Fury: S.H.I.E.L.D. 50th Anniversary #1

A very troubling sign greets us with the roll out of the many issues commemorating the 50th anniversary of S.H.I.E.L.D., Marvel's fictional representation of the overarching, suffocating U.S. national security state military industrial complex.

First off, as mentioned in a recent post devoted to Fantastic Four #600, I find it bizarre how little fuss Marvel made of the golden anniversaries of its seminal, industry-defining characters -- Spider-Man, Thor, Fantastic Four. I made sense of this bizarreness by explaining it as a marketing decision. Marvel's characters now principally toil for the profit of Walt Disney Studios. Seating movie-going youth in front of the big cinema screen is not achieved by accentuating the rich heritage of your fictional property.

But the opulent celebration of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s fiftieth cuts against this grain. Why? S.H.I.E.L.D. back in the day -- meaning, back in the Silver and Bronze Age of comic books when Marvel replaced D.C. as king of the hill -- was never more than background noise, set dressing, Stan Lee's fictive recasting of the Cold War, CIA vs. KGB, as S.H.I.E.L.D. vs. Hydra; it provided a platform on which the superheroes could perform their derring-do. But S.H.I.E.L.D. and its agent Nick Fury, outside of an influential -- influential among industry aficionados -- 20-issue run by graphic pioneer Jim Steranko in the 1960s, was never front and center. So why now?

My suspicion is base commercialism. Disney wants to emphasize characters that can be easily and lucratively translated into television and film. S.H.I.E.L.D. is the anchor.

This bodes ill for the creative potential of Marvel going forward. I think the recent iteration of Secret Wars, Marvel's latest crossover reboot, was a confusing dud. And having recently watched Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), I can say the same thing about it. It was horrible. I had to struggle to sit through it.

But the heavy promotion of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s fiftieth also has a political component as the presidential election years approaches. The message is don't fret about our old buddy the intrusive national security state; see, he has been with us for a half century, and that whole time he has been keeping us safe from hatred and Hydra.

An example of this noxious message is on full display in Fury: S.H.I.E.L.D. 50th Anniversary #1, written by David Walker with art by Scott Hepburn. Here the black son of Fury, the present Nick Fury, travels back in time to Watts during the rebellion of the summer of 1965 where he encounters his father, the original Nick Fury, who, hagiographically, is actively sympathizing with blacks and trying to keep the Los Angeles Police from overindulging in a murderous rampage.

For the sake of verisimilitude, representatives of the national security state would be actively engaged in the "turkey shoot" alongside L.A.'s Finest, not trying to tamp it down. Proof of this is the political tsunami that Watts, along with Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, brought about -- white backlash. It elected Reagan in a landslide over Pat Brown, probably the greatest liberal governor in the history of the United States.

Absurdly the story concludes with Nick Fury rescuing the tot Obama from assassination by a time-displaced Hate-Monger. But Obama has transformed nothing about our system of predatory capitalism, war-mongery and institutional racism. So the contemplation of his possible death at an early age really represents nothing in terms of a meaning counterfactual.

Below you will find eight scans from Fury: S.H.I.E.L.D. 50th Anniversary #1.

Where Monsters Dwell (Vol. 2) #1 & #2

The plan for the holiday weekend was for a lot of running and at least one day of graphic indulgence. (Last month I got out of the habit of a Friday-night scanning of pages from the prior weekend's reading. I'm reading fewer comic books, some weeks none at all, as I attempt to read at least two books a month.)

Yesterday, following a morning run in the July heat, I made the error of picking up Occupy Comics #2 off the top of a stack. I say error because the three issues of Occupy Comics are not light reads. At the center of each are segments of Alan Moore's detailed history of the comic-book industry. So instead of sitting down with my runner's high to a rejuvenating smorgasbord of colored panels I chewed through Moore's description of the shady foundations and reprehensibly exploitative practices of corporate comics.

The drop off in posts on current Marvel titles corresponds with a hiatus in the Where Monsters Dwell (Vol. 1) project I have been pursuing sporadically. Where Monsters Dwell was a Bronze Age Marvel reprint series of material, chiefly Kirby and Ditko work, from the company's pre-superhero Silver Age. The last post published was in early April. I am working my way backward, and I hit a hole in my collection, Where Monsters Dwell #13, and I have run into trouble finding a copy.

Fortunately, as part of a tie-in with the latest crossover, Secret Wars, Marvel has resurrected the title after the last issue appeared 40 years ago.

The story -- penned by Garth Ennis; art by Russ Braun, with fantastic colors by Dono Sanchez Almara -- is a throwback to the pulp magazines of the 1930s, out of which the modern comic-book industry grew, with the interesting tweak that the leading man biplane pilot is an alcoholic coward afflicted by satyriasis, while the female sidekick, no mere eye-candy appendage, is the one who actually fights and wears the pants.

Below you will find scans of the opening pages to Where Monsters Dwell #1. The poltroon flying ace Karl Kaufmann skips out on the jungle princess who holds in her belly the fruit of his loins. These four scans are followed by the cover of Where Monsters Dwell #2 followed by the concluding pages to that issue.

What adolescent can resist a death struggle between a gigantic great white shark and a super-sized alligator (both from the age of dinosaurs), topped off by the appearance of a troop of Amazons?

AXIS #9

I finished David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules (2015) yesterday. The concluding essay of the volume is "Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power," which is a critique of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and its ham-handed politics; in particular, its not so veiled attack on Occupy Wall Street (OWS).

Graeber, as is his incredibly erudite wont, covers a lot of ground in the essay. He makes numerous interesting points: the superhero comic book is basically the depiction of a violent fugue state birthed in the 1930s, a time when fascism and Freud were in the ascendant; the villain represents the creative id who needs to be battered into submission by the superhero super-ego in order to restore the status quo; the superhero does not use his (less often, her) amazing powers to change the system to feed the hungry or house the homeless, but rather merely in a reactive capacity to guarantee the maintenance of the present system.

Graeber acknowledges that there are comic books that deviate from this pattern. But on the whole, he asserts, the mainstream superhero titles of industry giants DC and Marvel follow this generalized pattern. I think he is right.

I haven't done a comic-book post in several weeks. Part of the problem is that I'm reading more book books on the weekend, but it also has to do with my disappointment in two of Marvel's recent crossover events, AXIS and Original Sin. What made my disappointment acute is that these crossovers were written by two of my favorites, Rick Remender and Jason Aaron. Aaron's Original Sin was superior to Remender's AXIS, but both seemed tired, scattered, as if the writers were punching the clock, distracted while on the job.

Reading Graeber reminded me of the importance of keeping on eye on the comic book. Comic books are a culture's conscious dreams, its fantasies of power revealed.

There was an article, "Rise of Far-Right Party in Denmark Reflects Europe’s Unease," by Steven Erlanger in yesterday's newspaper that fits well with AXIS #9: "New World Disorder: Chapter 3 - Grinding Halt." AXIS is a "world turned upside down" narrative. Villains are heroes; heroes, villains. All the old verities have been upturned, as you can see in the seven scans below. The All-New Captain American, the formerly angelic Falcon, pummels to near death a superannuated Steve Rogers, the original Captain American, who is trying to protect his lifelong mortal enemy the Red Skull who is now a feeble and decent White Skull. To say the least, things are crazy; or as Erlanger mentions in his story about the fracturing political landscape in Europe, the traditional center has lost credibility:

LONDON — The surprisingly strong showing in elections on Thursday of Denmark’s anti-immigration, anti-Brussels Danish People’s Party has underlined a growing crisis of confidence in traditional political institutions and in the European Union itself.

European officials have seemed incapable of framing a credible alternative narrative to that of their critics in the face of rising immigration and slow economic growth, and parties expressing popular anger and anxiety are gaining traction, pushing politics rightward in some of Europe’s wealthiest and most stable countries, like the Nordic nations, Britain and France.

At the same time, the inability of the European Union and the eurozone to negotiate a compromise with Greece over that nation’s financial problems — to the point where a Greek exit from the euro and even from the bloc itself cannot be ruled out — has further undercut confidence in traditional political leadership and in the direction of European politics.

“We are in a new place, and people are right to be worried about the political direction,” said Simon Tilford, deputy director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research institution. “The eurozone crisis, combined with outside trends like migration and globalization, has exposed the disconnect between domestic politics in many countries and E.U. politics.”

The effort of traditional political parties to attract alienated and angry voters has shifted the discourse. “Once society legitimizes talking of immigration and immigrants in a way now routinely discussed, there is a greater risk of policy becoming more extreme,” Mr. Tilford said.

In Denmark, the center-left coalition lost to a center-right coalition, but the main surprise was the Danish People’s Party, which ran second with 21 percent of the vote and beat the center-right Liberals four years after finishing third with 12 percent of the vote. The Liberals are likely to form a coalition government in any case, but the People’s Party platform, appealing to anti-foreigner, anti-Islamic and nationalist sentiment while promising incentives to older people, suggested fundamental shifts in public opinion.

The same formula has been used by France’s National Front, which is running strongly in opinion polls, as well as by similar parties in Finland, Sweden and Britain, where the U.K. Independence Party won only one seat in May’s election but got nearly 13 percent of the vote.

Greece is led by the far-left Syriza party, which won on a promise to end the austerity imposed by Brussels and to get a reduction in Greece’s huge and probably unpayable mound of debt. Syriza, like many of the right-wing populist parties, appeals to voters unhappy with “dictates” from the European Union’s headquarters in Brussels that trump national politics.

“Syriza and the Danish People’s Party are mirror images of one another, part of the same megatrend now in many European countries,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “There is a remaking of the political order, with centrist parties that have run politics over the last few decades being hollowed out and replaced by parties appealing to the fringes.” 

To Mr. Leonard, the shift appears structural, similar to the way that liberal parties were weakened a century ago and then surpassed by socialist parties, like the Labour Party in Britain.

“Globalization produces winners and losers, and large groups feel they’ve been left behind, no longer represented by mainstream parties,” Mr. Leonard said.

Marvel is registering this shift. The latest crossover event, Secret Wars ("Time runs out. Everything ends. Secret wars commence.") chronicles the collision of various universes into Battleworld. "Battleworld" is an accurate label for the world in which we live today.

Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spider-Man #12

Brian Michael Bendis is a giant. One of his lasting achievements will be the creation of Miles Morales, the black Spider-Man of Marvel's Ultimate Universe (Earth-1610, as opposed to the primary Marvel Universe featuring Earth-616). Begun in 2011, Marvel recently concluded Mile Morales' run as The Ultimate Spider-Man in issue #12. Bendis will move Mile Morales over to Ultimate End, a core chapter in the Secret Wars crossover event that is rumored to be the end of the Ultimate Universe.

It is hard to believe that Marvel will mothball a magnetic superhero like Miles Morales, one who was drawn up in the heady days of the post-2008 Obama landslide. The less wise and jaded among us were hopeful that "change you can believe in" was indeed coming our way. Boy, were we wrong.

One of the ways that Obama has been such a disappointment is in his administration's support for the continuing privatization of the American public education system. Miles Morales goes to one of these privatized Gates Foundationesque charter schools, Brooklyn Visions Academy. (For an excellent primer on this topic -- the destruction of the U.S. public education system -- check out the "Notes from the Editors" in the June issue of the Monthly Review.)

Having recently finished Cathy Wilkerson's Flying Close to the Sun, there is no doubt that '60s radicalism -- the civil rights and antiwar movements -- was fueled in large part by the excellent system of public and non-corporate private education in the post-WWII United States. Good education will create an unquenchable appetite for the truth, something incompatible with the inequality produced by capitalism.

Bendis' Miles Morales stories were always concise and clearly written, with matching artwork first by Sara Pichelli and then David Marquez which featured a style that was Hyperrealistic. The panels were airy, the colors solid -- everything in its place and ascertainable. But the overarching narrative was not. Peter Parker's death at the hands of the Green Goblin, the alter-ego of a corporate titan named Norman Osborn whose diabolical research was also responsible for the origin of Miles Morales' super-spider powers; Miles' criminal uncle Aaron, a.k.a., the Prowler; the conflicted, unclear role of the government agency S.H.I.E.L.D., etc.

If the original Steve Ditko high-school Spider-Man of the early-to-middle 1960s had a center, which was Peter Parker's Midtown High School in Queens with its baleful jocks and cruel girls led by Flash Thompson, a hallmark of Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spider-Man is the lack of a center. Miles Morales is a true Baudrillardian hero, a simulacra of the original Spider-Man. The world we inhabit today has no center, only infinite digital copies.

Below are nine scans from Mile Morales: The Ultimate Spider-Man #12. Miles, on the brink of vivisection, goes nova and demolishes Hydra and Doctor Doom. The last two scans show an impending collision with an Earth from an alternate universe (the main New Avengers narrative).