqua Man, The Flash, Green Lantern, Green Arrow. They fight evil and it is obvious. One major character that doesn't fit this mold is Batman.He really toggles the good/evil line at times but by all other counts, he is a conservative. He blames government for the death of his parents, he uses his own resources to tackle the crime problem and beats up on the poor and the insane. The insane are almost always portrayed awfully in the DC universe a la Arkham Asylum. When you have a DC "bad" guy, he/she is evil or insane, usually both. 

The only exception of the DC major heroes is Wonder Woman, the only woman in the bunch. She is a feminist icon, working in a man's profession and trying to change the world. Most female DC heroes are simply female counterparts of male heroes: Super Girl, Bat Woman, Hawkwoman, etc. Although, I do admit Marvel has done the same with She-Hulk and Spider Woman. 

Marvel came out of the rebellious liberal 60's. Liberals are wishy washy. They never met a nuance they didn't love. Marvel is full of them. Spiderman is a struggling college student who moonlights as a photographer for the Daily Bugle who portrays him as a menace. The cops want to arrest him. His Aunt May is afraid of him. The Hulk is hunted by the military. Thor is a demigod. In the Marvel universe gods are just very powerful beings from different realms. The X-Men are actively trying to change the world making it safe for mutants (aka the outsider) which is a neat sci-fi way of saying homosexual, black or any other counterculture. Their leader is disabled, Professor X is bound to a wheel chair. 

The differently abled are well presented in the Marvel universe. Professor X's son, Legion, has multiple personality disorder. Daredevil is blind, Moon Knight has schizophrenia, Deadpool is in constant pain, Puck is a little person and Hawkeye, the Avenger, is deaf. The disabled don't fair so well in the DC universe. The first disabled super-hero, Caption Mid-Nite, introduced in 1941 was blinded by a grenade and discovered he could see in the dark.  Even comic geeks like me, have never heard of this guy. It is difficult finding a major DC character with anything close to a disability.  They are idealized beings, like Greek gods. The best example is probably Cyborg, who is an amputee whose parts have been replaced by machines. Not incredibly inspiring. 

Marvel villains are also more complex than DC's. Sometimes they are extreme evil, but often they are just people who have had a raw deal. Magneto grew up in Auschwitz and only survived with the help of his mutant abilities. He grew to hate non-mutants because of the experience in the camp.  

Galactus is a cosmic entity that requires the eating of planets for sustenance. Thanos actually wants to save the universe by reducing our population by half; he's an environmentalist with simply too much power.  The Submariner is also a radical environmentalist, protecting the ocean from humans, after all he is the prince of Atlantis. Can we blame him? Also, can we really blame Red Skull for doing evil, he was chosen as a teenager by Hitler and then groomed by the Fuhrer himself.  

Marvel's Iron Man may seem like an exception. In the early days, Tony Stark is just another millionaire industrialist (weapons manufacturer) using his technological toys to defeat bad guys. But in later issues, he sees how war is destroying the world and how his lifestyle is killing him (alcoholism). He changes Stark Industries to green energy, cleans up his personal life and ends up being a good liberal. 

The one true exception in the Marvel universe is Captain America. Perhaps this is because he predates the 60's. He premiered in 1940 published by Timely Comics. He fought Nazis and communists. He was later reintroduced in Marvel as a superhero fighting bad guys in 1963. He is still a very conservative character. His powers are a result of a righteous government experiment that worked.  He is the idealized blond hair American guy who was even born on the 4th of July. 

Iron Man, Captain America along with The Avengers were not very good comics. This is one the amazing things about the film adaptions because they work so much better in film. 

For a long time, every black super hero had the word "black" in their name: Black Lightning, Black Panther, Black Goliath etc. This is a trope that had to end. As you guessed it, Marvel has more black heroes in more prominent roles. Marvel's Power Man, Hero for Hire or Luke Cage (this comic was renamed many times) was the first American comic, 1972, starring a black character. It was created in the wake of blaxploitation films of that era and it was pretty bad. He had a catchphrase "Sweet Christmas!" He is a street level hero with the stories based in a high crime section of New York City much like Daredevil. Comics are still the realm of the white guy but now there is a lot more diversity than ever. Marvel's latest version of Ms. Marvel is a character named Kamala Khan, introduced in 2013, and she is Muslim. 

I must apologize if I am wrong about DC. Other than Batman and The Watchmen, I have not read a lot of their comics. This is mostly because I don't like them, never have. I love nuance. While writing this, I've had to wonder if I am a liberal because I read Marvel as a kid, or did I read Marvel because I have always been a liberal. I still have no idea. I did not grow up in a political family but I did read my first comic, The Incredible Hulk #2, by looking through my brother's comics. Perhaps if he had a copy of Hawkman lying around, I might be Trumper right now. I doubt it. 

The Watchmen: Season 1 Episode 1 and the Tulsa Race Riot

The world of The Watchmen is different from ours.  Not just because they have superheroes, that is obvious, but the story line exists in an alternative universe.  I am talking about the HBO Series based on the graphic novel/comic not the comic or the movie based on it. I've read the first ground breaking graphic novel and loved it. For some, when Game of Thrones went off the air, it was time to unsubscribe to HBO. For me, I could give or take GoT.  The Watchmen is more my taste. When the greatest television network, ever, makes a show about one of your favorite comics, starring one of your favorite actresses (Regina King) and Trent Reznor does the music .... you take notice.

The graphic novel came out in 1987 and was created by the British creative team consisting of writer Alan Moore, artist David Gibbons and colorist John Higgins. Alan Moore is considered by many to be greatest comic creator in the English language. Among his achievements are V is for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Batman: The Killing Joke, all of which received critical acclaim. The original graphic novel,The Watchmen, is on many media organizations' lists of top 100 greatest novels of all-time. It made Time Magazine's list and is along side The Great Gatsby and To Kill A Mockingbird; it is that good.

The most interesting thing about The Watchmen, as a comic, is that it is much more realistic and less mellow-dramatic than most comics. It is about a group of superheroes but it is questionable whether they are the good guys or not. The good guy/bad guy dichotomy doesn't exist in this world. The characters exist in a gray area. Some people in their world fear them, some think they are menaces and part of the problem, and they are celebrities. Some of the characters are borderline evil, like Rorschach. He could be seen as extremely right-wing or a character out of an Ayn Rand novel. He is unstable and a bad ass. Some might consider him a hero. Others think he's a fascist. Lets face it, if super heroes did exist, this is how it would be. Right? They would be aligned along political lines. The white supremacy group in the show, the Seventh Kavalry, are inspired by his writings and wear his mask (like how Klansman would wear a hood). The comic is thought provoking as is the show.

The HBO show takes place 30 years after the comic book story ended. The story has no connection the film that came out in 2009. Its setting is a bit terrifying. Richard Nixon served five terms, he is on Mt. Rushmore, Vietnam is a US state and Robert Redford is president. Please note, Robert Redford is not playing the president. In this world, the actor, Robert Redford, has become president and his biggest achievement is reparations for slavery. Redford never gave them permission to use his image (thank you public domain). Reparations are so controversial, they are referred to as Redfordations (much like the ACA is referred to as Obamacare in our universe). The police in this universe have to wear masks (yellow masks, the color of the iconic smiley face), because violence against cops is so high, they have to hide who they are. White supremacists are making a resurgence, coming out from hiding, which is another parallel to our world (thanks to Trump). It also rains squid in this universe which is a reference to an event in the comics. That storyline ended with a giant squid attack.

When watching a show like this, it is difficult to tell what is an actual reference to our world and what is fiction. The first episode opens with some incredible violence in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It appears like fiction, because it is outrageous, graphic and I never heard of this event. Unfortunately, this is real and not something from Moore's imagination. The Tulsa Race Riot (also called the Black Wall Street Massacre or the Greenwood Massacre) took place in the Greenwood section of Tulsa in 1921. Greenwood, at the time was called Black Wall Street. It was a thriving middle-class African American neighborhood with black owned businesses, doctors, dentists and tradespeople. It was thriving. The violence exploded on Memorial Day Weekend when a 19 year old black man was accused of raping a 17 year old white girl. Thousands of whites marched in this black neighborhood in what is known as the worst race riot in American history. 36 black people were killed, 10,000 were left homeless and over a $1 million (in 1921 dollars) in real estate destroyed. The rioters actually used planes (at least a dozen) to shoot rifles and firebomb businesses, homes and fleeing families. When you hear about events like this, you understand the call for reparations. Not a single white rioter was prosecuted following the riot.

The rest of the show takes place 98 years later, still in Tulsa. As of right now, I don't know if the riot has any connection to any of the characters or if it was just an introduction to Tulsa and its history.  We'll see. I am looking forward to episode two this evening. What should I watch? The World Series is also on.

Avengers: Age of Excess

I was excited to see the new Avengers movie yesterday. I went to see it alone. I was quickly disappointed. It was choppy, uneven and difficult to follow at times. Having grown up reading Marvel comics, I await the newest installments from the Marvel Cinematic Universe with too much glee for a 50 year old man to admit. The technology did not exist to set these books to film when I was a kid, so I welcome the excess usually ... provided that the excess is well done and worth the money I spent to see it.  I can't say that Avengers: The Age of Ultron was worth it .. the wait or the money.

The Avengers were never my favorite comic. I read it and enjoyed it, but I was more into the more angst ridden heroes like Spider-Man, Daredevil and the X-men. The more cavalier Captain America and Iron Man were too perfect for me to wrap my little head around. A war hero loved by all and an obnoxious millionaire with high tech toys didn't really resonate with this post-hippy working class teenager. The Hulk was the only member of the Avengers that had any appeal to me, but he had his own book so The Avengers book took a back seat. But when Marvel came out with the first Avengers film a few years ago, they pulled me in again. It was one of the best comic book movies ever made. Most of them are stinkers, but when a good one comes along, I have to really embrace it. Among the better ones I would put Spider-Man 2, The Watchmen, Guardians of the Galaxy and Batman Begins. The Avengers joined that list. The follow-up to it, did not. Expectations were high and they fell miserably.

Most of the members of The Avengers already have their own film franchises (Captain America, Ironman, the Hulk) so no time is wasted on their back stories in this film.  The remaining two, Black Widow and Hawkeye don't, so screen time had to be wasted on character development. This isn't usually a problem if it is done well, but it isn't in this film. Hawkeye's back story, well, who cares? He is not a very interesting character. An archer just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense in this group. It didn't seem to make a lot of sense when I read the book as a kid. I wouldn't have been upset if they killed him off. Black Widow is a different story. She has an interesting back story and has always been an interesting character. She is the only woman in the group, so of course, her back story had to be a romance (of course not) ... with David Banner, a guy who can't get excited or he might hurt somebody. It was a bit too much like Twilight for me and just seem to be stuck in the film. It went no where. The one joy of the film is the introduction of The Vision, always one of the more elusive and mysterious characters. He was so well done in the film. His presence almost saved the film for me.

I haven't even gotten to the biggest problem with the film. It was just really hard to follow. For one, I couldn't tell what was going on in some of the action sequences. I had no sense of who was where in some of the scenes and who was fighting whom. They were so choppy that the moment I thought I understood what was happening it would cut to another shot or another scene altogether. This type of choppiness continued throughout the film, not just the action scenes, making the narrative difficult to follow.

As far as plot goes, I don't ever expect profundity or anything to challenge any of my ideals. I simply expect good fun and a few hours of pure entertainment in comic book films.  But I can't say I am entirely sure what our villain, Ultron's, evil plan was or what his motivations were. He was trying to destroy the human race so we could evolve into something new. What? When he couldn't get the nuclear codes, he decided to take some East European country, make it fly and turn it into a meteor to destroy us like the dinosaurs?  Uhm, what?  Am I right about this!  Did I get that right?  I am still unsure. Lets hope the next Avengers film is better and less of a muddle.  Hopefully, we'll get less excess and more clarity as to what the heck is going on.

East of Eden

I have blogged about Tolkien a lot in the past, more than other writers. This is mostly because of the Peter Jackson films. I do enjoy Tolkien's writing but if I were list my favorite writers he wouldn't be high on the list, but he'd be on it.  My problem with his work is the well defined line between good and evil. Characters are either good or evil. This doesn't bode well with my world view. Reality is more nuanced than that. It is not black and white, people teeter back and forward through many shades of gray. Evil and good are not entities. People, everyone, has capacity for both. I am not too critical of Tolkien, I still love his books. Perhaps I'd I have a different take on good and evil if I were writing a novel while living in England during World War II.  He wrote it in the malaise of one of the few conflicts in the history of the world where there certainly were well defined lines of good and evil.

Higher on that list (and I promise I will put it together someday) is John Steinbeck. I just finished reading East of Eden, a book that I have wanted to read for years, and I have the same problem with it that I have with Tolkien, at least, the beginning of the book. He has good characters and evil characters with very little gray. This is the fourth book of his that I have read and I might have to put it as my least favorite, certainly below Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. 

Perhaps it is hubris, but since I have been reading novels for close to four decades now, I am confident enough in my reading that I feel that I could edit some canonized works of literature to make them better.  For example, I love Moby Dick, but I think it would be a better book if those 80 pages about the history of whaling were removed in the middle of the book.  East of Eden is about two families, I think it would have been a better book if it were only about one.  One of the families in the book is Steinbeck's, the Hamilton family. He is the narrator of the book and he even makes an appearance now and then mostly as an infant.  While reading the book, you find yourself wanting to skip over the chapters about his family to get to the chapters about the more compelling Trask family.

Steinbeck began writing East of Eden merely because he saw his beloved Salinas Valley in California changing dramatically. He started writing about the valley for his children so that they would know what it was like when he was a child, but the story evolved into a religious allegory.  The story of the Trask family is the story of Eden, Cain and Abel told in an American backdrop. The Eve character, Catherine (later called Kate) is pure evil. She uses her beauty and sexuality to get what she wants destroying people in her path. She has killed, blackmailed and has abandoned her children. The Trask storyline is of the good people who get hurt in her path. Adam who married her and her children, the twins, Aron (Abel) and Caleb (Cain).  As Sam Hamilton (Steinbeck's wise grandfather character) explains, something is missing in her. The goodness that Adam possesses, is nowhere to be found in Catherine. I'd love to read what Feminist critics thinks of this book.

The Trask story is a collection of antithetical pairs, opposing evil and good, all starting with C and A like Cain and Abel.  The story starts with Cyrus and Alice who are the parents of Charles and Adam. Adam's children, that may be Charles', are Caleb and Aron. The two main female characters are also a C and A match-up Catherine and Alba, girl friend of the twins, although they never actually meet in the story. The most interesting character, the youngest of the C characters, Caleb (or Cal) acknowledges the evil that he inherited from his mother (the sin he inherited from Eve) and struggles with it. The angst ridden Cal is famously portrayed by James Dean in the Elia Kazan film which whittles the story down even more than I would. The film concentrates on the twins Cal and Aron which is basically the last third of the book. Kazan might have it right, for evil that Cal struggles with is a far better story than the comic book like Catherine who doesn't struggle with it at all. She thrives on it. Magneto and Doctor Doom from Marvel Comics have more depth than her.

Most books that I love have a complex narrative structure. Three of my favorites, The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, have first person narrators that are unreliable and biased minor characters.  Their imperfections as narrators make for complex interpretations and are fodder for many conversations of what is really going on in the novels. East of Eden is different in that the narrator (Steinbeck) is a very minor character but who obviously wasn't present during the time of the story.  So interpretation of his narration is problematic because everything he narrates was obviously told to the narrator, not a first hand account.  The narrator tells us that Adam Trask is a good man, but his actions are, sometimes, otherwise. He frequents prostitutes and he neglects his twins during their formative years. Evil no, but hardly is he as purely good as his wife is evil.

Like a Tolkien hobbit, Cal Trask struggles with an evil that possesses him. No magic here, though, nor is there an embodiment of evil, the evil is humanity itself. It makes for a more mature book when you have a main character who is full of flaws but you love him anyway.  This is why we love Gatsby and Heathcliff (from Wuthering Heights).  We see wrong in them and we want them to make good because the wrong we see in them, we see in ourselves.  It seems my problems with the book is that I don't believe in sin, original or otherwise.  So perhaps I would cut East of Eden down even further, like Kazan, to a short story or a short novel about Cal, a teenage boy trying to be good but failing, but I guess if I did that we'd just have another Catcher In the Rye.

Superman Fighting the KKK

As a life-long Marvel Comics fan, I have always turned my nose up to DC Comics.  DC comics always seemed too simplistic. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman may have seemed really creative when they were created in the 1940's but for my post-hippy angst, Marvel was much more appealing.  Stan Lee created characters like Spiderman, the Hulk and X-men in the 1960's.  They are much more complex.  Their stories have an edge to them and have a lot more social commentary in them with themes of racism, otherness and individuality.

I just finished a  chapter in Freakonomics (by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner) that gave me new appreciation for Superman, not the comic but the radio show.  In the 1940's political activist Stetson Kennedy went undercover with the Ku Klux Klan with the intention of publishing a book about their inner workings.  He learned a lot of their secrets like their recruiting techniques, passwords, handshakes and terminology.  For example, when a Klansman went on the road, they could find other Klansmen by asking around for "Mr Ayak" which stood for "Are you a Klansman?".   If a Klansman heard someone asking for Mr. Ayak at a bar, a church etc., they could identify themselves by replying "Yes, and I also know a Mr. Akai" which stood for "A Klansman Am I."

The Klan was growing strong.  Kennedy thought that just another journalistic book would not affect the spread of bigotry enough, he had a better idea.  He contacted the producers of the very popular Superman radio show.  Superman was running out of villains.  Why not take on the Klan?  "The Clan of the Fiery Cross" was born in 1946.  For 16 episodes Superman battled the Klan.  In these episodes the Ayak/Akai passwords were revealed and the Klan mystique was demystified.  If the following years the Klan attendance dropped and recruitment plummeted.  What was once a secret code was now common and afloat in the pop culture airways.

Levitt and Dubner call Kennedy, the "biggest blow" to the KKK in their history.  They may have over stated this, but the idea that tolerance is good business may have started here.  Nonetheless my appreciation for Superman, real world or otherwise has greatly increased.

Snoopy

Snoopy made his premiere in The Peanuts comic strip two days into the strip's history. So October 4th, 1950 is Snoopy's birthday. Charles Schultz modeled him after his childhood beagles Snooky and Spike. He originally was supposed to be named Sniffy but changed it to Snoopy after discovering that Sniffy was taken. In the early days of the strip, Snoopy walked on all fours and was silent. After two years, the thought bubble was introduced to show what he was thinking. Other characters in the strip seemed to be able to read his mind because they responded to his thoughts as if he was talking. He was mostly silent in the TV specials. It was ten years after he was introduced that Snoopy started walking upright. Since then Snoopy became the real star of the strip and shows. Schultz claims that Snoopy became the character that the loser Charlie secretly wanted to be. Schultz suffered from manic depression and he modeled the character Charlie Brown after himself. When he was young, he claims, every time he started to show pride in some of his accomplishments, his father would tell him not to get a big head. So when he created Charlie, he purposely made him with a disproportionally large head.

Superman is a Fascist

It bothers me, a bit, about Superman. He fights crime under one personae and then under another personae .... writes about it. Talk about controlling your own message. No wonder everyone in his world thinks of him as being super ... he was the media ... he told them he was super and they believed him. A bit fascist, don't you think?

Two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, created Superman in 1933. This was during the height of fascism in Europe and antisemitism, not only abroad but in the states as well. Surely what was going on in the world had some influence on them. Superman was clearly a leftist in the early days taking on the KKK and promoting the New Deal. It is unclear whether they took the name of the character from the Nietzsche concept, the Superman, but the fact that Nietzsche was also a major influence of Hitler always seemed ironic to me. The name Clark Kent comes from the movie stars Clark Gable and Kent Taylor (a B movie star from the 50's). Many of the other names they took from Hebrew with Superman's real name, Kal-El resembling the Hebrew word for "the voice of god" while his childhood mythos resembles Moses in that they were both cast out by their parents to save him. Moses was sent down the Nile in a basket, while Kal-El sent in a pod to Kansas. So maybe, Superman isn't a fascist, but perhaps, he's just Jewish.

I have always been more of a Marvel fan than a DC fan anyway. Spiderman is more my style. He worked for a newspaper too, but he just took the pictures. Others were open to interpret what he was doing in them. He didn't control his own message ... it controlled him.

Check out this Archive of Studio 360. It was a good one:
http://www.studio360.org/americanicons/episodes/2007/01/05