Can Superheroes Achieve "Big Picture" Changes?
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you.
There’s a scene in the fifth episode of the show Invincible in which Mark, the titular superhero, asks his father Nolan (aka Omni-Man) about whether he should help local super-criminal Titan take down Machine-Head, the [machine] head of an organized crime ring.
Nolan’s answer? No. It’s a waste of time to help the common man with common problems. Titan is a black man living a life of urban poverty, and he works as the muscle for the criminal organization to make ends meet for his family, including his young daughter. But the needs of the disenfranchised and [socially and economically, not physically] disempowered are not the concerns of a superhero. According to Nolan, a superhero’s job is to look at the “big picture”; repelling alien invasions, stopping monstrous kaiju, and blocking Texas-sized asteroids from wiping out the planet.
That’s where my mind went as I read the first part of “The Truth”, Volume 1 of Superman: Son of Kal-El.
Let’s back up.
Superman: Son of Kal-El focuses on Jon Kent, the son of Clark Kent and Lois Lane who is taking up the mantle of Superman. Jon has much of the same power as his father–and the same costume–and that means something to him. He wants to help the world, to stand for something greater than what we humans can only settle for in our tribal divisions and petty greed. He laments that his father only led by example, putting out fires both literal and metaphorical, and wants to fight the more systemic problems plaguing our world. Inequality, climate change, poverty, etc.
Jon wants to be a literal Social Justice Warrior.
Oh, that’s not me being snide. The back of the book advertises this.
This is the book where he is revealed to be bisexual, by the way. The infamous scene of him kissing the pink haired boy that made all the Comicsgaters and anti-woke Youtubers scream “DC made Superman gay to insult their readers!” as they cried tears of nerd rage.
Delicious.
Superman’s gay kiss that sent thousands of grifters into a nerd rage.
But anyway, yeah, so Jon Kent is an official SJW. Alright, awesome, sounds great to me. But it got me thinking.
How does a superhero go about fighting for progressive change? For systemic solutions?
So at the point in the story that made me stop and write this loose collection of half-thoughts (the plurality of the contents of my brain at any given point), Jon hears of the plight of refugees from the fictional nation of Gamorra. In making the dangerous overseas voyage, their ship is in danger of sinking. However, there should not be refugees because Gamorra is supposed to be a paradise that no one would ever want to leave, and the existence of these refugees is very inconvenient for the Gamorran president. No developed nation wants to help these people for fear of upsetting the resource-rich nation. So what’s a systemic-solution-seeking-Superman to do?
He lets them die.
No, just kidding. Obviously he stops the boat from sinking. And before you all complain about spoilers, come on. The Superman franchise is nearly a century old. Is that even a spoiler?
But consider that in an earlier conversation with Damian Wayne, Jon said he wanted to differentiate himself from his father by “being the cure” instead of “fighting the symptoms” (technically Damian’s words, but Jon is on board at this point). What does Jon want to be the cure of? The climate crisis, inequality, erosion of the free press, and the rise of demagogues (again, quoting the comic here).
So let’s go back to Gamorra. Or, rather, the asylum seekers.
Gamorra is a “resource-rich nation” that the developed nations of the world want to appease. So we can use it as a stand-in for Saudi Arabia, and its resource being oil, just to apply some real world comparisons. Say Superman wants to stand up to such a nation like Saudi Arabia. Or Qatar, an oil (and financially) rich Middle Eastern nation. Jon wants to do what FIFA didn’t have the spine to do in seeking a country to host the World Cup, and that’s directly stand up to the nation’s slave labor and anti-LGBT bigotry rather than bend over backwards to appease it.
Okay. How? How does Jon do that as a superhero? As Superman?
By making himself a symbol of peace and hope for all mankind? Superman is that symbol, but only for those who believe in those concepts. And it’s not like the people of Qatar can’t be made more progressive, but Jon just standing tall and espousing platitudes about tolerance and love is just not going to do it. Nor would some American kid, superpowered or otherwise, be able to just convince the Saudi royalty to ditch Islam and their queerphobia, or the Gamorran president to act in the best interest of his people and not himself. After all, conveying platitudes and ideas is a battle of words. And that doesn’t take a superhero. Jon’s strength is his, well, strength.
Okay, what about drawing attention to causes? He could use his superhero celebrity status to get people talking, taking an interest. That’s great, but he does stand with protesters in the comic. Even gets arrested too. If I had a dollar for every progressive activist that got purposefully arrested at a peaceful protest to draw attention to a cause, I’d have enough money to retire. And yet, racial and social inequality still persist, climate change is still a problem, and we still find the leaders of the developed world kowtowing to the demands of oil-controlling autocrats. And while Jon’s solar-powered invincibility affords him a level of protection against police violence that other protesters and activists don’t have, he still doesn’t fight law enforcement. We’re talking about peaceful resistance. Stuff that Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr did.
Superman leading a climate change protest.
As a superhero, Jon’s power is, ultimately, violence. He can fling a skyscraper into space and raze a forest with only a glare, after all. So how does he use those gifts? Bully and intimidate populations into being more progressive and accepting of queer people? Coerce the CEOs of the oil companies to stop polluting and make the government invest in green energy? Use his strength to bring down tyrants personally?
There was a universe where his father did that. It did not go well.
I think about these things because I like superheroes and I like progressivism. And the history of superheroes has been a progressive history. Captain America punching out Hitler on his debut cover was progressive for the time. Superman and Batman fighting political/corporate corruption and organized crime. The X-Men’s pro-Civil Rights message.
Yet being progressive doesn’t magically solve these issues. There are systemic issues that Jon wants to fix and they only have systemic solutions. You cannot impose systemic solutions with raw physical power. Jon can’t just end wealth inequality with a punch.
I’m reminded of an old issue of Action Comics (really old. Like, 1938 or 1939, probably), where Superman took on an auto manufacturer and its skimping on safety features to save money by literally bursting into the CEO’s office and threatening to beat the crap out of him unless he changes his ways.
That’s great, but does that solve the deeper issues of capitalism?
Does Superman throwing the autocratic leader of Gamorra, or Saudi Arabia, or Russia, into space solve the problem that modern society runs on the fossil fuels that these nations produce, and that to meaningfully fix the problem, we need to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels and invest in clean energy?
Just because he’s powered by the sun doesn’t mean Jon is punching widespread solar energy consumption into existence. That takes scientific research backed by government grants, and the political and cultural will to make the shift.
These random musings might well be pointless. Superheroes don’t exist, obviously. But as a superhero fiction writer–and as superheroes have historically stood for progressive principles–I do think it’s a question worth looking at. How can you write a superhero story where your superhero tackles and solves systemic issues like climate change or the rise of fascism as a superhero? Systemic issues require systemic solutions, as I said, and I’m talking about them engaging in solutions and not just standing for progressive issues.
It’s why I hate the criticism of the MCU that the superheroes are all just status quo-protecting super cops. Sure, but how do you expect them to handle these greater issues? And yes, I know Tony Stark could throw money at the problem, but then he isn’t acting in his capacity as a superhero, is he (and is a billionaire capitalist really our go-to answer)? How does Iron Man, or Captain America, or Spider-Man, solve the health care issue, or the lack of workers’ power due to the collapse of labor unions, or child food insecurity?
And, to be clear, I do feel like there’s an answer. I just feel like those who demand that writers make their superheroes “do more” are the least likely to be able to answer “What do you think they should do?”.
Though I guess an important step–both for superheroes and for the average person–is to recognize that the “big picture” may not always look like Thanos finding the Infinity Stones and snapping half the universe out of existence.
Sometimes, it’s the historic injustices and socioeconomic forces that force a black man to act as a crime lord’s superpowered muscle in order to afford his daughter’s medical care.
For exciting superhero fiction written by me, be sure to check out the BLUE EAGLE Universe!