Monster Men Episode 2: Power (Patreon)

Welcome to my ongoing series Monster Men where I talk about why we tell monster stories and what they mean. Last time we talked about serial killer fiction, and that topic is pretty heavy, and pretty dark. I actually had several friends pull out of contributing to that video because the subject matter is so grim, and I understand, that’s fair.
So today, we’re going to talk about a much more light-hearted, easy topic - superheroes! My contention is that superhero stories are a kind of monster story where the monster is on our side, see? So with that caveat, let’s have a chill, relaxing time, without any--

Monster Men
by Eric Sophia McAllister
Episode 2: Power
Something we need going in to understand the history of comic books is the influence of the Comics Code Authority. From 1954 to about the year 2000 the comics mainstream was hugely shaped by the CCA, a conservative censorship organisation who gave a stamp of approval to comic books they considered “morally appropriate”. This wasn’t as direct as the Hollywood blacklist but it did guide where the bulk of advertising money would be spent so it indirectly controlled which comics got published for decades. Their conservative censorship stopped mainstream comics from featuring extreme violence, sexuality, anything too politically challenging, and of course, any acknowledgement of the existence of queer people whatsoever.
The Comics Code Authority was started in large part as a response to the publication of Fredric Wertham’s book The Seduction of the Innocent in which Fredric is a big crying baby covered in milk and piss crying and whining. Sorry I can’t sum up Wertham’s bullshit with a straight face. He claimed that Wonder Woman was a lesbian which… um.. Ok?
He’s also the originator of the lazy homophobic jokes about Batman and Robin being gay together, because he was such a normal regular dude totally secure in his masculinity and sexuality that he couldn’t see a man and boy living together having a close relationship without blowing his no-homo whistle and calling the gay police.
In response to this gay-bashing fear monger, comics publishers established the CCA, which then controlled the comics mainstream for almost half a century. So as you can imagine, an underground community of comics celebrating diversity, queerness and communism -- I’m just kidding. There were people making fantastic comics really challenging the status quo, but the main thing that comic book fans felt missing was violence and gore.
Titles like Judge Dredd, Grendel, and Hellboy were drawing a tonne of attention away from the big publishers abiding by the CCA, and ultimately, when advertisers saw that there was a market for those comics they started ignoring the CCA’s recommendation and by 2000 the stamp of approval was largely ignored, with Marvel fully abandoning it in 2001 and DC finally abandoning it in 2011, and since then comics have been as gory and violent as anyone could ever have wished for. Yay! To be fair, comics have also been gayer, leftier and more diverse since then too, which is really nice.
This history is important to understand because this censorship of extreme violence and the appetite it spawned is the context into which Frank Miller published The Dark Knight Returns.
Important note: Reading back I realised that what I wrote here might sound extreme. In the following section I call Frank Miller a fascist a lot of times, because he is.
The book begins with a piece by Jimmy Olsen bemoaning how bad everything has become now that the real good people have gotten too old or tired or broken to carry on, and how things used to be good. He ends the article “we used to have heroes.” Bruce Wayne has been retired as Batman for a decade and in his absence Gotham City has fallen apart, with streetgangs maintaining an absolute reign of terror and sensitive liberals are doing nothing or in some cases, like the treatment of the criminally insane psychopaths at Arkham Asylum, are actually making the situation worse. At the peak of the crime wave, Batman finally returns to crack down on crime, defeating the leader of the biggest gang, putting an end to the Joker once and for all, and coopting the gang goons to form his own gang dedicated to maintaining law and order on the streets of Gotham. Eventually Superman is called in to stop Batman’s push against the degeneracy engulfing Gotham and Batman has to fake his death so that he and his gang can continue to maintain order from the shadows aaaaaand
When I first read this comic as a teenager I thought it was satirising the beliefs I now realise it is unironically promoting, because this book is extremely fascist. Miller constructs Batman as a noble crusader against societal decay and criminal degeneracy. He plays to the reactionary fear of an inner city crime wave, portraying Gotham as almost completely succumbed to gangs and muggings and murders and prostitution. He shows out of touch liberal elites who have convoluted theories for how to help but really just make the problem worse, where the ordinary people support the old-fashioned, common sense approach of getting out on the streets and beating the people making the city bad. Multiple people at various points in the comic call Batman a fascist and it’s simply used to demonstrate how out of touch they are, how much they don’t have the courage to do what needs to be done.
Jim Gordon shoots a teenager to death at point blank and the internal monologue we get is “I think of Sarah. The rest is easy.”
Batman starts a street gang dedicated to law and order. Like, come on. The same kids are shown earlier in the story joining a neo-nazi gang. How is this not satire?!
Because of the history I already outlined, of course, The Dark Knight Returns was enormously popular when it came out, and has become one of the most influential graphic novels ever written.
So Batman’s a fascist now.
The Dark Knight Trilogy by Christopher Nolan and Batman v Superman by Zack Snyder both borrow heavily directly from The Dark Knight Returns, and in a more general sense Batman has led the charge in mainstream superheroes becoming edgier, darker, and yes, more fascist. I feel like I’m not alone in reading The Dark Knight Returns wrongly, and the 2 reasons for that are simple enough: Firstly, Frank Miller is a comically terrible comic book writer, giving everything he touches a clownish absurdity that pleads the reader to interpret it ironically despite being absolutely sincere, and secondly, it’s not most people’s natural assumption when reading a story, that the author is a fascist, even if they depict the hero of the story as a fascist.
Since The Dark Knight Returns, both because of it and because of the larger trend in comics, Batman being a bit of a fascist has been a prominent recurring theme, usually as an interrogation of policing, vigilante justice, the inherent morality of superheroes -- basically a lot of smarter artists doing more interesting things than Frank Miller based on the assumption that what he was doing was smarter and more interesting than it actually was.
Also, to some degree, a lot of people just don’t seem to interrogate what comics are actually saying.
Every person talking about influential comic books treats The Dark Knight Returns as if it and Watchmen, V For Vendetta, or Maus are somehow the same. I mean, they also talk about, like, Death of Superman the same way - I think folks confuse popularity for quality. A story where Superman gets punched really hard and dies was always going to sell well but… it doesn’t really have much to say.
Watchmen and TDKR were actually released by the same company in the year. This is the degree to which publishers and fans alike don’t seem to discern between comics. Alan Moore’s Watchmen tells us “if superheroes existed in the real world they’d be pretty fascist, and that would suck” while Miller’s Dark Knight Returns tells us “if Batman existed in the real world he’d be a fascist which would be really cool.”
Rather than anyone in Watchmen though, Miller’s Batman might be more directly comparable to V from Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta.
V is a terrorist, but he’s like.. A cool?? Terrorist??
Depictions of terrorism are definitely also a kind of monster story, but it’s really complicated and will need it’s own episode, so we’re not getting into it here. V is a terrorist against an authoritarian regime directly trying to topple the white supremacist christo-fascist government, but it’s the deliberate obfuscation of Batman’s politics by Frank Miller that makes him so fashy.
Frank Miller’s heroes commit acts that are clearly terrorism but for them the enemy isn’t the state or the political establishment but rather the culture. The government is seen as part of the problem but who Batman targets directly is the young people, the gangs, the vibrant and often queer and racially coded counter culture.
Hope he goes after the homos next.
To examine this rhetorical trick we need to accept that Frank Miller isn’t simply using this guy as an authorial mouthpiece. He’s doing something altogether more slimy. First he shows us the working class black man, and we, the reader agree that Batman is doing a good job and making up for the lacking law enforcement, but then we, an audience with a presumed set of liberal values and sensitivities are told that this guy is a violent homophobe. Oh no! Maybe Batman is bad after all and the people who call him a fascist are correct.
But then we see the prime example of the person who calls him a fascist. The white liberal elite who drawls on with long winded jargon only to admit when confronted on the issue that “no”, he’d never actually live in Gotham city. So our reality must lie somewhere in the middle, right? Well, that’s just it, in this Batman comic for Batman fans there isn’t really much telling us that we should find our answer in between these two guys. One of them likes Batman, the other doesn’t. One of them is the relatable everyman, the other is a despicable liberal - what we functionally have here is a two-panel argument that while you might not agree with violent bigots, they’re the ones who are really on your side.
The 30th anniversary edition of The Dark Knight Returns has a preface where Miller talks to Brian Azzarello his co-writer on one of the sequels, and what really stands out is, well, how much of a fucking reactionary Miller is making Bruce Wayne into:
“My intention in the beginning was to tell a story of Batman at the age he would be at this time if he really aged from his origins. He was aged, he was seeing how the world had changed and how he would bring essentially a World War II mentality to the modern world. To him it wasn’t just criminals he was fighting any more, it was moral decay and political corruption.”
It’s important to appreciate that a writer constructs a narrative to show us who is right and wrong, and nothing that happens in this story really tells us Batman is wrong. He gets results, he beats the gang leader, he kills the Joker, he saves Gotham. Again and again smug liberals with their sensitive psychological therapeutic approach to solving problems fall short and Batman’s straight forward muscle-punch-man approach saves the day. Everything is a contest of brutality, strength and cruelty, and Batman saves Gotham by being the most brutal, the strongest, and the cruellest.
Something that really comes through in that preface is how much Miller was projecting not only a disgust towards liberals and progressives, but a disgust towards weakness he saw in himself. On the topic of ageing Batman up, he says:
“I was 29 years old, I was dreading turning 30. To me, that was entering middle age.”
There’s a really tangible envy, that’s typical of reactionaries, of the people who got to fight in a so-called “meaningful war”. Where Miller feels like he’s turning 30 and turning soft, he writes this Batman who brings a “world war II mentality”.
I’m not saying all of this to just do what Fredric Wertham and the CCA did. I’m not attempting to blacklist The Dark Knight Returns or say anyone is bad for liking it, but all of this is really important to understand our current ways of telling superhero stories and why so much of it is about the authoritarian mindset of a vigilante. Besides that, Frank Miller didn’t create Fascist Batman from whole cloth, the potential for this kind of superhero storytelling was there right from the beginning.
Implicitly, the idea of the superhero ties into the Great Man theory of history, with powerful individuals’ decisions being the only important things that move the “plot” of history forwards. In a piece for the Guardian on the strange cultural position of superhero stories, Archie Bland wrote “Some connect the concept [of the superhero] back to Nietzsche’s 1883 work of philosophy Thus Spake Zarathustra, with its idea of the Übermensch, a superior human whose existence would justify the species. The word itself was first used in 1917, to describe “a public figure of great accomplishments””
The original superhero, Superman, was first conceived as a bitter and angry homeless man who, suddenly gifted with super powers, took out his vengeance upon society. When the series became an ongoing story Jerry Siegel decided a hero would sell better, so when I say superheroes are “monsters who are on our side” it’s really been there since the start.
In his book Popular Culture, Geopolitics & Identity, political geographer Jason Dittmer explains that “Captain America predates the American entry into World War II, but he nevertheless punches Adolf Hitler in the face on the cover of Captain America Comics no. 1. This was because the early comic book industry was dominated by Jewish artists and writers who were far more aware of Hitler’s treatment of [European] Jews than most Americans were. Hoping to push America off the bench and into the fight, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created Captain America and located him in an America that was rife with German spies and subversives.”
Captain America’s origin, jingoistic as it may be, was still driven by really good intentions. But here’s the rub: A monster antagonist necessitates conflict, the protagonists are compelled to go and stop them, but a monster protagonist needs to be given things to do. That’s why after World War II ended, Captain America fell massively out of popularity. Marvel actually tried to reboot the hero twice, once as a horror series and then as “Captain America… Commie Smasher!” neither of which sold and both of which had to be quickly scrapped.
Both of the biggest publishers in comics, DC and Marvel, have a history of wavering politically and making some egregious errors, but broadly speaking DC has always been the more conservative of the two.
When DC wanted to compete with Marvel, who had already created black superhero Luke Cage, they created the Black Bomber, a white racist who would turn into a black superhero under stress. Comics historian Don Markstein later described the character as "an insult to practically everybody with any point of view at all". Sorry I just love reading that quote.
This character would later be scrapped by DC, who then hired Tony Isabella, a writer with experience writing Luke Cage, who created the character Black Lightning.
The superheroes of DC Comics tend to try to remain more abstract and philosophical, with concepts like “what if a man was really strong” or “what if a rich guy solved crimes” rather than Marvel’s “arms-dealing billionaire privatises hyper-technological policing” or “angry frisbee patriot”, and as such Marvel’s blunders are a lot more explicit and politically involved.
Dittmer writes “places can be represented in a variety of ways, some subtle and some blatant. Captain America decidedly falls into the blatant category. Given his origin as a jingoistic wartime crusader against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, this should not be too surprising.”
In the 60s and 70s, when Captain America was successfully rebooted, he came back as a social justice warrior, but no more of a radical than before. Marvel was in a tight spot between their young audience’s more progressive politics and their broader public reputation. Communism was off the table. So now, although still very much a centrist, Captain was used to launder America’s reputation when it came to race.
“With communism unavailable for Captain America to battle, he instead continued his rivalry with, of all people, Nazis, such as the Red Skull and the Prussian aristocrats Baron Zemo and Strucker. While this seems bizarre given the lack of real-world threat posed by Nazis in the 1960s, it makes sense if you consider the ideological value of Nazis as still to this day being seen as inimical to the mythological values of America as home to individual freedom and equality.”
So embarrassed by their attempts at red-baiting, Marvel actually retconned Captain America’s history and said that Steve Rogers had been trapped in an iceberg since 1945, making a distinction between the “real” Captain America and the 1950s McCarthyite Cap who was revealed to be an impostor - a fan of the original Captain America who had blackmailed the US Government into letting him be the new Captain America and then spent his time chasing down communist sympathisers and people of colour.
In the 70s there were a couple of arcs featuring this 50s Cap, where he comes back spouting racist nonsense and working with the KKK trying to start a race war, and good sensible centrist liberal Captain America has to stop him.
What’s so interesting about this storytelling device is the way that the writers of Captain America made a monster out of their own mistakes, literally turning him into a “bad Captain America” all the while refusing to question the character of the “real” Cap. The examination of this monster, the owning up to the fact that some element within America had been this way, and furthermore that that element was inspired by the character they continued to promote, was ironically being used to draw attention away from America’s favourite monster: the monster who fights for “us” battling his reflection who fights for “them”.
The monster of the superhero needs to be put to use, and finding a justification of that is one of the elements of superhero stories that lends itself naturally to reaction. Most superheroes are “crime-fighters”, so to continually justify their existence these heroes keep being tied back to policing. Miller’s bleak, violent, streetgang-dominated Gotham was building on this existing element, and on the urban crimewave that was a huge focus of conservative politics in the 70s and 80s. In the preface to Dark Knight Returns, Miller says “Crime was rampant and I had been mugged a few times. I was very very angry just watching Clint Eastwood movies back to back just getting absolutely paranoid. I figured if Batman was a grownup he’d take care of things.”
This is another place where “the monster who fights for us” is making superhero fans uneasy. As more people rightly start to question the police, more people are uncomfortable with superheroes being magical cops.
So the natural question now is what alternatives there are to the supercop.
One possibility, since the superhero monster is usually a defender of the status quo, is that superheroes can still be a protagonist, but representing the marginalised and oppressed instead of the powerful, making them heroes by having them fight for change instead of against it. This is something that seems pretty obvious when you think about how popular supervillains like the Joker have become in tandem with Batman’s authoritarianism becoming more explicit.
Well, it’s also something that Stan Lee, the absolute mad lad, thought of decades ago. Lee always tried to write superheroes who had everyday, relatable problems, saying “Just because you have superpowers, that doesn’t mean your love life would be perfect. I don’t think superpowers automatically means there won’t be any personality problems, family problems or even money problems. I just tried to write characters who are human beings who also have superpowers.”

“I have always included minority characters in my stories, often as heroes. We live in a diverse society — in fact, a diverse world, and we must learn to live in peace and with respect for each other.”
And so it’s no surprise that Stan Lee would create a whole team of superheroes whose troubled lives come from their diversity and from what makes them different - The X-Men. The X-Men if you… don’t know what… the X-Men… are? What am I doing right now… The mutants in the X-Men are their own diegetic marginalised group, making them a really robust metaphor for different real world groups.
In Popular Culture, Geopolitics and Identity, Dittmer has this to say about the X-Men:
“Some readers saw the story as an allegory for American race relations, with Professor X standing in for Martin Luther King and Magneto standing in for the more confrontational Malcolm X. This reading makes special sense in the comic book, which was first published in 1963.”
Dittmer goes on to say:
“However, to many audiences, the franchise’s tales of an oppressed genetic minority has equally often seemed to be that of homosexuals, especially in X2. In that film, the plot remains focused on ethnic conflict, but there is a scene in which mutant Bobby Drake “comes out of the closet” to his parents by demonstrating his power to them. His mother’s response “Have you tried not being a mutant” is something of an in-joke with homosexual viewers as the cliched response of many parents of homosexuals.
The third film, X-Men: The Last Stand, is driven by a medical cure for mutanthood, intersecting with political debates in the United States about homosexual marriage and whether or not homosexuality is a choice or genetic trait.”
In this regard, X-Men and other superhero stories like it bring superheroes into the real world in a different way altogether, making them not idols or gods of myth but relatable human beings.
In X-Men, the persistent plight of Mystique highlights the intersectional nature of oppression, since her struggle is markedly worse than the rest of the mutants. Cyclops or Wolverine can “pass” as non-mutants in public, but Mystique has to disguise herself to avoid inspiring fear and hate from others. In this sense she could be understood in the queer reading of X-Men as a trans woman, or a black woman in the civil rights interpretation, or for that matter just someone with significantly darker skin. Her struggle explains very intuitively the way in which people within marginalised groups can experience more complex or extreme bigotry than the rest, and that’s why many representations of her character show her sympathetic to the protagonists’ cause, but ultimately rejecting their moderate politics, because she feels that only Magneto and the Brotherhood of Mutants can bring about change that will make her safe.
You know who else has thoughts about the progressive and diverse messaging of X-Men? Frank Miller hahaha I fucking hate this guy. The act-one primary antagonists of The Dark Knight Returns are “the mutant gang”. They’re a group of colourful young people who wear these visor glasses and they’re a stand-in for everything wrong with society, the degeneration of Gotham City.
The stated mission of this series is to interrogate why we tell monster stories and Frank Miller repeatedly relies on the image of the degenerate-criminal-as-monster to justify the existence of the monster on our side: the superhero.
The leader of the mutant gang is this grotesque, fanged and clawed brutish monster man who talks in broken english and, actually wait why does he talk like that Frank?
“The guy with the sharp teeth. Mr. T was a real popular figure at the time, and I patterned his speech as close to Mr. T’s as I could”
Oh. Cool.
If superheroes are monsters that are on our side, and X-Men conjures a form of the “sympathetic monster”, Miller’s response is exactly that of any good reactionary pissbaby. No!
These people are freaks! Monsters! We can’t sympathise with them! These degenerates are everything wrong with our society!
Maybe, as a special lover of monsters, and as someone who wants to find the human beings at the root of all these monster stories I have a bit of a bias, but this is exactly why I have a particular disdain for the cheap fascist crap that Frank Miller peddles. Maybe that’s just me.
Oh wait no it isn’t even his fans are sick of his bullshit!
Holy Terror is a comic written by Frank Miller in direct response to 9/11 where Not-Batman and Not-Catwoman team up to fight Al Qaeda...


As for Miller himself, when he was working on the book, he described his upcoming masterpiece as "not to put too fine a point on it, a piece of propaganda... Superman punched out Hitler. So did Captain America. That's one of the things they're there for."
Explaining his reaction to 9/11 as the inspiration for the book, he said “For the first time in my life I know how it feels to face an existential menace. They want us to die. All of a sudden I realize what my parents were talking about all those years. Patriotism, I now believe, isn't some sentimental, old conceit. It's self-preservation. I believe patriotism is central to a nation's survival.”

While we’re here why don’t I just take a second to look at this drawing of… presumably? Obama?

Give my regard to those seventy-two black-eyed virgins… sigh
Holy Terror was going to star Batman, and Miller claims that at some point he “realised this was no longer a Batman story” but the protagonist is so clearly Batman, his love interest is so clearly Catwoman, the city is so clearly Gotham City… it feels like DC pumped the brakes there.
In 2006, when the book was still about Batman, Grant Morrison fellow Batman writer and also the most extra comic book writer yet born on planet Earth explained why even they thought this book was fucking ridiculous.
“Batman vs. Al Qaeda! It might as well be Bin Laden vs. King Kong! Or how about the sinister Al Qaeda mastermind up against a hungry Hannibal Lecter! For all the good it's likely to do. Cheering on a fictional character as he beats up fictionalized terrorists seems like a decadent indulgence when real terrorists are killing real people in the real world. I'd be so much more impressed if Frank Miller gave up all this graphic novel nonsense, joined the Army and, with a howl of undying hate, rushed headlong onto the front lines with the young soldiers who are actually risking life and limb 'vs.' Al Qaeda”
Kind of rude of Grant to come right up to Frank Miller’s house and get him where he fucking lives imo.
Look: don’t read this book. I had to, and that’s one person too many already. His fans don’t even like this book. Terrorism is a complex subject that should be discussed with nuance and care and at least some vague grasp of geopolitics, and that’s why I’m giving it an episode later in this series. Don’t read the angry-stabby-racism-book, just spend an hour outside. Go sit by a tree. Much better.
Some more recent media has also embraced the idea that superheroes can be a bit fashy, but y’know, not as the good guys - and even leaned into the idea of superheroes as scary monsters. Amazon’s The Boys is a great look at superheroes as metaphors for different ideological strains in the American ruling class - okay specifically season 2 I think season 1 is really dragged down by it’s edgy source material. There’s a flag-cape guy, there’s a nazi, it’s great. I actually don’t have so much to say right now because season 2 really communicates it’s ideas very openly and well, and all I can say is if you’re half way through googling “Holy Terror Frank Miller pdf” right now, stop, and google “putlocker watch free the boys season 2” instead. In Minecraft. Parody. Non-actionable.
Here’s my two-point pitch for watching this excellent season of television (spoilers obviously)
1. The nazis invented superheroes, because, of course they did
2. Captain-America-Superman standing on the top of a building masturbating into the wind and shouting “I can do anything I want”
The Boys Season 2 is so fucking good. It’s what Frank Miller wishes he could write, and it’s even an interesting use of super-terrorism, but we’re not talking about that yet.
So now we’ve seen the superhero monster as protagonist promoting authoritarianism, as antagonist condemning it, and we’ve seen how superheroes can be the sympathetic monster driven away by society, but before we wrap up I want to talk about why. A lot of it rests on that idea, that when the monster is there, and they’re on our side, they have to be given something to do. Look what happens to Gotham when Batman retires!
Interrogating this issue is something Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy does pretty well. Right from the beginning the existence of Batman is marked as a temporary measure that causes its own problems, isn’t the solution everyone would prefer and is harmful to the person doing it as well. Still though Nolan’s Batman is the monster of reaction, he wants to return Gotham to some prelapsarian past before it fell to crime.
I think this is a big distinction in the stories of superheroes, because of the way that the typical conflict is framed as good versus evil. Evil in the world necessitates change, whether the evil is the status quo which treats our protagonists like monsters or the evil is a threat to it which we need a monstrous defender to fight back, but since so many of these stories pose evil as a threat to the status quo, and for a lot of people the status quo is exceptionally terrible, there is a pattern of people identifying with supervillains. The Joker says society treats the mentally ill like garbage, Killmonger wants to turn the tables on historic colonial injustice, Magneto wants to keep his people safe and he doesn’t care who he hurts to do that because society hurts his people so much already, compounded even further in the movie franchise version where Magneto is a holocaust survivor. This is why we see people push radical politics by saying things like “not gay as in “one of the X-Men”, but queer as in “magneto was right””
This too, is where our problem of the superhero monster constantly needing something to fight against arises. If the superhero is a defender of the status quo, then his constant battle is against anyone who opposes it, but what if our superhero fought against the constant evil that thrives in the real world?
In his video How were they allowed to make Immortal Hulk? Scaredy Matt from Scaredy Cats asks the question, well, uh, “How were they allowed to make Immortal Hulk?” It’s a question worth asking, because Immortal Hulk, for a Marvel series about a flagship character, is a shockingly radical comic. I’m talking about Bruce Banner explaining to the media how corporations exploit and profit off disasters, I’m talking about Hulk gaining a following of protestors who are basically antifa, I’m talking about the central conceit of the series is Hulk smashes capitalism.
The main antagonism currently in the series is Hulk taking on a huge multinational megacorporation called Roxxon - Roxxon are a staple for Marvel when talking about capitalism, they’re the corporation Miles Morales was defending from the evil protestors in the new game sigggghhhhhhhh - and the CEO of Roxxon is a horrifying minotaur man who treats the world around him, his possessions, his staff and the public alike as completely disposable, oh and of course when his true form is revealed publicly it doesn’t even hurt the company stock prices.
Incidentally, the company manufacture and sell the plastic hulk masks the protestors wear, which of course doesn’t make the protests any less meaningful or the company any less opposed to them, it’s just a nice touch showing how businesses will profit off absolutely anything they can. In the same way that Captain America was there to push America into WWII, and in an era when so many comic book writers still just make Donald Trump their symbol of everything wrong in the world, Immortal Hulk seemingly exists to explain to young comic book readers what all those protests on the news are about, why they’re so mad and, yeah, they do a great fucking job.
There’s this whole bit where this cop is thinking about his kid who he no longer relates to, thinking about how he wanted this traditional, conservative, american dream future for her and the more that she’s become some dyed-hair lefto-commie radical who he doesn’t understand any more the more he sees her as part of the problem, up to the point where he’s pointing his gun at her in the crowd and he’s imagining what will happen next, knowing he’ll get away with it facing no legal consequences, and he thinks about who he wanted her to be, and he pulls the trigger. It’s a real “I think of Sarah” moment.
And then the Hulk steps in the way of the bullet, and he [redacted] the cop. In minecraft. Parody. Non-actionable. This comic is shockingly radical.
At their absolute best, superhero stories embrace the way that a superhero can be a monster, and the way that a monster is a representation of an idea, and abstraction of something bigger than a person, and when comic book characters fight you’re seeing a clash of different ideologies or seeing the way that issues interact with each other. Magneto vs Professor X! Avengers Civil War! Batman versus Superman!
In the middle of Civil War II - see I can’t make an electric boogaloo joke here because of the boogaloo boys. Goddamn fascists ruin everything. In the middle of Civil War II: The Civil-War-ening there’s this great scene where Tony Stark is trying to get Miles Morales over to his side and he explains the future-crime prediction policing that he’s opposed to as like racial profiling, and then when you think he’s just going to get away with manipulating this teenage boy, Miles says “hey, why’d you say that? You’re making that comparison because of my race right?” and Tony Stark has to own up to exactly what he just did, but also Miles can see that it’s a valid comparison that bears saying.
In Immortal Hulk, there’s a villain brought in by Roxxon (defending the interests of capital) whose power is to change how people remember things. He retcons everything good leftist commie Hulk ever did as something he did instead and only lets people remember the bad things Hulk did. Liberal propaganda is a big fluffy monster villain in Immortal Hulk. They made Aaron Sorkin the villain of this comic book!
The comparison deserves to be made here between Xemnu the fluffy propaganda monster and honestly, what Marvel have themselves done, pretending McCarthyite Captain America was an impostor, framing Magneto’s separatism as dangerous, radical, shortsighted, and wrong. And what’s great about Immortal Hulk is that both in the allegory and the real world, the solution to this problem is to [redacted] parody non-actionable.
The way that people are continually drawn to the villains and the monsters of comic books, the Joker, Magneto, Killmonger, is expressed beautifully through the Hulk, and through the series’ constant refrain “Is he man, or is he monster? Or is he both?” Immortal Hulk is such a beautiful bit of monstrous superhero storytelling because the monstrous side of Bruce Banner is also just a reasonable, thinking, feeling person and when you get down to it what he actually wants is really cool.
In another sense the monster of the Hulk is the monster that the media make him into to try to dismiss his intentions and his agenda and deflect away from criticism of capital. Nonetheless he gains this popular support because even if people see him as a monster, they see him as the kind of monster that necessitates change, not the kind of monster that defends the status quo, and they want that.
I think we’ll see more and more that this is the kind of superhero story people want, because if the monster is going to fight for us, then it’s going to have to fight to change things. Not gay as in one of the X-Men - queer as in Magneto was right.
Okay well now we’ve talked about Serial Killer and Superheroes, real people who do bad things and a type of character who’s usually the good guy. Next time we need to get back to basics and talk about some straightforward monsters I think, so look forward to next time when we’ll be talking vampires.