WORSHIP
DC as Demo Crats
Robert M. Price
I have a
confession to make. I have a special affection for “heroes” (I know some may
challenge the designation, but that’s the whole point of the essay) like
Rorschach, the Punisher, Supreme, and Superman the Last Son of Krypton. These
are crime-fighters who seem to understand their role, the role of the
executioner, as what Martin Luther called “the Left Hand of God.” Once a
philosophy student of mine asked me a question of conscience. He had served his
country in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and other theatres of war, and in the
process he had had to kill quite a number of people. He did so without
hesitation. But now he wondered what I thought: on the Judgment Day, would God
hold it against him? Immediately I realized in exactly what theological
situation I found myself. A la Jacob Neusner, I regard scripture as a fund of
paradigms in which we may discern the likeness of our own situation and gain
guidance. And I recognized my position as that of Krishna on the eve of the
great battle in the succession war of the Mahabharata, where Arjuna, the
pious general, whom the divine Krishna for the moment serves as charioteer,
confides in the avatar his conundrum: he was beginning to think all the
impending bloodshed would be a senseless waste of human life. Really, what
difference could it make who won the war? At this, Krishna upbraids him,
charging him not to swerve from the dharma assigned him. As a warrior, a
noble member of the Kshatriya caste, his only concern now and ever must
be to draw the sword and butcher the foe in the glorious battle to come!
(Krishna tells Xena the same thing in the same situation on an episode of
Xena: Warrior Princess) And it is this example, that of the merciless
wreaker of bloody havoc, that this segment of the Mahabharata called the
Bhagavad Gita, makes emblematic for caste duty, the destiny that is
assigned variously to everyone. My duty at that moment, as the guru of my
philosophy student with the bloodstained hands, was to assure him of the same
truth of which Lord Krishna had assured Arjuna so many centuries before. And I
did. I thanked him for shedding the blood of the enemy on behalf of the
oppressed of other lands and for the defense of our own.
This is the Gospel
of Ethan Crane, the sworn duty of the Eradicator Superman to use his power as
Krypton’s Last Son to purify the earth. It is the terrible truth Rorschach
learned from his long look into the abyss. But it is not the code of your
average DC Comics hero. As you know, Superman, and even Batman, the supposed
crazed vigilante, refuse to kill. The Silver Age Superman even swore to renounce
his powers if he ever took a single sentient life (I assume he was not a
surgical-masked Jainist, blowing all microbes and insects out of his path with
puffs of his super breath). And of course, he finally did just that. In the
finale of the epic of the Silver Age Superman (forgetting the Sword of Superman
bullshit in the Bozo Age), namely Alan Moore’s wonderful “Whatever Happened to
the Man of Tomorrow?” Superman had no choice but to destroy the mad Mxyzptlk by
bathing him in the rays of the Phantom Zone projector—whereupon he promptly
bathed himself in the power-nullifying rays of a sample of Gold Kryptonite. No
more Superman! Okay, he deserved retirement. But ask those aliens whose world
would be destroyed next time because Superman was not there to save it, and they
might challenge the moral calculus of his decision. Would taking the life of an
evil enemy really be so great a crime in its own right that forfeiting all
future service to humanity would be requisite? We see the same point drawn very
starkly in the “Hush” episode in which Batman very nearly beats the Joker to
death for all his crimes (including crippling Batgirl and murdering Commissioner
Gordon’s wife). Gordon prevails on him to stop short, lest he find himself
having changed sides and become like the Joker by exacting vengeance upon the
Joker. And this despite the fact that Gordon and Batman alike acknowledge that
no adequate justice can ever be served the Joker given the present system. A
justice system in which the Joker and his ilk are repeatedly shoveled into and
back out of an insane asylum to kill and kill again is no justice system, and,
remember, that is the very condition that supposedly drives our superheroes to
be what they were first supposed to be. Remember, even the Golden Age Superman
did not scruple to kill crooks or threaten them with death. And Batman? Don’t
kid yourself. Or think of the horrors of the Spectre!
What happened? What made Batman into the “scoutmaster” as we call his 50s and
60s version? What turned Superman into the “boy scout” we still hear him called
in derision? It was a little thing, I think, called the Comics Code authority.
It was a piece of paternalistic liberal fascism. Kids can’t read Tales from
the Crypt without getting warped? Then we better not show them any real
criminal violence or justice either! Let’s come up with a safe substitute.
But such a cartoon
universe of “justice” is essentially Toon Town, a world where colorful
characters merely cavort and have the equivalent of Risk games. I recall a
perfect illustration of the essence of the whole thing in a late 60s Mighty
Crusaders issue, when a costumed hero and villain are apparently struggling
to the death, whereupon the camera angle widens, and we see they are tumbling
about on a kitchen floor, and the hero’s wife comes in with a bag of groceries
and asks the boys to please play outside!
Isn’t it Toon
Town? There are battles, endless battles between the super-beings, but no blood
shed! People are just “stunned.” Even when Superman and Doomsday kill each
other, they seem to be merely a pair of Energizer Bunnies who have at long last
run out of steam. And look at the resurrection rate in comics. Even in the rare
cases where DC seems to have had the guts to kill a major character, he soon
pops up alive and well through some contrivance or another. Okay, so far,
they’ve resisted the temptation with Barry Allen (though nothing has stopped
them from going back and chronicling various new “hithero-untold” adventures of
Barry in the Silver Age!). And his replacement looked pretty much identical
anyway! Supergirl was replaced by… Supergirl! Wonder Woman was replaced by
Wonder Woman. And so on. We are here not far from Looney Toons: Daffy
shoves a stick of TNT up Elmer Fudd’s butt, but in the next scene Fudd’s just a
little singed! The DC Universe is Toon Town, isn’t it? You don’t really need
justice in Toon Town, because there’s no real crime, no real damage that can be
done. All the villains are little more than Mr. Mxyzptlk used to be: annoying
pranksters.
The late 80s
witnessed an attempt to move comics into the real world, and that’s when the
justice issue became acute. Frank Miller understood correctly that the world is
not Toon Town (even if “Earth 1” was), and that it is perverse moral instruction
to portray the world as Toon Town in one’s depiction of the good/evil struggle.
Miller understood that the Joker had to die, and so, in The Dark Knight
Returns, Miller’s Batman killed him. Loeb and Lee’s “Hush” Batman should
have killed him, too. Behold the tragic moral confusion of both Gordon and
Batman: for Batman to execute the Joker would be on the same moral level with
the Joker’s own multiple murders? That is warped thinking—and no good for the
kiddies, if you ask me!
You will already
have noticed how this is the major issue in the magnificent Kingdom Come
by Alex Ross and Mark Waid. Wonder Woman (correctly, to my way of thinking)
realizes that Magog, the killer of the Joker in this version, was right, and
that Superman was wrong in prosecuting Magog for it. There is an apocalyptic war
of good versus evil going on all the time, and in a war people die. You have to
be willing to make sure it is the right ones doing the dying. Wonder Woman
finally manipulates Superman into embracing the tactics of his arch-enemy Magog
once the Gulag goes all to hell. But “luckily” Superman sees the light just in
time, well, almost just in time. He tries to put on the brakes.
But the war is soon over, and everybody is getting along pretty well. Lex Luthor
as Max Klinger. And what is the supposed solution of the problem of whether the
metahumans, the Nietzschean Supermen, have the right to intervene in human
affairs at all? The denouement of Kingdom Come, to me, is sickening. The
super heroes are finally forbidden even to wear their costumes, these last
abandoned to the status of nostalgia schlock in a restaurant. Some buffoon of a
waiter wears Green Lantern’s costume, while the godlike Green Lantern himself
now sits as one more ineffective politician among fellow windbags in the
do-nothing United Nations. The tigers have been defanged, the dragons made
lapdogs for their inferiors. The cringing slave-hoard of Lilliputians has
finally worn them down. And you can tell they have worn them down, because the
metahumans themselves have internalized the slave creed. They seem to think it
better that they serve the common herd as beasts of burden in whatever tasks the
mortals find non-threatening. Greatness always makes the weak, the slaves, the
mediocre feel threatened, whereupon they proceed to enslave the great, provided
the latter allow them to.
I find an acute
correspondence between the sad outcome (as I see it) of Kingdom Come and
the cowardly “internationalism” of neo-pacifistic Democrats today, with their
sissy bleating about the supposed sin of “unilateralism.” They fear initiative,
boldness, decision. They want a system in which no one may make a decision, like
all bureaucracies where no one is in charge. It is the scourge of Collectivism,
and among superheroes only the spawn of Ditko and his disciples seem to
understand the danger. The one good scene in Frank Miller’s otherwise wretched
The Dark Knight Strikes Again is the Chris Matthews Hardball show
with the liberal Green Arrow and the ultra-Randian Question shouting rejoinders
at one another.
Liberalism, with
its opposition to capital punishment, promotes the confusion of Commissioner
Gordon: to kill the Joker is to make Batman no different from the Joker. To kill
Saddam Hussein is no better than Saddam’s own killings. Can anyone really think
so? Liberal Democrats (and Greens, etc.) seem to think so. They seem to think
they live in Toon Town, where we may safely parole and release serial rapists,
molesters, and murderers.
The recent animated Justice League episode, “A Better World” would seem
outrageously silly if we were not already so thoroughly embued with the capon
liberalism of DC. The whole premise of the cartoon is that all it takes is
Superman deciding the world has had enough of Lex Luthor (and hadn’t it?)
and executing him—and what happens? The world is plunged into a totalitarian
regime run by the former heroes! What? That is a natural progression only in the
tear-clouded eyes of ultra-liberals who see no difference between the state’s
right to exercise force on the one hand and fascism on the other! And how
revealingly ironic it is that at the close of the very same episode Luthor, now
pardoned by the government, inaugurates the plotline whereby he will become
President of the United States! Good thing Superman didn’t kill him, huh?
Remember the crossover book which co-starred the Morrison JLA with the Wildstorm
Wildcats? The DC superheroes assumed the stance of smug moral maturity as
Superman and the rest “sagely” warned the new kids on the block that time would
correct their judgment on the propriety of killing bad guys. But I think that is
just the doting, dithering decadence of those who mistake our world (Earth
Prime”?) for Toon Town. If you’re trying to set comics in the real world, then
you’re going to need Supreme, the Punisher, Rorschach, and the Eradicator.
Copyright©2004 by
Robert M Price
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