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Superheroes are pro-police propaganda. They teach you to be afraid of those who disobey the state rather than yhe state policies that drive impoverished and precariats to desperation.
What does Spidey do with the suspects he catches? He leaves them to get processed into the prison system where they can be used for slave labor, are subject to abuse by the staff and occasionally are killed by thirst or by getting braised in the showers.
White collar crime causes way more loss of life, more destruction and more cost than all the petty crime by multiple orders of magnitude and yet Spidey still goes after street goons. _The same for Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Ironman and Captain America. If they’re not fighting their own rogues gallery, they’re hunting street thugs.
They’re certainly not interested in the plutocrats who have captured our governments.
This is a weird take when “really rich guys doing depraved things” is a recurring villain trope across an awful lot of comic books and take up a huge portion of the narrative. Insane wealth is often framed so powerfully in these contexts that sometimes it can parallel superpowers.
The green goblin and doc oc are just really rich guys that do fucked up things! It’s implies that spidey puts goons and henchmen into the justice system because of course he does, what else is he going to do? His other options are killing them or just letting them get away with whatever the insane rich guy wants to do, which is often some kind of terror attack on NYC. And those both suck too.
Spidey is too busy trying to literally prevent some business tycoon from idk opening a demon portal under central park to also advocate for prison reform.
Just let the stories be fun.
The villains appear after the fact.
Spider-man, the Batman all the rest fight crime because (generic) crime is the problem. As with James Bond and SPECTER (SPECTRE?), there’s a point when the USSR and the cold war was too complicated to be an easy-to-punch baddie, even with the gulags and tanking, so James Bond got a Moriarty, a nemesis to fight instead. The superhero rogues galleries are what happens once it becomes awkward that all the superhero does, is as Garth Ennis put it beat up poor people. And so Jokers and Doc Ocs and Red Skulls are invented when the real Nazis are no longer a threat.
When we stick superheroes into the modern western world, the pretense is that the system mostly works, essentially that Ronald Reagan isn’t around gutting social programs, turning prisons into (pretty literal) gulags, fueling the war on drugs and otherwise making the federal and state justice systems into even more of a system of oppression than they were after prohibition (specifically to target non-whites, at that). In the DC and Marvel worlds, police are not overly brutal. Prisons are not overwhelmingly unhumanitarian (nor are they impacted). And yes, criminals really did make some avoidable bad life choices (rather than IRL getting steered into the school-to-prison pipeline).
Though the silver age, the system ran by magic capitalism, even as IRL industries were capturing the regulatory agencies that were supposed to prevent them from driving precarity and poverty to 80%+ of the nation (and thereby fueling the white Christian nationalist movement that is taking over the federal government and many states today).
Through the dark age (that is 1985-1995-ish), Batman sometimes killed, but Frank Miller noted that the thugs were so awful that they deserved it. The criminal element were painted as literal undesirables you could do anything to without moral concern. Sure, Arkham Asylum was a literal dungeon and the jails were infested with rats, lice and scabies (as they are IRL) but it was okay not to give half a fuck about the inmates, because we know what they did.
And yes, even when the current MCU villains have a point, they are obligated to offer a solution that involves decimating the public, so that they can be waved away as too radical, and the Avengers can go back to serving the establishment plutocracy (and not the public). Heck, even Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias in Watchmen ) killed half of New York in order to stop a nuclear holocaust.
Christ you know how to suck the fun out of escapist media don’t you.
If being able to point out the biases within a medium sucks the fun out of it, then there are bigger problems that belie the medium… or the fun.
To be fair, the biases of comics are typical throughout movies and television as well. As I noted elsewhere, the GCPD in Gotham what is supposed to be the nadir of police corruption is actually less corrupt and more concerned about public welfare then every police department in the United States. Considering all the content produced by Dick Wolf consumed by Americans, it’s no wonder we have cognitive dissonance when we see video footage of real-life officers gunning down detained suspects or escalating non-violent incidents.
There are many ways to approach this. My wife still enjoyed true crime television recognizing that the world portrayed is not the one we live in. You can continue to read comics, but look for ones that take steps to move the dialog forward. It’s what some folks did regarding the wizard game.
You can also look to recognize that you are really in a cyberpunk dystopia in which our plutocratic masters want to keep you harmless and then exploit you as a laborer or soldier until you are depleted and need to be replaced, and your own story is how you break out of that paradigm. So there’s grounds in all our lives for hero stories.
That’s literally so wrong.
Why did Spidey become a hero in the first place? Because the cops couldn’t find the killer, so Peter did and killed the guy. Which was not justice.
So many heroes of NY in Marvel are focused on justice and the concept of what is justice. The Punisher kills, Daredevil punishes, Spidey is learning. Sometimes he lets people go, otherwise he believes imprisonment is an alternative. Sometimes there is an option that don’t fit either.
The point is Spider-Man knows killing isn’t justice and the cops/system doesn’t either, he literally is an enemy to police always. He simply is trying to make a dangerous world a little more safe in his local area.
Fuck out of here with your fake ass political take. Especially such a terrible one.
… you might be reading too much into a silly superhero. He fights a man with mechanical tentacles named ‘Doctor Octopus’. He has an enemy who is literally just a stage magician called ‘Mysterio’. There are several animal-people. One villain is literally made out of sand.
It’s… generally not that deep.
The MCU is one of the biggest moneymakers in Hollywood. It is literally Disney’s flagship media line and curiously when they attained Spider-man from Disney, the first thing they did was pull Spidey out of poverty and put Aunt May on the Avengers payroll.
It may not be that deep in the comics, but it’s still teaching kids the way to fight crime is to punch them in the face, break their legs and put them in an impacted and inhumane prison system.
Just like Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle taught us we should do as they were subsidiIng the prison industrial complex and pushing the War on Drugs.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy Spider-man. I read Spider-man as a kid and my grandson does today. He also fantasizes about punching baddoes in the face, and I can only hope he’ll realize that’s fantasy before his first real encounter with law enforcement.
Alright but 99% of my memories of superheroes as a kid weren’t them fighting crime, but them fighting supervillains, which is generally the main draw for kids.
It still instills a dynamic that the best way to solve disputes is by force and that some parts of the public are undesirable by fiat.
Given the current affairs of the US in which half our federal officials are trying to outlaw trans folk, I’m hyper-aware that this is a bad message to give.
It still instills a dynamic that the best way to solve disputes is by force
How often is it that superheroes start the violence? Or are you suggesting that smiling as your teeth are knocked down your throat should be the reaction, here?
and that some parts of the public are undesirable by fiat.
… given the predilection of comics for redemption arcs, antiheroes, the struggle of being different, and the fucking X-Men, I’m gonna have to press X to doubt on that.
Given the current affairs of the US in which half our federal officials are trying to outlaw trans folk, I’m hyper-aware that this is a bad message to give.
You’re hyperaware that a message that isn’t being sent is bad. Okay. I’m very aware that Teletubbies advocating genocide is bad. Good thing that’s not at all relevant.
How often is it that superheroes start the violence? Or are you suggesting that smiling as your teeth are knocked down your throat should be the reaction, here?
Here in the US, law enforcement escalates to force far more often than they encounter someone who is already aggressive, so it raises a question why villains in comics so consistently engage first?
The propaganda is in what is implied. Redemption arcs are the exception not the rule, and the implication is that most villains don’t get redeemed.
Now maybe it’s because they know their audience wants to see brightly colored supers knock the tar out of each other, and that might be true, but in the context of police work or vigilantism, it does paint human civilization as a lot more violent than it is. How often do heroes see violence break out during their day to day life (rather than, say, tracking it by police radio?)
I get that you don’t want your hobby criticized too sharply. Still, have you seen Spider-man stopping Proud Boys from harassing a drag queen? Have the avengers interposed themselves between a BLM demonstration and the police armed with CS-gas and riot munitions? (I really don’t know if they’ve done these things. I’d be delighted to see right-wing culture wars cross into the MCU, but Disney has their own opinions about their right to continue capitalizing.
Here in the US, law enforcement escalates to force far more often than they encounter someone who is already aggressive, so it raises a question why villains in comics so consistently engage first?
… because superheroes aren’t cops?
This is not in any way a normal reaction to a image of a woman in a catsuit called Black Cat singing showtunes from the musical Cats.
Take your hangups somewhere else.
Iron Man has plenty of stories where his enemies are other rich businessmen. The plot of his first two films have those bad guys. Captain Americas stories tend to be more about international espionage than street level crime, especially since Brubakers but reinvention in the early 2000s. Batman/Bruce Wayne canonically pumps tons of money into social programs for Gotham. When was the last time you picked up a comic? 1965?
Philanthropic foundations are known to be a really poor way to actually fuel change in a neighborhood, but a great way to get tax breaks and some positive marketing. We knew that when Andrew Carnegie dumped a bunch of his own money into community works.So no, the Wayne Foundation is no such program. However, note that because of Bruce Wayne’s charitable contributions, you managed to believe that was a way that a billionaire might be remotely ethical. A lot of people would like to believe that people who are filthy rich can keep their money and be ethical. It’s really not possible.
It comes down to what are they fighting for? What is it that the rich businessmen are trying to do that Iron Man must stop them? What is Iron Man and Batman protecting?
The status quo. If we imagine that this is fine and that our civilization is intrinsically good and just needs protection from some external evils, then sure, it’s just like every other 1980s TV show.
And you know, when the fossil fuel industry was able to effectively obfuscate that we weren’t headed towards global ecological collapse (because in the 70s, few people had heard of the Holocene extinction, and the crying Indian was telling them it was their fault that the environment was trashed). Batman isn’t fighting to end industrial control of the government of Gotham (and the whole US). He’s fighting to preserve his own control of government.
That said, I read Batman mostly in the eighties and nineties, After BTAS, the later animated series dropped in quality, and movies got really strange after the Nolan films and the DCEU series emerged. But The Batman the most recent one actually acknowledges how the paradigm typical of the late 20th century (and the MCU and DCEU in the 21st) are more like pro-wrestlers.
But then, that is consistent with hypotheses that human society is infantilizing, and are less interested in seeing reflections of our own world as we are some dudes smacking each other around on a stage or in a cage.
