Los Angeles City Beat considers the socio-political themes of Marvel’s Civil War:
Tales as diverse as Alan Moore’s iconic 1986 miniseries Watchmen, Pixar’s animated film The Incredibles, and the current X-Men movie have in greatly different ways dealt with superhero registration, the underlying fear of the Other that motivates such mandates, and the perils of playing politics with heroics (which could mean, as Cap seethes, “… Washington starts telling us [heroes] who the super-villains are”). The latter feels like the heart of Civil War, as various players on both sides can no longer agree to disagree while focusing on common ground – now they must point fingers, place blame, and punish the other side accordingly.
How perfectly this reflects our own increasingly calcified divide of red/blue, elephant/donkey, conservative/liberal -– shorthand that itself oversimplifies the range of positions on both sides, not to mention handily (at least for the powerful who benefit from one nation, quite divisible) obscures how much people do agree. Just who in this story has more dangerous unchecked power, the heroes or the government?
The saga also reflects our culture’s need to impose simplistic solutions on complex problems. That Gordian Knot jazz only works in fables – in the real world, incessant repetition of talking points does not create truth, speed the wished-for outcome, or reinforce the moral authority of the talker (or the decider).
Somewhere, Mark Millar is beaming.
Related: “Marvel heroes choose sides in war on terror”
June 22nd, 2006 at 8:30 am
He’s beaming? Is that piece really a compliment? Isn’t it really saying that Civil War is portraying trite representations of complex problems?
These things I must know!
June 22nd, 2006 at 9:58 am
The problem with that article is that there’s no need to bring real-world politics into it; it’s a perfectly straightforward issue without trying to make a dubious analogy out of it.
There are no barriers to entry for superheroism; anybody can try it. And if anybody can try it, common sense tells us that some of the people who try it will be irresponsible or foolhardy or even just crazy. But that’s what would happen in reality. In comic books, superheroism really does seem to attract the best and the brightest; people who can live up to the role. People, in other words, that the government doesn’t have to worry about them going off the rails. The Marvel-universe US government’s mistake in ‘Civil War’ is not to recognize this.
Or, possibly, Marvel’s… mistake? … is to bring this real-world-type problem into the comic book world, which quite frankly can’t handle it easily. There are really only two ways to resolve it completely: a) kill them all (which we’ve seen tried in ‘Kingdom Come’ and the Wild Cards novels), or b) lose the masks and secret identities completely (the actual ending of ‘Kingdom Come’). Obviously Marvel isn’t going to do a) and I don’t think they’re going to do b) either.
But the Marvel-universe US government has a legitimate concern here. It isn’t reasonable to let anonymous superpowerful individuals run around doing whatever they want, however well-intentioned you hope them to be. Perfectly sensible of them to try to get control of the situation. But it doesn’t have anything to do with the war in Iraq.
June 22nd, 2006 at 10:27 am
[...] That’s right, it’s time to apply real-world physics to comic-book fiction. Hey, if L.A.’s City Beat can do it with politics, MSNBC can do it with science. [...]