Interlock PrayerNet

As a young teenager, I was hooked on Marvel Comics.  I can remember taking my grass mowing money I earned on Saturdays and running over to Bower’s News Stand on Main Street in Montgomery, Pennsylvania to buy the latest issues of Spider-Man, X-Men, Daredevil, The Incredible Hulk and the Fantastic Four.  I have found it fascinating that all of these have been made into major motion pictures in recent years.  

The rival to Marvel Comics was Action Comics’ Superman, and DC Comics’ Batman, and yes, they have been made into movies also, but for some reason, these guys never grabbed me like Marvel’s characters.  To me it seemed that other comic books only focused on the conflict between the evil villain and the superhero, but Marvel’s team of writers, Stan Lee and illustrator Jack Kirby, created superheroes that had personalities as well as conflict.  They had real struggles with their powers.  Those portrayed as teenagers like Peter Parker (Spiderman) and Johnny Storm (Human Torch with the Fantastic Four) had the same kind of problems in life, like getting a date and passing tough exams in school, that I had.  The Incredible Hulk and The Thing (Fantastic Four) hated their disfigurement, but had to make the best of it.  They had super powers but they weren’t super people – they were just people.  

The question is, though, why these costumed crime-fighters who emerged in the 1960s for adolescent youngsters like myself, have made such a comeback in the new millennium?  Personally, I can think of three possible reasons.  

First, there is a real hunger for the heroic today.  Hillsdale College president George Roche wrote a little noticed but quite thought-provoking book in 1987 entitled, A World Without Heroes: The Modern Tragedy.  His thesis was that contemporary society suffers with an “affliction of the spirit” that has been produced by the advent of the dehumanizing influence of Marxism, Dadaism, Aesthetism, and Empiricism, which have prevailed over intellectual life in the twentieth century.  He states that these ‘isms’ create an anti-heroic vision that dominates Western thinking.  Current evidence for this can be seen in the reconstructionalist historians who focus on the fact that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves or that Abraham Lincoln supported repatriation of blacks to Africa, for instance.   

Yet despite this undercurrent of thought that runs through our culture, there is still something in us that denies this notion and aspires to the heroic.  John Eldridge captured it well in his book, Wild at Heart, when he wrote that in the heart of every man is a desperate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.  

The comic book heroes represent this world-view.  They are regular people possessing extraordinary powers who use them for the betterment of their fellow man.  They are not perfect people.  They sometimes use poor judgment or have moral lapses.  But they show that altruism is not an anomaly but part of what defines us as human beings.
 
A second possible reason why these stories are captivating followers today is because they don’t seem as far-fetched as they did forty years ago.  In 1962 when Spider-Man first came out, the idea of radioactivity transforming a human being had no basis in science.  It just made a good story.  But it is getting harder and harder to tell science from science fiction in the past ten years.  Scientists have actually experimented with a form of ‘beam-me-up-Scotty’ molecular transporter.  Researchers are developing quantum computers that may be thousands of times faster than today’s computers.  Drugs that will drastically increase age and memory recall are right around the corner.  When we see superheroes in action, we might be watching the possibilities of a not-so-distant future.       

But perhaps the biggest reason for the current popularity of the comic-book hero is that the world of evil portrayed by the enemies of the superheroes is remarkably similar to what we see today.  I have remarked on several occasions my debt to Lee Harris, author of the brilliant work, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History.  The title is an illusion to Francis Fukuyama’s 1993 book, The End of History and the Last Man, in which the author argues that the progression of History toward a universally beneficial system of government has culminated in liberal democracy.  Harris’ argument is that Fukuyama was premature in his analysis.  While it is true that as far as governments go, democracy has trumped all other ideologies and the argument for competing political philosophies is over.  But we face a new threat – one that is not fashioned around nationalistic ambitions but religious ones.   The rise of radical Islamists possessing what Harris termed a ‘fantasy ideology,’ represents a grave threat to the very existence of civilization, as we know it.  

The enemies of the superheroes were always nihilists who wished destruction not as a means but as an end.  They could not be reasoned with.  The Fantastic Four could not sit down with Dr. Doom and say, “Let’s engage in a dialogue and see if we can find some mutual grounds by which we can establish a framework for consensus that will provide for our mutual well-being.”  Big Dr. D would have blown them away before they got past the word “Let’s…”  Similarly, Harris states that the terrorists of today need confronted, not with reason, but force. 

And just as the superheroes were often feared and reviled by the very society they were seeking to protect, Harris also notes that, "The ideals that our intellectuals have been instilling in us are utopian ideals, designed for men and women who know no enemy and who do not need to take precautions against him."

Unfortunately, we don’t have Marvel comic characters to fight our battles for us.  I experienced this personally when I returned from college one weekend in 1970 and discovered that my mother had thrown my entire lifetime collection of comics in the trash.  She figured a university student had no reason to read comic books.  (She was probably right, but I cry thinking of what my first editions and complete sets would bring on ebay today…)

No, we have to face our enemies ourselves.  Like the dilemma of the superheroes, we must be ruthless in the defense of civilization while not succumbing to ruthlessness ourselves.  The stories in Marvel Comics showed that this is never easy.  There are even times when the good guys lose.  But they don’t give up, because the cost of giving up would be to see a destruction of all they hold dear.   Maybe that is why we like those guys so much – they remind us of what we ourselves should be.