The date of July the 4th means a great many things and has significance to a large number of people. Today it has inspired some thoughts and a blog post from a friend about a couple of the biggest icons in comic history, and their relevance today.
Truth Justice Liberty Hope Relevance is an interesting read, talking about DC's Superman and Marvel's Captain America and their place in the world today. Reading it, I knew immediately that I would have something to say in return because it feels like a puzzle piece, just one piece of a larger conversation that has been ongoing between myself a friends for a very long time.
I'll start by admitting a personal bias right off. I've been an avid supporter of Marvel just about my whole life and my attempts to get into the DC universe have generally been met with a variety of less than stellar responses. I'm going to do my best to put that bias aside however, while at the same time I'll also be trying to look at this from the view point of someone who hasn't grown up immersed in comic culture.
Captain America & Superman...are they relevant in today's cynical society or has the shine worn off these icons of "good"? This is the essential premise of the question
Darcrider asks.
As he says, each of these characters is held up as an image to embody what is the "best" in the United States of America, living symbols of truth, justice and the American Dream. Each filled to the brim with happy propaganda and somewhat dated in their adherence to "old fashioned" values that sometimes seem to have no place in the world today. With various levels of success, they continue to front large franchises as the average public buys movie tickets, plastic toys and logo-ed t-shirts, so you would think that answers the relevancy question in itself but I think it's more complicated than that.
Superman feels like he's always been around and, unless you were born before 1938, that's pretty much true. Everyone knows his origin; the last survivor of a dead alien world, raised without knowledge of his birth by a simple Kansas family until his teens when are the powers given to him by our yellow sun show him just how different he really is. He is the eternal outsider fighting for a world not his own and saving us from ourselves and outside forces, doing it because it's the "right" thing to do and also in the hopes of finding acceptance with people who would supposedly just fear him otherwise. Clark Kent, the name he was first raised under, becomes his secret identity to hide who really is.
Captain America came into the comic scene just 3 years behind his DC compatriot, all bright and shiny in his very obvious red, white and blue finery. He was created to instill patriotism and fight fear in a populace gone from Depression to war in a blink of an eye. A symbol of good, of strength and justice and all that people should strive for, he doesn't actually exist. Steve Rogers is a man who grew up rough in Brooklyn, New York during the Great Depression, the son of Irish immigrants. Sickly and frail for most of his young life, he still wanted to make a difference and gets his chance thanks to an experimental serum. That serum and the Army's propaganda machine, turn him into Captain America.
In a way, for all their similarities, these two icons are almost polar opposites.
I can remember a time when I thought Captain America was dull but that had more to do with perceiving him as an overly patriotic symbol of the great US of A rather than for his ideals. When I came to realize that he was more than the flag he wore, that's actually when I began to find him interesting. The average person doesn't know the origin of Cap as well as they do Supes nor do they know his story, the layers of his personality and why he stands for what he does. With Superman, it's very much what it says on the package for most people. I feel he loses relevance more in his lack of surprises than in his shining morals.
DC likes to write Archetypes, Marvel likes to write characters. Darcrider quotes a comedy story of Lex Luthor verbally taking Superman down a peg or two and, while the story itself is meant to be a jab at Marvel in general, I actually feel that it makes my point for me in a lot of ways.
“…Your job is to be an inspiration for people! Someone they can look
up to! Someone they can aspire to be like! In steadfastness, in
character, in ideals! And what did Marvel offer? They said, ‘Don’t
worry! You don’t have to aspire to anyone in our books. You just have to
relate to them.’ And now we have an entire culture that thinks that who
they are is just fine and how dare anyone suggest that they can improve
themselves? Why aspire to be Superman, when it’s so much easier to
relate to Spider-man? No one wants to look up to you Superman; they
don’t want to strain their necks. Instead, they look straight ahead at
the compromised heroes in front of them and say, ‘That’ll do just
fine’…”
Do we not want to strain our necks or is it that people don't want to look directly into the sun? It's unattainable, it's an impossible dream and hazardous as well. Superman has often been referred to as a Sun God for a reason.
The Moon is just as big a dream, just as high a mark to strive for but it's not going to burn you while you dream and plan and it's grounded in some real possibility. Ground a hero in something people can relate to and they feel more able to attain the same lofty heights that hero stands for. Captain America is a symbol of good but it's an attainable good. When he holds people to account for their actions, he does the same for everyone, including himself, including governments.
I don't think it's their ideals that take these characters out of relevance or makes them dull, I think it's their treatment and the treatment of their stories. Captain America holds so much more humanity and more surprises for people right now, so he draws people to want to find out more. DC needs to find the humanity in Superman, which you can see they kind of TRIED to do in the recent
Man of Steel film, but they went about it in the wrong way. And they need to stop telling the same story over and over again!
One of the few DC writers I really love is Grant Morrison, who has an amazing ability to find the interesting and the relatable in the most ridiculous of characters. (He managed to legitimized
Bat-Mite! I'm still stunned) In his book
Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human there is a quote from the writer that seems quite perfect here:
“We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.”
(You notice the book title talks about Superman teaching the meaning of being human? Think on that.)
Being "good" or a "hero" doesn't make a character irrelevant no matter how cynical our society gets because the fact we keep making comics and turning to comic book characters for our escape shows just how much we need them, how much they mean to us in the ideals they represent. What causes problems is when we stop looking for new stories to tell and ways to MAKE our heroes continue to grab our hearts, minds and dreams and make us strive to be more in-spite of ourselves.
Btw, Happy Birthday, Steve Rogers. :)
