Sylvie

I’ve never taught a course on or with – you’re right that the price could be an issue – but I may use some comics for a unit or two in future. In writing this post, I did come across this blog from a course called Comic Book Politics taught by Marc Lynch at Williams College. The blog is on hiatus now (He has a busy blog on Middle Eastern affairs) but the course looks to have been great.

Captain America is an odd case. I’m not as good with Marvel details as DC – but I think he only gets interesting as a character when they thaw him out of the ice. Captain America in WW2 is just a ploddingly literal wartime hero. He’s strong, he’s named after the country he fights for, he punches people. Ho hum. When he’s reborn in later years, as you say, you can have all these conflicts about his vision of America and the America he finds himself in. So, unlike Superman, it’s the anachronism that makes the character work. Now, why am I cool with making Captain America confront his own anachronism, but I have no interest in seeing Superman or James Bond or Tintin have to do the same? The root reason is probably that, unlike the others, I don’t like Captain America all that much. So I don’t mind seeing him suffer.

Chris: Knew I could count on you for the backstory to the Kryptonian S. Even if it doesn’t really explain things. (Re: Byrne’s two fish, you can also see the S-shield as a stylized Yin-Yang symbol – I wonder if anybody’s ever done anything with that.)

And yeah, you should like the De Haven novel, though I should warn you that Clark’s rail-riding isn’t a big part of the book, it’s just a minor detail that jumped out at me. The Great American Dustbowl-Rambling Superman vs. the Goldbugs and the Quest for the Big Rock Kryptonite Mountain Tale remains yet to be written…

Now, you could argue this kind of superhero ‘revisionism’ in general is what makes Moore’s portraits and politics “screwy”–but, when you look at his wider writings, it could just be that he’s intrigued with the question of how to fight evil without doing/becoming evil. A question the fire-bombing, atomic-bomb-twice-dropping New Deal generation has surely been pondering, not to mention every subsequent American generation in political power that finds that its foreign policy is a whole lot more indebted to Hobbes than most of the rest of the world is comfortable with. (Surely my own caricature of post-1930s U.S. foreign policy and the New Deal generation, but that’s in part my point: there are complexities behind caricatures that sometimes it takes caricatures to help expose.)

Last things first: Ralph, that does interest me quite a bit, mostly because I really don’t know much about Stetson Kennedy, or what people tend to think about him these days (if they think about him at all). From Freakonomics, the Woody Guthrie song, and a dim memory of having heard the Klan story ages ago, I had the idea he is a revered figure. From a little Googling from this post I got a sense that he’s a largely debunked and forgotten self-promoter. Does the truth lie, as Grandpa Simpson sagely put it, somewhere in between? Is there some reason he had to be left out of the Reporting Civil Rights volumes? Is it just that white Southern civil rights heroes are not in style?

Simon / Constructivist: I loved Kavalier & Clay (big surprise) and talked about Superman’s Jewish side in my earlier Superman post. I looked over Wright’s Comic Book Nation while writing this post. It’s a good reference but unremarkable – I had a lot more aha! moments with Jones’ Men of Tomorrow.

I liked the “Apollo + Midnighter are lovers” angle in the early Warren Ellis issues of Authority. It was done with a light touch and seemed like the obvious next place to take the Superman/Batman archetypes. But I was pretty dismayed by where the later writers took it. Once their plotlines became all about them being gay and other people’s negative reaction to it, it seemed exploitative and kinda juvenile (in a comic book? go figure) I recognize that it was the villains (the evil replacement Authority) who were homophobic, but the cool thing about the earlier issues was that the earth’s most powerful heroes were gay, happy together, and it was no big deal. Turning it all into a hyper-violent after-school special about homophobia was a big step backwards, I think.

I haven’t read 1602 but I have read (and taught with) Deloria’s Playing Indian, so I guess I’ll have to check 1602 out now.

On Superman/Batman, what do you make of The Authority‘s recasting them a couple, contra Moore?

On Captain America, Gaiman’s 1602 recasts him in ways reminiscent of Deloria’s Playing Indian. Both definitely worth a read!