See Part 1 of this post for my examination of how comic books published in the 50s and 60s portrayed contemporary cultural and political values.
In this second part I provide examples of how these decades have been portrayed in comic books published during later years.
Generation gap
It didn’t take long for the orderly and authoritarian world of the late 50s and mid 60s depicted in Leave it to Beaver and Happy Days to begin falling apart. By 1968, young people around the country and the globe were waging a worldwide rebellion against political and social repression and the cultural status quo. By the time the Bronze Age of comic books began in 1970, less than ten years after the Fantastic Four’s race to beat the Commies into space had ushered in a superhero comics Renaissance, Marvel Comics was already having second thoughts about the ideals its characters had so recently championed.
With the Marvel Comics superhero revival in full swing, Stan Lee decided to bring Captain America back again in 1964, despite the failed attempt 10 years earlier when the company was going by the name Atlas (see the “Battling super powers” section in Part 1). In The Avengers #4, written by Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby, Iron Man, Thor, Giant-Man and the Wasp recover Cap’s body from arctic waters, discovering that he has been frozen in suspended animation since the end of World War II. While readers were happy to have the Sentinel of Liberty back, his supposed twenty years on ice didn’t explain the “Commie Smasher” incarnation that had briefly returned to comics in 1954.
Panel from The Avengers#4. Written by Stan Lee and Drawn by Jack Kirby. Copyright Marvel Comics.
Panels from Captain America #155. Written by Steve Englehart and drawn by Sal Buscema. Copyright Marvel Comics.
Cut to 1972 and Captain America #153, where the title character’s African-American superhero partner, the Falcon, encounters an ultra-right wing, racist Cap, mercilessly beating residents of Harlem. Over the course of four issues, writer Steve Englehart and artist Sal Buscema reveal that this is the McCarthy-era Cap, who had been chosen by the U.S. government to adopt both the civilian and costumed identities of his presumed dead predecessor. Unfortunately, this new test subject was slowly driven insane by a flawed version of the super soldier serum that had turned Steve Rogers into the original Captain America. Faced with this second Cap’s increasingly paranoid and violent behavior, the government put him in suspended animation until a cure for his deteriorating mental condition could be found. Years later, a technician angered by President Nixon’s recent trip to communist China revived the 1950s Cap, who set out to take back his title from the person he assumed was his own, left-leaning replacement.
This story line essentially denounced as madness what had once been the commonly accepted anti-Communist ideology in comics (and the country). It also treated 1950s racism, sexism and nationalism with the same contempt EC Comics had in Shock SuspenStories (see Part 1, “Mad men”). To leave no doubt as to which era held the moral high ground, Englehart has the real Captain America of the 1970s defeat his 1950s impostor in a dramatic battle on the grounds of Miami’s Torch of Friendship monument. (The 1950s Captain America recently returned to comics, causing quite a bit of controversy last year when he seemingly associated himself with the Tea Party. See the “Tea for two” section of my previous post on censorship.)
Panel detail from Fantastic Four #136. Written by Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas and drawn by John Buscema. Copyright Marvel Comics.
The following year, Marvel published a more lighthearted but no less critical look back at the post-war past in issues 136-137 of The Fantastic Four (cover dated July-August 1973). In part one of the story, “Rock Around the Cosmos,” written by Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas and drawn by John Buscema, the FF enter an alternate reality created from one man’s nostalgic recollections of the 1950s. In this pocket dimension, The Nation, an ultra-authoritarian and conservative regime, is run by the Patriots, whose mission is to protect society from the chaotic influence of a band of juvenile delinquents. Known as the Wild Ones, these young rebels ride around on flying motorcycles wreaking havoc. In a parody of the witch hunts carried out by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Fifties, “Protectors of the Nation” Senator McHammer (representing Joseph McCarthy) and Joe Kone (standing in for Roy Cohn) interrogate Mr. Fantastic and the Thing to ensure their loyalty.
Fantastic Four #137. Cover art by John Buscema. Copyright Marvel Comics.
In part two of the story, “Rumble on Planet 3,” the Fantastic Four combat Warhead, a physical manifestation of Cold War nuclear anxieties in the form of a giant gorilla with a laser beam-shooting, Sputnik-like satellite for a head. The Patriots and the Wild Ones temporarily put aside their differences to help the FF force this B-movie monster back into the drive-in theater screen from which it had broken free. Finally, a group of African-Americans, who until then had been treated as second-class citizens known as “the Invisibles,” confront the leaders of the Nation to announce that they are taking their rightful place as fully empowered members of society. By forcing social change that conflicts with the consensus reality, the Invisibles cause this faux-Fifties universe to dissolve. When the Fantastic Four find themselves back in the “real” world, the Thing seems far less certain than Captain America did about which decade he prefers, complaining to the Human Torch about 1970s problems like “riots, pollution and Women’s Lib.”
Comic books since then largely maintain the position that although the optimism and innovation of the Fifties and early Sixties contributed much to our nation’s progress, our society is better off having left behind many of this period’s restrictive, repressive and discriminatory cultural attitudes. Recent works during the current Modern Age of comics, which began in the mid-1980s, have continued to cast a critical eye on nostalgic misperceptions of these still idealized “happy days.”
Panel from The Golden Age written by James Robinson and drawn by Paul Smith. Copyright DC Comics.
Super hindsight
Despite it’s title, the four-issue 1993 DC Comics miniseries The Golden Age is set entirely during the Atomic Age of comics (see Part 1). Taking place from 1946-1950 (with an epilogue in 1955) this “imaginary” story by writer James Robinson and artist Paul Smith depicts what might have happened to comics’ very first superhero group, the Justice Society of America, after its members (supposedly) hung up their capes at the close of WWII. Ted Knight, who once used the gravity rod he invented to soar through the night skies as Starman, suffers a deep depression over the knowledge that his scientific theories were used to develop the atomic bomb. Radio station owner Alan Scott, who formerly wielded limitless mystic power as the Green Lantern, feels helpless against the House Un-American Activities Committee’s efforts to ruin his employees’ careers over their past political affiliations. Retired masked hero and Nazi hunter Mr. America, now a U.S. Senator, urges his past colleagues to publicly reveal their secret identities and swear an oath of loyalty to the government. With its open condemnation of both McCarthyism and the Nuclear Age, like the other modern examples that follow, no company, except perhaps EC Comics, would even have considered publishing this story during the actual period in which it is set.
Darwyn Cooke‘s 2004 six-issue miniseries, DC: The New Frontier, presented another reimagined superhero history. Spanning comics’ Golden, Atomic and Silver Ages from 1945 to 1960, it was inspired by John F. Kennedy’s presidential acceptance speech. The snappy writing and retro art style in this revisionist tale of superheroes during the Cold War perfectly captures the idealism that exemplified post-WWII America. At the same time, like The Golden Age, The New Frontier also examines the darker aspects of this period.
In this version of DC Comics history, Superman and Wonder Woman are agents of U.S. foreign policy. Making clandestine trips into Vietnam as America’s involvement there escalates, Wonder Woman has to rescue an air crew and their downed plane from Cambodia, to make sure the Pentagon’s illegal incursions there remain a secret. During this trip, she discovers a jungle camp where women are being kept as sexual slaves by the Viet Cong, and returns to free them and let them take their revenge on their former captors (read this entire scene here). Later, when she attempts to share her concerns about the Vietnam conflict publicly, the Amazon princess is silenced and then patronizingly dismissed by President Eisenhower.
Panel from DC: The New Frontier by Darwyn Cooke. Copyright DC Comics.
Page from DC: The New Frontier Volume 2, bt Darwyn Cooke. Copyright DC Comics.
Another subplot of the story involves one man’s quest for justice after his family is murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. Becoming a hooded, sledgehammer-wielding vigilante known as John Henry, he embarks on a mission of violent retribution across Tennessee, crippling dozens of Klansmen and killing two before racist mobs finally bring him down. In a eulogy delivered on national television, a newscaster reminiscent of Edward R. Murrow points out the hypocrisy of a nation that proclaims itself the defender of democracy around the globe while its own citizens are still denied basic human rights (read the entire John Henry saga here).
The Kennedy administration and racism were also focal points of Wildstorm Productions’ 2006 eight-issue miniseries, The American Way, written by John Ridley and drawn by Georges Jeanty. Taking place during the Silver Age years 1961-62, it’s the story of Wes Chatham, an out of work ad man who’s offered a job, by former college roommate Robert Kennedy, to head the public relations department for the government’s superhero agency, the Civil Defense Corps. After learning that some of the CDC members’ abilities are no more than special effects, and that all of the team’s major battles against alien invaders and communist super villains are actually staged propaganda pieces, Wes is determined to make the CDC a positive force for social change.
Wes recruits the first African-American member of the CDC, the militant Jason Fisher, with the understanding that his race would initially remain concealed until he gained enough public approval and trust. Granted super strength and physical invulnerability by government scientists, Fisher retains the ability to feel pain (making him a metaphor for the centuries-long perseverence of blacks through slavery, lynchings and Jim Crow laws). Dressed in a full spacesuit and helmet and equipped with a jet pack, as the New American he quickly gains the admiration of both the public and his fellow CDC members, until his tinted visor is shattered during a televised battle and his race is instantly revealed to the world. This causes a schism between the main body of the CDC and its subgroup, the Southern Defense Corps, that eventually escalates into a super civil war, ending in a fiery battle to the death between Jason and SDC member Southern Cross (a racist version of the Fantastic Four’s Human Torch).
Panels from The American Way #6. Written by John Ridley and drawn by Georges Jeanty. Copyright John Ridley.
In the course of all this, Jason also tracks down a psychopathic super villain, Hellbent, who has murdered a busload of Freedom Riders, including Jason’s brother (Hellbent was deliberately released from prison by the government to provide a spectacular battle to entertain the masses and restore their faith in the CDC). When Jason finally captures Hellbent and beats him into submission, the killer explains that his higher purpose has merely been to expose the American people to their own hypocrisy and wake them up from their blind obedience to authority.
That is essentially the same function served by series like The Golden Age, DC: The New Frontier and The American Way. Without negating the scientific achievements or cultural progress of the 1950s-60s, they remind us that our nation also has a long-established history of both institutions and individuals using technology and political power without regard for the consequences—whether here at home or throughout the rest of the world. For all our deserved pride in our accomplishments as a nation and a people, this dark legacy is something we should never forget. Because if you believe your country has done no wrong, it’s easy to believe it can do no wrong.
