I wouldn't say that they're right wing per se, but they're most certainly reactionary figures. They're inherently defenders of the status quo in most iterations of superhero stories, made to protect the existing order against the radical change represented by the villain.
There's an incredible article by David Graeber that dissects the nature of the superhero, you should definitely check it out: https://thenewinquiry.com/super-position/
One rebuttal I've heard to your argument (a rebuttal I find weak tbh) is that the supervillains are just so evil that their threat to the status quo must be stopped. I don't like it bc all we get are evil villains who -conveniently always- threaten to change the status quo for the worse (with indiscriminate violence and destruction.) We never see villains that want to change the status quo for better.
Actually, there have been many famous villains who want to change the status quo for the better. But they always pull some Pol Pot move and blow up an orphanage or massacre a retirement home because…. ANARCHY!!!!
For example, in the latest Batman movie, The Riddler spends the whole movie slowly exposing the city’s elites and how Bruce Wayne benefits from his family neglecting orphans and cozying up with the mob to murder investigators. Then Riddler just decides to flood the entire city lol.
I mean it's how Cao Cao defeated Lu Bu, why not
But we also dont see a hero who has the same level of creativity as the villains. So they are reaccionary regrdless of who the villain is.
We never see villains that want to change the status quo for better.
That's a choice made by the authors though
The superhero genre emphasizes the idea that problems are solved by a single powerful individual rather than collective action. This is reactionary thinking.
Superheros often get their powers from genetic superiority. This is another right wing theme. Other superheroes get their power from being wealthy (iron man, batman) or being a nationalist (captain america, wonderwoman).
The supervillains are often portrayed as mentally ill or petty criminals or sometimes even activists.
Superheros never try to improve society, they only uphold the status quo. The most common plot of superheros is beating up petty criminals. The superhero plot revolves around stopping the villain and not actually trying to improve material conditions of working people. Superhero plots even sometimes value protecting property over human life.
The supervillains often try to change society. Villains are often portrayed in that they want to fix a problem, but are going about it in a wrong way.
With these 2 things in mind, we are given the narrative that trying to change the world is bad, but trying to prevent change is good.
What about villains that don't try to change the status quo? Like they just want to wreck havoc on the lives of the innocent with no greater goal in mind. There are so many versions and variations of that within the genre. Joker comes to mind.
what is that but the image of the criminal, in the minds of reactionaries?
I think comic writers knows that they can't actually write a villain that actually helps without making the hero look like they're in the wrong.
You can't kill billionaire vampire Theter Piel! You will become just like him! - super hero moments before villain violates the NAP justifying lethal response
I mean the Joker usually has a goal, even if it may be one that is hard to understand. They reboot and speculate Joker's origin pretty often. It's usually somebody either ordinary or someone with a mental illness being completely broken and humiliated by American society to the point of nihilism. With no coherent ideology or education, the Joker is typically somebody who is now only able to express themselves through bombastic violence and tries to mindfuck Batman into seeing himself in the Joker or something. Granted, these characters are shuffled through dozens of hands over the course of decades so this isn't always accurate
Yes, superhero culture promotes the kind of exceptionalism and individualism that are antithetical to the socialist ideals.
The Soviet Union did not have any of this superhero comic book crap. Their heroes were often normal people who went above and beyond their duties to the society and achieving the impossible, in spite of their ordinary lives.
"In your opinion, if anyone around the world wants to take their revenge on the assassination of Soleimani and intends to do it proportionately in the way they suggest — that we take one of theirs now that they've got one of ours — who should we consider to take out in the context of America?
Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? They don't have any heroes. We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large landmass, but it doesn't have any heroes. All of their heroes are cartoon characters — they're all fictional.
That's not true. The US has plenty of flesh and blood celebrities. From Tom Brady to Taylor Swift to Elon Musk to Joel Osteen to Donald Trump, we've definitely got people that we've placed on pedestals.
We don't have war heroes because we have a military focused on terror bombing and assassinations, rather than street fightering and militia building. But we do have warmongers, who we regale as bold truth tellers and spiritual leaders.
If the Iranian government were to assassinate the Op-Ed section of the NYT, far more tears would be shed than if they knocked out a David Petraus or a Lloyd Austin.
If they really did pull a Sum Of All Fears and blew up a football stadium during the Super Bowl? Killing famous singers and ballers and countless middle managers and political mega-donors? Bedlam.
Beating up poor mentally ill people to protect the status quo is perfectly conservative. It is the western myth of the gun and eugenics combined.
The first issue of superman red sun is great though. Superman lands in the ussr as a baby and is raised soviet style. He overthrows all the world governments and brings in a general age of peace and prosperity. The rest of thr run goes downhill from there but I just stopped it there and had a very nice time.
I heard about that one, I had a feeling they were quickly going to move into "communism bad" territory.
It is in the seccond or third issue. So I having accidentaly only read the first one never knew about that.
Well, Moore particularly is pretty cool I think.
On the politics of super heroes as a whole, there's definitely something to be criticized, I'd take it from Alan Moore himself in this interview. There's some more interesting criticism in the video I found it in, which is about comic book movies rather than comics themselves, but still criticizes the idea of the super hero.
My own take is that, while the role that super heroes usually take reinforces cultural hegemony and the status quo, it's still possible for them to embody proletarian ideology, they just need to shed the great man theory of history and lean into a social message of improving society through collective action. I don't know about any examples of that if I'm being honest.
Golden Age Superman is the Proletarian Superhero. Thst dude fucking ruled. His original antagonists were landlords, domestic abusers, the kkk and corrupt politicians. He also took a LOT less shit from people and would straight up tell them they're assholes and why and that if they don't clean up their act right now he WILL be coming back. 1930s-mid 50s Superman was a really good dude.
I was looking into golden age superman lol I can't believe they just turned him into what he is today. It's a shame, he kinda was a more unhinged green arrow.
I don't know anything about Green Arrow but that seems cool. The old Superman radio play has some really really based serials, a very thinly veiled KKK (different name, but it's easy to tell) is a recurring threat. He tells a dude with racist hiring practices thst he's no better than Hitler cause Golden Age Superman does NOT mince fucking words.
Also I've had the outline for an absolutely epic Supean movie trilogy in my head for a while which spans the entire 20th century it's a lot even in broad strokes but essentially same origin story as usual and he moves to metropolis and starts being Superman around the start of the Depression and is Golden Age Superman, really going for the little guy, ww2 comes and he's famous as hell by then and sticks to his normal landlord beating job while doing anti nazi propaganda films as essentially an Elvis style draft publicity thing, he's feeling pretty patriotic at the time and is all truth justice and the American way Superman until he's bamboozled into essentially being the Hiroshima bomb in effect and leading to pretty much the same end conditions of the war BUT Superman is disillusioned and fucks off.to.the USSR He makes a solid life there and really helps the fuck out and having him there is essentially a permanent nuclear deterrent. Going back go ww2 lex luthor is born in the mid 30s or so and experiences the war as an American child, his dad is a Henry Ford kinda old timey industrialist guy and blah blah blah, by the time the 50s-60s are going on he's an objectivist and rises politically due to the anti Superman ubermensh rhetoric he's known for blended with anti communism cause Superman is now a Soviet, the irony should not be lost here. This situation leads to a massive nuclear stockpiling by NATO and a lot less so by the Warsaw pact cause they kinda just lean on Superman to be their iron dome. President Author blasts off the nukes in the late 70s, Superman can't stop em all and the USSR is devastated. In response Superman pulls a Superman 4 the quest for peace and gathers all the nukes and hurls them into the sun. This leaves him weak as hell and he's out of commission for at least a year. In thst time conventional ww3 has totally broken out and Superman fully charged up saves a shitload of innocents (which btw, he is rescuing cays from trees and that kinda stuff throughout) and ultimately wins by using super loud speaking to win the hearts and minds of the world over with a really good speech that really encapsulates the whole trilogy well thst there's no fucking way i could imagine but the overall thing is that Luthor was right, humanity didn't need Superman, but he needed them as an alien infant who crashed on a farm 90 years ago and he's just trying to repay the kindness as best he can we as an audience secretly know we DID need Superman to teach us about our fundamental kindness, we get a heartwarming ceae Fite montage. Superman flies to the fucking white house and says 'Lex Luthor! I'm placing you under arrest' and then flies him to the Hague.
Tone wise, despite the content I want it to feel like the 1970s Superman movies with Christopher Reeve. The summary may seem bleak but bear in mind I'm talking 3 movies around 2 hours each and a Superman who spends most of his time handling smaller scale good deeds even when dealing with geopolitical crises. I want absolutely massive and bombastic with major highs and lows and all that drama crap but in general an aggressively uplifting tone should permeate
Damn, now I really want to see Superman put a landlord through a wall.
Just read Action Comics #1 and go from there, it's the absolute earliest incarnation of Superman so it's easy to find. Here he is demanding better conditions for prisoners!
How cool is that?
There’s a Flash comic where he works with Fidel Castro lol. But the ending makes Castro seem all sinister
Pre ww2 superheroes are pretty cool across the board. Batman still sucks, but less than he did after!
One thing I've been thinking about is the new Batman movie. That one highlighted Batman's philanthropy as a means to helping the impoverished of Gotham. Although to be fair philanthropy is hardly an effective means to improving people's socioeconomic conditions and discrimination groups face.
I just don't think I've seen a superhero ever address the systemic causes of crime.
He doesn’t.
At the end of the movie, he monologues about how the city is full of crime and misery. But he needs to continue being an accountable vigilante because it gives people hope, and hope will fix things.
But the movie didn’t show the Wayne family’s philanthropy as good. It was portrayed as a corrupt political move that resulted in the abuse and neglect of orphans which the Riddler was a victim of. It also resulted in the murder of a journalist orchestrated by Bruce’s father and the mob. The Riddler spends the whole movie exposing the crime and corruption of the elite, then Batman doesn’t even acknowledge them besides “I need to follow the clue of this crime scene to catch the Riddler”
Zamn.
I haven't had the time to watch movies but is that really what that was about?
Yes, but the lack of acknowledgement from Batman and Riddler just committing random acts of violence at the end just made the movie dumb as hell to me. They built up this grand narrative then just… liberalism.
With Joker, at least they didn’t try to make Joker into some underdog with an agenda trying to fight the rich. He just had a personal grievance due to the same factors as Riddler (abuse, poverty, mental illness) that spiraled out of control and accidentally made him a symbol of resistance.
Are comics inherently conservative? No. Are they forced to be conservative in its current incarnation? Yes.
By having a shared universe between heroes, comics running in perpetuity, and the setting being an alternative version of current earth, superheroes are forced to defend the status quo without introducing much change. If not, the framework wouldn't work when the same characters are used by dozens of different writers at the same time.
Others made the regular critiques like exceptional individualism but I wanna bring up another angle, beyond the literal superhero.
You can read superhero stories as myths, legends, and folklore for the modern world (and to be frank, the Western world). And the myth of a culture can be a retelling of their experience of their world. In this case it's explanatory, like creation stories, national epics, and cultural heroes. Just memorializing and celebrating what already exists
But sometimes it's more hopeful or even vengeful, like eschatological myth (end of the world prophecies). These express a change they want to see or hope to prevent in the future.
Superhero stories might seem like they are in the second category because they are promoting the regular world and regular people to the supernatural. But that's just the premise that puts it in the fiction genre. They aren't actually proposing humans become superhumans. Really they are more in the first category: they explain, justify, and celebrate what already exists.
Which is why superheroes are "defenders of the earth" or of specific nations, like Captain America. Otherwise they'd just be revolutionaries.
I remember playing with my younger cousin who lives in a 3rd world country. His little kid fantasies weren't about being the strongest guy and beating up bad guys. Rather he wanted to start a movement to establish a system where everyone had access to all the things they need (in his mind, snacks, sweets, and games)
Btw this is kinda why most superhero stories disappoint me. It's all a contrived conflict. It's already a symbolic story because it's fiction. But then you have heroes fighting villains out of the blue. For example Captain America fighting the made up Red Skull even though Hitler was still there. Or the Indian Brahmastra could have been about saving India but rather it was some cult vs another cult that didn't matter to any regular person in that world or the real one
Conservative or not, I just find the entire idea silly.
A community finds out that they have someone with supernatural powers living next to them. Their powers can uplift poverty and eliminate hunger or eliminate fascist wars. But coincidentally, the earth just so happens to be attacked by some Mega Aliens from the Zeboid dimension. That, or some mad scientist just so happens to inject himself with Evil Serum and also gain super powers. Thus humanity’s problems become more grandiose or individualized.
Would be cool to have a hero that goes after bourgeoisie elites tbh. Unfortunately we just get joker or zod.
Im not deep into Marvel lore but I understood the X-Men for example as a progressive force. Like they are fighting for change and a better world. Mind you im not that into their comics that was just my surface level reading of them.
X-Men had one foot in either world.
At it's best, it was a show about people struggling with the bigotries aimed at their conditions and arguing the best path forward. Characters confronting disease, debating the causes and responses to racism, exploring their sexuality, uncovering the horrors of the police state and the two faced nature of liberal responses to poverty and crime. It's often written for babies, but it's ultimately good politics.
At it's worst, it was just xenophobic copaganda with Wolverine shouting "Don't worry we're some of the good ones!" while he punches Russo-China The Evil Communist Super Fifth Columnist in the genitals for hitting those African migrants with a literacy ray.
It really just depends who was writing at any given momoment. Are we having Magento doing Mutant Stalinism On One Asteroid while Cyclopes struggles to pay for prescription lenses on a student budget? Or is Ice Man doing fat jokes at the Blob for six pages?
They are inherently unegalitarian, so yes.
It makes sense, because superheroes as a genre suck