Are comic books too liberal for their own good?

That’s the assertion of Darin Wagner in his Bleeding Cool News essay “How Liberalism May Be Hurting Comic Book Sales“. In it, he purports to note how comic books have gotten so incredibly liberal in some of their stated views that it’s hurting the stories and the sales of comics.

Hmmmm.

Okay, I’ll give Wagner some level of credit here. There is, net-net, a “liberal” bias on the part of most comic book writers. There are some writers who are distinctly not, and there are some areas where comics are distinctly not liberal, and a lot of the cases that Wagner gives are …  not well-chosen (we’ll get to this last point below).

I will also concede that when writing is too polemical and too one-sided, it doesn’t work well.  One case I would pull out (and actually criticized the responsible parties for) was Marvel’s “Civil War” saga, which ostensibly dealt with the dangers of Authoritarian Security (Iron Man leading the effort for metahuman registration and control after irresponsible super-heroes led to the destruction of most of a town) vs Freedom  (Captain America leading the resistance against said registration).  While there was some discussion of pros and cons for both positions, Mark Millar, the primary writer of the saga, very clearly tilted things toward the latter, less through studied and careful exploration of the issues than from Iron Man’s side Acting Badly.

Now what’s amusing here is that how this was perceived at the time depended on where one stood politically. In the depth of Dubya’s administration, a lot of people associated Iron Man’s Authoritarianism with conservatives / Republicans (esp. given Tony as a rich business mogul), and Cap as a liberal fighting for personal freedom against the regime.  Of course, a lot of folks could argue the other course — Cap being more of a “Tea Party” individual vs. the forces of Big Government.   Which just goes to show … something.

At any rate, with those admissions, let’s look at Wagner’s tale.

If you are a conservative like me, you’ve been reading fewer and fewer comic books over the last 12 years.

Comic book circulation has taken a nose-dive over the past decades. I don’t think anyone’s ever suggested an ideological reason for it. Usually it has to do with (a) high costs vs other entertainments and (b) lots of other entertainments.

For those of you who know what I’m talking about, the weekly visit to the comic book shop has become either an exercise in irritation or a monotonous drill.

You pick up a superhero comic book featuring a childhood favorite of yours, hoping to reignite some of that magic you felt way back when …

I have bad news: the stuff you liked when you were a kid? A lot of it is very disappointing to read today.

Is Wagner suggesting a return to the narrative sophistication of the 50s-60s?

… and you see that the opening sequence in the comic deals with an oil rig disaster. You immediately and disappointingly know what’s going to be said, either by your childhood favorite or by some other character given credibility within the story. You turn the page, and sure enough, your childhood favorite grumbles about his/her country’s dependency on oil …

Is Wagner suggesting that the nation is not dependent on oil?

… or how inherently dangerous oil drilling is to the environment and how it’s not worth it …

I think most folks would be willing to agree that oil drilling is dangerous to the environment.  The debate, for most folks who are not spokescritters for oil companies, is whether it’s worth it or not.

… or simply mutters to him-or-herself briefly about the evils of corporate America.

I agree: corporate America has had a bad name in comics since … um … well as far back as I can think of.  Heck, Superman in the early 30s days of his existence was as likely to be punching out profiteering / labor-bashing corporate chiefs as bank robbers.

It’s worth noting at this juncture that Marvel (a Disney company) and DC (a Warner Bros. company) are hardly Mom&Pop or Budding Anarcho-Communist entities.  They are part of the heart of corporate America.  That they let that sort of thing get out indicates that it’s a  sentiment that resonates with the large majority of the readership.

That’s when you put the comic back on the shelf and your local retailer loses a sale. (Sound familiar? Brightest Day #5 contained a similar scenario featuring Aquaman.)

Yes, imagine, the King of the Seven Seas might be a bit touchy about oil rigs. Go figure.

You pick up another comic book featuring a superhero team you used to really enjoy …

I used to really enjoy a lot of stupid things.

… and there’s a member on the team who shares a lot of the same socio-political views you do, but he doesn’t articulate them very well (by design, you can tell) and gets everything wrong (again, by design) and you realize that he’s the “team jackass” precisely because he is supposed to represent you.

Wagner does have something of a point here. There are not a lot of obviously “conservative” socio-political types in comics, and when you can point to one they often are, yes, team jackasses. One example is raised below; another is the Guy Gardner Green Lantern.  And on the Marvel side we have John Walker, the uber-conservative Captain America replacement.

Interestingly, while most super-heroes are “law and order” focused (busting street crime is always something they make time for, as well as defeating invading alien hordes), they often challenge the status quo  and those in power for the injustices they do as well.  Does that make them “conservative” or “liberal”?

(Another Brightest Day example of this; issue #7 where Steve Ditko creation Hawk says he wrecked a restaurant’s juke box because it was playing a Dixie Chicks song. Hawk was created to represent conservatism during the Vietnam War era, but today he’s apparently a reckless caveman who doesn’t understand the very conservative idea of private property rights.)

Okay, Wagner, you have two points here. (1) Geoff Johns (the guy behind Brightest Day) is never going to be a conservative poster boy, and (b) Hawk is an asinine character that I soundly hate no matter what my politics or what title he’s appearing in — not for his politics, but for his Neanderthal portrayal.

So you put that comic book back on the shelf and if you haven’t walked out by now, you’re sure to get at least three more experiences like these before finding a superhero comic that is, at best, not very political.

By the way, to be fair, I hope you’re not just reading these comics in the comic book store. Because you should really buy them first, then read them at home.

We see this all the time, don’t we? Black Canary just happens to make a comment about how supposedly unsafe SUVs are while pursuing a villain in one in the pages of Birds Of Prey.

Um … the dangers of SUVs (both roll-over dangers for some and the dangers to other vehicles they impact) is pretty cut and dried.  Whether there are mitigating reasons one might buy an SUV is another matter, but that doesn’t make them any less dangerous.

Over on the Marvel side, in the pages of Alpha Flight, a Canadian man parks in front of a fire hydrant while attempting to vote and he’s given a ticket for doing so. The man accuses the cop (Snowbird’s alter ego) of voter suppression and how she’s “harassing the patriots who are trying to change things”… to which she responds “Please, sir. We’re Canadian.”

Ha! Those zany Canadians.

Um … how is that a conservative-vs-liberal thing?

It even extends outside of comics into animation. In the Justice League animated series episode “Paradise Lost,” Superman and Wonder Woman are investigating a shopping mall. Wonder Woman looks at the interior of the mall and likens it to a temple. Superman replies “Yes, for those who worship their credit cards.” Now, what are we supposed to make of this? Superman clearly doesn’t think very highly of shopping malls, at the very least. (This is odd considering that the character once symbolized something called “the American Way” of life, which was defined by, among other things, capitalism.)

Interesting.  Because, on the one hand, I don’t ever recall Superman ever saying, “Hey, vapid consumerism — it’s the American Way!”  And, on another hand, I know a lot of conservatives who condemn over-use of credit cards and a consumerist society (esp. around the holidays).

But back to comic books. Sure these little jabs and nods are individually nothing that can’t be dismissed… but they have a cumulative effect. They wear us down and eventually the excitement and magic of comic book superheroes becomes outweighed by our being annoyed. It’s happening more and more over the last dozen years: The people behind the scenes allowing their personal politics to bleed through into the stories of otherwise apolitical superheroes whose adventures are meant for everyone to enjoy. This in-and-of-itself wouldn’t be quite so bad if it weren’t always the same political views repeated over-and-over ad nauseum.

Simply put, there’s too much liberalism in comic books today.

Is there really more liberalism today — or over “the last dozen years”?  Really?   Because I’d say that wall was broken in the early 70s — Denny O’Neil’s Green Lantern / Green Arrow run was the most obvious early examplar of this, but since that day, the idea of “apolitical superheroes” has, rightfully, been difficult to find.  Pollution, racial equality — those have been easy causes to find for four decades.  That these causes have been supplanted by more recent ones should be little surprise (though Wagner still seems to be unhappy about pollution being considered a bad thing).

And that’s, overall, a good thing.  You can only beat up on so many mobster bank robbers and motive-less alien invaders and megalomaniacal world conquerers, for so long.  Sooner or later there’s going to be wrong-doers that someone is going to disagree whether they’re actually wrong.

Or, sooner or later, someone’s going to ask, “Well, should we respect authority all the time? Are the police always right? Is the status quo the best we can be?”  I’d argue that the “apolitical” comics of the 50s and 60s — they were, in fact, conservative, because they took the existing situation, the authorities, law and order, and accepted them as automatically good.

Now, is it fair or positive if all the superheroes consider the same evils as evil?  No — and probably not interesting, either.  Comics balance this in three ways:

1. 

   Proxy conflicts over methods (is it okay to kill someone? and, if so, when?)

2. Broader proxy conflicts over when it’s okay to bend the law, let certain criminals go, prioritize certain causes to fight for (e.g., mutant rights)
3. Discussions of the rightful use of power — Should Superman save the world from hunger? Should the Teen Titans intervene in what might be a case of spousal abuse? Conundrums facing police officers are often used in here.

One thing that those who disagree (most of whom are typically self-described liberals) will say is that there is conservatism in comic books because superheroes are inherently conservative. In saying this, they are implying that they are in fact balancing the scales by having these characters occasionally-to-frequently quip liberal adages. I have to disagree with that.

Actually, I’d disagree with it, too.

The first comic book superhero, Superman, fought a liberal/social agenda in his first stories. The character only became a symbol of lawful authority later.

Correct.

Most superheroes, it can be argued, are apolitical by virtue of the reader’s ability to insert their own politics into the character when the writer has not already done so.

But one person’s “basic,  fundamental, obvious moral code” and “apolitical” motivation is another person’s biased, prejudicial, partisan hackery.  I mean, aside from the virtue of saving a cat up in a tree, or stopping a group of masked bandits from robbing a store, or keeping Doctor Doom from turning everyone into mind slaves, it’s hard not to get into nuance.  Stopping a war?  Well, only if it’s established for all  readers as an obviously evil war fought in order to kick puppies; other wars usually have people arguing that the war is, in fact, the right thing to do.

Can we have more discussions about moral and political conflicts between characters?  Sure, we probably should

Even Green Arrow could be a conservative character, rather than the liberal one we’ve had since Hard Traveling Heroes.

Now, you might say, “Darin, you’re obviously unaware that Green Arrow is based on Robin Hood and as EVERYBODY ELSE KNOWS, Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor. He’d be an Occupier today.” Well, yeah, that’s how those on the left view Robin Hood… but if you look more closely at Robin Hood you will find that the character more accurately stole from the state and gave back to the people… so one could just as easily say that Robin Hood would be a Tea Partier today and, therefore, Green Arrow could be too.

That would certainly be a new take on the character. Of course, I could see that character as being popular with economic conservatives (“robbing from Big Government”) and unpopular with social conservatives (“breaking the law”).

Of course, this raises another issue — that the question of  “conservative” vs “liberal” is a simple, single axis (if not a binary decision).  Consider the Political Compass, which had both economic (collectivist vs. free market) and political (authoritarian vs. libertarian).  There are many types of conservatives. And many types of liberals.

Folks, I know comics are created by artists. I know that Marvel and DC offices are in New York City.

Right. New Yorkers are all liberal.  So are all artists. Got it.

I realized before I started typing this that asking for authentic conservatism …

Which, as anyone following the current election season is like saying “authentic Americanism” or “authentic Christianity” — something subject to a dozen different interpretations.  Indeed, the same can be said about “liberalism.”

… in comic books from the Big Two to counter constant jabs, references and snide, preachy copy they print is like asking the mob to please leave garbage alone. I get that…

…but for the good of the comic book industry, this escalation and domination of liberal sentiment has got to stop and it’s gotta stop quick.

Everybody knows that when an entertainer goes political, he/she runs the very serious risk of cutting their audience by at least half. The comic book audience has been getting smaller and smaller and I think it’s time to honestly consider that a big part of the problem is the content.

I really think Wagner’s off-base here.  I seriously don’t think that “going political” is why comics have diminished in popularity.  There are a dozen much more significant factors.

It’s gotten so bad that some of the more open-minded liberal comic book readers I know are getting turned off because it’s so obvious what’s been happening.

I’ve been turned off of any number of titles — but political liberalism has never been the reason.

I know that some of you are going to reply with some variation of “I don’t see it” or “This guy is a troll” or “Shut up.”That’s fine, go ahead and exercise that right… but it won’t help the comic book industry or make the audience grow again.

Wait, if “I don’t see it,” I’m not helping the comic industry grow again?  Is the same true if someone says the comic book industry is in trouble because its stories are too conservative, and Wagner “doesn’t see it,” does that mean that’s true, too?

And so here’s a counter-example.  Consider a core “liberal” cause: feminism.  Sure, women in comics are no longer a complete rarity, relegated to cooking and making coffee for their male counterparts. Someone suggesting that the Black Widow’s place is in the kitchen, or Wonder Woman should be finding a man to make her happy and settle down — though some conservatives might agree with that — would not get very far.

But women are still a significant minority amongst the super-hero world.  They are still presented (in physique and costuming) in a far more sexualized manner than their male counterparts.  They are, from a story perspective, far too often marginalized, far too often done away with or abused in some gruesome fashion (vs. males), far too often mistreated, retconned away, treated as sex objects, etc.

If comics were being overly-liberalized, I’d expect that would not be the case. Unless the liberal comic creators in their liberal comic book companies in their liberal media conglomerates are, in fact, bad liberals. And, honestly, I’ve heard of far more people reducing their comics consumption over that than over a lack of fair presentation of conservative ideology.