on comics and politics

How could I let this go by without comment: Pandagon on the politics of comic books.

Comic books themselves presented my first awareness of any number of topics, at least in part because I was rather late to reading, being completely uninterested in what the schools wanted to me. Comic books were an important catalyst in my becoming a reader. At least that's what I tell myself. In any case, comic books made me think about politics. There were two stages to this, at first I was the only person I knew who read comics, so I didn't discuss the stories with anyone else because no one was interested.

Marvel comics, especially, are populated with moral ambiguities. The good guy is always good, and the bad guy always bad. But each of them is really in conflict with themselves and their unusual places in their environments. Some manage to over come their problems and become heroes like Spider Man, others are consumed by their own desires and become villians, like Dr. Doom giving into vanity and rage. There's also a significant group, such as Magneto, who walk back and forth across the hero-villian line and the morally ambigous, hulk on a rampage, Nick Fury in his treatment of espers etc. Of course, there are others who are simply unexplained toad people. Why do toad people do what they do? I don't think we're ever meant to know. The point being that the stories can often become a complex dance between the motivations of the characters. The actual punching could come as a relief to trying to understand the problems motivating a story. Since these stories tend to reflect the most prominent anxities expressed at large when they are written, the step towards more real world style political thinking was easy.

Turns out that not eveybody read comics this way. The second stage was after a comic book store opened in my town and created a community of comic readers. In general comic book readers are intrigued by ideas, but don't take to them naturally. I remember one long discussion in which a group of store regulars could not figure out a way in which they could reliably become rich given a time machine. Try this exercise yourselve. Moreover, most felt that the violence in the comics needed to be understood as a literal solution to the sorts of problems that might be considered. (Spiderman's punching and web-slinging was a solution to crime, whatever Stan might say on his soap box. It was as if Godzilla showed the way to fight environmental corruption when he took on the smog monster. Apologies for media jumping.)

The second stage didn't so much change my political reflections as it made it clear that having an intelligent conversation about comic books, at least in my small part of the commonwealth, meant leaving the comic shop.