Unqualified Offerings

By BruceB

This is perhaps my geekiest political comment ever, and therefore worth memorializing in a post.

The first comic books were created by people who hadn’t grown up reading them because, well, there weren’t any. As late as the 1960s, comics were still created by people who hadn’t been childhood comics fans themselves. The first lifelong fans of comics, and in particular of superheroes, entered the American comics publishing industry in the 1970s, and gradually became more and more numerous until now almost everyone involved in making the books that Marvel, DC, and other such companies publish are fans turned pro. (This isn’t as true at the highest reaches of management, but particularly when you’re owned by a conglomerate, management is like that.)

This has been good for the field in some ways, bad in others. One of the most damaging features – though almost never wielded with intent to do harm – is the desire of a certain kind of reader (now creator) to have things all make sense. “It’s just magic, never mind” doesn’t wash as an explanation, and objections like “look, we know about the laws of motion, and we’re just not worrying about it because it looks cool if his gear does this” get overridden in favor of lengthy explanations about Newtonian compensators and whatever.

Unfortunately, the same problem also applies to characters’ psychologies. A pillar of the superhero tradition is the hero who does the right thing because, well, it’s the right thing, and that’s that. Men and women see the good and act upon it, just as most of us sometimes wish we could do. This, those who crave the appearance of realism said, won’t do. There must be better reasons than that. The way this worked out in practice is that heroic people would turn out to have pasts in which they’d done something awful and felt guilty about ever afterward. Possibly the nadir of the trend came in the late ’80s, when John Byrne decided that Superman couldn’t just have a lifelong code against killing instilled in him by his parents as part of their training him to use his powers responsibly. No, he had to actually execute a trio of captured super-villains and then feel guilty about it and decide not to do that anymore.

The response to this trend came gradually from other, equally fannish creators who realized that all this sort of “realism” didn’t actually lead to more of the sorts of stories they wanted to read, or that even worked all that well on their own terms. American creators like Kurt Busiek and British ones like Grant Morrison started making more stories willing to accept the superhero conventions and see what neat stuff they can do without trying to rip the whole thing apart first.

Now, what’s all this got to do with the Democratic Party?

Just this. Via one of Avedon Carol’s wonderfully link-rich posts, I see Salon columnist Joan Walsh assessing Obama’s recent moves, including this observation: “It’s funny how so many defeated Democrats — Al Gore, John Kerry, John Edwards and now Clinton — seem to become more progressive after they learn that pandering can’t protect them from the attacks of the GOP and its friends in the media. Let’s hope Obama doesn’t have to learn that lesson the same way.”

That’s when it struck me: what an inappropriate desire for realism is to comic books, Republican power worship is to American politics. The American enterprise is, after all, very much an episode in wish fulfillment. We talk about the Original Dads’ respect for human greed, pride, and weakness, and it’s true, but the basic conceit is nonetheless the hope of achieving something better than anyone ever had before and of getting a whole nation to operate in that hope, putting historically justified fears in at least partial abeyance and dreaming forward. Utopia may not be an option, but America is in part a machine for making it an option. By contrast, the Republican machine rests on accepting that there can’t be all that good a life for almost anyone below the top, that this is fine, and that the thing to do is therefore reward anyone who gets right up to the top while doing whatever’s necessary to keep the rest down. It’s the anti-dream.

Does the history of American superhero comics offer any suggestions in this regard? It might, actually. One significant thing about the revival effort on the part of creators who want more of the legacy in their works is that they didn’t actually win an argument with creators or fans who felt otherwise. There have been extensive arguments about this, in print fanzines, newsgroups, and now web forums, to be sure, and probably will be for decades to come. But there is no sense in which setting aside “realism” ever became policy. Instead, most comics publishers who do superheroes publish in a variety of styles. Those who want the idealistic, fantasy-accepting style go ahead and do their work, and it sells to those who wish to buy it, alongside other approaches. Those who feel the need for something more earnest and gritty can still get it – they haven’t been driven from the field or anything like that.

As nearly as I can tell, the recovery of a lost tradition in cases like these begins with a willingness to act even though others still disagree. Politics is a very fannish enterprise in some ways, and one of the classic fannish fallacies is the conviction both that we can win everyone over to our cause before we proceed and that we ought to do so, that it is in some important sense wrong to proceed without a strong consensus. Unfortunately, this accounts neither for the terminally stubborn though honest objector nor the calculatedly dishonest chaos-maker. One of the leading causes of collapse in generally open communities is the harm done by an abusive few to the majority trying in good faith to operate this way – eventually people have enough of it, and they leave.

So this suggests an important criterion not to have, for those now experimenting with organized efforts to act within the general American political framework but outside existing party establishments and (in some cases) clearly outside party boundaries. We will need to not measure our success or failure by the existence or disappearance of dissent and resistance. In fact, if anything, we can expect champions of recent styles to pick up the pace and push harder as they feel challenged. In addition, we can expect some people to play multiple sides over time – there will be people who do absolutely great and wonderful things, switch around and help make horrible disasters worse, and then jump back again, all without seeming aware of just how contradictory the moral sum of their actions is. Consistency is neat, but if you need a lot of it, the human race isn’t really your best bet.

Success or failure of efforts like Strange Bedfellows will have to be judged by the steps forward they manage to take, or not take. We do not, alas, get to hope for crushing our enemies beneath our heels; even if they’re driven much farther from power than they’ve been anytime recently, they’ll still be around, still dripping poison at the base of the tree of liberty. Successful reform will be a matter more of adding something to the existing mix than managing to subtract very much. Thus does a mystically inclined Scotsman illuminate a better path for American elections.