Defenders of the Status Quo
The villain’s time machine has run amok. Dinosaurs are rampaging in downtown Dallas. Soldiers in blue and gray are firing muskets at each other in a crowded amusement park. A futuristic man with a personal jetpack on his back caused a passenger jet to dangerously swerve on its final approach. The heroes fight through a mass of anticipated minions and unexpected obstacles. They finally reach the center of the chaos. With a well-placed energy blast, they disintegrate the troublesome time machine. “Whew!” the team’s jokester sighs with relief. “Everything’s back the way it was.”
It’s a pretty standard scenario -- one that regular comic book readers have encountered again and again. A future dystopia is prevented. A rogue timeline is erased. An evil spell is undone. The heroes have accomplished their goal. They’re restored the status quo, putting the world back the way it was.
Several weeks ago, I wrote about the comic book principle of relatability -- the idea that comic book publishers need to keep their fictional worlds similar to our own so that the audience can relate to it. I agree that this principle is important -- though, of course, not universally so -- but it comes with an unintended consequence. Superheroes, for better or worse, have become defenders of the status quo. Their primary purpose is to keep things the same, to put things back the way they were.
It’s a significant shortcoming, though it’s more apparent in the big picture than it is in any individual story. By placing the emphasis on preserving the status quo, superheroes have essentially -- if unintentionally -- embraced a conservative mindset. I don’t mean to use that term in a purely political sense, though I recognize it has those connotations. But they have become the advocates for keeping things the same and, by default, rejected the idea of making the world a better place.
As I said, it’s an unintended consequence of trying to maintain a resemblance between the fictional world and the real one. If a superhero used his or her powers to change the world, that world would quickly deviate from our own.
Some superheroes have tried to change the world for the better. J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars, also mentioned in the earlier article, is a good example. One woman used her powers to turn Israel into a verdant paradise, with the idea that people wouldn’t fight over land if more of it was habitable. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is another example. Christopher Reeve’s Man of Steel tried to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Yet, even in trying to change the world, these stories undercut the promise of making the world a better place. They demonstrated that trying to change the world is difficult, dangerous, occasionally foolhardy and even ineffectual. That’s true, of course. It’s not easy to change the world and some attempts are bound to backfire. Yet they -- perhaps unintentionally -- reinforce the idea that superheroes are better off defending the status quo than they are making the world a better place.
That’s not to say that there aren’t good examples of superheroes being a force for good. Paul Dini and Alex Ross’s oversized specials, Superman: Peace on Earth, Batman: War on Crime, Shazam: Power of Hope and Wonder Woman: Spirit of Truth, are wonderful stories that depict the kind of idealism that should be inherent in superheroes. Unfortunately, such stories are few and far between. Dini and Ross’s collaboration stands out because it’s so rare.
Two stories illustrate the defense of the status quo particularly well. The first is Geoff Johns’ debut arc on Flash from the year 2000, "Wonderland." On the one hand, it’s a very good example of a writer escaping the constrictions of deconstructed storytelling that was in vogue around that time. Johns essentially wrote 2 3-issue stories and disguised them up as a ready-for-trade 6-issue arc. That allowed him to move the story along at a much quicker pace, which is especially important for a speed-based character like the Flash. On the other hand, it’s yet one more example of a hero trying to get back to the same old status quo. Wally West is simply trying to escape this mirror world and get back to his own. Like the heroes in my opening, he sighs a big relief when he returns to the world he knows.
The second story is also by Geoff Johns and it also stars the Flash. It’s the crossover, "Flashpoint," which led into DC’s current fictional universe. Once again, the Flash is stuck in another world and, once again, he wants to get back to his own (though this time, it's Barry Allen, not Wally West, as The Baron politely pointed out). Yet, in "Flashpoint," the Flash demonstrates a greater awareness of his situation. He suggests that it might be possible to not only get back to his own world, but to make the world he returns to a different and better place. "Flashpoint" didn’t hold together as a story as well as "Wonderland" -- it got bogged down with too many seemingly unrelated sub-plots -- but I applauded the way that Barry Allen showed ambition.
I’m almost sorry to bring "Flashpoint" up as an example since it led into DC’s New 52 and fans are prone to argue about whether or not that was actually an improvement. I won’t argue that the Flash succeeded in making his fictional world a better place. But I did appreciate that Barry Allen as the protagonist and Geoff Johns as the writer unshackled their imaginations from the preservation of the status quo.
Superheroes have tremendous powers. They also have laudable awareness of right and wrong -- that’s why they became heroes and not villains. It would be nice to see a few superheroes make use of their superior consciences and imaginations to make the world a better place. Of course, they can’t change the world too much or they run into the problems I noted in the earlier column. Yet an imaginative writer can show that his hero isn’t content with the status quo.
Replies
Small quibble - wasn't it Barry Allen that was the Flash in Flashpoint?
D'oh! You're right. I've corrected the article (and given you the credit).
The Baron said:
The problem in using their powers to change the world is that powers are very simple, the world isn't. In one episode of I Dream of Jeanie Major Nelson got Jeanie's powers and mentioned that he could make a desert and ocean, to which she responded that if he did that he might drain an ocean. Superman could grab all of the guns in the world and next week there'd be new guns to replace them. As Douglas Adams put it in Hitch Hiker's Guide "People are a problem."
There's also the matter of "the Devil you know"--the heroes know about the problems of the reality they're used to, but have no idea what new, possibly worse, problems that might be unleashed by altering that reality. Those darn butterfly effects can be brutal!
Still, that doesn't mean that superheroes shouldn't try to think bigger. Wonder Woman often does -- remember the Wonder Woman Foundation, and she's been involved with other charity and social change efforts, as well. We've seen Batman work like that as well, with Bruce Wayne funding everything from affordable housing to better rehabilitation programs for convicts. But these things all tend to be sidelines from their work as superheroes, which can essentially be broken down as either protectors or vigilantes.
As protectors, superheroes protect the innocent from encroaching dangers -- a poisoned reservoir, an erupting volcano, an alien invasion, As vigilantes, they work to catch and punish (or arrange for the punishment of) the guilty. Neither of these roles creates a big-picture change in the world -- though who knows what good an average person is able to do because when her family home was saved from a tornado when she was 9, and so gets to continue to excel at her studies without disruption, and go on to do diabetes research, or become a police negotiator, or do anything, really. Yes, that is the status quo -- her life did not change so much as carry on unimpeded. But it affects, and changes, the big picture nonetheless.
Of course, the very existence of super-human beings would change the world in unpredictable ways, even if they didn't actively try to change it. There's no way that a world in which super-humans began to appear in 1938 (Starting with Superman, of course!) would remotely resemble our world by 2014, and that's not even factoring in the existence of mythological beings (Amazons, Aesir) or frequent extraterrestrial visitations (It's my belief that if the existence of alien life was demonstrably proven and came to be widely believed in, there would be a fundamental shift in human society like nothing we've ever seen.).
Wow, this is a topic with much mileage if we were minded.
I can see that the mode of ongoing stories means that superheroes are often in the position where they have to defend the status quo. Morrison did several storylines in Doom Patrol where the title team could be viewed as the villains, setting back the antogonists' attampts to make the world more wonderful and fun.
It's definitely a tension in the genre. People mention Miracle Man in these conversations, as someone who profoundly changes the world, and the fun of reading is to see the rules of our world being changed in front of our eyes. However, the early Superman comics do more or less the same thing, so that impulse was integral to superhero comics since the beginning. The fun of those comics is in seeing Superman strike out on behalf of sense and compassion, and against greed and thuggery in a way that wasn't to be seen in the real world. But the 'status quo' eventually set in, once corporate DC started paying attention to the messages he was sending out.
There's lots to talk about there. However I'm more interested in how the deep messages of modern superhero comics are somehow profoundly conservative. Reactionary even.
I'm reading Adventure Comics from 2009 at the moment. We see Conner Kent retreating to Smallville to live on the Kent farm to figure out what kind of man he wants to be, or could be. (This is after his resurrection in Legion of Three Worlds.)
Whilst pondering whether he has more of the personality and moral compass of Superman or of Lex Luthor, (both of whose DNA was used to produce him) he gets the chance to rescue a girl who's fallen into a river. For the duration of that girl's participation in this story, her body is slavvered over by our supposed hero. Although he is making lists throughout these early issues comparing his behaviour to Kal-El or Luthor, it never occurs to him to consider which one would look at a girl and see only an object and a means to satisfy his needs of the moment, and which one would see a person who might be in need in of help. As readers, we can see the girl has a lot going on, and plenty of life-problems, but Conner doesn't see beyond her supple teenage form!
Our society does objectify women at every turn, and in that sense, this story reinforces that. This comic supports and perpetuates that unfair status quo, and gets story mileage from it. A classic case of privilaging the male gaze. It's ironic that Conner is assessing his own behaviour as being either good or bad, while not seeing the simple point that treating a person as an object, there for his possible gratification, comes down on the non-heroic side. This really highlights the deeply conservative sexual politics on display here.
Later in the same issue we are introduced to the Legion of Superheroes as set up at the end of Legion of Three Worlds.
Here they are.
In issue three they are introduced as 'representing diversity, unity and tolerance'.
Again, the text is completely blind to how it is failing miserably even in the terms of it's own narrative. Look at the picture above again. There is no attempt to to make this team inclusive or representative of any possible readers except white people. Yes, there are green and blue folk there, but I doubt there are many green and blue folk reading DC comics. The alien Dawnstar could be said to represent Native Americans perhaps, but Dawnstar's representation in our modern age, has had it's own problems. (The Baron has already drawn our attention to 'Princess Bigboobs Cameltoe' during his JSA readthrough.) Certainly neither the readers nor the creators need consider how the experiences of Native American women might be in any way different to their own, or how a degree of sensitivity might be in order. It's a matter of white male privilege again, that we don't have to consider how Native American women have some of the highest incidences of sexual violence perpetuated on them as a group. In this context, it's unfortunate that Dawnstar is hypersexualised even for a female character in a superhero comic.
The status quo of the world we live in very much suits (privileges) white males, and comics like these are blind to this fact. They not only refuse to question it, or discuss it, but their 'deep structure' seems to argue that rather than the unfairnesses built into society being a problem, it is something to be celebrated, perpetuated and profited from.
I like to think Geoff Johns' work is especially useful to look at critically, because his approach was entirely vindicated by DC Comics in how they rewarded him professionally and put him at the centre of their superhero line, and in how his work was largely lapped up unquestioningly by the fans. We are seeing the core values of DC and a large section of their fanbase being promulgated in his comics, as exemplified above.
My point here is that Johns' work is especially representative of how conservative modern superhero comics are at their core. But then, superhero comics are an artform where producing a book starring a muslim female with a normal body is seen as a revolutionary act that makes headlines.
I don't know, I'm a white male and I've never particularly felt privileged. Unless you call gettting up at five and being out of he house 10 hours a day working privileged. I think I might have had advantages at some points in my life, but I've taken a few hits too. My early education was all but thrown away during the bussing era because a school needed another white person to balance out the ratio. I went from going to a bad school 20 minutes away from the house to a worse school an hour away from the house. So taken as a whole privilege has never really worked for me.
I don't see superheroes as protecting the status quo as much as I see them protecting the field upon which the status quo rest. For the nature of man to change man himself must survive and given the number of times the species had to have been saved I see that as someone like Superman's primary job. His very existence and the way he lives is an object lesson. He's a man who has power to make himself absolute ruler but he doesn't. Having that power and not abusing it is one of the great things about the character. He could impose peace but that doesn't work over the long term. If Superman took on peace in the middle east he'd fail. He'd have to be moving 24/7 and as fast as he broke up one fight there'd be another and if he kept at it they'd stop hating each other only long enough to hate him. Short of sinking the middle east into the Mediterranean and dispersing the various ethic groups to different planets there's no way he could ever do it.
As I've said before the problem with looking at the big picture is that you miss the people being crushed by the frame. I'd rather have superheroes help after natural disasters and stop supervillains than try to fix life itself. Just keep the world safe so that I have a world to live on, the rest of my life is up to me and the ultimate direction of humanity toward heaven or hell is up to humanity.