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Posts: 23
Join Date: Jan 2010
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The essay spends a lot of time using more traditional definitions of liberal and conservative, which is fine for me as an Aussie but at the end of the day what they mean in the US and what they mean in the rest of the world are too different things. As such, while he makes the case that Marvel is more 'conservative', I think at the end of the day it doesn't address the real debate. It's semantics.
I liked this paragraph on Civil War though. It confuses the hell out of me that some US conservatives can put themselves on the pro-registration side.
Quote:
Marvel has always been a bit more concerned with "real-world" stuff than DC, and this decade they've tried to be even more "relevant" (as relevant as superhero comics can be, that is, which isn't much). The axis around which the Marvel Universe has revolved for most of the decade is Civil War, which many people read incorrectly. It's not traditional right-wingers who "won" the Civil War, it's traditional left-wingers. This may sound insane to you, but it's true. Many people read Civil War as a parallel of Bush's expansion of governmental power due to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, which isn't a terrible interpretation. However, it's not the best analogy. While the terrorist attacks occurred in the Marvel Universe, they had absolutely no impact (Civil War, you'll recall, began five years after 2001 and two years after the Iraq war began, and jokes about Steve McNiven's slowness aside, that's too long to draw a completely accurate parallel). Civil War was spurred on not by a terrorist attack, but by a supervillain losing control of his powers. The closest analogue in the real world would be gun control. People have guns and many of them have no idea how to use them. So the government wants to control the flow of guns and people's ownership of them. Who is in favor of gun control? Liberals. So the government in Civil War is, despite being headed by George Bush (or someone who looks a lot like him), doing what today's liberals want: Controlling things that are "too dangerous" for people left to their own devices. Conservatives should have been on Captain America's side in Civil War: The government has no right to step in and control these people, especially because guns (or superpowers) aren't inherently evil - it depends on the person using them. The triumph of Iron Man and the government in Civil War is a triumph of the nanny state. I remember some of the kerfuffle over Civil War when it came out. Conservatives whined that Marvel was showing the government of George Bush as fascist. Perhaps they should have thought about it a bit more. Civil War is a classic example of a government that thinks it knows best trying to regulate what people can do with their lives. And yet conservatives thought Marvel was picking on them. A bit silly, really.
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