They Call Him The Man Of Tomorrow
After reading Chuck Dixon and Paul Rivoche’s Wall Street Journal editorial of Sunday (our Monday), we wanted to dive right in with a refutation. Partly because the piece is riddled with factual errors and misrepresentations and we are both proud enough of the history of our hobby (and being fair, pedantic enough) to want to set the record straight, but mostly because the thesis seemed off. What held us off until now was our great difficulty in coming to grips with even defining the piece’s central argument.
After great consideration, we are going to go out on a limb – the piece has no properly identifiable central thesis. It is, in fact, a muddle of contradictory partisan complaints boiled down into inchoate irritation at the state of kids comics today. It demands a return to an atmosphere of free speech and nostalgically yearns for the days of the Comics Code. It speaks of the conservative roots of superheroic characters of the 30s while ignoring both the controversial roots of characters like Superman and their evolution into themes and stories so frightening to reactionaries that they brought the Comics Code into existence. It lauds Superman as an inspirational immigrant taking on Southern racists and bemoans the “political correctness” of today’s left-leaning editors. All of this, of course, builds up to a paean to comics suitable for children while pitching their own graphic adaption of The Forgotten Man, a piece we very much doubt is in David’s six-year old niece’s wheelhouse.
While we deferred putting pen to paper, trying to pick the editorial apart to uncover the heart of its argument, the as-per-usual spot on Janelle Asselin got a pretty dynamite refutation in first. She discusses most of the major inconsistencies in the call to arms, whilst at the same time maintaining some sympathy for conservatives who consider themselves underrepresented. As a consequence, rather than rehash the ground of her article (which you should go read!) we thought instead we’d talk about the part of the article that most interested us – the politicisation of comics, and whether or not it is ever avoidable, and if that’s even desirable. (If you want to skip to the end, it isn’t, and it isn’t).
Working backwards, then:
Independent Comics
We’ve already noted that the Dixon/Rivoche piece is timed as a form of cross-promotion for a new comic of their own, The Forgotten Man. This is not something we have a problem with. With the creator owned, ‘auteur’ portion of the comics industry stronger now than it has ever been, creators should feel empowered to take a stand on what comics should be like. Thanks to developments from the big end of creative co-operation like Image, to innovations like digital publishing, self-publishing and, of course, Kickstarter, finding a way to express your views is easier than it has ever been. Especially, of course, where you’re industry legends Chuck Dixon and Paul Rivoche, and have many, many fans waiting to buy your product.
This is what makes the claim that comics today are controlled by a cabal of left-leaning editors and money-men enforcing a liberal ideology of political correctness and moral ambiguity so incredible. If nothing else, the mere existence of Holy Terror, the Frank Miller tale about a superhero cutting a bloody swathe through Islamic terrorists and described by the author as “bound to offend just about everybody”, strongly suggests that there is no liberal gatekeeper preventing comics repugnant to liberal sensibilities from being made and published. It’s also worth noting that one of the more politically conservative comics, written by a conservative, Bill Willingham’s Fables, has enjoyed a long and successful life at Vertigo, an imprint associated with perhaps the oldest and most traditional house in comics, ‘despite’ wearing its politics to an extent on its sleeve.
These independent comics may be in their heyday, but there is already a long and proud tradition of ‘independent’ comics being more personal. Our view is this makes them more political. Not only is this the case with Maus and Persepolis, the independent comics highlighted somehow as politically neutral, but equally with works from classic works like A Contract with God through to modern stuff like Lazarus or Holy Terror.
So despite spruiking their own independent work, we think you can clearly dismiss these bespoke indie comics as not really being the target of the Dixon/Rivoche opinion piece. Unless they are being taught in schools, these individually politicised narratives seem to be dismissed as blips on the radar (unfairly reductionist to the great renaissance of creator owned comics we’re seeing at present as that might be). What really seems to draw the ire of Dixon and Rivoche are the current attitudes prevailing in the dominant Big Two comics publishing houses. More particularly, what they’re talking about is superhero comics, the same superhero comics that underpin world dominating movie franchises and storming television, that flare up on t-shirts, on keychains, as iPhone lock screens and pop culture references.
The Politics of Superheroism
There are three fallacies that we believe underpin the Dixon/Rivoche editorial:
1) That superhero comics should not be politicised.
2) That superhero comics are presently a bastion of liberalism.
3) That, if superhero comics MUST be politicised, there needs to be a redress of the balance to represent conservative politics.
Comics Are Polticised. Everything Is.
Stay with us here, kids: All speech is political. And all narrative art is a form of speech. Bill Willingham, in fact, pointed out that all comics are reflective of their author’s politics: “It’s impossible to keep them out entirely. We’re all political creatures whether we cop to it or not.” Out of the mouths of award winning authors.
You take the archetypal, contextless superhero story, in which, say, a person is set upon by muggers, and a figure appears and saves the person from the muggers. This isn’t the only superhero story, by any means, but its a fairly universal one, like cats out of trees and children out of burning buildings. It underpins the genre.
When you write that story, when you break it into panels and draw up the appearance of the participants, you’re saying something about the human condition. If you present the muggers as overwrought maniacs, you’re saying something about how we should perceive the humanity of criminals. If the victim is a woman, and the muggers leer, you’re talking about gender politics (actually, you’re talking about it even if they don’t leer). When you pick a skin tone from your colour palette for the muggers as of a particular ethnicity, and your victim and hero are of a different ethnicity, you’re forming part of a dialogue about race.
Most importantly, insofar as this basic work has themes, and it does, by painting ‘the good guys as good’ and ‘the bad guys as bad’ you encourage people to buy in to a fundamentally Manichean view of the world. Which is, to be fair, is something Dixon and Rivoche seem to be very comfortable with. They want to step away from what they perceive as a chasm of “moral relativism”, and back towards the clear “right and wrong” they think they can see and portray. They don’t see this as a question of politics, but rather one of “values”.
That particular substitution is hollow. Politics are based on values. Values are demonstrated by actions judged through a political context. A depiction of happy nuclear clans enjoying dinner only seem an innocuous image if you share the creators view about the definition of ‘family’. Supporting the troops is so commonly presented as above politics – unless, of course, your readers are from the country in which those troops are stationed. To draw from a direct example particular to Chuck Dixon, when you don’t address AIDS in a story because you are concerned it will emphasise the existence of AIDS and AIDS sufferers, you are fundamentally indicating that the fact of the disease’s existence is something people must be protected from (even if those people are children) and thus stigmatising it.
Despite significant and ever-increasing demographic evidence that comics are not primarily directed at children and have not been for some time, once can argue that this should be their purpose. Narratives providing early building blocks for moral and ethical learning are one of the most important roles stories can play, and a visual medium is a great vehicle for achieving that goal. So, accepting that children were the target market for the sake of argument, the very intention of providing moral education is one of speaking politically to children. This is not, in our view, either exceptional or problematic. We personally don’t live in a country where, for example, one is made to recite some sort of Pledge of Allegiance, but we have national anthems taught to young children, they are taught about stranger danger and listening to policemen, and how to share, given $1 savings accounts, they’re taught to recycle (or not) and about appropriate touching/hitting/fighting/standing your ground (or not). Children who grow up in certain demographics learn things differently from people in other demographics – that’s why there are fights about public education. Heck, to take a conservative issue, that’s why there are fights about evolution in schools, even though science, rightly speaking, should be one of the only things objectively removable from a political agenda.
Now, to be fair to Dixon and Rivoche, this seems to at least be their real point. Any attempt to suggest this is ‘depoliticising’ comics is disingenuous: what they want is to move comics closer to their preexisting political agenda.
Superhero Comics Are Not (That) Liberal
Once you approach superhero comics from a position that they must be political then you need to question what political message they are sending. At this point, we concede there is a superficial case that comics have swung to the left. One thinks back to Marvel’s fairly skewed use of political analogy in the massive Civil War event. While aiming for political balance, Iron Man (a big business, pro-domestic intelligence Republican at the height of the Bush era, against the Democratic Captain America, already putting the Right behind) became so maligned, his ethics called into question so often and so savagely across multiple titles, that the only way to cash in on his movie success and make him readable again was to give him amnesia and have him destroy the oil industry with a car powered by green energy. And as big comics readers, this did not feel especially weird.
However, it is crucial to recognise that the fundamental truth of superhero comics are they are about individuals seeking to better society not through collective, government or political action, but through the application of extraordinary individual power and means in accordance with personal values. This is pretty much definitional – while the superhero narrative has absorbed bits and pieces of many other genres, it is grafting them on to stories about extraordinary individuals (the ‘super’ bit) making decisions about how to apply their powers to the world around them (the ‘hero’ bit).
That is, for example, why it matters that superheroes are so commonly white men, because in being so they contribute to a narrative in which our greatest heroes are white men, particularly white, college educated, middle class and above, men. You know: the people at the top of the privilege hierarchy. The narrative that underrepresentation in superhero comics continually reinforces is that the people at the top of the social food chain belong there, and the best hope we have is their omnidirectional benevolence – if they are inclined to provide it.
Those aims can be liberal, but in so far as the term “conservative” equates with “believes in limited government”, superheroes certainly fall into THAT category at least insofar as it applies to their ‘crime-fighting’ activities. Conservatism, by the way, is a catch-all descriptor for a number of political philosophies (so is liberalism, but we would suggest its signposts are clearer). There are conservatives who feel that any form of government intervention beyond the absolutely necessary on private choice is bad (libertarian conservatives) and there are conservatives who feel that the government should be stepping in to regulate all kinds of social issues (such as who can get married, what kind of medicine people can have access to, and what the entertainment media should be allowed to display).
Generally speaking, when applied to Conservatives who care about storytelling, the term refers to the preservation of traditional social institutions. Many conservatives describe this as a preservation of traditional social values, but, we’d call this a slight reframing of the debate. The real distinction between good-faith conservatives and liberals are not about whether or not freedom and opportunity are important and laudatory (to pick two values of which conservatives are fond), it’s about whether or not those are provided fairly to the greatest number of citizens under present or traditional systems, or whether those systems are in need of intervention and reform. When conservatives talk about tax cuts, they’re saying that it’s fairer to allow everyone to spend the maximum amount of their money in their own way and the kindness of strangers will ensure the wealthy charitably take care of the poor, or that the wealthy will create jobs with that money so the poor will become less so. When liberals talk about tax funding into programs, they’re saying that the overall spread of wealth doesn’t provide real fairness, and that this needs to be rectified not through individual charity, but through systemic overhaul of the means of opportunity.
As a matter of record, Superman did start off in the Thirties – as a slum-busting vigilante. Putting aside the specific political content of those early Superman stories, however, there appears to remain in Dixon and Rivoche’s mind an unquestioned assertion that a Superman who fights Nazis and the Klan is somehow utterly incompatible with the ‘politically correct’ Superman of today. Superman was using his power to stand up for the little guy against the big guy. Those elements we mentioned before – a traditional white male brimming with the desire to take matters into his own hands to enforce his sense of justice – were not widely recognised or understood as political framing in the time of his debut. If anything, Superman has become an increasingly conservative figure simply because his core story has mostly stood still while the world around him has changed. It is a story born more of the Wild West more than a modern pluralistic society. We accept Superman’s aims as a universal good, and as a consequence, we grandfather in the exigencies of his behaviour which would make us concerned with his activities as “how superhero stories are told”.
When they point out that Superman renounced his American citizenship, Dixon and Rivoche point out that he’s saying that America can’t be trusted as the be all and end all anymore. But Superman still lives and works in America (he even did before the New 52 retconned that story out of continuity), still holds American citizenship as Clark Kent and still believes in the best elements of American life. If Superman is unhappy with the direction America is headed, that just puts him up there with 74% of Americans at present.
So, if it’s not about the government, and if most superheroes are still white, interventionist, professional men operating independently, where is this bastion of liberalism? Is it the sporadic, if increasing, appearance of persons of colour and women, or gay people or trans people in superhero comics? Because their numbers are well below an accurate presentation of the number of those people who actually exist in the world. Is it about the shades of doubt that superheroes seem to suffer on contentious issues? Even the most aspirational writer would have to admit that, given the state of political dialogue the world over at present, society is hardly uniform in its opinions of the right way to go. Even if it’s accepted that these simple factors form part of the ‘liberal agenda’, they don’t really overcome the fundamental traditionalism of characters who have been, by and large, doing the same thing for upwards of 75 years.
That is, in fact, why these individual stories can be seen as remarkable, so stand out. Be it Speedy getting HIV or Superman turning in his citizenship, they are important not because they are common but because they exist at all. They’re noticeable because they drift so far from the conservative norm that superhero comics represent. If it was all liberal all the time, it wouldn’t be surprising that Superman wanted to turn in his citizenship, it’d be par for the course. Yes, it was a comment at that time from that writer that perhaps America isn’t the place he would like it to be, but not only does Superman snap back to a more conservative, patriotic status quo, we would argue he did so within the very same comic.
This suggests that the conservative objection of Dixon and Rivoche, at its heart, is not that comics have become a medium for printing tracts of progressive screed each and every week (because we all know you are far more likely to see a guy’s arm get ripped off than to see a same-sex kiss, political speech or hero questioning his country) but because progressive stories are showcased at all. As such, it feels suggestive that their insider case-in-point is not that Dixon was prevented from telling a story he wanted to tell but rather than he objected to someone else’s story pitch.
If we’re labouring the point for any reason beyond the reputation of comics-related journalism, it’s this: however you slice it, superheroes are about an attempt to promote what is perceived by the person writing them as good in society. That means that you must per force make an assessment of what social good is. Artists make that assessment in many different ways, with many different results. This is why a plurality of voices matter, both for minorities and underrepresented viewpoints of all kinds. So, if you are so inclined, feel free to buy The Forgotten Man or collect Fables in trade. Conservative voices in comics are a fine thing.
The problem with stories based on gut impressions of the ‘right thing’ is they can create false observer biases; it’s why something like George Will’s article on the coveted status of sexual assault survivor comes out. We’re not equating the two positions by any means, we’re just saying that both conclusions can be reached because of the same flawed methodologies. What is not a fine thing is to exalt your own political voice, your own ‘values’, as a source of truth, equivalent with some objective right and wrong. Any call for stories holding a vision of right and wrong without ambiguity is ultimately a blind call to arms, a request for greater conflict and division between those who accept your views as absolute truth, and those who don’t. In trying to stamp out “moral relativism”, regardless of lip-service to free speech, that kind of assessment just stifles any form of contradicting data, which in some cases means the real stories of real people.
It’s important that conservatives seeking greater representation in popular media recognise this, because their perceived marginalisation tends to result from people accusing them of having lost touch with reality, of not knowing how to engage in a constructive dialogue when they are not the moral majority. Running from that just lends credence to the idea that conservatives don’t have any political motivation beyond self-interested repression. And though we’re liberals, we’ve both known enough conservatives to know that this isn’t a universal truth. Conservatives deserve a better rallying cry than that article, and liberals deserve not to have to listen to it over again.
Articles like Dixon and Rivoche’s promote the partisan divisions that make politics so ugly and politicians so inefficient. They equate political difference with moral panic. They might only be talking about stick figures in capes and tights, but the whole point of those stick figures are they are symptomatic of the problems we face and don’t know how to solve. In this case, the problems that prevent either side of politics from addressing the real issues it sees as most prevalent. If an increasingly divided society can agree on anything, maybe it can agree that we’re all tired of that.