This mornings CBC Radio 1 show "The Current" had a short but interesting round-table discussion about Marvel's newest 'big summer cross-over event' series Civil War, in which the US government is on the edge of passing laws requiring all active superheroes to divulge their secret identities and register with the government.
You can see a short description of the segment (scroll down to "Superheroes Panel"), and you can also download the segment (although I'm ashamed to admit that my national public radio station uses Real Player audio files... I feel dirty).
In the discussion were Joe Quesada, Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics, Peter Coogan, a comics scholar and e-colleague of mine, and Laurel Bowman, a Classics professor from UVic. I have some thoughts on the matter myself...
Civil War is an interesting attempt to address a current political issue over at Marvel. It's working and it's not, in different ways. It's been constructed to contain a discussion about privacy vs. safety (and you can go ahead and attach the hackneyed phrase "... in a post-9/11 world" to that sentence, and any others like it), and some creators have managed to do some very interesting things with that. JMS's Amazing Spider-man went to Washington and was part of a congressional Q&A, so they were actually discussing legal precedent and American history.
The only problem is that it's not actually a privacy vs. safety issue. Instead, it strikes at the heart of the superhero 'doctrine' (if you will). The story isn't about keeping tabs on everyone, just the people who run around viciously beating those criminals that they deem to be dangerous enough to deserve it. Judging from Quesada's side of the interview, I don't think that he realises that, which is interesting. Civil War, like a lot of superhero stories, tries and/or pretends to be about 'street-level' Americans, but ends up being about the clash of 'great' powers and 'important' people.
Now, in as much as superheroes have always made an attempt to represent us street-level people metaphorically, they might have some leeway to stand for us, but they're still more powerful and doing something that we don't, so the political commentary in this case is a little off the mark.
If they really wanted to push the privacy vs. safety issue, they should have superheroes going around America removing wire-taps. Watching Captain America stare down an NSA agent on a mission to kidnap and interrogate a Muslim American would be much more 'on the nose.' I'm afraid that Civil War might have pushed so far past the reader's political situation that it only just barely applies anymore.
That said, the on-line chatter regarding the series has been fascinating, and it's clearly provoking thought, discussion, and debate amongst fans. "Who's side are you on?" is a very hard question to ask. It requires that you not only decide which world you're going to answer the question from, ours or the Marvel universe, but also untangle a very complex set of assumptions and political ideas about whom you trust.
In America, it's not uncommon to espouse a healthy distrust of government; it's supposed to be a very libertarian state, after all. The reality doesn't quite match that, but the idea is very deeply-rooted in many American minds. From that point of view, slapping laws onto citizens who are 'clearly' (a word that always makes me sceptical) improving the world by protecting others, is state interference, and exactly the kind of thing that Americans revolted against (or so goes the logic). "How long will it be," asks Captain America in the first issue, "before the government decides who the supervillains are?" The implication of that question is not just domestic, either. How long will it be, really, before Cap. is dropped into Iran and told to assassinate the King? How long will it be before the Avengers are put on duty protecting oil wells in Iraq? How long will it be before superheroes are just another military resources used for political ends?
A just as apt question, though, is "How did superheroes earn the right to make that decision in the first place?" If we analyse the doctrine of the superhero, we'll see that they usually intervene only at moments of imminent threat to human life, or occasionally property. I can't say I disagree with that. It is perfectly moral to pull the baby carriage out of the way of the on-coming bus. However, you have to ask what qualifies as an imminent threat. Is cutting off the power to a little old lady in California enough of an imminent physical threat that it justifies beating up the regional VP of Enron? If not, why not?
On the flip side of that problem, in cases of mere theft, and not physical attacks, is viciously beating, for example, a purse-snatcher a justifiable act? Urban police forces often debate about the safety issues around 'hot pursuit' through populated areas. There is a parallel to Spider-man swinging after a pick-pocket in New York.
This line of thinking is why I say that Civil War isn't about civil liberties but about the superhero convention itself, and I'm not, in hindsight, surprised to see that. The more comics writers examine the genre in a realistic way, the more they're going to come to the conclusion that it rests on extremely thin ideological grounds. In Daredevil comics, right now, Matt Murdock is in jail, ostensibly just for being Daredevil. Unless you move your narrative mode to the level of the icon, as is more the case in DC's comics, you run the risk of revealing your genre to be at least highly questionable, doing as much harm as good, and at the most inherently unethical. However, unless you honestly examine that genre in its ethical dimensions, which is more the case at Marvel right now with books like Civil War and Squadron Supreme, then you're just wilfully ignorant, possibly even hypocritical.
Posted by orion at May 11, 2006 11:13 AM