“Get your politics out of my superheroes!” “Get your SUPERHEROES out of my POLITICS!”

Politics! Superhero comics! THE TOPIC OF TODAY!

Superman #24

Anyone reading comics news sites has surely seen the 175-car pile-up that is the Robot 6 comment thread to Bill Willingham’s article on politics and superheroes. (I love how the Superman picture chosen there is the Alex Ross pose that mirrors the famous Alex Ross Obama t-shirt.) The comment thread is a completely unjustifiable clusterfuck, the kind of thing Internet bingo cards were invented for, that’s pretty quickly devolved into the standard ideological baiting and namecalling you always get when people talk politics on the Internet, with poor Kurt Busiek standing in the middle as an oasis of sanity.

The timing of Willingham’s article was especially prescient, though, since it hit around the same time as the Obama in Spider-Man news, panels from which I’ve now managed to see on the TV at bars, on elevator ad LCDs, on every damn news website imaginable… for some reason, regular people are really, really, really interested in a throwaway five-page story where Obama shares a fistpound with Spidey. Personally, I’m going for the regular cover, which (sorry for the small image) looks like a masterpiece. (I can see now why Mark Waid was talking it up - “Face it, COUGARS!”)

But this all reached a critical mass for me when my mom sent me a link to an article about it on Christian Science Monitor. Somehow, this debate is reaching my mother. This has gone too far.

Do comics lean left? I’m gonna go ahead and say yeah, they do, just like the vast majority of creative media these days. This isn’t an indictment, or a statement that this is the way things should be; it’s just a fact. The thing is, though, I’ve never really felt like superheroes lean left on particular issues. Any writer worth hiring is more than aware that the viewpoints held by the characters s/he writes don’t necessarily represent his/her own, and really when working with longstanding corporate properties any bleed-over between the two is inappropriate. Of course there are exceptions, like Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, but Superman is so adverse to getting involved in partisan politics that he refused to even get involved when the winner ended up being Lex fucking Luthor!

What Willingham seems to have a problem with, in his original editorial, is the fact that Superman is no longer distinctly American; that seems less like a defense of conservatism than it does of nationalism. He states that he wants “and the American way” returned to the character’s masthead, and I realize what Willingham is trying to say here: that the way Superman has always acted has always been the American way at its purest, that there’s nothing more American than being non-partisan and using your gifts selflessly for the benefit of those less fortunate. Superman is that gung-ho, “I don’t care whether you think it’s my business or not” crusading power but with the means, ability and purity of heart to actually pull it off. What bothers me about Willingham’s statement more than anything is the conflation of America with moral righteousness. When you restrict the origin of Superman’s selflessness and moral code to within the borders of the United States, you effectively devolve him into a nationalist character in a decidedly globalized era. Superman isn’t the Man of Yesterday, he’s the Man of Tomorrow, and he should always represent the forefront and peak of human possibility. Perhaps this is just because I’m a liberal, but I hope that pissing matches over flags and borders aren’t the ideal we get to be pointed towards by the foremost avatar of human progress within the DC Universe. (I realize he’s not human, but as it’s always been stated, he shows the way.)

It’s not any different at Marvel, with their character Captain America, who they have clearly not divorced from the concept of America due to the fact that I still buy a comic book called “Captain America” every month that features a dude wearing the American flag as a bodysuit. I’m sure it’s a shining example of what Willingham considers wishy-washy gray-area superheroics, even though he’s (as demonstrated in the Robot 6 comment section) friends with Ed Brubaker, but it’s a shining example of how to intelligently tell a superhero thriller surrounded by the trappings of American politics without ever giving in to unnecessary partisan debate. While I don’t at all doubt that Marvel as a whole is a liberal company, with liberal editors and largely liberal writers and artists, I also think they’re all smart enough (and their publishing records back this up) not to have Iron Man stop mid-fight to berate the reader on stem cell research.

Partisan politics, as in the Democrat versus Republican fight, really don’t have that much of a place in superhero comics; DC Universe: Decisions, cowritten by Willingham himself, is a pretty convincing argument against ever doing anything like that ever again. The reason it doesn’t work is purely story-based: superheroes are above all this crap. Stories like Civil War work by recontextualizing the ethical and moral arguments that form the basis of partisan politics into situations that can provide metaphors for the current political situation, but also simply serve as springboards for the characters to do what’s natural to them. Bringing real-world politics into superhero comics without the layer of obfuscation provided by metaphor is never a good idea; as bad as “Our Worlds at War” was, it was still a more sensible reaction to 9/11 than Doctor Doom crying next to the rubble of the World Trade Center.

More than anything, it comes down to this: the characters in superhero comics shouldn’t support individual politics, the politics in superhero comics need to support the stories of the characters. Then everybody wins.