Terrors of the Imagination
The Fiore post below reminds me of Avengers 113, titled Your Young Men Shall Slay Visions. It was Steve Englehart at his most earnest, and since I was an earnest lad myself, it made a big impression on me. Vision and Scarlet Witch kiss in public. She’s a mutant, sure, but he’s an android, so the kiss inspires outrage and bigotry. Anti-synthezoid bigots attack the Avengers, hoping to kill the Vision, willing to take down any Avengers who get in their way. They believe they are making a last stand on behalf of the human race. Here’s the thing: the attackers are suicide bombers. They call themselves “the Living Bombs.” A synopsis of the issue appears about a third of the way down the Avengers page from Forgotten Comic Book Character HQ.
I remember finding the idea of suicide bombers pretty unnerving. It’s oddly more unsettling in retrospect - suicide bombings were not common features of real life back in 1972. Terrorists tried to get away. There had been the kamikaze in the 1940s; there would be the surge of murderous martyrdom in Lebanon beginning with the next decade. (The Wikipedia link quotes the London Times using “suicide-bomb” contemporaneously to describe kamikaze planes.)
But in 1972, suicide bombing as we know it existed purely in the imagination of a comic book writer. There is a qualititative difference between flying a plane into a warship during a battle and walking up to someone on the street and blowing you both up. Englehart was ahead of the goddam curve on that one.
Someone stupid enough might try to find some link between Avengers 113 and young Lebanese radicals - some kid who read a comic and later became a revolutionary. But the answer is probably simpler. Englehart wanted human villains to take on much more powerful foes. He must have wracked his brain to come up with something regular shmoes could do to superheroes. And at some point it hit him that, were they fanatical enough, sure enough that they were in the right and the situation was desperate, more committed to victory than self-preservation, there was a way. One of the bombers even declares that he is willing to “martyr” himself.
What we’re actually observing between American newsstands in 1972 and Levantine war in 1980 is simple parallelism - different people, similar problem (taking out superior targets for millenialist reasons), same “solution.” One imaginary, the other all too enduringly real.
