Are American Superheroes Causing Unemployment?
Ecological Economics and the Arts
As I was growing up I generally liked the common American superhero stories, but I’ve wondered off and on if that wasn’t a terrible mistake on my part. I’m starting to think the problems with those stories are probably a microcosm of the problems with America in general, that they come from the physical ecology of America, and that it’s all sort of inherently cursed. All the problems with superhero stories are essentially problems that come from the corporate aspects and the economy of when they were made. I think anyone who says these types of comics are inherently lowbrow or consumer culture is almost certainly correct because of these correlations.
However, I think neither comic books nor superheroes themselves are subject to these limitations, not even superhero comics, perhaps especially not them. The first superhero comic is not Superman but an Australian comic called The Phantom. The word superhero also vastly predates Marvel’s and DC’s attempt to copyright it, though it was often spelled as “super hero” instead. The Phantom was likewise predated by science fiction comics such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon which themselves largely popularized the idea of space as being the setting for adventure stories and many other science fiction concepts. The whole history of superheroes seems to me to be a lot like megacorporations took all of everyone’s idealism and turned it into cynicism to try to get people hooked on their ideas, which is totally the opposite of what I think science fiction should do. I also dislike the term speculative fiction entirely, because speculation means you’re just wondering about the future, but I think the point should be to inspire it and participate in it.
Over a week ago I read a comment on the Internet where someone was saying superhero comics are inherently left-wing because they were made by Jews who couldn’t get employment due to racism. I tend to think that sounds like total nonsense because plenty of Jews were well-employed in America especially despite the fact there was plenty of racism against Jews. This now seems even more incorrect because the first comics were things like Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and The Phantom, which were not made in those circumstances at all, and the word superhero also predates the character of Superman by quite a bit (so does the word superman, though that’s of course much more well-known anyway.) However, most of the popular superhero comics from Marvel and DC, though probably not only them, are definitely rather mocking of the idea anyone would have a job.
When I was thinking that these comics were just people’s attempts to make jobs and that that must be a great and noble thing, I was thinking, well, it’s probably good to mock people whose ego is too tied up in their jobs. However, these comics never ever depict any kind of real alternative. Elon Musk can identify with Doctor Strange because he interprets the main characteristic of Doctor Strange as doing a bunch of psychedelics, meeting the spirits on his trips, and turning into a wizard, not his work as a doctor. Not one fan I’ve known of Iron Man has tried to start a business. Professor X is certainly not getting people into genetics, psychology, or any other related research areas since they just make him look like even worse of a jerk than Doctor Strange or Iron Man. Batman mostly just makes people wish they could inherit a bunch of money too, or run around in a costume throwing shurikens at people while talking in a gravelly voice, rather than getting a bunch of degrees and working out to get as muscular as he is. The popularity of the PayPal Mafia itself might very well be the fact that comic books tend to present a bunch of people who have wealth and power for basically no real reason whatsoever as the emblems of our society, and people decide to admire that. Even someone like Batman who people consider to be the epitome of what a normal human would be is portrayed as only having his power because he inherited a bunch of money, no random person who didn’t inherit a bunch of money actually worked to gain the money he has, plus Gotham is a wreck anyway.
The most irritating part of commercial superhero comics from giant publishers like Marvel and DC, however, has to be that they totally fail as science fiction and seem to take away the attention people would spend on real science fiction. The idea of Superman getting power from the Sun and flying around and saving people with super strength is pretty boring. I think pretty transparently X-Men has been the most popular title in Marvel because it has telepathy in it even if it originally seemed to want to make the only telepathic character look totally unattractive and didn’t seem to want to frame it so people would identify with him either. Wolverine has largely been something totally separate and he survives because people also like the idea of immortality (pun intended,) but you’ve never seen, say, an Iceman comic and there’s a reason for that. People like the idea of immortality so much in fact that Deadpool also has his own comic despite having nearly the exact same powers and also originating in X-Men comics, and there’s also Cable who time travels and was made by the same author as Deadpool in X-Men comics and is also immortal by another mechanism due to the time travel thing. They have also just given Psylocke a comic, who combines the ideas of telepathy and immortality by moving her mind into different bodies repeatedly, though I thought we already had that plus time travel in the show Quantum Leap in the 1980s which underscores my point that comic books seem to turn into brainrot fake science fiction because of the corporate aspect. The Avengers did not remotely exist in the way that the Avengers movies wanted to portray them. The characters existed, but they were basically all B-list type characters. Fantastic Four movies tend to flop hard every time they make them despite the fact Fantastic Four at least had comics you could purchase individually, unlike Iron Man, Hulk, or Thor. Spider-Man wasn’t even released in his own comic book and The Punisher was only released in one of Spider-Man’s, and in it he didn’t even resemble the version of The Punisher that exists in the popular imagination today. Superman was originally a quite morally ambiguous character for adults, as evidenced by the name Superman being like the Nietzschean Superman, and before then he was going to be a poor man who got put through an experiment to get serum to get telepathy, as in the story “The Reign of the Superman” that became Superman instead.
This all seemed like a continuous dumbing-down of the story but also brings us back to why Marvel’s most popular title is X-Men, because people still want the science fiction stuff. Inversely, Batman could be seen like what The Phantom originally was. Stories like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were already written at a much more intelligent level and are really why I find superhero comics disappointing at this point, because those actually were a lot of what inspired actual real life space exploration and they let characters use things like telepathy as well instead of going like, well, that’ll alienate people too much so let’s replace it with super strength. The level of engagement those required was much higher and they inspired people to good actions in real life whatever their flaws might have been, and as the Bible put it, ye shall know them by their fruits. What do popular modern superheroes inspire? For people to act like Elon Musk and smoke dope on Joe Rogan while identifying as Doctor Strange? That’s not productive at all, that’s just people pretending to be productive. Maybe Marvel and DC themselves largely inspired that.
At best, the common type of American superhero comic seems to be a bunch of heavily external locus of control stuff, as evidenced by even Batman not actually working for what he has, he was born with his powers just as much as Superman was, just it was decided Batman is a rich human and Superman is a poor superhuman. The Phantom on the other hand decided to become the phantom, even if it’s a role that was passed down, the first Phantom was someone who just decided to do that. This also reminds me of something I read once, in the context of why Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness, that European aristocrats often didn’t like colonialism because they thought it gave too much power to people who didn’t inherit it, though I’m not under the impression the Phantom was a colonialist, the same thing I think applies to the idea of people going on adventures, going West, becoming pirates or explorers, etc. more generally. The Phantom is that sort of thing, Batman is more like an American aristocrat which is exactly the kind of thing we don’t want. Incidentally I wrote that Crocodile Dundee was already criticizing America for having become that kind of society so Australians are probably positioned to see America in such a way quite easily and Americans are not, though it seems like no one should’ve gotten into Batman when The Phantom already existed in the first place except that there was some kind of limitation on the distribution or the knowledge of The Phantom. I also don’t think there’s anything wrong whatsoever with the idea that people will be born with their powers, but I don’t think that has to lead to the external locus of control stuff you see in pretty much every mainstream comic book. This is basically the nature vs. nurture debate, and stories that are replacing Australian adventurers with American aristocrats and telepaths with guys who are just really strong and get rid of ideas like space travel more or less entirely to try to preserve the status quo world for people to fantasize about should not be expected to be able to portray the nature vs. nurture debate very well whatsoever.
So, do I like the idea of superhero comics? Yes, I do. It’s easy to see things like The Phantom, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, etc. as well as independent media that’s not comics but inspired by it such as the game City of Heroes which was inspired by the Champions RPG and just see it as a story where megacorporations annihilated what could’ve been and then the winners wrote the history, not as something inherently bad. But since the winners wrote the history people seem to think it started with Superman and whatever which is not correct. This also seems like a huge problem to me because superheroes really are kind of a modern mythology and that’s not bad, that doesn’t mean superheroes are the new gods. I need to write more about Schelling, and this is the umpteenth reminder to myself that I need to get my writing about Schelling and Tolkien out of the works, but the role of mythology is mostly that it gives people an idea of how the world works and this isn’t necessarily in some superstitious way, much less a literal one. For example if you call someone you don’t like Voldemort or Umbridge and debate whether Voldemort or Umbridge is worse this is a function of mythology. I think the case of superhero comics has shown that megacorporations have largely taken over mythology and this has demonstrably made the world worse than it would’ve been if that hadn’t happened, since before then people were reading Buck Rogers and wanting to explore space and now people are watching Marvel and DC movies and wanting to smoke dope to become a wizard or inherit a lot of money and throw shurikens, and I do think a lot of the media is definitely life imitating art rather than vice versa.
I think this happened predominantly in America because I think America has generally been characterized by economies of scale or the maximum power principle in the modern age. Economies of scale are generally considered a good thing by business owners such as in the book Turning the Flywheel by Jim Collins, but the problem is that there’s a so-called Darwinian aspect to all systems so whenever they get overwhelmed they will implode and thus large systems can implode worse and faster than small ones in many cases. This is probably the main pragmatic result of the idea of the mechanistic worldview (a flywheel) vs. the organicist one (ecological collapse,) and the view that sees the world as an ecosystem will ultimately prevail over the one that sees it as a machine.
I think you should watch other videos from the channel above, but as I see it, the dragon is the same idea as the flywheel and economies of scale are the same as the maximum power principle, but the people who benefit from the system want to use the metaphor which promotes the idea they can continue to expand indefinitely. This is clearly tied into the idea of the mechanistic worldview. However, I think the mythology of major commercial superhero films exemplifies the problems of the society that would think the flywheel is the correct interpretation and promote this, and which for that reason depends on the mechanistic metaphor of all existence. Marvel and DC superheroes are probably totally doomed to be terrible because the huge dragon corporate power structures force them to make stupid ideas like the Marvel and DC multiverse which are not a good implementation of a science fiction multiverse story at all, and which always had problems that are not seen in earlier comics that were not American superhero comics made by megacorporations. There’s really nothing that makes me want to read Superman or Batman comics that much and even X-Men comics barely do anything for me since I started finding all the old so-called psience fiction. However, due to the existence of Flash Gordon and even just Calvin and Hobbes, I tend to think the comic format can be pretty great and the problem isn’t books with pictures in them, contrary to a relatively popular belief. I think shows and movies can probably be more useful, especially in the age of AI as they become easier for private individuals to produce, but comics as a medium at least go back to Ancient Rome and probably before, and societies that don’t have written versions of phonetic languages rely entirely on pictoral depictions. Movies themselves is a shortened version of the phrase “motion pictures” which are simply pictures that move. I think pictures in general are the most primal way of depicting messages, not written words, and this fact should be preserved, which makes me especially sad that it seems like megacorporations just hijacked comics to turn them into something stupid that seems to have actively dumbed people down, whereas Buck Rogers apparently inspired space travel before Star Trek was around and even before Space Odyssey was around, so whatever flaws it had, it at least had good fruits in my opinion, and this makes me inclined to think the corporatization of our media has dramatically dumbed down society.
The idea that people would want to read about Batman or Superman during the Great Depression in my opinion sort of reflects an idea that people can’t actually take any actions for themselves that would help fix anything and that’s really defeatist, and I think people overlook how much the function of all media as a mythology in a Schellingian sense that people would think of more as a Jungian, Tolkien, Joseph Campbell, or George Lucas idea so the entertainment people make up actually makes things worse, which I think is what Tolkien referred to as “mere escapism” anyway contrasted to his idea of escapism as being something potentially lofty when it actually reflects on reality but isn’t identical to it. Tolkien was inspired by Coleridge who was inspired by Schelling who was inspired by Goethe anyway, so the idea that yes, fiction should prepare people to engage with reality and not just be a distraction probably goes hand in hand with the idea of mythopoeia and commercial superhero comics seem like an inversion of the productive mythopoeia Tolkien and C. S. Lewis championed, but that doesn’t seem inherent to the medium at all, only to the contexts that produce it due to the constraints on producing it in the past, and I do think this will potentially be a highly positive use of art AI, since it will make it much easier for independent publishers to make their own comics and movies among other similar media. I think it will take a lot of pushback though, because I think one of the aspects of mythology that can make it pernicious is that people’s views of reality will conform to their myths about it unconsciously and unreflectively, which is how I think there are so many of these reactive external locus of control comics that are badly-written to begin with. People have assumptions about how things must work, and now people have meta-assumptions about our assumptions about how things must work which obfuscate reflection on assumptions because people think they have already reflected on their assumptions, but really they have just mythologized unreflectively instead.
