ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Superheroes

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Following the recent Trip episode on Heroes, Keir and Jem return with a Microdose focusing on the masked, the winged and the mutated. Why are superheroes such a cultural mainstay? What psychological and political desires do they fulfil? Are they inherently reactionary? From Superman to Batman, Wonder Woman to 2000AD, it’s a weird left reading […]

This is Acid Man. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the Weird Left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert and today I am joined only by my good friend Kear Milbert. Hello. Well, a theme to today is superheroes. So why are we talking about superheroes, Jim? Well, you wanted to, and I said I'm happy to do so, because apart from anything else, I would say the superhero movie is one of the dominant global cultural phenomena

of this century so far, like to an extent that really one has to have something to say about it, and have to try to make sense of it. And there obviously is going to be quite a lot to say. sort of putting it in historical context and thinking about what it all means. So, and I also, it's one of those topics I often feel guilty for not really engaging with properly. So as I'm sure he's bound to come out sooner or later in this show, like I've hardly watched

any of the MCU or the big DC superhero movies that have been released this century. I've seen some of the older ones. I've seen one or two, but I've just not bothered with them, even though I do objectively recognize it's like a huge cultural phenomenon so i feel it's important to talk about but it was your idea so where was your thinking coming from well first of all dear listeners please take note of that jeremy hasn't watched these films and it will not stop him expounding at length about them well i can talk about superheroes as a cultural phenomenon without having much engagement with that particular iteration of it well i mean part of the reason i want to talk to them is because i don't even

think you have to watch all of these films it's almost like they're the dominant form of culture you know they're like, they form the ambient sort of culture around which, you know, that we all sort of exist. But one of the things I really wanted to explore was, you know, that we have this ongoing interest on what's going on on the far right on this show and like the weirder aspects of that. One of the, one of the reasons we did a main trip on heroes is because of this idea that the hero's journey, the idea of seeing yourself and your life as, in terms of this idea of a hero's journey, the idea that you can create your own myth and reality seems quite central to the far right, basically, you know, and the sort of world-building dynamics

or somebody like Donald Trump and the people around him. We should note that, you know, there's a contemporaneity between the rise of the far right and the period for which the superhero movie has been dominant, although it's probably, you know, I mean, the superhero a movie sort of, they basically took off around 2000, 2001, so, you know, we're talking about quite a long time, but there's been the rise of the file right there. But in particular, like, there seems something, you know, just innate to the concept of superheroes, the idea that there could exist, people with exception abilities, perhaps superpowers, people who are different to ordinary people, you know, and they're the ones

were the protagonists in this fiction, that seems linked to ideas of hierarchy or inequality and even in certain iterations into sort of hygienic sort of ideas of a separation. That's quite an important part in various sort of superhero stories around the X-Men in particular, the idea that perhaps the X-Men is a superhero story in which those are superpowers and the X-Men are sort of mutants, basically,

and so there's this big dynamic between our, there are these mutants, the next stage in human evolution, et cetera, and they keep getting, you know, persecuted by humans and that sort of dynamic, basically. So it's like it seems sort of like quite, you can see the connection there between this idea of the far rights

around the hero's journey and, you know, the innate sort of link to inequality or hierarchy that seems there in a superhero movie. we should say that we're not going to just dismiss superheroes as it's innately reactionary or perhaps you will later on I don't know because the history of superheroes is sort of interesting we sort of need to get into the history of superheroes because when they were invented with the invention of Superman in 1938

Superman's quite a leftist, he's quite a social justice warrior at that point and Superman is invented by two Jewish artists and authors almost as like a sort of anti-fascist sort of wish-fulfillment device, if you want it that way. So it's something to talk about, basically, something to unpack about contemporary culture and the way you unpack it is to go back and look at where it originated from, how it changed and it's changed quite fundamentally over the years. The history of, like, superhero comics in particular is divided into different ages. So there's the golden age, the silver age.

the Silver Age, and people talk about the dark age, the modern age, these sorts of things. And in each one of those ages, the form of the superhero changes a little bit. So it's interesting, I think it'll be interesting to trace that through. So shall we sort of do it chronologically, then we'll get back up to talking about the contemporary superhero movie. Yeah, it makes sense. Once we've done some of the historical background. So we thought we could start off saying, arguably, there's a sort of prehistoric, obviously of the idea of the superhero.

I mean, one of the most cliched observations you can make about the super heroes in the comics, and this is an observation cultural commentators are making, at least from the 50s, probably in the 40s, is they're really, they're like characters from ancient mythology. They're like gods or sort of demi-gods. You know, they cross the line from just being the sort of hyper-competent individual human to being somebody who's capable of having some sort of quasi-divor. characteristics or sort of magical characteristics and it's interesting to think about the history of that kind of idea in my mind as someone who's interested in genre fiction and things like that

it's always it's sort of interesting to try to think about the distinction between like superpowers proper and like magic for example because I think it's a comment I might have made on the show before but you know the way in which magic is imagined in contemporaries or fantasy fiction you can think about Harry Potter is the most globally popular example. It's this idea that somehow through some combination of natural talent

but also a kind of learned practice you can tap into cosmic forces that make otherwise impossible sort of supernatural effect happen in the world. And of course that is not how people conceptualise magic really at any point before the 20th century. What people

meant when they talked about magic, at least in Western culture, was something we would think of more as a sort of animist practice. You're summoning or invoking or having relationships with supernatural beings like demons or spirits or angels or fairies that you know, you're not, the idea that you just say some words and fire comes out of your fingers is not there in the sort of mythology or the fiction of the whole sort of classical period. It's not there in medieval. It's not there in the only modern period. It's really not there at all. So, so there's sort of a fight, there's sort of, and there's obviously still our imaginary

distinctions, but superpowers as just being these kind of innate, like, fantastical qualities that certain individuals can have, like it does have a prehistory, has a prehistory in fairy tales, has a prehistory in superpowers are things which magical beings can give you, for example, in some medieval stories, something we would now call superpowers, you know, like extraordinary strength or something like that. But it's still a relatively, there's a relatively few examples actually of this idea that, well,

as individual acquires these very special abilities. And even when it does occur, you know, whether you're talking about like Heracles in the Greek mist or Sir Gawain in the early Arthurian stories, then it's mostly what they get from what they get given as a superpower is something that's really sort of easily imaginable. It's just like it's superhuman strength basically.

lot of the time, just like physical strength. But this, so this idea that actually what people get is this range of possible, like, fantastical things that they can do, like, which transcend any real, you know, always physical laws. But it's not exactly magic, because they don't have to engage in sort of rituals in order to, or any kind of learning process really to exercise them. That's like the specific idea of superpowers. And I've thought quite a lot about, well, what, are there any real sort of precedent for that. I sort of came to the conclusion that the most, the

closest analogue in sort of pre-modern cultural mythology I could think of was the tradition in the idea in some yoga traditions actually, some tantric traditions that the accomplished yogi acquires what are called in Sanskrit CDs, which are basically like

superpowers, they're special powers, the ability to read minds or control the weather or predict the future or teleport or levitate. So there's a little little bit of that. But again, that's this very specific tradition, which ended up being quite influential in contemporary culture, partly because it kind of anticipates a lot of contemporary concerns with self-cultivation and sort of self-optimization through incredibly rigorous discipline. But you could identify all those sort of mythological and so quasi-religious

traditions as partly feeding into the myth of the superhero. But you wanted to talk about some other things in the early 20th century that sort of directly feed into the idea of Superman, didn't you? Yeah, well, I mean, just before that, though, there's, because I think there, because there is magic in superheroes, as Dr. Strange, for instance, who, who goes to Tibet to learn how to do magic and does rituals and these sorts of, sorts of things. But that's added in a lot later, and in fact, it's added in in the 60s as part of that. Was it? It's a self-conscious borrowing from fantasy fiction into superhero mythology. Yeah, and there's, yeah, there's different waves, I think, of superheroes where people have

drawing on science fiction, and then they're drawing on fantasy, etc, etc. There's all sorts going into it. One of the books I was reading in preparation for this was a book by Grant Morrison as a very famous, a comics writer, and we'll talk about him a little bit more later on probably. It's called Super Gods. You know, one of the things he points out is that Superman, he's sort of like Apollo basis, some sort of version of Apollo, the god Apollo, the sun god, because Superman gains his powers from our yellow sun. His home planet of Krypton

has a, it goes around a red sun and so it's only when he gets, he feels, you know, exposed himself to the yellow sun. This is all later. Superman mythos, not the original stuff, but, you know, so you can say that that, you know, there are obviously deep roots in that sort of like mythological

stuff. But yeah, I wanted to talk about something a little bit more, little bit less mythological. So one of the other books I read on this, or I read a little bit of it anyway, it gets a little bit tedious. It's a book called Men of Tomorrow by Jared James,

Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the comic book. And it's really about, like, the birth of Superman, which is sort of invented by these two New York Jews, basically, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. And, you know, they came up with the figure Superman.

And that book, Men of Tomorrow is really interesting on that sort of soup from which it emerges, the sort of, and you're right, Jamie, it is that sort of like self-improvement stuff. Joe Schuster is really into bodybuilding, and he subscribes to bodybuilding courses by people like Charles Atlas, who was a famous bodybuilder. And in fact, in the 1970s and 80s, I still think you get adverts for Charles Atlas bodybuilding courses in the back of comics, and it would be a little comic strip itself in which a weedy man would get sand kicked in his face by,

some beefy guy at the beach and then he'd go away, build his body with Charles Atlas's instruction and come back and put him in his place. I'm thinking about it now, that was just to me, seems to be based on breeding paranoia. Who goes around kicking sand in other people's faces at a beach? I've never seen that. I've not seen it, no, but I fear it dreadfully. I definitely did as a kid. But one of the ideas is that the build of Superman is actually based on, like, you know,

that sort of bodybuilder, Circus Strongman sort of thing. And in fact, the Circus Strongman sort of costume is one of the roots for like Superman's costumes. They used to wear these. I don't know if they wore their underpants outside of their trousers. I like to think they did.

But the other thing that like fits into that bodybuilding sort of culture, which was really, you know, wrapped up in like in pulp magazines and that sort of stuff, like, you know, one of the things that was also floating around there was like a sort of quack science. you know, if you eat this, then you'll get this, etc, etc. It just, when I was reading it, it just really made me think of, like,

that's the sort of, that's sort of like the sort of soup or the slop around which contemporary far-right influences, if you were like, you know, like Joe Rogan or somebody like that. You know, that's the sort of soup, you know, that bodybuilding, sort of quack science, sort of pulp, pulp, all sorts, basically, you know, pulp psychedelics in terms of Joe Rogan. Which should make me think, you know, that is, I suppose they're attending to similar people, young boys who are, you know, really uncertain about their place in the world and, you know, insecure about their masculinity. Perhaps that's something that was going on in the 1930s and it's also obviously going on now, you know.

And, I mean, even today, these sort of far-right influences like Andrew Tate are really drawing on, I mean, in some ways it's very ancient tradition of fantasies of hypercompetence. the note I made to us in our notes was from Achilles to Jason Bourne the idea of like the super trained because Achilles has sort of divine help so he's in that grey zone between the sort of

the semi-divine superhero and the Batman style superhero who's just incredibly highly trained and rich but this sort of this sort of fantasy of hypercompetence which again like I say you also get in kind of the secret agent fantasies there's James Bond and Jason Bourne type things.

The idea of the operator. Also, like the idea of the ninja. You think of the popularity of the figure of the ninja in the 80s and 90s is basically just someone who's become hypercompetent and a specific set of skills that make them dangerous, but almost magical in the level of their competence. In some ways it's a really old idea that pretty much comes along in any culture where masculinity meets individualism.

You know, the sort of the fantasy of beings, the sort of the best, like just. And it's also, but it's interesting to think that, I mean, one of the things I want to talk about today is that I think both the modern idea of magic in fantasy fiction and the idea of superpowers, I think they're primarily obviously responses to the emergence of modern technologies,

especially the technologies of the second industrial revolution. So you get the emergence of election, electricity, electrification, telecommunications, powered flight, the internal combustion engine, telephones, radio, cinema, all these kind of extraordinary technologies, which part, one of the effects of which is to just enhance the capacities of the human senses and the capacity of humans to move other objects and to move themselves around the world in ways that really, that would clearly have been thought of as magical, divine, like by even a generation or two before the end of the 20th century, end of the 19th century, I should say.

And I think obviously, like, a lot of superpowers are analogies of those things. So, I mean, you just look at Superman, what do you can do? He can fly like a plane. He's got x-ray vision, like an x-ray machine. Like, he's got heat vision, like some, like a welding torch or a laser. He's a, most of what he can do is, like, it's just something that some industrial technology can do. And so I think obviously it's that kind of, it's obviously, it's partly a response to that

extraordinary experience of living with all those technologies. But in an abstract way, in an abstract sense, the beginning of the development of human technology is the development of really basic tools, but also just the development of any sort of techniques that humans you learn and can reproduce and can pass on to others in order to get good at doing certain things, like whether it's farming or blacksmithing or fighting.

And so, and in a sense, those fantasies of hypercompetence, like even your sort of bronze age heroic fantasies, they're sort of real responses to the awareness of the fact that all part of what it means to be human in the world as well. In theory, you could just like train six hours a day and become like incredibly good at running or sword fighting and something. Like in theory you could do that. At least you could if you had the resources.

And part of what it means to be human, I think, is always a sort of awareness of that. that awareness can be inspiring, but it can also provoke a lot of anxiety because you can sort of never, you can never quite live up to your own potential. I think sort of knowing you can't that you're not quite living up to your own potential

unless you are training like 16 hours a day and being waited on hand and foot, I sort of think that's an anxiety that haunts a lot of human culture from really early on. But particularly prevalent, it seems now. Perhaps it always seems prevalent. Yeah, now, of course,

because of course the whole, a lot of the functions of contemporary media and social media is to make us all super anxious that we're not realizing our potential and someone else somewhere is doing so. Let's dive into the world, the history of comics. The history of comics, it divides quite nicely into different ages. I want to be clear with people, though, comics as a medium and superheroes as a concept are not totally co-terminous.

So there are always comics that are not superhero comics. But comics is the medium where superheroes are first invented, although they are very quickly taken into other media. So there are popular radio shows about Superman, for example, very soon after the Superman comics come out. And I think it's important to say that, because for people who have no contact at all with comic culture, for example, but it's often just assumed that comics and superhero comics are simultaneous.

They're just the same thing, so they're not. And yet there's this convention you're referring to now, isn't it, Keir? There's this convention of referring to particular epochs in the history of comics, like beginning with Superman in the late 30s in terms of these ages. But do you know, when did that convention get established? Well, in fact, it's specifically the golden age and the Silver Age of Super Bowl. Because one of the things that happen when those ages end is that, like, other forms of comics, such as the detective comic or horror comics, etc., come into vogue and superheroes sort of fade. And I think it's basically, it's not in the Golden Age, but halfway in the sort of like, I think it's something like 1960 in one of the, it's commentary within a comic, I think, where somebody says, this is the, this is not the golden age anymore, this is the Silver Age, etc.

and then it becomes this, it becomes this a convention in which you're looking for the next one, basically. And so when we talk about the, when people talk about the golden age of superhero comics, what historical period are they referring to? It's generally something like 1938, so 1938 is when you get the first, where Superman appears in Action Comics No. 1, and then up to something like 1950. And in 1950, there's a big sort of like moral panic around, juvenile delinquency linked to comics, basically, and there's a big... There's a congressional inquiry of some kind, isn't there?

Yeah, that sort of thing, basically. Congressional inquiry... This is all around the time of the Hays Code being brought in as well. This is all around the time of... It's around the moment when the New Deal administration, the Democrats are finally going to lose control of the White House, and Eisenhower is going to become president for most of the 50s. And you get the back, the McCarthyite Red Scare,

is going to get underway by sort of 53 and the Hayes Code is imposed on Hollywood to basically say you can't you can't have films in which criminals get away with crimes for example which basically it's like just destroys American cinema for like a 10 years makes it really I'm getting my history a little bit wrong because the golden age sort of ends in 1950 and it's sort of like basically it's a little bit like superheroes have played themselves out basically they're stuck in a sort of rut. In the Second World War in particular, a lot of the superheroes,

you know, they're sort of like, suddenly they're fighting the Axis forces, quite racist ways in lots of times, lots of ways. And like they sort of play themselves out and then there's a shift in taste towards horror comics, basically, towards horror comics

and towards crime comics and something a little bit harsher. And then in 19, it's in 1953, it's a big moral panic and there's a congressional inquiry and then they're, the comic industry comes together and they have a voluntary comics code

which cracks down on like horror comics and crime comics. You know, they want to move away from that and something a little bit more on that. So there's a shift back to superheroes which start to take off in like 1956, something like that is when you or a little bit before that where you have a sort of like

rejuvenated superheroes and it become a bit more complex. But let's get back to like the invention of Batman. sorry, Superman. Because Superman, he establishes the model of the superhero. And so like I said, he's invented by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. So they're like, they're poor New Yorkers. They're Jewish. So like 1938, it's quite interesting. You know, the Second World War is going to erupt the year after. You know, which is fascism very much on the rise all around the place. Actually, yeah, that's the other sort of background we should talk about. you know, when we talk about supermen and ubermensch and subhumans and these sorts of things,

you know, that's the sort of context in which two Jewish guys might want to sort of invent a myth around a superhero who's going to defend them from that sort of thing. I mean, the phrase Superman is the English translation of the Ubermensch. And that's, I mean, one of Nietzsche's famous books, Man and Superman. and he sort of seems to suggest that, I mean, I would say philosophically what he suggests is that, you know, to become a Superman is to be someone who is basically supermodern and is not really stuck in traditional ideas of morality or not really confined by traditional culture, which, you know, you can read as like amoral nihilism, or you can read as just exactly what like Zen Buddhists had been arguing for hundreds of years anyway. But of course, Nietzsche famously gets taken up by the Nazis. Nietzsche's sister, actually, was a massive Nazi and really promoted a pro-Nazi reading of Nietzsche. And so part of some bits of Nazi rhetoric had become the idea that one of the goals of Nazism was to create the necessary political, economic, institutional conditions for the emergence of the true Superman, who would necessarily be a purebred Aryan and would have to live in a. fascist state which facilitated is

Supermanless. In fact, like, later on Superman will go in defeat Hitler. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm just adding the context to what you said already. Yeah, no, no, no, yeah, totally. I was just going to say that it's, like,

Superman starts off in a slightly more modest way, basically. So in the first sort of run of Superman, he can't fly, right? He can leap buildings in a single bound and outraced trains, et cetera, et cetera. But, like, you couldn't fly. He didn't have some of the other bits you might associate.

But he had all of, like, the conventions which then become, you know, all of the attributes that then become the convention for a superhero. So he has a costume with a big S on it to say Superman, of course. He has, you know, a secret identity or, you know, an alternate identity. which is Clark Kent, the journalist, etc. And is the origin story given in the first comic, so I'm not sure about? The origin story isn't, no,

but his secret identity is, as Clark Kent. And then his ability sort of, like, establish that sort of early on, basically. And then when you say, you know, somebody who can overcome morality, etc., in fact, early Superman is, like, really, you know, he's fighting crime in the first, in the first Superman, action,

Comics 1, but by Action Comics 3, he's not just about criminal justice, it's about social justice, basically. So in Action Comics 3, it's a really interesting story. He goes, as Clark Kent, the journalist, he goes to the aftermath of a mining disaster, and he interviews some immigrant worker, and he interviews him in a very sympathetic way. The immigrant worker blames poor health and safety. If you want to get how woke can you be when you begin, basically, Then Superman goes and visits the mine boss and teaches him a lesson, et cetera. And the owner of the mine is shown in a swanky apartment, like drinking champagne. And, you know, that's seen as a bad sort of thing.

Do you know what I mean? That's the third ever Superman story. You know, there's another Superman story where he beats up a wife beater. He's so woke when he begins. There's another one which is really interesting, which is really, really early on, where Superman, he's telling off some young delinquents, but then he looks around, he said, I can't blame you for being delinquents.

It's not totally your fault. Look at the conditions you live in. And then he fakes, he sort of like spins round and round. He evacuates this slum area, spins around and around to simulate a hurricane because he knows, he's just seen on TV that in the aftermath of a hurricane, the US government has gone in and built fantastic houses.

is probably like Rooseveltian sort of era. So, like, you know, yeah, he starts off extremely sort of social justicey, basically. And I suppose it's arguably significant that, of course, Superman himself, or Calell, as is his true name, is an immigrant. He's an alien. He's come, this also establishes one of the absolutely essential elements of the superhero mythology. that he has this elaborate like origin story that his home planet of Krypton is destroyed when its sun reaches the red giant stage

but he's as a baby, like Moses in the basket, actually. He's sent out into space by his wise father and kind of lands on Earth. And the story is anyone from Krypton coming to Earth would have the same powers, has always led me to wonder since I was a small boy, if I went, if I had gone to Krypton, was I have had a set of superpowers or would I have just been like really weak, like, not really able to walk, you know, couldn't, couldn't see through anything, couldn't,

you know, see through glass, like which, which way would it work? I want to know. I think you'd basically be weaker, but I don't know. We have nowhere trying it out. But you could see, you know, that, that immigrant, that you can see how the dual identity thing fits with like the experience of immigration, you know, having to like speak to different cultures or having to like live in two different cultures. And the other thing about the dual identity thing is that Clark Kent is like, it's a terrible disguise as all is he's wearing a suit basically. I think you might wear glasses. Yeah, no. Clark can always wear glasses. The whole point of Clark Kent is the glasses. He's got, he's huge, a huge guy,

but he's like a real clots and he's, you know, he's, you know, basically he's the person, that the reader can identify with, I think, as like, you know, the person who's like people don't look up to, et cetera, but his secret identity is a Superman. There's a wishful fulfillment part of this sort of, a wishfulfillment fantasy a part of us. Well, yes. Well, of course, wishfulfillment and fantasy

is a kind of central psychosocial function of the superhero narrative. And I think once we get up to the contemporary super hero films, I think there'll be quite a lot to say about that. Because it's significant that this is happening historically at exactly the moment when in other forms of narrative fiction, sort of fantasy is really, I had a kind of low air, actually, as a feature. I was telling Kear this when we were getting ready for the show. I might have mentioned this on the show before because it's just one of my favorite little historical factoids. that this is exactly the moment, the late 30s, when I would say arguably the most popular film in the history of cinema, The Wizard of Oz, gets made. The Wizard of Oz, classic film, is actually based on a set of kids books, which had been super popular sort of best fellas, a generation, maybe, yeah, a bit more than a generation previously.

So they were very well established part of Americans' Kids' Literature. but when they were first published, they were kids' fantasy stories, again, written from a sort of progressive political perspective, actually. But when they made the Hollywood film of The Wizard of Oz, they decided that contemporary audiences in the late 30s were not going to have anything to do with this sort of nonsensical fantasy. So they had to frame the film in terms of it all being a dream, it all being a sort of dream sequence.

A lot of people think of modern fantasy literature is beginning with Tolkien, but it really doesn't. There's a lot of sort of what we could recognize as fantasy literature in the late 90th, 30th, 20th century. People like Lord Dunseney, George McDonald, people like that. But it's really at a low ebb in the mid-20th century because it's the great era of popular faith in science, reason, progress,

like doing the high era of Fordist industrialisation. And so comics become the place where something like sort of fantasy fiction can go. I mean, comics sort of, they're sort of taking the place of the pulp to some extent. The so-called pulps, the cheap, The magazines where people were just probably short prose fiction had been the place for fantasy and most importantly science fiction as literary genres had really developed and horror

in the period between the wars. And then the comics are kind of inheriting that role of the pulp at the moment when fantasy, and fantasy in the broadest sense actually, fantasy and science fiction and horror are all not really, they're very kind of low, regarded, very sort of poorly within literary fiction and within cinema. So they become this incubator for post-war fantasy in the broader sense.

Although Superman in particular is really rooted in sort of like more optimistic side of like science fiction fantasy or science fiction. There's in that book, The Men of Tomorrow, they show this image, which is in one of these science fiction pulps of somebody flying using technology, etc., which was apparently a bit. influence on seagull and schuster because that contrasts quite nicely with like batman so batman comes along in 1939 he's the second superhero to be invented and this is in 1339 and it's number seven number 27 of detective comics which will be later shortened to dc of course so bob kane is the artist who sort of invents him and bill fingers a writer and if superman comes out of like that science fiction sort of popes to some degree

anyway. Although I do agree it's like the science fiction but then given that the fantasy sort of twist basically it's definitely not hard sci-fi, is it? Then sort of Batman comes out of like the much more grimy sort of crime or detective pulp fiction

stuff. So Batman has no special powers basically. It's just got that training, that hypercompetence and later on like the gadgets that come from like wealth basically. Bruce Wayne, which is Batman's alter ego. He's a sort of like millionaire socialite, basically. You could almost put it this way, right?

He's a sort of like, he's the capitalist, he's the capitalist superhero to contrast with Superman's quasi-socialist sort of, especially at the beginning sort of thing. Yeah, I think we're a pro-superman, aren't we? He has a phoe. He's a psych. He's a sociopath. You should have been locked up, Batman.

It's just some sociopath. some like sociopath rich guy engaged in a sort of personal class war against the the lump and elements of the lump and proletariat yeah although i will i will defend the adam west campy's batman in the 1960s yeah the the camp batman we should also say mention that wonder woman you know the woman see pierre is also comes out really soon it's 41 wonder woman first makes her appearance earlier than i thought actually that yeah well i think think it's important to remember that, you know, aspirations towards gender equality, they were part of the culture of the New Deal, for example. Yeah. That's one way of reading, of reading Wonder Woman.

Well, I do, yeah. I mean, you can say she's supposed to look kind of sexy, and that's going to attract boy readers. But so to the, I mean, you can say that about all of them. I mean, yeah. They're all drawn really erotically. They are very erotically, yeah. One of Wonder Woman's things is that she combined men with her magic whip and make them tell the truth. There's definitely, like, Like S&M things. The magic lasso. She can beat them with the whip. Yes, that's it.

The magic lasso. That is all true, but I'm going to say, I actually, I don't think, I don't think that Wonder Woman's Hot Pants and Sports Brough more realistically resemble actual women's sportswear today than anything Batman and Superman are wearing, which does just look like some weird sort of a gimp fantasy costume. Well, you say that, but I've got a strong feeling that the cape is going to. come back into fashion very soon. So I am going to defend Wonder Woman. I mean, I think, yeah, I think, and I think Wonder Woman as a character for her time was like

a really big deal. And I remember my mum telling me, you know, when she was little, she loved Wonder Woman. And it was really, and it was seen as a sort of, she was seen as a sort of preto-feminist icon. And I always feel it's important because people, everybody gets taught at school and university, this idea that there was, there were

these two waves of feminism, the first wave, the second wave and one was the suffragettes and the other one was women's liberation and it's just completely misleading historical narrative and it overlooks the extent to which women's liberation did emerge as a radicalisation of an ongoing feminist project which was did chug along all through the 40s 50s and 60s and produced a lot of important culture it massively influenced the framing of the civil rights act in the states and it you know it manifested in things like wonder woman in the 40s I mean the other thing you say about Wonder Woman is that like, and to agree with your point is that her origin myth is that she comes from a race of like Amazonians. Yeah, she's the Amazon. Not Amazon. She's

one of the mythical Amazons in that story. The Amazons of Greek myth, the supposedly of Anatonian or Skiddean tribe of all women warriors, they're real in this story and she is their princess. On a hidden island, yeah. On a hidden island, she's their princess. and they all have, like, incredible powers, basically. Yeah, so it is, you know, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool, especially, as we say, I mean, 1940. Just to go back to Batman, I suppose, the other thing about Batman is that, like,

because this will follow through into his various reinventions, not all of them, Adam West, but, like, you know, quite a lot of them is. Batman's origin story is that he's traumatized by seeing his parents get murdered in a mugging, basically. And he then he then dedicates himself to enact vengeance on criminals, basically. Yeah, it becomes, it's the single most iconic single panel in the whole of comics history, is that his mother's pearls on the ground in the alleyway, which is, I don't know what the first, I don't know when that first got drew,

but it's been repeated like many, many times in later Batman comics. This is the moment of trauma that produces Batman. and that convinces him that what he should do in order to get his revenge, his clearly class-fueled revenge against the criminal element for the murder of his parents,

as if you can hold all members of this, you know, loosely defined social group responsible for the actions of one of them. You know, what he should do is you go, joke dresses of giant bat. And it's always, there's always this refrain, like from the earliest version, like nothing strikes fear into the mind of the criminal more than the sight of a bat. I remember first from counting that as a kid and thinking, what are they

talking about? I assumed this must refer to some, some tradition, some history of folklore that I hadn't yet been taught about. I assumed that at some point in my life, I would learn why it was an established cultural convention that criminals are more afraid of a bat than any other thing. And they didn't. It's just, it's total nonsense. They're not, criminals aren't afraid of bats. Have we got scientific studies to back there? No, I mean, you could chose a grizzly bear or something, couldn't you of it?

But that is, that is one of the, one of the distinctions as well with Superman is, like, Batman is all about, it's got that thing of like, I'm going to mobilize fear, the tool of the criminal against themselves. And that's a big thing that comes back over and over again of like, you know, can you use violence and fear, you know, in the cause of good, how you define good. I'm not quite sure. So early Batman, like, is killing people all the time,

basically, whereas Superman isn't. It's much more sort of violent, sort of like... Well, is a sociopath, like, as a psychopath, really, isn't he? I mean, that does end up getting played out, and some of the bets, as well, some comics will refer to a bit later on. I mean, the idea that actually he is. He is actually mentally ill. Does become a theme from the 80s onwards.

Because he obviously hits, to me. Yeah, particularly when it when it's like arch nemesis, the Joker gets, you know, gets reestablished as somebody who's like, criminally insane, basically. And there's sort of like some sort of, they revolve around each other, put it that way. I suppose the other thing with Batman as well is that Gotham City is like this city in crisis. I suppose it's like the Depression era sort of like New York. But it's New York and Chicago, isn't it? It's some sort of mixture of New York, Chicago, Detroit. but it's mainly, indeed, mainly New York.

I don't know, I've been to, the place I've been that most look like Gotham is actually downtown Chicago, I would say. I'd always thought of it as New York. Yeah, so like, you know, those are like some of the key sort of superheroes of like that Golden Age. You have other people like The Flash, who has sort of wings on his heels, so that's a direct reference to Hermes, you know, from Greek mythology, who's incredibly fast, etc.

And then the predecessor from Marvel comes along to rival DC Comics. It's called Timely Comics back then. And you get the invention of people like Captain America, and then the Human Tort who will later be part of the Fantastic Four. And then you get Captain Marvel, who goes on to name Marvel, then they move from Timely Comics. Compared to something like Superman or Batman, Captain Marvel is much more,

is really drawn in that fantasy genre, I think, on like classical myth, etc., because it's like this young boy who meets a wizard, in fact, and the wizard teaches him this secret magical world, which will transform him from a little boy into like this sort of Superman analog in some sort of ways. And he has to say the magic word Shazam. So the Shazam is an acronym of Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury.

So they're not hiding the roots in classical mythology. We've sort of talked about why the Golden Age ends. And then, you know, in the mid-1950s, these, you get this establishment of the comets code and, you know, the reinvent or the move back towards superheroes. People sort of date it from 1954, no, sorry, 1996, because the flash, who I mentioned just then gets reinvented or get relaunched and reinvented, and it's sort of, like, sets a model for like a much more humanized sort of superhero. But the Silver Age is in particular, so Silver Age, people sort of say it runs from like 1956 to 1970, and it's

especially towards the end of that, you're getting the readership for comics is moving from just small boys into like college age kids, basically. And of course, college age kids in the 1960s are going through a thing of their own, you know. At least some of them are experimenting with psychedelics, etc. And, you know, there's a countercultural sort of feel that leaks into Marvel comics in particular, I think. And so when's the first Spider-Man comic? It's an amazing fantasy in 62. 62, yeah, it's quite late actually, yeah. And the deal with Spider-Man is partly that he's, I mean, what exactly the age of Bruce Wayne

and Clark Kent is supposed to be isn't totally clear. I sort of always infer that Bruce Wayne's in his 30s and, or even, and Clark Kenton's in his 20s. But Peter Parker is a teenager, isn't he? He's at high school. Yeah, yeah, he's like, wise-cracking high school kid, yeah, actually, yeah, it's at high school kid. And so you get, as famously you get introduced the idea that this guy has sort of accidentally become a superhero, but he's also having to deal with in the other half of his life being like being a high school kid to which other high school kids can relate.

And the idea that being a superhero actually doesn't magically resolve or basically any of the issues he has to deal with as an ordinary high school kid. He's got his life being Spider-Man, going around parkouring around the city and fighting criminals. sort of for a laugh, and then he's got his life as a high school kid, which does not feature in the strips as much as you would think, given the amount of commentary that people like me like to make about it. But it does, but it does feature, and it does, like, bleed into his life as Spider-Man. Sometimes he has to try and get a friend out of trouble as Spider-Man without them finding out with Spider-Man. So it does generate all these quite interesting, like, narrative features, which make for quite a lot of narrative and sort of psychological complexity,

with quite simple ingredients. While, of course, doing the important public service of informing the public as to why you really shouldn't be afraid of being bitten by a radioactive spider, that it might actually be quite beneficial to you. Again, I have to say, as a child, there was at least one time

and I became quite contrite with my parents when they declined to present me with any opportunity to become bitten by a radioactive spider. You didn't hang around radioactive generators, off too much, did you? But that isn't it because it's like the Hulk is also gets his special powers from being exposed to radiation. And so it's that, it's that thing of, is this science fiction? Is this fantasy? Because basically radiation in that time in comics does function as, it may as well be a wizard as it does it basically. It does function like, like magic.

Exactly, yeah. It just becomes an all-purpose plot device that can make anything happen. We'd probably say the Hulk as well is somebody, you know, and the Hulk is all about, you know, he, Bruce Banner is a mild-mannered scientist who turns into the Hulk when he loses his temper, you know, when it gets the adrenaline flowing through him, etc. Which obviously also links to this idea that that's not somebody who's in control of things, do you know what I mean? That's somebody who's superpowers is a problem.

Once again, that's quite different to sort of like Superman. I mean, that definitely becomes the basis upon which Marvel comics kind of sell themselves in the 60s. I think I've still got somewhere a little paperback, a fantastic four paperback that belongs to my mum or my aunt in the early 60s. And the blurb on it is all about, this is the cool new breed of groovy superheroes whose problems are as big as their powers. I mean, that is the sort of language that it uses.

So, yeah, you can see kind of what the appeal of that is. Yeah, and so we'd also probably mention the Fantastic Four as well, because the history of the Silver Age goes that as part of this reinvention of super Heroes, DC Comics, who, you know, were completely dominant because of Superman and Batman, et cetera, they introduced this, the Justice League of America. And so they start this, this thing that takes off in the silver age of superheroes coming together. So the Justice League of America has got, you know, it's got all of the superheroes banding together to fight super, super villains sort of thing. And in response to that Marvel comic, they decide they need a super team and they pull together the fantastic. stick for, which includes the human torch.

But there's sort of like, it's that in that there's a sort of family dynamic. Sue is the sister of the human torch, Johnny's store. And then Ben Grimm, who's the thing, who's the only one who doesn't like transform and have a secret identity. I don't know what his role is in the family. He's just hanging about, basically. He's like the pet, though. He's like the dog.

Yeah, maybe he is, yeah. Anyway, that's a, or the unemployed uncle who hangs around the house. Yeah. And they get their superpowers because they're exposed to cosmic rays, which is a form of radiation, of course. They're seen as like, you know, they're a key in this invention of like, you know, there's a family dynamic going on. But they're also like, you know, there are stories where they're struggling for money, et cetera. And they've got all these other dynamics as well as fighting these are that super villains and aliens races invading and all that sort of stuff. With Marvel, you'd have to talk about various people.

I mean, Marvel is associated with Stan Lee, who was the editor through all this sort of period, and, like, really went out of his way to identify himself with Marvel Comics. So in the comics, he'd have a little, is it called Stan Speaks or something like that, which would be, you know, his editorializing basically, talking about the general issues as well as, like, the Marvel Comics, etc. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, by far the most iconic, like, writer or editor figure in comics history. obviously one of the features of comics as a medium

is that except in the case of some unusual sort of voteurs there are people who write the scripts and Stan Lee wrote a lot he wasn't only an editor and he became sort of powerful as a sort of line editor at Marvel but he wrote like the most famous amazing Spider-Man stories for example and you have the artists and the artists you know you would bring their distinctive visual styles

to the medium but of all they're those figures. I mean, maybe before Alan Moore, who we will get up to, Stan Lee is kind of the most iconic. The Silver Age is pretty much sort of synonymous with the kind of the emergence and the popularity of Stan Lee and the various comics of these associated with in various ways through Marvel, I think. Well, we get up to the Marvel films as well until he dies. Anyway, he does a sort of Hitchcock-esque cameo in each of the films, which is like an extension of his sort of, like, Stan speaks sort of thing. The other people who do, talk about there are, well, there are two

altars associated with that Silver Age of Marvel Comics in particular, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. So Jack Kirby is like this artist, he almost sets the sort of the standard format for what Marvel should look like basically until Steve Ditko sort of alters it a bit a later day. But Jack Kirby events,

he co-creates Captain America in the sort of Golden Age, but then he and Stan Lee invent, you know, Black Panther, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Iron Man, the Silver Surfer, the X-Men, the huge array of superheroes. Like, he's got this, like, really sort of naturalistic style of, like, particular around, you know, around action, etc., and fighting in particular, that sort of stuff. He also had a sort of countercultural sort of status, despite not being countercultural at all as a person because he also drew these incredible like cosmic landscapes. I suppose they'd be like they're not landscapes. They're in space, but like cosmic space with spacescapes, because

they're spacecapes. Spacecapes, that's what I'd say. Yes, spacecapes. Cosmic spacecapes using all sorts of techniques like montage, etc., like cutting stuff out and all. Some of them are absolutely amazing. The Silver Surfer in particular acquired this reputational status as like the cool, countercultural psychedelic superhero, but I've never been sure if it's really because of anything of the stories, or it's just because the imagery of a guy surfing through space, like, was sort of resonated so much, especially with, like, Californian psychedelic culture. I mean, the latter, I think, because, like, when it turns up, he's originally, like, the sentinel for this universe-eating great alien god being, and then he sort of rebels, basically,

becomes a sort of superhero, but he's not sort of like counterculture and a loo. He's quite uptight, I think, that's a surfer, but he is riding a surfboard, so. Through space, through space, yeah, through incredible, quite psychedelic sort of spacecapes drawn by Jack Kirby. The other person you talk about is Steve Ditko's most famous for co-inventing Spider-Man alongside Stan Lee. later on he develops almost like a sort of psychedelic element to his sort of like to his drawings etc he's sort of an interesting character Steve Ditko he got really into Ayn Rand and Ayn Rand's

pseudo philosophy of objectivism and so he was really you know he was associated he was drawing he's sort of like quite psychedelic images at certain points but his views were really at odds with the countercultural sort of like young students who were reading his stuff in later Superman Spider-Man, he was, you know, he tried to toughen Spider-Man up a little bit more, basically, you know, showing student protesters in the bad light and all that sort of stuff. And Stanley had to step in. Stan always driven by the dog had to step in and so not to do it.

I mean, Stan Lee's a sort of liberal, isn't he? Stan, I'd say, he's not, his political stances historically were pretty well, very well in tune with that emerging boomer, sort of boomer liberalism, and would remain, say, right through to the days of the early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. Yeah. A sort of liberal in the sort of the playboy sort of countercultural element, if you know.

Well, or not, maybe, I mean, on this I would say not even really counterculture. I mean, this is the strand of what we sometimes thought of as the historic counterculture, which clearly was mostly just anticipating, like, late 20th century, that liberal consumer capitalism. This was not really the counterculture of, you know, the Bay Area acid scene, or the Students for Democratic Society. But it was sufficiently in tune with some of their desires to sell them comics.

Exactly, yeah. I mean, the other thing to say about this period is like this is a period where they develop this, the MCU, the Marvel Comics universe. DC Comics do it as well, basically. And so you have of these sort of crossover comics in which you get different superheroes as fighting each other at the drop of a hat, basically.

I've a collaborator to fight a super-villain of fighting each other. Well, this is really important. I don't think we can underestimate the importance of this because it's not the first example. You can go back through some strands. I think I'm thinking particularly of horror fiction, influenced by H.P. Lovecraft in the mid-20th century

and have examples of multiple authors writing stories set in broadly the same fictional universe, but they're all going to have their own take on it. Again, one reason why Lovecraft has been this lasting influence in the culture, even though he didn't really even write that much, is because of that, because his stuff got taken up by another cohort of writers, and it became this sort of shared mythos as its call.

But it is really, it's the comic writers around this time in the early 70s that do this on a, scale which no one has really done before or at least unless you want to sort of include sort of ancient mythology or you know medieval romances or something they they co-create this really really elaborate like fantasy world like with this really complicated cosmology in which you know there can be multiple storylines and multiple characters and and at some point they borrow actually from michael morcott the british the fantasy writer the idea of the multiverse the idea that these parallel worlds, there are these parallel versions of the same world. They borrow that

partly just because it's an easy way of getting around continuity errors. But of course, if you think about how important that sort of collaborative, fantastical world building is now to various kinds of narrative fiction, various kinds of some screen fiction, computer games, that sort of thing, then it is really significant that the first place this happens on this kind of scale is when they start to kind of integrate the different comet lines held by, you know, published by a particular publisher around the time we're talking about now, really around the turn of the 70s. It eventually ends up as a huge cosmology of parallel universes in which I think like the main universe is Earth 616, something like that, right? But there are all sorts of

different sort of Marvel universes. And in that way, there's a way in which you can deal with different writers writing and rebooting and relaunching different superheroes, etc. when they go when they go stale and just to jump forward into the movies so that one of the best of the superhero films of the last sort of 20 years that well as two films into the Spideiverse in which a Spider-Man jumps between different parallel universes and so he encounters you know the Spider-Men of different eras and different sort of styles of drawing, et cetera, et cetera, and it's incredibly effective. They're really, really good.

Yeah, well, I mean, my understanding, this might be wrong. I know this is a claim that's made. I don't know if anyone's tested it definitively. But my understanding, the phrase multiverse, which now is used within, like, quantum mechanics, to talk about many worlds theory, for example, is used. It has, it was first coined by the British fantasy writer Michael Warcock. Really, really, really important, like late 20th century British writer, who's still alive. but was really popularised by its usage in comics

because comic writers are all very familiar with sort of pulp fantasy and non-pulp fantasy in science fiction. And that's really, that's how it got out into general circulation as a word, that word multiverse. Though it could be wrong, it's perfectly possible some theoretical physicist used it in like 1944 or something. So comics really playing an important role there and primarily superhero comics, like playing this really

quite important role in the culture. And I think that's, you can, and you're going to keep seeing right up to the present day that comics as a narrative form are a really important source for screen narrative in particular because they're a narrative form that incorporates dialogue which has to be written. It's always important to think about this, that comics dialogue is basically like writing a play. You can't write sort of prose fiction because what goes in the box is some minimal description of what's going on in a scene and the dialogue of the characters. So people who are writing comics are more sort of writing like plays or screenplays

than they're writing novels, even though the phrase graphic novel will become popular from the 80s onwards. And then this is accompanying visuals. So you can see why they would be a source for various kinds of screen fiction, for TV and cinema, because basically you're playing around with the possibilities of frame-by-frame, visual with dialogue, communication and of course in a comet you can do stuff much much more cheaply you can try stuff out much more cheaply than you can if you're recording a TV show or making

a film so so really from that moment on they're going to become a really important source for less so for TV in a way surprising that it's less so for TV maybe but really important source for cinema and also I'm going to keep saying for computer games I think

plus you know they look a little bit like storyboarding which directors do of course yeah exactly yeah yeah The Golden Age and the Silver Age are very clear and distinct there and then people talk about the Bronze Age Grant Morrison talks about it as the Dark Age which people say it's sort of run from 71 to 85 something like that. It's a little bit less distinct

but one of the markers is that the comic code gets relaxed in 1971 and so comets can deal with a little bit even a little bit harder elements of social realism. So very famously in the Green Lantern, there's a comic story which dealt with drug addiction, for instance, and you were addicted to heroin. It's not a time of like huge reinvention of superheroes which reach mythic status, though.

That happens in like the golden age and the silver age. There are superheroes invented, in particular there's sort of like an effort around, you know, increasing representation from different groups So perhaps Luke Cage, who was like an African-American superhero. It's like a kung fu artist, in fact. Because that's one of the other things that's going on in the 70s, isn't it, the rise of kung fu? He lives in Brooklyn, et cetera.

And it's sort of, I suppose, it's sort of around the sort of black exploitation, that sort of era, that sort of stuff. There's also, there's other stuff going on in comics. One of the outgrows of the counterculture is the true kind of underground comic scene. So you get things like the fabulous fairy, Freak brothers, and you get Robert Crum, Eventually, you're going to get these innovators like Harvey Pekar, just literally just drawing comics about his everyday life in Cleveland. So I think sort of the key thing that's happening for our story during that period is that the creative energy in the world of comics isn't really in the superhero domain anymore. And at the same time, you start to get, for the first time, really, like convincing cinematic renditions of superhero fiction. So there's been TV shows.

there's been kids cartoons, there's been the famous, stroke, notorious, you know, queer surrealist interpretation of Batman on TV in the late 60s.

But, I mean, the Superman movie, Superman in the mid-70s with Christopher Reeves, it's like the, it's the first post-Star Wars superhero film.

So it's a superhero film whose special effects still look sort of basically convincing today to modern audiences pre-CGI. So that's another, and that's another thing

that's happening, I think. That's another part. of what's going to be the cultural context of what happens around the mid-80s. And that is the fact that the success of those Superman films, at least, has sort of, it has sort of cemented the idea of Superman in particular as this sort of, this almost trans-historical icon of American culture, this cultural representation of American-ness,

which is going to set up the whole idea of the superhero as something that radical writers are going to want to actively deconstruct rather than simply ignore from about the mid-80s, I think. In a mid-80s, there's something definitely does happen with superhero comics. You probably associate it most with Frank Miller's The Dark Night Returns from 1986, which will set a sort of model for Christopher Nolan's sort of films around Batman in the 2000-2010s. And then Alan Moore's Watchman from 1980s. six to seven again, I think that is.

I mean, the thing that is really happening, at least in the case of the beginning of that career of Alan Moore, is writers who have really cut their teeth in the comics underground. And in this, we would have to also mention 2000 AD, the great British kind of science fiction comic, which in a way, arguably, I would say, is sort of the most commercially successful underground comic in the history of English language comics.

so it has a vibe and an ethos which comes directly out of that comic underground but it mostly does recognisable genre fiction sort of science fiction sort of fantasy not really superheroes but it does it with this very left field way it's a very significant early component of cyberpunk culture

2000 AD which is still going today it becomes a kind of proving ground in particular for British writers like Anna Moore and Grant Morrison who then get recruited by the big American comic companies, DC and Marvel, to write and sometimes reinvent established strips and lines there. And probably the sort of most important moment in that I think is Anna Moore

getting commissioned to write some of these Swampthing stories. Swampthing is an established comics line. Swamp Thing is already a really weird phenomenon because Swampings, I'm not sure when the first Swamp Thing was published. It's been, Anna Moore doesn't start Swamp Thing. But it's all and it is sort of self-consciously experimental in that it it sort of doesn't want to decide whether it's a horror comic or a or a superhero comic so the swamp thing is sort of a superhero but even more than the Hulk or benjamin grinned the thing he is he's sort of a monster as well so he is a the swamp thing is a person a scientist or someone who somehow has become transmuted into this creature that lives in the swamp and

He looks like the Swamp Thing from like American B movie. It's a horror cinema of like a decade or two before. And then Alla Moore is given the job of writing, I think from number 32. I think in 85 he's given the job of writing the saga of the Swamp Thing. And he really runs with it. Because you can already see there's obvious potential in this. If you are someone who's sort of coming out of the left field, countercultural scene, the idea of a guy who gets turned into

a being who is defined by his sort of inseparability from a kind of vegetal environment, the swamp, the creature who looks like is kind of covered in sort of slime and plants all the time. Well, there's a lot to play with there. And more absolutely goes wild with it. And the story becomes indeed that the swamp thing is this being who was a human

and through some kind of scientific accident, some radiation blast or something, I can't remember, gets transferred into, you know, the swamp is somewhere, you know, somewhere in Florida or something where all this, well, Louisiana, this is supposed to happen. And he, and starts to animate this, becomes this kind of humanoid form, which is animated plant life. And then as it develops, the story becomes all about how the swamp thing is basically in the process of becoming a sort of earth gods, basically, who is capable of sending his consciousness into the entire

the sort of vegetal layer of the earth's biome he calls it going into the green I mean it's a very clear analogy to sort of you know taking psychedelics out in the countryside or something sort of losing your your sense of self feeling your consciousness

merged with the greenery the leaves and the trees and it is really sort of extraordinary really sort of extraordinary work and it did it was very widely it was very well received critically and I think one of the things that's going on in the comics industry in the mid-80s

and this is partly to do indeed with demographics it's partly to do with the fact that by the mid-80s there's a critical mass of readers who have kept reading comics since they were kids in the 60s and are still reading comics and are interested in more kind of adult storylines so my understanding of it is

there is a kind of feeling around amongst the kind of commercial management of the comics industry that they want to kind of bring on writers and storylines that are more appealing to adult readers and Alan Moore is kind of one of the people identified as somebody who's capable of doing that. I think by that point he's already, I think he'd already published Veefe Vendetta,

I think as an independent comic. Yeah, so 82, the Vendetta comic first comes out, which is a classic piece of British dystopian fiction responding directly to the kind of anxieties people had about early Thatcherism. And so the seniors, my understanding is some of the senior executives are around the comics industry at this time in the mid-80s for various reasons, much like the way senior executives

are companies like HBO, we're taking a similar view of television in the early 2000s, are going through one of their very rare phases when senior decision makers in the culture industries think actually what they want is serious artists doing serious experimental art for an adult audience. And that's where Animal comes from. And then the first big strip, he does it, is what Watchmen is for DC, isn't it? It is, yeah.

Yeah. So he publishes this strip, The Watchmen. All right, so, Kit, tell us, tell the people, in case anyone is listening, doesn't know what happens in Watchmen. Well, I'm not going to say everything that happens in Watchmen because it's an amazing book. I mean, it's got like comics within comics and these motifs that repeat, et cetera. But basically it's the story of a world in which

there are masked vigilantes, but they don't have superpowers. It's like our world, but, you know, with these mass vigilantes, etc. And then in the mid-1950s, I think, probably something like that, perhaps a bit later than that. There's this accident, a scientist gets locked into some sort of tacky an accelerator or something like that.

Science is magic anyway and gets turned into like an actual blue Superman, doesn't wear his underpants and it's outside. He walks around with his cock out, famously. But he's got incredible superpowers. And in some sorts of ways, the story is about, the purpose of the watchman is to, is to, for the first time to say, well, look, say there was somebody, you know, there was a Superman's psych analog suddenly appeared in the world. What would happen? Do you know what I mean?

A lot of the superhero stories before then were our world and the superheroes were in them, etc. Having a Superman suddenly emerged would fundamentally change things. And so in watchmen, you know, Dr. Manhattan is the name of this sort of Superman analog. It's not, you know, directly, but in some sort of ways, he's almost got, like, godlike powers. You know, he sort of goes and goes off and fights in Vietnam and, like, wins the Vietnam War for the U.S., etc., and all that sort of stuff.

And so, like, you know, it's all sort of that sort of stuff is tied up in it. You know, there are other superheroes, the comedian is just like, the whole story starts with the death of the superhero sort of anti-hero called the comedian who gets thrown out of his window and a high-rise somewhere in New York, actually. I think its name is New York. And he's like his evil, evil bastard. He's the one who shot Kennedy, in fact, it's related to later.

All right, no more spoilers, because we want people to watch the... We want people to read it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And no more spoilers. That's the sort of like the setup, basically. And, you know, all the way through, there's this clock motif repeats all over the place, basically. And the clock motif is set by this idea that, five minutes to nuclear war, whatever.

So it's set in that sort of like mid-80s acceleration of Cold War paranoia about nuclear destruction and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, so that sort of sets the scene. And then the story is a story of people trying to uncover. Who killed the comedian, basically? That's the initiative, the story. And it's sort of like the anti-hero, the other anti-heroes, this villain

caught, this this superhero called Rossarch who is based on Steve Ditko's objectivist, Randy and objectivist superhero inventions and the question of Mr. A

that he kept on trying to put forward and never really caught on. Yeah, that's as good enough summary of Watchmen for people. And the cultural impact of it's huge, because it's published as a comic series. And it was at all a new thing for comic series to then get published in single volumes. But that's how I've always read them. I've never been somebody who can't be bothered

like collecting comics. So if I've read comics, I read collections. But the Watson was this huge thing. And the collected, the collected volume of Watchmen, I don't think it was the first time the phrase was used, but the popularity of it, popularized the term graphic novel, meaning basically like a complete comic story in a single book. But also of obviously the idea of the graphic novel is the idea that what you're reading is something which is more serious than a mere comet for kids. Of course, so there's a huge amount of commentary in the press on TV, arts programs. It also sells huge amounts. It sells loads. Part of the typical commentary around the success and popularity of Watchmen in the late 80s

was to point out to like middle class educated readers that in France, like a Bond destiny, what we call comics had always been thought of as a kind of serious art form and had been treated as a serious art form for decades and that it was about time the English-speaking world sort of caught up to this. But of course there's something

there's something else going on with Watchmen because it is about the thing that comics are routinely sort of denigrated for being about which is superheroes but it is this kind of meta-textual reflection on the whole problem of the idea of the superhero and it is absolutely brilliantly done. It's an extraordinary piece of work.

I've got to say, you know, my partner Joe, who has just an absolutely woeful, like ignorance of and indifference to all forms of genre fiction, absolutely loves Watchmen. Like, it's one of her favorite books. So it is really a sort of a powerful piece of work, and it established Alan Moore, the bearded, long-haired,

be-ringed, bejewed, sort of six-foot-three, Northampton, a lifelong Northampton resident, and Midlander as a kind of iconic figure of British culture and in some ways he was like a more famous and iconic figure of sort of British counterculture in the late 80s than any musicians

were. You remember was it Pop Willits itself had that song, one of the lines of which was Alan Moore knows the score. Yeah, yeah. And you saw everywhere. The iconic image from the comic is a smidey face badge that has had blood splashed on it

so it looks like the smidey is crying. which it resonated very, very powerfully with the sort of cultural zeitgeist, you know, which Keir and I have often referred to, which was widespread among young people. So young Gen X at that time, which was this sense of sort of tragic loss, even though people couldn't quite put into words, you know, a lot of the time what it was we had lost. I mean, like I've said so many times on the show before, fuck really what it's about is the consequences of the defeat, the minor strike, and the incipient collapse of Soviet Union.

The way which we thought of it was the sense that the 60s already represented this kind of utopian hope, which we were blocked off from and could never go back to. And, you know, the Smidey Face badge, this image associated with the 60s, although I think accurately, it's more kind of early 70s fad. I'm not sure about that. Yeah, with blood splashed on it, it just seemed to resonate so much with that sense of things. And with the sense of kind of dark foreboding, which advancing thatcherism, generated in people, and to which, you know, Alan Moore, in Vendetta and Watchmen,

and then some of the work he did shortly after that. He, I mean, he was arguably the creative artist responding to Thatcherism in the most of a significant way, actually, in any needy. You know, that blood splattered on a smiley face as well is also at the position of five to 12, five minutes to midnight, basically. If you want to know how carefully plotted It is by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, who is the artist. And that's just one of the many repeating Five to Midnight motifs through the comic. I mean, the other person who would mention, and I mentioned them earlier, they have a comic that was really signified with this moment or associate with this moment

is Frank Miller's The Night Returns, which is 90. Dark Night Returns. Batman, the Dark Night Returns, yes. Yeah. Very different, very different. Yeah. No, yeah, totally. Yeah, very, very, very different. I'm frankly, a quite right-wing character. Very famously, you know, condemned Occupy Wall Street when it was on.

Then said he was, then retracted that, actually, and said he was going through an alcoholic stage. But he wrote, didn't he write 300? He wrote the comment that 300 was based on. It said something about the real depoliticisation of popular culture that was going on at the time. there was really typical of like Pomo, emerging long 90s or Gen X culture that, like, if you read them closely, it was very clear that, like, Miller and Moore were, like, politically antagonistic to each other. And they themselves would, would say this in interviews sometimes. You know, they themselves would acknowledge this. And people who are really into comics knew this,

but it wasn't kind of widely talked about. They were widely just talked about as this kind of common phenomenon of the graphic novel, like the adult, dark-themed superhero story. that you know watchmen on the one hand dark night returns on the other and it was you know it was this kind of gesture which really sort of depoliticized watchmen in particular but of course it's not watchmen but dark night returns that becomes the sort of launch pad of the modern superhero movie

yeah yeah absolutely so like dark night returns is so it's like you know the sort of people talk about a superhero noir basically and it's like you know Batman is this like traumatic thing you know, there's this sort of like nihilism. Film noir features characters who are hardened because they've been to war, et cetera, and they come back to the world, and they've got this knowingness about them and all that sort of stuff. Here, like, the trauma is basically from crime.

And, like, Gotham City is seen as like this absolutely crime-ridden, falling apart city, absolutely drenched in corruption, et cetera. And that is quite interesting to think about, like, the early 80s, New York, which was seen as, like, you know, the crime, crime-ridden city, et cetera. It's a sort of New York of, like, taxi driver, et cetera, that sort of thing. Like, in 1975, like, before, you know, the early 1970s and in the post-war period,

New York was actually, it was actually something of a sort of, one of the closest things to social, to a social democratic city in the U.S. And, like, you know, really famously, it came close to bankruptcy in 1975. Well, they had to. This is partly, there's a David Harvey's book in his brief argument in. his book, Brief History of Neoliberalism, that New York had to be disciplined and basically destroyed, in effect, in order for global neoliberalism, really, to get going. In 1975, this is a very famous headline in, probably, I don't know, one of the papers,

Ford to City, drop dead. And it's like this thing of like, no, we're not going to bail you out. We want you to go under, basically. For Frank Miller, you know, this is like, basically what's going on is moral corruption, a moral corruption, which is also, you know, also repeated in the ambiguities of the Batman figure, etc. But they've got from City that they're seeing as this creator of traumatic crime is, that's a result of a conscious project to destroy New York, basically, you know. And interestingly, who's the figure who comes and saves New York from that? Donald Trump, basically. A rich vigilante figure.

Yeah, exactly. I'm pushing it a bit far. No, no, I think that's a very good analogy. It is very good, yeah. But, yeah, anyway, that is a theme running through superhero movies. Obviously, it's innate to it. It's just like individual solutions to, like, social problems. Do you know what I mean?

And then, in fact, you're like individual or moralistic diagnoses of why there are social problems in the first place. And, of course, it's some sort of, like, moralistic failing. And then perhaps an individual can come in and step in. and save that. Frank Miller's Dark Knight returns. In fact, it doesn't really save anything, in fact. He puts away some criminals, you know, but the Joker always gets out. You know, that sort of theme, nothing ever improves.

It's even nothing. He's a total failure. Yeah, yes. I really hate him so much. Well, actually, just before we segue into the films, I wanted to talk about 2018, just a little bit more. It was a really important comic to me growing up in 2008. I got the very first issue in

1977, but then I didn't get it for a while and I got it in 1979 right up until, you know, the early 90s. And then I just recently started subscribing it to it again about, well, not recently about 18 months ago. I've been very much enjoying it. But like they don't really have superheroes

in until sort of late 80s, I think actually. It's late 80s isn't it, where you have this figure, the superhero figure Zenith by Grant Morrison, who I mentioned earlier, And it's an interesting take on the superhero genre because in Zenith, there's a wave of superheroes in the 1960s who were sort of like, you know, countercultural figures. And Zenith is the son of two of them. And he's got superpowers like Superman.

But he's utterly uninterested in fighting either for social justice or for fighting against crime, basically. He's just a pop star, a vacuous sort of reality TV pop star who uses his time to get into tabloids and like go around getting drunk. drunken, bedding, supermodels and all that sort of stuff, basically. But then he gets drawn into this huge, what ends up as like this interdimensional sort of lovecraftian drama where these interdimensional beings, Zologra, are trying to take over the world. And in fact, they are the ones who basically passed the knowledge

of how to create superhumans onto the Nazis. And the real reason they wanted to create superhumans is because those superhumans would be, they have bodies strong enough for them to occupy when they came through the interdimensional space, very much drawing on sort of like Levcrafts. And as you say, you know, 2008 was this real proving ground

for a whole British wave, a British invasion, which went through to sort of launch that era's sort of re-evention of superheroes, not on their own. And in comics more broadly, did Neil Gaiman ever write for 2000 AD? No, I don't think he did, no.

Neil Gaiman also British writer. Or contemporaneous, but yeah. Yeah, and he writes the same. Man series. It's also for DC, which is not superhero at all. But he writes Sandman just around the same time. Sandman starts coming out early 90s. I mean, he gets hired to write Sandman because they are looking for the next Alan Moore. But there's no question about that. That is why that happens. That's how many of gamers career gets established. In much the same way, indeed, like American A&R men, we're looking to sign the next Beatles, like in the mid-60s. I mean, in some ways, like the great comics renaissance of the late 80s, early 90s, like, it does feel it's a bit, you know, it's a bit continuous with our story on a so much earlier episode about the early 90s is this kind of optimistic moment whose promise doesn't really get realized, isn't it? Because, you know, Alan Moore, like, helps to launch a comic and explicitly political comic.

Crisis, that, yeah, that's like late 80s, basically. probably 89, 88, 89. Yeah, it's directly afterwatchmen. And it sort of looks like comics are going to be this radical popular medium in the 90s. And then it doesn't really happen. Like Gaiman keeps working. There are loads of interesting comics,

but it does sort of, it doesn't stay very politically radical. So Neil Gaiman, Grant Morris and Alan Moore, they write these sort of philosophical stories, but they're not very political from the kind of mid-80s onwards. And Alan Moore, sort of notoriously, famously, gets really into the occult, gets really into magic.

Grant Morrison gets into magic as well, sigil magic as well at the same time. It's a real trend, isn't it? Yeah, Grant Morrison really into like chaos magic and Osman Spears of British, you know, it's a particular strand of sort of British esotericism. But it's also, it's very sort of

of end of history. It's very much actually about literally looking for magical solutions because political solutions seem to be entirely out of reach and almost unimaginable. And it does produce some really memorable work like Grant Morrison's series, The Invisibles, which is sort of in some ways my favourite comic series ever, but I also sort of hate it for it's like it's lack of politics. It's sort of it's lack of real politics. It's that's a classic 90s thing. It sort of promises politics. You know, it sort of emerges.

The first thing is like, you know, a young scouser. No wonder you identified with it, Jim. A young scouse gets like initiated into this sort of like magical sort of world, et cetera. The leader of like the Invisibles is an anarchist called King Mob, etc. And all that sort of stuff, you know. Yeah. Who's sort of based on the Jerry Cornelius character created by Michael Morkock? But basically, yeah, it doesn't pan out that way, basically.

It's much more into sort of quite psychedelic. think sort of like imaginative but like head fuck sort of villainy and that sort of stuff yeah and i can't really claim to know you that so i date my knowledge of i've been sounding very authoritative i know because basically i know a lot about that that that kind of 80s yeah what is now thought of it's a bit like the golden age of hip-hop it's it's all it is sort of a second golden age really in some ways of comics that that period when alan moore's a big star and what's meant a new thing or mid-80s through to the early 90s and then I suppose like most people

I didn't really keep up with the culture much apart from reading the Invisibles and reading everything Alan Moore ever wrote. Don't you think that might be an age thing as well? I stopped reading comics to so much it it might well be an age thing it might well just be an age thing. No

I think it's probably not I think there's an element of that I'd lose touch of comics to some degree in that period but like you know there's not a huge there's no sort of like new mythic level superheroes invented you in that period. There's no obvious successor to Alan Moore as like the great

radical comics writer as well. Which is something I think more himself. I think Anna Moore himself actually I have a sense he's very disappointed by he's very sad about. He thinks he's blazing a trail for almost a whole new art form of like very serious

politically and intellectually serious British comics which can draw on the comics heritage of the fantastical but but also drawn social realism and draw on sort of pulp storytelling and experimental storytelling techniques. And he's

trying to sort of blaze a trail for all that. But there isn't really a clear sort of generation that comes after him and sort of takes it forward. But of course, this is partly because I think the comics industry, like everything else, gets quite disrupted by the internet as well. And like it's also because

the kind of people who would have been, you know, the kind of people who would have been reading a lot of comics and like the late 80s, as in their late teens, it's like too busy playing computer games by the mid to late 90s. That's part of the narrative. And that is partly why it becomes, it's sort of surprising in a way. It's something I'd never properly got used to, the fact that the CGI superhero movie, the sort of gets going, I don't know when we trace the proper beginning of it. I think it is the turn of the century. I mean, there are superhero movies in the late 90s, but like they're, you know,

they're not of the form that we've come to know them, if you know what I mean. No, there's this sort of stop and start process of superhero movies emerging as a real thing, isn't there? So there's the Superman movies, which are widely regarded as just not being that good after the second one. And then Christopher Reeves has this tragic accident, and that does sort of affect, you know, people's interest in making superhero movies a bit.

There's the Batman movie of the late 80s, which is very much influenced by Frank Miller that Dark Night Returns, even though that influence isn't made as explicit as it will be in the Christopher Nolan version in the early 2000s. But then, and there are some films made in the 90s,

as you say, but, I mean, it's really about CGI, isn't it? I talked about Superman as a post-Star Wars superhero movie. And then, and that kind of generation of superhero movies last until CGI really gets going

at the end of the 90s. But then it's the CGI-enabled superhero movie which we're really talking about we're talking about them becoming this dominant narrative form in this century, aren't we? Yeah, no, absolutely, yeah.

In some ways you can sort of like mark two things, a technological advance, which means that you can show some of the stuff which could only be drawn, you could only be, you could only really visualize through comic art before that. But the other thing that people point to is like, you know,

9-11, the Twin Towers, etc. in 2001, the superhero film, which really over and over and over and over again visualizes 9-11. It replays 9-11 to some degree, you know, basically superheroes, fighting supervillains, inner city, and they're destroying the buildings around them, which couldn't have been done so easily, you know, just sort of like five years before in terms of technology. In many ways, that's the sort of, that's the backdrop to the rise of the superhero movie. A little bit like, you know, the sort of Kaiju sort of Godzilla films are always seen as representing that, you know, people dealing with the trauma of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc.

You know, there's something there around that the rise of those, of that particular type of superhero film, the US, America, dealing with that sort of trauma. There's a great book by Dan Hassler Forrest called Capitalist Superheroes. Cape Crusaders in the age of, in a neoliberal age, is from 2012. But, like, you know, his argument is that there are a couple of characteristics of that era of, well, it's still an era we're sort of still living through, but like that it takes off in the 2000s, probably reaches its peak. I don't know, probably reaches its peak sort of like in the mid-2010s.

But there's two sort of defining characteristics of that. One of them is this focus on the final battle which destroys the city, but saves the city. And then this real focus on origin stories. Like a lot of the reboots are just like rebooting origin stories of how superheroes came about. And he's got this quite a nice argument that like these are two quite often traumatic origins basically are traumatic events. So origin stories are quite often traumatic. Batman's origin story, the death of his father, et cetera. Superman's origin story, the death of his planet, that sort of stuff.

Yeah, I sort of, I'm sort of interested in that. I hadn't even occurred to me before you referred to Dan's book. We were preparing for this. That it might be odd that the origin story would be such a central element of the films today. Because as a kid, that was the thing I was fascinated by. I wasn't that interested in the actual superhero stories. I was fascinated by the origin stories, mainly of, course because I wanted to be one, I wanted to figure out how you could become one. And

if I hadn't had kids, then my, you know, my several hours a day training Tai Chi and yoga I was doing before we had kids, I think it would have led to me being a sort of a new age superhero today like I always wanted to be. I've seen you try, I've seen you attempt yoga flying. Yeah, I know. It doesn't, you know, I can't, it's, you know, it's been worth it. It's been worth it the joy of being a, being a father. But the world has been deprived of a sort of of a character from a 1970s, slightly alternative superiors. Well, what would have been your origin myth, though? Well, I would have just, it would have just been like trait. The origin myth would have just been like some acid trip when I decided I was going to devote my life to

the spiritual discipline and social justice. Well, that's not so far from reality, is it? I haven't really kept up the training to the level that would have made the intellectual, rigorous intellectual training. Anyway, sorry, I've sort of interrupted and derailed, and you were explaining to us, Dan Hasler Forest's very important point, that the reason that indeed, partly they're important in contemporary superhero films because they're presented to these traumatic scenes. So there's like, so in the contemporary sort of post-refero?

9-11, that's not contemporary is it, in the post-9-11 superhero movie, there's like a logic of two traumas, basically, an original trauma that always has the origin myth in the superhero film, and then it's like the second trauma, this trauma of the destruction of the city, which is prevented. Of course, the big thing is that the US couldn't prevent the fall of the Twin Towers, etc. So it's like that, that he sees it as like this sort of like therapeutic or perhaps not quite therapeutic and avoiding sort of technique in which the US can build itself back up again after this traumatic incident in 9-11. That's sort of his thing.

It's like these two traumas, basically, the original trauma, and then the semi-prevented trauma is the logic of these films. And you do see that. They always end on this bigger and bigger and bigger city-destroying, but city-saving battle, basically. And that's what you would associate with a big-budget, Marvel film, for instance. Yes. Well, I think that is all really insightful, but I feel it still leaves us with a big

set of questions to tell. Why have those stories of all types of stories become so prevalent in contemporary cinema? It's not really something anybody expected. And I think, you know, if you were giving an account of the content, the 21st century culture, as distinct from the culture, even really of the 90s. I mean, arguably, the two most important things to point to are reality television, basically replacing various kinds of fiction, like sitcoms and soap operas as the dominant form of television, and in the cinema of the superhero movies, they're becoming this huge phenomenon. And there are some features of it you can point to, like fairly obviously, I would say. I mean, they're obviously a deeply escapist, and they do

represent very basic, like almost infantile, like power fantasies. This is why it's not, I mean, it's, it is, it's funny, but it's also sort of relevant that I was obsessed with those as a little kid, because they were stories about how an actual human, like got to live out a pure sort of infantile power fantasy. And, you know, there's a fairly direct connection between a widespread political pessimism and the increasing popularity of escapist fiction, I think. It's partly why at the moment of the greatest social optimism in the history of the working class, you know, fantasy is at its least popular in the mid-20th century. And I think you have to see that as continuous with the popularity of the Lord of the Rings films, with Game of Thrones becoming

like one of the biggest shows on TV, with loads of science fiction, things that would have been seen as just geeky and marginal being really, really popular. You know, it's sort of all forms of escapism and it's continuous with computer games and maybe even with like you know tables up role playing games becoming really really popular that people understandably and I mean and it's probably true of all of us like needs or forms of escapism there's also there's the obvious individualism the fact that the superhero is obviously you know the whole thing about a superhero is they have all these abilities mostly the ability to do stuff that actually humans can do if they've got like a team of support and they've got access to the relevant technology. But the CPU is

able to do that stuff without having to be inserted into the set of social relationships which are required to actually like fire energy blasts at people or, you know, no one could do really yet. So obviously a big part of it is just the deep hegemony of neoliberal individualism as an intense iteration of the long history of capitalist and liberal individualism. So that's obviously part of it. I'd say it's also partly that a lot of the time in super hero fantasies, I would say what's really going on is a sort of articulation between conservatism and liberalism. There's a basically conservative dimension to the whole thing. It's about restoring the order, defeating the chaotic elements, etc. But doing it as this kind of individual who on a personal

level might have, you know, fairly progressive views on sexuality, ethnicity and gender and is able to, and it's sort of personally hyper-competent. So I think in all those ways, you can sort of see how it's resonant. I think it's also, I think you also have to, you also have to see it partly in terms of the fact that from the end of the 90s, really, cinema is having to do what it has had to do to some extent for the previous few decades, and that is to justify its existence in a world of large screen TVs, basically, and increasingly high quality. television and so the the superhero movie the cg i enabled superhero movie is partly just

a relatively easy to come up with version of a cinematic spectacle that you can't really you can't really reproduce at home very easily i think i think that's also part of it i think it's also like they cost incredible amount of money these sorts of big blockbusters and there's a huge risk a version uh tied up with that and so the superhero movie or superhuman You know, the super superhero genre, and particularly when you've got huge, huge history such as DC and Marvel, they're a good way. Once they've been established as these can make money, the sort of Marvel crossovers, the reboots, you know, that whole history of how do you exploit a superhero and, you know, make as much money as possible, how do you get people buying different things, keep coming back, etc., get Thorpe fighting Spider-Man, not Superman, remember. that is something to be drawn on in which there's a certain level of guarantee

that just churning out another superhero movie is actually quite a risk-averse way of making large-scale cinema. I think that's partly why we're probably towards the end of that dynamic now just because people are absolutely sick to death of them. Also, my sense is I haven't really checked stats on this, so I'm pretty sure this is right.

I mean, one reason they make so much money is because they're really popular in markets where a lot of other Hollywood films aren't that popular. So they're massive in India, I think, for example. They're massive. And you can see why the superhero narrative is unobjectionable to the authoritarian regimes in places like India, Turkey, those sort of places, places where more explicitly liberal or explicitly sort of pro-Western narratives are less kind of palatable. This could lead us to touch to the question of like whether superheroes, superhero narratives are inherently reactionary. Because we started off with that suggestion and then said, well, look at woke Superman from

1939, etc. But like with the Marvel universe, you know, most of them I think you would say they're pretty reactionary. David Graber has this article in which he sort of says, look, you know, just informed their reactionary, i.e. superheroes and other ones who are trying to do something. They're always the ones who are trying to prevent something from happening. Right. So they're, you know, the people who do the invention, the creation, we want to change things, not necessarily changing to the better, always the supervillains. And then the superheroes come together to prevent that and to protect the status quo. We spent some time thinking about this from preparing our notes for the show. And I feel like

the conclusion we came to is, while one can point to isolated exceptions where people are making a very self-conscious effort not to make the superhero story inherently reactionary. You can talk about, I don't think we've mentioned yet, Green Arrow, who was a sort of self-consciously leftist superhero based on Robin Hood, predictably came out in the early 70s, the original Black Panther, of course, etc. While you can point to these exceptions where people are trying to do that, and indeed the original Superman, broadly speaking, for the reasons, David, set out in that essay and for the reasons we've given because it is basically a full,

a kind of story that necessarily marries a kind of deep individualism with a very conservative kind of heroic and usually masculine narrative is very difficult for them not to be reactionary. And I think, I think that is sort of, it is sort of the question asked by watchmen. I mean, I would say part of what's going on in watchmen is the question is raised are CPA is necessarily reactionary and the answer is given. yes, they are. I mean, that's the irony, isn't it? Alan Moffoyer, he was like,

he was consigning superheroes to the dustbin of history, but he didn't. He contributed to like the absolute explosion to a level that there's never been at before. No, of course, and, I mean, but I also think, I think the Watchmen, the original Watchmen book of the late 80s,

it anticipated its own relevance, sort of despite itself, in a really incredible way, because in many ways, its reflections on what's at stake in the superhero narrative are much more relevant in a world in which, like, the MCU, has become the dominant, dominant cinematic phenomenon of the century than they were in the 80s, when really, I mean, really,

this is the thing, Watchmen was, it was intended to be a sort of, it was a sort of auto-critique of superhero comics, written for an audience who were basically assumed to be, it was assumed to be a relatively small audience of people, who had grown up with and grown out of superheroes. And it was a sort of literary meditation and what it meant to have grown up with

but grown out of superheroes. So, and it was written for this, it was only ever intended for a relatively small audience and it became this mass phenomenon. It is one of those examples of something that it does become a mass phenomenon partly just because it is so well executed. You know, this is partly why, as I say,

like Joe absolutely loves it. She's got no interesting comics, no interested in superheroes. She doesn't really, she doesn't get like half the cultural references it's making, but she absolutely loves it because it's just so well-executed and so profound. But in many ways, its actual cultural relevance is greater now, which is one reason why it is so sort of peculiar that the brilliant Watchmen TV show that was on HBO about five years ago,

which was produced as a sort of tribute to and deliberate sequel to the Watchmen comics, hasn't really achieved the status as a kind of iconic example of left culture that I think it deserves. I think it's worth saying about Watchmen about Animal. Animal notoriously hates all the screen versions of his work that he's seen.

So he didn't like the film version of Vef Vendetta. I think it's a bit unfair because honestly Veefa Vendetta itself, the original is pretty simplistic, to be honest. He notoriously hated the movie version of Watchmen. which I have always refused to watch because I assumed it could only be bad. I think you've watched it quite recently again, yeah.

It's actually quite, I mean, it's good in that... It's done by Zach Snyder, another director he'd associate with the rights, basically. But it's like an absolute homage. So, Alan Maud have nothing to do with it. I don't know if he's ever even watched it. But Dave Gibbons, the artist, had a lot to do with it. And it, you know, it looks...

So many of it are like reproductions of the comic. Do you know what I mean? So it doesn't quite work as a film because it's basically a filmic representation of the comic. But the TV show, it was, I think it's eight episodes, one series, was on HBO. I think it was first put out in 2019. It was made by Damon Lindelof. It's absolutely brilliant. It's presented as a sequel to the original comic.

So you really can't watch it if you haven't read Watchman. You're not going to understand what's going on, right? Basically, you shouldn't. It's presented as a sequel. it's presented this very convincing sort of parallel world like Watchmen, the original is in a parallel world to ours

and in which, and it's not dystopian, which is refreshing in 2019. So it's the world in which Robert Redford rather than Ronald Reagan became president and did carry on the progressive project of the 60s. And so black people have been given reparations

and that's part of the story. And I'm not going to spoil the rest. That's sort of the mizonsent. Let's just give a hint of where the politics are coming from, the sort of like the bad guys are a white supremacist sort of like clan group, aren't they, basically? Yeah, yeah. It's absolutely, it's really interesting

because it comes out in 2019 before the big 2020 wave of BLM that everybody now remembers, but he's totally informed by the politics of Black Lives Matter defund the police. At a moment before, when people in 2019 mostly thought that was something that had died down.

so it's very very political in that way it's very is very very radical I mean people talk a lot about the HBO output of the 2010s but it's arguably the most explicitly leftist thing that HBO have ever produced in my view actually but I mean reputedly

I don't know if it's true reputedly Anna Moore has never watched it because he couldn't stand to watch any more screen adaptations which is really a shame because it's a brilliant piece of work by someone who clearly does up a deep understanding of what the original Watchmen was about is a great, great television. Part of what's going on there, of course, is that that show continues the sort of meditation on whether superheroes

can ever not be reactionary. It sort of deals with a question like, well, what if you lived in a world which is better than our world, which Robert Redford had been president, and there were superheroes and also people realised superheroes could only be reactionary? Then what would you do? I mean, the other way to think about whether superheroes are inherent in reaction is one to look at superhero stories in which superheroes are trying to do, not just do good things, but they're trying to deal with. So if you think about superheroes is like individuals trying to deal with social problems and therefore, you know, the stories recasting those social problems as problems of individual morality, you know, what about superheroes who try to deal with structural problems is like one way to do it? to address and fight those structural problems. In fact, a return perhaps to like the originally 1930s, Superman.

And there's a couple of things we could talk about there. One of them is the comic book Red Son, which is by Mark Miller. Mark Miller's another one of the 2000 AD sort of generation. The conceit of Red Son is, what if Superman landed in the Soviet Union and not in the American Midwest? It's like the truth, justice and the Soviet way. the Soviet way, yeah. And indeed he does, you know, basically he, Superman lands, he becomes imbued with the communist ideologies of the Soviet Union, you know, he's friends with Stalin, etc, et cetera, but as the story goes on, again, it's that, well, what would happen in the world

if there was a superhero, and this side, it's on the other side. Yeah, do you want to know something true? Like, during my, most, actually, most of my reading of all these comics actually happened in the mid-90s. Like, I didn't read something when it came out. I read Watchmen not long after it came out the first time, but it was mostly, because I was living with my good my old friend John Gladney and he was really into comics and he

had all the Sandman and he had all the Watchmen, he had all the Swamp thing. So that, it was mostly really, sort of early to big 90s I was reading all this stuff. I was in my 20s. And I had the idea, I had the idea. Imagine if you did a story about Superman, where in my version of it, Superman wasn't born in the Soviet Union.

He becomes, he goes to Vietnam, he flies to Vietnam in the 60s, he sees what's going on and turns against the American state. Like, what would happen then? So that would still make a great story. I think that was my idea, but it might just be a comic I read. Well, I mean, it's an interesting one. What's really interesting about Red Sohn is that, like, you know, it is, can you just transplant this idea of a super individual, which is really, really is rooted in, like, US individualism, basically. Can he transport that into a project of collective liberation, basically? Of course, it runs into all stuff like the culture of the personality, etc.,

around Lenin and Stalin and all that sort of stuff. But like in the story, basically Superman, he ends up leading the Soviet Union, then along with this supercomputer brainiac, which is once evil, and then he sort of like converts to, well, it apparently converts it to the cause of socialism. basically they solve the economic problem and the Soviet Union works so well, the rest of the world basically says we want to join in with the Soviet Union

and the US is the only holdout and the US is in complete chaos, etc, etc, etc. And one of the other conceits in like 1960s Superman is that one of the cities of Krypton Kandor survived and is in but were shrunk by some supervillain and is in Superman's Fortress of Solitude, his base in a jar, basically. And this is repeated in Red Sohn.

Batman is like this agent of chaos in this story, who's constantly fighting, capitalist chaos who's fighting Superman. But it's Lex Luther who ends up leading the US, and he defeats Superman by putting a secret message in Lewis Lane's pocket, provoking Superman to invade the US. He defeats the US Army, then he reads this message and he says, Superman, why don't you put the whole of the world in a jar?

And he realizes that, in fact, he's been, you know, by taking over the world and moving it into a socialist direction, he's robbed everyone of agency. And in fact, none of it's real. And then he leaves the universe, leaves the solar system, et cetera, et cetera. The other one I'd mentioned is the authority, which was a series of comics in the late 90s by, well, started by Warren Ellis.

The Superman analog there's called Hollow and there's a Batman analog, etc. And they work for the US government, but then they revolt basically and they start killing authoritarian and dictators and people, you know, that sort of stuff. They start doing that.

Let's, why don't we, if we're superheroes, why don't we solve the world's problems, basically? Once again, that doesn't go completely right. But like, I think in Red Son in particular, is that, you know, it shows that thing of, you could have them fighting on the other side, right? But they're still imbued by the individualism. The whole myth is imbued by the individualism of that US, 20th century US ideology. Yes, I suppose

speculatively. I mean, probably there are comics and maybe even anime and things that we just don't know about where people engage with these things much more radically. Maybe listeners can tell us. Because I was thinking, well, then in formal terms, like what would a properly radical kind of superhero narrative be. And it would have to be one in which actually somehow it's only the collective rather than individuals that have the superpowers or something. It's only when people sort of cooperate and work together. But then I was thinking, well, actually, I mean, in a funny sort of way, that is the kind of, that is the basic, the typical cliche kind of narrative form in sort of Dungeons and Dragons, for example. I mean, it's, you know, listens to the show we'll

know, like, we like tabletop role playing games. I do, we're fine playing Dungeons and Dragons, but mostly we're interested in a more sophisticated end of the gaming spectrum. And the criticism that's usually made of mainstream Dungeons and Dragons these days, actually, the most common thing that's said about it is, well, it's basically a superhero game. It's basically a game about becoming a magical superhero. It's not really even sort of medieval fantasy or whatever. But I would say what's interesting is that the typical sort of story in a Dungeon Dragons game over a long narrative arc is, one in which a group of people have these kind of complementary abilities that are only really

functional as part of a collective. And it's also much more persistent and common these days than you might expect that the stories revolve around like helping people against the rich oppressors or something like that. And I think, I sort of think that's part of the explanation for this mysterious phenomenon of the mass popularization of D&Ds, because it is actually a way of taking like what people like about the superhero fantasy, you know, the, the superpowers, you know, the super competence, the agency, but also sort of collectivizing it, sort of collectivizing it, sort of meritocratic logic, actually, where you have to sort of, you have to acquire your powers, you know, just get them.

I mean, I think that's a difference, though, because in superhero comics and particularly in like Marvel universe, you do, you have superheroes banding together as the adventures or the Justice League of America, etc. Yes, that's true. But, of course, like, that is a distinction between those who can join that, the superheroes and, like, the ordinary people and the role of ordinary people in all of these films are basically to be, to scream or to be a mob,

either adoring Superman or turning against Batman or whatever. Yeah, that's true. So the implication of that in response to what I just said is that really that D&D narrative is a fundamental, a departure from anything we can really identify the superhero narrative because it still has this you know it's not socialistic but it

still has this somewhat kind of democratic and meritocratic idea that you sort of start off with nothing and you acquire your powers through sort of adventuring and helping people and solving problems and working together whereas even the superhero proper even if they're a member of a

super hero team has just inherited or acquired or obtained their powers sort of in one go. And that does ultimately, and that does tend to bring us back, I think, to the conclusion that you know, to the extent that you're making any of these kind of

narrative tropes not reactionary, you're taking them out of the sphere of the superhero proper. I mean, the other way into that would be to say they're actually quite some quite attractive supervillains, particularly in the films and the TV series. We were talking about Black Panther,

which is definitely not a democratic, be hero. Kachala, he's the king of this Afro-Futurist city that has hidden itself away in Africa, etc. But in the film, he's challenged by Kilmonga who wants to free African people

all around the world. Well, I think he wants to free all, and also he suggests at one point that maybe you would free all colonized people, all victims of imperialism, maybe you do that. No, you can't do that, no, what are you talking about? That would be mad. That would be revolution, which can only lead to terror.

Now, I can, I remember watching that. I remember being so excited when it came out, thinking, oh, great, like an Afro futurist, like, you know, black power, a super hero movie. And I was just sort of, I was just like watching it open mouth. Like, I couldn't believe how reactionary

it actually was. Well, it's also like, you know, they've got this huge, fantastic technology and they go to, like, I can't remember, I think it might be San Francisco and there's like these poor kids, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know, why you're not doing anything for these? And in the end, you know, they decide that they, this inward-looking attitude they had means that they had to look out

so they established embassies around the world. It's like, well, that's going to not going to do much for anyone. The other supervillars I wanted to point to are, is in this TV series called Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and they're called the Flag Smashers, and they're like an anti-nationalist. They want to abolish borders in order to help refugees. How evil.

But it's a bit like Kilmongue, it's like, you basically, you set these people up, you bring them up to like, you know, well, look, actually that would be a pretty good thing to do, wouldn't it? And then you have to signal, you have to signal that these are evil people. So they just do indiscriminate killing, which makes no sense at all, basically. It's the same with killmong, he just starts killing indistriminately, like mass killings, etc., mass bombings and all that sort of stuff. And so, but that's probably just the limit, isn't it? It's the limit of like the huge blockbuster movie in that, in this age in which there are huge wealth inequalities.

Well, I'd say it's the limit of the superhero narrative, maybe, because you can have CGI blockbusters that have a much more radical message, which is what you've got in like with Avatar, for example. I mean, Avatar is uncompromisingly a story about how anti-colonial resistance is good, actually. But it's not a superhero. And you do have people with sorts of special powers in it beings, but it's not a superhero movie. Just a round-off, can I tell you my favourite superhero story?

which is this one sort of like stand-alone series from, I think from the turning of the century called The Century. And it's a great story. It starts off with this guy who's just like a middle-aged, overweight man who sort of wakes up in the middle of the night. And he looks as though he's having a psychotic episode because he just suddenly thinks that he's a superhero called The Century. He said, why have I forgotten that?

And then he starts, goes out and he says, I've got a bit, oh my God, my nemesis, the void, I can feel he's coming back. and then he goes out and starts to try to contact other superheroes in order to help them but when he goes out he's basically just a fat overweight guy who's got like a sheet stapled to his jacket is like ordinary jacket by clothespegs for his cape and the first sort of like part of this you just think he's like somebody who's having a psychotic breakdown and then eventually they come to like understand that he and the void are the same people and that actually he'd sacrificed himself by erasing memory of himself as the as the superhero

of the century because when he becomes powerful a void becomes powerful i've got to not be a superhero anymore so he raises the memory of everybody of everybody's memory of him he raises his own memory and then he realizes he's stuck in a loop he's got to do it again basically and it's a really nice anti-superhero sort of story where he has to stop being a superhero to save the world that is really interesting yeah that it's a bit like the final conclusion of buffy in which she doesn't she doesn't stop being the slayer but she becomes she she changes the magic magical ecology she exists in so that there are there are multiple slayers so she is no longer the chosen one and she sort of uh it's sort of a deconstruction of the the individualism inherent in the in her status as a sort of superhero is is what is what resolves like the plot of the story so so so The only way to be a superhero, dear listeners, is to stop being a superhero. Thank you.