Sovereignty and superheroes

By Neal Curtis

Marks a major new contribution to the emerging field of comic studies and the growing literature on superheroes. Using a range of critical theorists the book examines superheroes as sovereigns, addressing amongst other things the complex treatment of law and violence, legitimacy and authority.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781784996383

Neal Curtis

Neal Curtis is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland. He is the author of War and Social Theory: World, Value, Identity (2006), Against Autonomy: Lyotard, Action and Judgement (2001) and editor of The Pictorial Turn (2010).

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Sovereignty and superheroes

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Sovereignty and superheroes

Neal Curtis

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Neal Curtis 2016

The right of Neal Curtis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 8504 8 hardback

First published 2016

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

For Noah and Amber, my secret powers

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: sovereignty and superheroes

1 Legitimacy and the Good

2 Defending freedom

3 Law and violence

4 Friend and enemy

5 Emergency and bare life

6 Symbolic authority and kinship

7 Sovereignty at the limit

Postscript

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This project emerged out of a desire to start up a course on comics in the Department of Cultural Studies and Critical Theory (now Culture, Film and Media) at the University of Nottingham. My colleague at the time, and the person to whom this project is therefore primarily indebted was Tracey Potts. Together we shared an interest in critical theory, popular culture and most importantly comics, and were looking for ways to introduce into the university environment forms of popular culture that were marginalised and yet so clearly deserved attention. Fortunately, once I embarked on this book project my comics shop at the time, Page 45 (which is not only the best shop in the UK, but the best shop in Sector 2814) directed me to a host of superhero stories that resonated with the theoretical readings around sovereignty that I was then studying. With the careful and expert guidance of Jonathan Rigby, Stephen Holland and Dominique Kidd my growing interest in superheroes became a book proposal and soon after that, thanks to the work of Tony Mason at Manchester University Press, it became a book contract.

With the help of others who slowly revealed themselves to be superhero readers – people like Chris Gardiner and Steven Sheil – I was able to navigate my way around the huge imaginative universes I was now committed to exploring. In the end, this was enabled by the award of an Arts & Humanities Research Council research fellowship, and so I am thankful to that institution for seeing the same value in superheroes and their stories that I saw. I also moved myself and my family to the other side of the world not too long after. I now live in Auckland, New Zealand. I must therefore thank my wife Amber and my son Noah for helping me continue this project while we tried to build a life and team up with new people on the other side of the planet. I should also thank my colleagues in Media, Film and Television at the University of Auckland for being incredibly supportive and for having to listen to me ‘banging on’ about superheroes for three years. I should also mention Stu and Sue Colson at Heroes for Sale who now keep me up to speed. A word of thanks must also go to my students who have helped me refine the comics course I now teach, but I would like to reserve the final thank you to all the creators involved in the ongoing development of superhero universes who use the genre to challenge prejudice and bigotry and offer us a brave and bold vision for how great we might become.

Introduction: sovereignty and superheroes

Stories of the super-powered beings we have come to call superheroes have now been written for over seventy-five years. In that time, vibrantly colourful tales of hope, courage and the search for justice have adorned the pages of innumerable comics that have filled countless shelves of news-stands and bookshops. Regularly derided and marginalised, these stories have nevertheless come to be one of the most dominant popular art forms. Supported by their ability to leap from the pages of comics into the cathode ray tube of the television and onto the silver screen of the cinema, a significant number of these characters are now household names. From T-shirts to pyjamas, colouring books to Lego, lunch boxes to duvet covers, superheroes are ubiquitous. However, this comfortable familiarity is said to hide an unpleasant secret. Despite the numerous characters and titles, and the variety of writers and artists that has developed these stories over the years, as well as the growing number of academic studies that take the comics seriously – such as Will Brooker’s Batman Unmasked (2005) and Hunting the Dark Knight (2012); Adilifu Nama’s Super Black (2011); Angela Ndalianis’s The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (2009); Matthew J. Costello’s Secret Identity Crisis (2009); Ben Saunders’s Do the Gods Wear Capes? (2011); or Jason Dittmer’s Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero (2013) – superheroes are still blighted by the accepted view they are either dumb conservatives that blindly support the status quo or anti-social vigilantes with little respect for democratic institutions; loners that get the job done by any means necessary and thereby satisfy our darkest fantasies for violent retribution and control.

Although there are stories that support such a claim, this is only a partial view. To address this I would like, first of all, to argue that we can arrive at a more rounded understanding of superheroes if we read them as meditations on the problematic concept of sovereignty. This offers a coherent framework with which to analyse a variety of themes that appear in superhero comics, not least the problems of law, order and violence. Secondly, studying superheroes in terms of sovereignty will enable us to see how these characters represent very complex and nuanced considerations of a range of other related issues, such as legitimacy, authority, kinship and community, the enemy and emergency powers, and that contrary to received opinion superhero comics regularly offer challenging and politically progressive treatments of them. Finally, I will argue that these progressive possibilities are rooted in a fundamental intuition presented in superhero comics regarding the contradictory nature of sovereignty. Essential to the grammar and syntax of superhero comics is the idea of a struggle between all-powerful defenders of the worlds we build and an array of all-consuming villains and monsters that threaten total annihilation. As neither of these opposing principles can ever be finally defeated, sovereignty is split between the forces of productive order and those of entropy. This never-ending struggle certainly makes Marvel and DC Comics plenty of money, but to reduce this problem to commercial exploitation seriously misses the point. Put another way, this contradictory sovereignty might also be seen in the problematic nature of a superhero’s powers. As a character like Superman has developed, he has become increasingly powerful only for the writers to find it necessary to introduce elements that diminish him in some way. Again, this might be understood in narrative terms as an attempt to generate moments of drama, but it is also a conceptual problem because untold power spells the end of everything. In the presence of the absolute, nothing can happen. Importantly, then, at the moment when a hero becomes all-powerful – a trait that has had a very long association with sovereignty – something nihilating and abyssal seems to ride alongside. This is, then, a problem that ripples out in concentric circles, unsettling a number of other seemingly stable concepts like the supposedly pacific nature of the law, the firm foundations that are said to underpin authority, or the easily definable enemy that threatens to destroy or at least corrupt the community or kinship structure the sovereign defends. Before moving on to these issues, however, it will be helpful to say a little more about how we ordinarily define both the superhero and the sovereign.

There have been numerous debates regarding definitions of what a superhero is or who qualifies as a superhero. The fact that a character such as The Phantom – the first costumed crime fighter, who premiered in 1936 – does not count is supposedly because he failed to sufficiently break the mould of the adventuring detective heroes that had gone before. However, were he to appear today in either the pages of a DC or Marvel title it is quite likely he would be welcomed in and unproblematically incorporated into their pantheons of superheroes. To understand this, it is possible to adapt Josef Witek’s (2009) criticism of attempts to define comics in general and argue that rather than any essential trait it is simply a matter of reading conventions or protocols. Just as Witek argues that reading something as a comic makes it a comic, it might be said that seeing someone as a superhero makes them a superhero. However, while there are characters that have gained the tag of superhero or super-villain simply because they exist in a superhero universe this is not entirely satisfying. In attempting a definition, the most widely accepted one is Peter Coogan’s (2006) argument that to be a superhero a character must have the following three attributes: powers; a sense of his or her mission; and they must outwardly display an identity.

Although these may not be sufficient to contain every character, they are certainly necessary. It would be hard to find a popular character that doesn’t have all three. Of course, there are major superheroes who don’t have super-powers as such. Batman and Iron Man, for example do not have powers like other heroes and yet their athleticism and powers of deduction in the case of Batman, or scientific genius in the case of Iron Man do make them super-human. So, even when contemporary innovations within the genre offer a very reflexive take on these principles and the overall concept of the superhero, powers, mission and identity remain crucial to the new character. For example, when Mark Waid created The Plutonian for his comic Irredeemable (Waid and Krause, 2009) these principles were carefully followed. However, while The Plutonian has a clearly identifiable costumed identity and has powers way beyond those of any normal man – in fact way beyond any state, as is shown in volume 1, when the United Nations (UN) is compelled to submit to him – the twist on the concept is that his mission switches from one of protection to destruction. Unlike Superman, he cannot deal with either the adulation or more importantly the criticism that follow his actions, and in a radical shift – the point where the story starts – he turns on those he used to protect and starts a campaign of global, mass killing.

The story of The Plutonian also immediately suggests how superheroes lend themselves to a consideration of sovereignty, the modern conception of which can be traced back to the work of Jean Bodin whose Les Six livres de la république (Six Books of the Commonwealth) first appeared in 1576. For many political commentators, it is Bodin’s thesis that remains essential for our understanding of the concept today. In this thesis, what Bodin called the ‘attributes (marques, nota)’ (1992: 46) of the sovereign included amongst other capacities and privileges the power to give laws to all and demand an oath of submission from all subjects (56); the right to wage war and make peace (59); to act as the final appeal in matters of justice (67); to have power over the right to grant pardons (73) and therefore power over life and death; and the right to reprisals (85). With superheroes being physically powerful enough to enforce submission to their will, it is clear to see how the concept of the superhero relates to the sovereign rights pertaining to war, peace, justice and especially reprisal. For Bodin, the sovereign (or the sovereign prince) is the ‘earthly image’ of God, meaning ‘there is nothing greater on earth’ (46). As far as superhero comics are concerned, the example of The Plutonian already shows us that this quasi-divine status is a staple within their pages. For Bodin, however, what is important is that the sovereign’s greatness isn’t simply a case of being the strongest or having a monopoly on violence in a given territory, as Weber defined twentieth-century sovereignty, it is also about having the legitimacy to possess that strength – something The Plutonian immediately loses once his ‘mission’ changes from protection to destruction.

As the image of God, the sovereign represents something transcendent and it is the sovereign’s relation to this transcendent element that provides his or her legitimacy. In the opening two chapters, I consider this issue of legitimacy and how it relates to the two most authoritative characters in their respective universes, Superman and Captain America. Within traditional theories of sovereignty, this moment of transcendence is supposed to signal something about the continuity and permanence of the monarch, while also reproducing the idea that the world has a hierarchical order and everyone has their place within that hierarchy. This element of transcendence is evident in both Superman and Captain America. Their inequivalence sets them at odds with the idea of equality, upon which the more recent democratic sovereignty rests and yet they also represent the moral worth of that system.¹ This apparent inconsistency is overcome if we take a different view of what their transcendence might mean. In the best stories involving these two characters, their transcendence doesn’t signify a fixed order but highlights something transitive and transformational. Such stories always contain their directing us to something beyond the current state of affairs, which means that they are not as conservative as they are regularly declared to be. In fact, I argue that their legitimacy stems from an interpretation of transcendence that actually demands movement and transformation. They don’t simply stand over and legitimise the world as it is, but call on us to change it. This is a reading that draws a lineage from contemporary storytelling all the way back to the first issue of Action Comics in 1938, when Superman was introduced as an agent of social change.

To return to Bodin for a moment, the problem in the sixteenth century was the need to articulate the essential nature of sovereignty in the light of different forms of government that might be said to be legitimate (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy). Under such forms of government, the capacity to decide, decree and ordain might be delegated to a specific class of representatives, but the sovereignty that gives legitimacy to such delegation, Bodin argued, is not something that can be transferred. Sovereignty is absolute, perpetual and without limit. It is ‘the highest power of command’ (1992: 1), meaning ‘persons who are sovereign must not be subject in any way to the commands of someone else and must be able to give the law to subjects’ (11). In a democracy, of course, this would mean that once the representatives have been elected, they do not need to return to the people for each law they enact, and, while superhero comics are imbued with the legitimacy assumed by democracy, there are numerous characters that are sovereign in a manner much more in keeping with monarchy. From the rulers of Atlantis, Marvel’s Prince Namor or DC’s Aquaman, to the king of Wakanda, T’Challa, these stories are packed full of sovereigns: Black Bolt is king of the Inhumans; Doctor Doom is the dictator who rules Latveria; Odin, the All-Father, rules Asgaard; the X-Men’s one-time leader, Storm is an African goddess, who has been queen of Wakanda; Mole Man is the ruler of Subterranea; Wonder Woman is an Amazonian princess; and, amongst many others, in one Flash story we are even introduced to Katmos, an alien ‘conqueror from 8 million BC’ (Broome and Infantino, 1959: 1).

The presence of monarchs, rulers and dictators in superhero comics also requires a qualification regarding the approach taken in this book and how it relates to other scholarly works on superheroes. The presence of so many rulers and their territories suggests that these comics can be read via a geo-political approach to sovereignty, and that superhero comics can help us think about our conception of space, place, community, nation and belonging and how these relate to conceptions of the law.² Amongst these geo-political studies is Matthew J. Costello’s excellent account of the development of some of Marvel’s major heroes alongside the changes that took place in US foreign policy from the Second World War to the war on terror. It also raises important questions about the use of force, the nature of authority and the police function of the sovereign. Costello’s project is also very close to another important geo-political study, namely Jason Dittmer’s (2013). In much the same way that Costello presents comics not simply as a reflection of policy but an integral part of a complex sense-making process, Dittmer argues that superhero comics need to be ‘recognized as a discourse through which the world becomes understandable’ (2; italics in original). He later makes the absolutely crucial observation that because ‘geo-political orders are themselves stories that we variously tell or to which we listen’ (124), the superhero comics that directly address issues of national identity and belonging automatically become part of that narrative fabric. To set these ‘fictions’ apart from the ‘real world’ is therefore quite artificial. A central aspect of my own study, therefore, is to show how rather than simply being read as allegorical representations of real world issues, the comics themselves make a direct contribution to the culture from which they arise, and that in a very important way they make their own contribution to how we might understand the contradiction of sovereignty.

Instead of a geo-political approach, then, this study takes a more philosophical view of sovereignty as a constellation of concepts beginning with studies of legitimacy in Chapters 1 and 2. It then moves on to the relationship between law and violence in Chapter 3; the friend and enemy distinction in Chapter 4; emergency powers in Chapter 5; symbolic authority and kinship in Chapter 6; and the problematic conception of the absolute in Chapter 7. Much like the approach to superhero comics taken by Adilifu Nama, who views ‘the meaning of any pop-cultural commodity, image, figure, or representation as not being fixed or automatically evident as it first appears’ (2011: 5), I offer a textual analysis to show how this constellation of concepts relating to sovereignty are essential for understanding the superhero mythos, and that rather than being unthinking celebrations of authority and order the comics regularly destabilise any simple or unqualified claim about the goodness of these sovereign prerogatives. Once these concepts are traced across a number of titles and historical periods, the idea that superheroes are simply fascist thugs who enforce the law according to their own brand of justice becomes far more difficult to maintain. For instance, when I first read Batman stories, it became clear that he wasn’t simply a justification of the need for extra-legal violence but often represented the ambiguous realm of the law’s own violence. That is, the stories seemed to be exploring the violence that is integral to the law itself. For Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, he would no doubt be the superhero that exemplifies how these stories ‘bypass the restraints of law’ (2003: 35), and yet it became clear that in a number of stories something much more challenging was taking place.

The charge of vigilantism is found in all manner of media discussions and remains prevalent in much of the scholarly writings. Lawrence and Jewett’s central concern, for example, is why ‘do we so often relish depictions of impotent democratic institutions that can be rescued only by extra-legal superheroes?’ (2002: 7–8), and yet while I would not claim that this question is unjustified – you only need to pick up certain superhero comics to find this rather crude approach to justice being celebrated – persisting with this reading completely fails to explain adequately the superhero’s relationship to the law, which only comes to light when seen against the backdrop of the sovereign’s own relationship to violence. Scholars such as Chris Gavaler have done us a great service by tracing the lineage of extra-legal violence back to the type of vigilantism celebrated in the racist literature associated with the Ku Klux Klan. He writes as follows: ‘The superhero, despite the character’s evolution into a champion of the oppressed, originated from an oppressive, racist impulse in American culture, and the formula codifies an ethics of vigilante extremism that still contradicts the superhero’s social mission’ (2013: 192). While this excellent article is an important reminder of where the politics of extra-legal violence leads, I propose that it is only by understanding the nature of intra-legal violence that we can fully understand the concept of the superhero and assess its contribution to a critical understanding of sovereignty.

To offer one brief example of how sovereignty is treated in superhero comics, Kingdom Come (Waid and Ross, 2008) is an elseworlds story (which means that it doesn’t take place in the regular, ongoing continuity of stories in the DC universe (DCU)), first published in 1996 and set two decades in the future on Earth 2 – the DCU is a multiverse of different parallel worlds. The story addresses a number of relevant issues and opens with Superman in self-imposed exile in the Fortress of Solitude, while a new generation of superheroes, or ‘metahumans’ as they are referred to, wreak havoc by fighting amongst themselves. Now under threat from their protectors, who are completely out of control, the human population is effectively helpless, although, as might be expected, a group led by Lex Luthor and known as the Mankind Liberation Front plans a fight back. The story is premised upon an interesting idea that Superman, the sovereign protector, was no longer deemed to be tough enough in the fight against non-sovereign violence and the forces of chaos, and that even greater violence was required in the face of a supposedly limitless threat. The events leading up to the beginning of the story include the death of The Joker at the hands of a new superhero called Magog, who is happy to go beyond the limits set by Superman and use indiscriminate and extreme violence in pursuit of ‘justice’. As a result, Superman exiles himself because the human population supported Magog’s actions rather than Superman’s attempt to challenge them. Seeing himself as having been abandoned, he withdraws from his duties as protector and concentrates on working on the farm to which he has now retired. The book then opens with Wonder Woman asking Superman to return after Magog’s methods, formerly cheered by a frightened public, have resulted in the death of a million people and the irradiation of the US ‘bread basket’ in pursuit of a small-time super-villain called Parasite. Immediately, this story presents us with the potentially dangerous consequences of an uncompromising pursuit of order in the face of what we see as the forces of chaos. Introducing a problem I will return to at length in Chapter 7, the malevolent threat from super-villains that seemingly required the exercise of power without limits creates a situation in which the exercise of that power brings about the devastation against which it was supposed to guard.

The story is also interwoven with biblical visions of apocalypse. Mark Waid has a preacher named Norman McCay recite passages from the Book of Revelations, while also becoming the earthly host for the Spectre who has come to judge those responsible for the coming conflagration. As the story develops, Superman, having been persuaded to return and having reunited the Justice League, proceeds to round up and detain all the metahumans he now deems to be rogue in a purpose-built prison called the Gulag. As might be expected, though, in order to advance his own cause Lex Luthor is determined to unleash the hate the Gulag contains in order to bring the war to a head. In this project he has also conscripted (by brainwashing him) the only superhero capable of resisting Superman, namely Captain Marvel and sets this ‘soldier of chaos’ (Waid and Ross, 2008: 164) on a mission to destroy the prison. With Wonder Woman in an especially belligerent mood, declaring that ‘final, decisive action’ (138) is needed from the Justice League, she attempts to take control in order to ‘force peace’ (171). Once again, the pursuit of order in the face of a growing threat seems to be precipitating only further destruction. In the background, while the metahumans now fight with total abandon in a battle that shows no sign of ending, the UN decides to counter the threat they pose by using tactical nuclear warheads inside America. To contain the metahuman war that ‘threatens to spread forth and engulf the world’ (165), nuclear weapons are seen to be ‘mankind’s last hope’ (165; italics in original). From the humans’ perspective it is the metahumans who have now become the absolute evil they must test themselves against to the point of nuclear holocaust.

When the first bomb is diverted and detonated high above the ground, by a redeemed Captain Marvel, the casualties are still massive, with nearly every single metahuman having been destroyed in the blast. In the end, this is a tragic vision of how our fear of chaos seemingly necessitates support for extreme action, which then requires even more extreme measures to deal with the chaos brought about by those actions, only for the entire cycle of defence against chaos and projected evil to end in near total destruction. As a result, enraged with the failings of everyone, Superman goes ‘berserk’, and sets off to take revenge on the UN. The only intervention comes from the preacher Norman McCay who intercedes by asking Superman to think about why people are so afraid of him. In so doing, he manages to literally talk Superman down who was making ready to rip the roof off the UN building. While this is a story in which Superman must confront the implications of his seemingly limitless power it is also a meditation on our projections of all consuming evil. From the humans who support the extreme Magog in their fight against villains, to Superman’s response to the threat of the ‘rogue’ metahumans, to the humans own response to the threat posed by each and every metahuman. At each point, the danger is escalated until it reaches all-consuming proportions, which in turn demand devastating actions in response. In his writings, Carl Schmitt, a philosopher of law who joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and was one of the foremost thinkers on the concept of sovereignty, regularly likened the sovereign to the New Testament figure of the restrainer or katechon (2006: 59), who is said to hold back the onset of apocalypse, but, as Heinrich Meier notes, in siding with the Nazis in the belief that they would restrain the onset of chaos Schmitt ended up being party to its precipitation. As Meier wryly points out, in such a situation ‘how can the restrainer be distinguished from the hastener’ (Meier, 1995: 82)? In the context of Kingdom Come this is a question that Waid now poignantly directs at both the humans seeking order and Superman who is the supposed protector of that order. In other words, this is far from a simplistic apology for the use of sovereign violence, and aside from the brilliance of its conception it is not exceptional within the genre.

As for the stories I have written about here, in exploring the superhero multiverse I have limited myself primarily to a study of the regular Marvel and DC universes. I have included a few other elseworld stories and have occasionally dipped into the Marvel Ultimate universe – an alternative continuity that started in 2000 in order to give new readers a jumping on point and to open up new possibilities for story and character development.³ Where they are helpful I have also used stories from DC imprints such as Vertigo, Titan, America’s Best and Wildstorm, or other publishers such as Boom!, but I have remained for the most part in regular DC and Marvel continuity. This decision was primarily based on the popularity and importance of these universes, but it was also an attempt to draw some boundaries around the work, which could also have taken off into other national imaginaries and considered the global nature of the superhero concept as well as local, culturally specific interpretations. I have also, therefore, limited myself to comics rather than film or television. Although this is a somewhat artificial division – Will Brooker (2005), for example, has made a strong case for arguing that Batman might not have survived if it hadn’t been for the rise in popularity the character received on the back of the 1960s television series, and in the twenty-first-century superheroes should more readily be thought of as transmedia entities given their spread across all kinds of cultural artefacts, objects and forms – cinematic superheroes do require separate treatment and, I believe, raise another set of questions that would have made the project practically impossible.

Even for studying just the comics, I should point out that this is not intended to be encyclopedic. The examples here only just begin to consider the very many stories that might have been relevant. I have notes on an array of issues and story arcs that are not included here, and trust the reader will be kind enough to understand why some events and characters might be missing. Having said that, any suggestions for good stories relevant to the topics discussed will always be gratefully received. If you would like to tell me about anything that I have missed, you can contact me on Twitter @nealcurtis. While I haven’t included all the stories I might have, I should say that the book does attempt to approach the relevant chapter topics through a number of different characters and stories. Although the first two chapters are devoted to two specific superheroes whose origins are essential to the argument, the remaining chapters broaden out to incorporate a variety of heroes and heroines. On some occasions the topic is best dealt with via a crossover event, or multi-title story that introduces a very wide range of characters. I have made every effort to guide the non-specialist reader through these very complex narratives.

As the field of comics studies continues to grow and gain greater legitimacy within those institutions that consecrate literary and artistic works, the cultural importance of superheroes can only continue to rise. The work of the many superhero scholars presented here already shows why these comics need to be treated seriously and I hope that in a small way this book contributes to that demand. Perhaps running against the grain of common sense, these comics are worlds in which violence reigns supreme, but they also offer us numerous ways to challenge and question the basis of that violence and the grounds that supposedly make it legitimate. This is how superheroes can truly help us today.

Notes

1 In Earth X, America ‘was no longer the