O'Neil: Superhero in the Age of Genocide

Apologies for the abrupt end to postings.  I got really busy, and the blog became detached from the class, so it went on a brief hiatus.   We will return.    But for now, be sure to check out Tim O'Neil's very interesting discussion of "The Superhero in the Age of Genocide,"  part one and part two.    I admit that I've never read Marshall Law, but Tim sure makes it sound interesting.:

in the world of Marshall Law, the ability of American power to operate indiscriminately and without any check has been codified by decades of aggression. The super-hero has been reshaped by the government as an instrument of war, as immoral and as unstoppable as a bullet in a gun. These “heroes” don’t have origins where their terrible responsibilities have been explicitly laid out with defining moral boundaries. They were told to go and to kill, so is it any wonder that when they got home they were still wearing their necklaces of human ears?

The first Marshall Law is basically Chinatown with superheroes. There’s a series of crimes that eventually leads to a deeper rot in the status quo. Marshall Law isn’t particularly bright or particularly strong, but he is tenacious. He is the last honest man in a world gone upside down, where power is exercised indiscriminately and the privilege of ability is the perception of incorruptibility. Marshall Law can’t change the status quo, because the decay is set too deeply in society’s foundation, but he can certainly spend the rest of his life trying to expose every last hypocrite.
.....

Marshall Law is the ultimate counterpoint to these relatively utopian conceptions of superhero morality. Despite whatever dystopian scenarios they depicted, Watchmen, Dark Knight and Squadron Supreme all end with the heroes chastened but relatively unscathed, and fully recommitted to the cause of heroism. On the contrary, Marshall Law begins at the exact point where heroism is rendered obsolete - there will be no great moral epiphanies, no triumphant battles against the forces of darkness. The forces of darkness, represented by nihilistic genocidal destruction, have already won.

If the superhero was at least partially conceived as a bulwark against European fascism, it must still be acknowledged that the genre's idealized foundations are sometimes uncomfortably similar to those of Nazism. This is an uncomfortable idea which was recently explored in the excellent Truth: Red, White & Black limited series. By seeking to subvert and stymie the Axis menace, Jewish kids chose to create strikingly Aryan models of the physical ideal.

Read the rest.

 

Comments

[Transitional Man]

If the superman actually did exist, his or her government would attempt to eploit them. That much is a given, If you could count on a Superman or Dr. Manahattan to fight your society's battles then no pressed society could afford to ignore the possibilities such an individual provides. Whether such an indifdual would be known as a hero or vlillain would depend very much on perspective.

But the government would also be terrified by superheroes. At the end of the day, the government holds the moopoly of force within it's own society. That force may be bound by constitutional and legal means, but it is important to remember that at the end of the day the government always holds the power. If it does not, it no longer governs.

So imagine the challenge a Clark Kent might pose to society today. We pass laws that bind our governement and citizens in a mutual web of rights and obligations. But what obligates the Superman? Can the police hope to restrain such an individual? Can the army kill a Kryptonian? This is particularly difficult if you don't want to kill lots of innocents along with the rogue superman.

The superman therefore poses a real social challenge. If he can be co-opted with confindence, great. IF not he or she poses a mortal threat, for their power permits them to essentially write their own rules and ignore those of the larger society.

If superheroes are common, then one could be played off against the other, but that also implies the risk they will team up and decide to rule themselves. I suspect that any government composed of the unpowered would be extremely suspicious at best of the supermen among us. IF a power and clear external threat existed, the supermen would be embraced, at least until the menace was defeated. But without it the supermen themselves might become percieved menaces, if out of jealousy if nothing else. I suspect that in any such society at least a covert research program aimed at developing means of killing/containing your own supermen would be an ongoing process.

Second, war changes people. Some become inured to killing. People become callous and angry or they may break. A superman back from a long and victorious war may show little patience with 'business as usual'. His or her sacrifice may leave him with a feeling of entitlement. A group of combat veterans, loyal primarily to each other, might not show much patience for the 'chickshit' behavior of politicians at home.

I think a national super-team is possible, particularly during wartime. But not afterward where their potential will be seen as threateing. Perhaps a society blessed with such individuals might neeed a Eurasia and Oceana to war against, in order to keep the superman gainfully occupied, and thus unlikely to think hard on ruling himself.

[Steven M. Bergson]

Since this posting is past mid-June, I don't know if anyone will even be reading this until classes start in the Fall.

Interesting topic, but I was actually looking for a discussion of the reverse, i.e. "Genocide in the Age of Superhero".

The timeline I was considering was this :

- 1945 (reality) : The world learns of the death camps, which killed millions, including 6 million Jews

- 1955 : Bernard Krigstein's "Master Race" (Impact #1) portrays the Holocaust in a classic 8-page story

- 1966 : Kirby & Lee introduce Galactus (Fantastic Four #48), who can devour an entire planet, killing all life on it

- 1972 : Funny Animals #1, which contains the 3-page "Maus" Holocaust story by Art Spiegelman, which would evolve into a 2-volume graphic novel

- 1985 : DC 12-issue series Crisis on Infinite Earths, in which multiple universes are decimated. An entire universe is destroyed within the first half of issue 1 alone.

My question is this : Is the killing of "mere" millions, as happened during the Armenian genocide, the Shoah, the Rwandan massacres, Kosovo, etc. being rendered banal / insignificant in the minds of readers of comics, who have "witnessed" the fictional genocides of cities, countries, planets and even entire universes? In their attempts to outdo each other in fictional slaughtering, are comics writers making death, murder and genocide seem commonplace?

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