Who wants to be a Superhero?
Prepare for more JMS gushing, for the comic store owner who got me the Spiderman trades also threw Supreme Power in for good measure. Which is where Our Man Joe lets it rip with the politics and the paranoia and the darkness.
A part of the basic concept - the "what would our world realistically react to superheroes, and superheroes to the world?" part - owes something to Watchmen by Alan Moore. (Which post-Watchmen take on the superhero genre doesn't?) Moore's conclusion was that the superheroes would either be employed as tools for the government, be forced to retire, or work as vigilantes as hunted as the criminals they go up against. Or... but that would spoil everyone who hasn't read Watchmen yet. Anyway - Supreme Power has a similar premise, with the difference that the superheroes here are clear analalogues to the most famous stars of the DC universe - Superman, Batman, etc. Which makes the JMS variation so deliciously subversive. While he's at it, he also tackles that vexed conumdrum: how do you create sympathy for Superman in today's reader, when the guy is basically invulnerable and undefeatable, and the boyscout to Batman's messed-up antihero? Hint: the solution does not involve Lana Lang. Or Lex Luthor.
The opening scene is the iconic start of any variation of the Superman myth: an escape pod arrives, crashlands in the American heartland, is found by a kindly couple who immediately takes to the boy. (Well, the woman does at any rate.) And that's where things get nasty, and frighteningly plausible. Because the kindly couple isn't allowed to keep the kid. Before the night is out, the forces of the government have arrived and taken the alien toddler because naturally a meteor crash of that size didn't go unobserved. Since it's obvious the kid has invulnerable skin and great strength, the government decides he ought to be raised in a way that guarantees he's going to be useful later on. So he gets a name (Mark), a code-name (Hyperion), two agents assigned to play his devoted parents, and a Truman Show environment - a "Norman Rockwell childhood" under constant camera surveillance. Oh, and a daily propaganda program: even the fairy tales are about heroic Uncle Sam rescuing abducted princesses in nasty foreign countries.
As if all this isn't bad enough, the utter loneliness as Mark grows up is heartrendering. His "parents" do perform their role, but they never lose their fear of what he could do, and once they get the chance to be pulled out by faking their own death, they take it. The one day Mark gets together with other teenagers, as he demands to be in a normal school, is arranged by ordering the generals involved to volunteer their children, and the result is as awkward and as horrible as you can imagine. Looking for other meta-humans becomes a desperate quest, and the panels the first trade ends with make you wonder whether Mark won't arrive at the same conclusion about what needs to be done as Watchmen's Ozymandias did.
Next to this brilliant twist on the Superman myth, the thing I admire most about Supreme Power is that JMS, while busy reimagining archetypes, sees no reason to keep them all white just because they were in their decades-old origin. Making the Batman analogue black and his youthful trauma, the loss of his parents, a racist hate-crime has a different and deeper emotional resonance than the mugging-gone-wrong origin story of Batman has today. (Incidentally, Nighthawk reminded me as much of Moore's Rohrschach as he did of Batman.) The Flash equivalent ("The Blur") being discovered by agents of the non-FBI kind takes up another theme from Watchmen - superheroes being obvious candidates for sponsoring and product placement - but also has associations of the exploitation of black athletes. I'm not a comic book expert, so I might miss something, but I can't think of a another example that uses the superhero concept to explore racial tensions in today's world.
Lastly: while you can tell that JMS is no fan of Bush Senior (or Junior, if his posts are anything to go by), he's even-handed with his Presidents. Carter and Clinton don't behave any differently in regards to Mark/Hyperion than Reagan and Bush do. None of them however are caricatures the way Nixon is in Watchmen. (Otoh, Nixon... must be really hard to resist temptation there if you're writing in the early 80s.) (Unless you take Reagan, but I thought Moore's idea that Nixon, armed with superhero help, would have survived Watergate, changed the constitution and gotten himself reelected into infinity was more frightening.) And you can even see a bit of their pov - what does one do, after all, with a powerful alien whose potential for havoc can't be measured? Still, their solution emphasizes the John Le Carré interpretation of the world: no moral difference anymore as far any government, Western or Eastern, is concerned.
A part of the basic concept - the "what would our world realistically react to superheroes, and superheroes to the world?" part - owes something to Watchmen by Alan Moore. (Which post-Watchmen take on the superhero genre doesn't?) Moore's conclusion was that the superheroes would either be employed as tools for the government, be forced to retire, or work as vigilantes as hunted as the criminals they go up against. Or... but that would spoil everyone who hasn't read Watchmen yet. Anyway - Supreme Power has a similar premise, with the difference that the superheroes here are clear analalogues to the most famous stars of the DC universe - Superman, Batman, etc. Which makes the JMS variation so deliciously subversive. While he's at it, he also tackles that vexed conumdrum: how do you create sympathy for Superman in today's reader, when the guy is basically invulnerable and undefeatable, and the boyscout to Batman's messed-up antihero? Hint: the solution does not involve Lana Lang. Or Lex Luthor.
The opening scene is the iconic start of any variation of the Superman myth: an escape pod arrives, crashlands in the American heartland, is found by a kindly couple who immediately takes to the boy. (Well, the woman does at any rate.) And that's where things get nasty, and frighteningly plausible. Because the kindly couple isn't allowed to keep the kid. Before the night is out, the forces of the government have arrived and taken the alien toddler because naturally a meteor crash of that size didn't go unobserved. Since it's obvious the kid has invulnerable skin and great strength, the government decides he ought to be raised in a way that guarantees he's going to be useful later on. So he gets a name (Mark), a code-name (Hyperion), two agents assigned to play his devoted parents, and a Truman Show environment - a "Norman Rockwell childhood" under constant camera surveillance. Oh, and a daily propaganda program: even the fairy tales are about heroic Uncle Sam rescuing abducted princesses in nasty foreign countries.
As if all this isn't bad enough, the utter loneliness as Mark grows up is heartrendering. His "parents" do perform their role, but they never lose their fear of what he could do, and once they get the chance to be pulled out by faking their own death, they take it. The one day Mark gets together with other teenagers, as he demands to be in a normal school, is arranged by ordering the generals involved to volunteer their children, and the result is as awkward and as horrible as you can imagine. Looking for other meta-humans becomes a desperate quest, and the panels the first trade ends with make you wonder whether Mark won't arrive at the same conclusion about what needs to be done as Watchmen's Ozymandias did.
Next to this brilliant twist on the Superman myth, the thing I admire most about Supreme Power is that JMS, while busy reimagining archetypes, sees no reason to keep them all white just because they were in their decades-old origin. Making the Batman analogue black and his youthful trauma, the loss of his parents, a racist hate-crime has a different and deeper emotional resonance than the mugging-gone-wrong origin story of Batman has today. (Incidentally, Nighthawk reminded me as much of Moore's Rohrschach as he did of Batman.) The Flash equivalent ("The Blur") being discovered by agents of the non-FBI kind takes up another theme from Watchmen - superheroes being obvious candidates for sponsoring and product placement - but also has associations of the exploitation of black athletes. I'm not a comic book expert, so I might miss something, but I can't think of a another example that uses the superhero concept to explore racial tensions in today's world.
Lastly: while you can tell that JMS is no fan of Bush Senior (or Junior, if his posts are anything to go by), he's even-handed with his Presidents. Carter and Clinton don't behave any differently in regards to Mark/Hyperion than Reagan and Bush do. None of them however are caricatures the way Nixon is in Watchmen. (Otoh, Nixon... must be really hard to resist temptation there if you're writing in the early 80s.) (Unless you take Reagan, but I thought Moore's idea that Nixon, armed with superhero help, would have survived Watergate, changed the constitution and gotten himself reelected into infinity was more frightening.) And you can even see a bit of their pov - what does one do, after all, with a powerful alien whose potential for havoc can't be measured? Still, their solution emphasizes the John Le Carré interpretation of the world: no moral difference anymore as far any government, Western or Eastern, is concerned.