Benevolent Dictators
The last of my parallel discussions of Miracleman and Watchmen has to do with a less obvious form of self-reflexivity that is wider than the superhero genre, but to which the superhero is especially suited as a vector of social commentary. Put simply, superheroes make great cautionary tales against supposedly benevolent dictatorship, and Moore's twin "last word on superheroes" comics of the early 80s are especially good examples of that.
Miracleman, the character, takes over the world in issue #16, which was Moore's last. This issue, titled "Olympus," effectively closes the story thus far, even though Gaiman then extrapolated other themes for #17 through #24, before the title was cancelled. What's remarkable about Miracleman's rise to the status of god-king is the lack of a substantial discussion of the morality. The narrative strategy, here, is to provide an almost unequivocally utopian world, complete with the appropriate amount of flaws to make it seem real, but leave gaps where an articulate objection to the dictatorial nature of the utopia would be.
Miracleman and his cohorts exhibit little hand-wringing over their decision. They do not praise democracy or lament its passing. They simply assume control of the world because they can and because humanity is, by their reckoning, far less sophisticated than they are. Miraclewoman, who acts as the voice of enlightened reason throughout the series, compares humanity to cows and fish, adding "We're taking nothing from them. We'll give them more free will than they ever dreamed of or wanted. / We're going to love them [...] / We're going to make them perfect" (16.9.5). They plan to pull the human race up to their superhuman level, like parents raising children, or farmers breeding animals.
The new "Age of Miracles" appears to be a functioning utopia. Solutions to social ills, everything from shop-lifting to war, are generally systemic and socialist. Thanks to superhuman intervention, material needs (energy, food, etc.) are in enough supply that everyone can have anything they want for free, and thus money becomes unnecessary. By the same token, when everything's free, the majority of criminal behaviour disappears. They legalise all narcotics as well, and thus the economic base for organised criminal syndicates falls away. What criminal behaviour remains is thus conveniently attributed to personal defects, most of which can ostensibly be cured through medical technology or therapy, which allows the superhumans to rationalise resistance to their utopia as either the product of insanity or the free choice of unenlightened minds.
They also create a eugenics policy whereby Miracleman's sperm is shipped all over the world so that any woman can give birth to a veritable god. Each of those new gods in theory receives the genes of a blond, blue-eyed, white man, in which case, the new class of god-like superhumans would also be decidedly Caucasian in appearance. The one panel that depicts these "miracle babies" in Moore's run depicts one as brown skinned and all the others as white. In Gaiman's issues, they are mostly white, but also can be black or Asian. The series never directly addresses Miracleman's whiteness with regard to the eugenics policy, but a UK government assassin, a black man named Mr. Cream, does repeatedly refer to him as the "white miralce" and the "pale god" (12.11.3), but associates whiteness not with technology, "hot steel," or religious virtue, "sanctity" (12.11.5), but instead with death, "the whiteness of bone" (12.11.5). When he comes across the dead body of a would-be superhero whom Miracleman has already killed, Cream calls it "white man's magic" (13.12.7). Unfortunately, Mr. Cream dies before the series can fully explore the problem of Miracleman's race, and the whiteness of his thousands of miracle babies is never addressed directly.
In a similar vein, Miracleman and his cohorts create a technology whereby anyone can be transformed into a superhuman, which leads to one of the more telling scenes in the series in which Miracleman offers to transform Liz, his estranged wife, into, in her words, "Mrs. Miracle" (16.25.1). He offers it as a solution to their failed marriage: "this solves everything. You could have a superhuman body too" (16.25.1). She refuses, however, and cites his extremely public sexual relationship with Miraclewoman; in that same issue, the two superhumans have sex while flying through central London, explode in a veritable fireworks display, signifying orgasm (16.17-18.5), (much like Dan's flame-thrower in Watchmen, and when they finally dive into the Thames to cuddle, a crowd of on-lookers claps and cheers (16.18.6). Instead of attempting to see Liz' perspective or even really listen to her complaint, he instead claims that "there's no need to be jealous [...]. We've gone beyond possessiveness [...]. When you're like us you'll understand" (16.25.4). He sees his choices as by definition superior, and anyone else's as the product of a limited nature. Which is to say that he cannot understand the logic behind any choices but his own.
Finally, Miracleman sees himself as quite literally a god, if not the god. He names his London palace "Olympus," he entertains pilgrimages who journey up hundreds of stories to the top of that palace to ask for boons (issue #17), and he explicitly refers to himself and his fellows superhumans as gods, even if, in his own description, they "smile and mingle; spill their wine; [and] mis-time their jokes" (16.29.1). There is a kind of ironic authentication, here. Miracleman explicitly argues that his utopia is "Not without its problems, I'll confess; but then, without them, could perfection be?" (16.28.3). Admitting that the utopia isn't perfect rhetorically makes it more believable. By the same token, admitting that he and his fellow would-be gods spill their drinks and tell badly timed jokes makes them, ironically, less god-like, more attainable, but also more perfect because of it. They and their utopia are not merely perfect. They are even better, perfectly flawed.
Miracleman, the character, also acknowledges and comments on various theological interpretations of his battle with Johnny Bates/Kid Miracleman, calling them legends, apocrypha, myths, gospels, and even heresies (15.9-12). In a fascinating moment of narrative fluidity, he refuses to say which one is real, calling them all "as valid, if not more so, [than] the truth" (15.9.4), which leaves a gap of interpretation in the middle of a major, climactic moment in the narrative. Anything could have happened in that missing scene of the fight and the narrative explicitly abandons the notion that it has to indicate which one is real or true.
Miracleman's multiple versions of his battle with Bates establishes a major technique within the Revisionist comic-book style, in which narratives admit that they are consistent, logical, and fixed only by virtue of the storytellers deliberately constructing them that way. They can just as easily be constructed without any heed to the laws of logic or causality. Thus continuity, as understood in the SA-style, becomes an unnecessary intervention, rather than an implicitly natural requirement. In the SA style, a comics creator who ignores continuity is simply unskilled. In the Revisionist style, ignoring continuity is one of many narrative choices. Fluid narrative style is also highly self-referential--it implies that stories are inherently fluid instead of pretending that they're fixed--and it is extremely common in Revisionist comics.
However, the Warrior Summer Special 1982 attempts to fix this moment in the narrative by depicting exactly the gap in the story that Miracleman #17 leaves out. However, as luck would have it, Eclipse never reprinted that story, so the American audience largely has access only to the version that does not contain an explanation. Even if only by accident, this lack of a fixed explanation breaks from the Silver-Age style, in which narrative inconsistencies are almost always followed by attempts to retcon them into a fixed form.
This moment of narrative fluidity for the first time transforms the character, Miracleman, from a superhero who thinks he's a god, into a figure who is consistent with how gods are depicted in scriptures and myths (i.e., he is a point of contention and interpretation, not simply a character with one, reliable narrative). As mythic figures, Miracleman and his god-like cohorts have the freedom to ignore everything from sexual jealousy, to traditional morality, and even the basic rules of narrative causality. Their domination of humanity thus feels natural. They rule because they can and because they have a mind to; they do not see a need for any further explanation or justification for their actions.
However, issue #16 ends with a gap in the superhumans' seemingly perfect understanding of humanity. Miracleman wonders why Liz refused to be transformed into a superhuman, why anyone "should not wish to be perfect in a perfect world" (16.33-34.2). His inability to conceive of her reasoning, which would not require that he agree with it, indicates a lack of empathy, a total disconnect from average humanity, but the question remains: if one had the option of living in an ostensibly functional utopia, ruled by a theoretically benevolent dictator who possesses, by definition, superior reasoning and judgement, why wouldn't one choose to do so? The closest Liz comes too explaining her refusal is to tell Miracleman that he has "forgotten what you're asking me to give up" (16.25.5), which is presumably some ephemeral quality called "humanity." Here, Liz occupies the common, pop-culture literary position of "female voice of common sense." She repeats something akin to a Barthean myth, that there simply is something special about being human, and arguing the point only shows that one doesn't understand humanity. Miraclewoman, who occupies a parallel position, "female voice of enlightenment" (as I said above), implies exactly the opposite: "I don't know why you [Miracleman] persist in seeing the state of being human as something special" (16.9.4). Ultimately, the series does not provide answers to these questions, and instead provides only the conundrum and dis-ease that they invoke. Thus it portrays the superhero, which is ostensibly morally perfect and physically superior, as something to distrust, not as a straight-forward saviour.
Posted by orion at July 20, 2008 11:43 AM