In my diary yesterday I kicked off the Americana project, a superhero comic with liberal and progressive values. I started with the essay that first inspired me to begin the project: a few paragraphs from Matthew Putsz's Michael Moore in Tights: An Examination of the Possibilities of Progressive Superheroes.
Today we will begin to explore the title character. Who is she, where is she from?
Before I had a name, I knew my progressive superhero would be a woman. When I teach Freshman Composition at UCR, I usually start with feminist issues: the way women are silenced, deprived of authority, and marginalized in the literature we read and, just as importantly, the way those women navigate and negotiate those restrictions in an effort to break through or adjust. From Trifles to Hamlet, this issue is one I find intellectually stimulating. Moreover, there are simply not enough women in comics -- not enough admirable female characters and certainly not enough female creators. I can't do much about the latter, but I can do something about the former. The two best cases for a liberal superhero -- Denny O'Neil's Green Arrow and Morrison's Animal Man, are both men and I think a female character will provide some overdue representation. Finally, and most obviously, equal rights for women is a progressive value.
My next decision was to make the hero a Super-Patriot, or what is also sometimes known as the Flagsuit. This is a particular archetype of the super hero known for wearing a costume based on a national flag. The most famous flagsuit is Captain America, but although that character was created by no less a figure than Jack Kirby, Cap was not the first hero to wear the flag. Since then, there have been many other super-patriots, only most of them American. Characters like Quality Comics' Uncle Sam, the young Stargirl, Captain Britain, or the Israeli super-heroiine Sabra, shown here.
By tondropolis at 2007-08-07
The Flagsuit is not a foregone conclusion; it is a choice. Oliver Queen may spend a lot of time talking about the American Dream, but neither he nor Animal Man are Super-Patriots and virtually any sort of costume or color code could probably be made into a liberal hero if we tried hard enough. But if there is one aspect of the right-wing noise machine that particularly gets my goat, it is the idea that if one is a liberal one is somehow not a patriot ... that if one has the gall to criticize this country, or its leadership, that somehow makes one a traitor to the country. This charge really gets me hot, and I don't mean in a good way. So I wanted my liberal superhero to not only be a patriot, but to publicly boast of being one. She asserts her patriotism in the same sentence as she asserts her liberal cred.
Now for the name. This is a tough row to hoe, as there have been hundreds of flagsuit characters in comics since 1941. I myself have invented quite a few in my other creative work, and it is hard to go back over old territory and still find something fresh. However, it is still possible to come up with good names, the most recent example being Roy Thomas' Anthem. When I heard that name, I had a "DAMN! I wish I had thought of that first," moment, which is perhaps not surprising considering we are talking about one of the most creative and admired men in the comic writing business. It took a couple of days of sitting around my favorite haunts before I stumbled over Americana. The name did not at first seem like a good fit: it evokes the past. It is a backwards-looking, Conservative name, suggesting a glorification of yesteryear rather than a forward-thinking point of view. This troubled me. In principle the name was a good one, and I was having a hell of a time thinking up something better, but I could not figure out how to make it work for this project.
Today I latched onto the idea of the Man From Tomorrow, another well-established superhero archetype. This sort of hero is one who comes back to our time from the future. Examples include Booster Gold, Bishop, and Rachel Summers. There are basically two kinds of Man From Tomorrow. The first is one who comes back to us from a perfect, idyllic future. These sorts of characters -- like the Legion of Super-heroes whenever they visit 20th century Earth -- see Earth customs as quaint or old fashioned. They sometimes see us 20th century people as barbaric savages who have to be "saved from themselves." But what I wanted was the other kind of Man From Tomorrow: the kind who has come back to our time from a dystopian future and is committed to preventing that future from ever existing. This would be the place where Americana was born: a Conservative future, one in which right-wing conservative practices have achieved their extreme end. The decision to ignore global warming has resulted in the flooding of America's coastal states. The gulf between rich and poor has become so extreme and pervasive that the country has devolved into a neo-feudalism in which masses of the utterly destitute are governed by the tiny fraction of the super-rich. Everyone has access to information sources like television and the internet -- but those information sources are all lies and manipulation, tools for control. The people still have religious faith, but their governmental leaders only profess that faith hypocritically in order to use it wrongfully against the people. Our natural resources are exhausted. Politics is dominated by the ideology of fanationalism -- the absolute imperative that one believe everything one's country does is, by definition, right.
Americana is from this time, perhaps a century in the future. She is a soldier in the Army or Marines, well trained and competent. Cunning. Dangerous. It does not take great wisdom to see the government's tyranny for what it is in that world, but it does take great courage to do something about it. Somehow, through a mechanism I have not yet figured, she escapes that future to our own time. She has decided to change the past to ensure her own future never happens. She is fighting for her own self-destruction and, in the process, the salvation of all mankind. Through the mechanism of making her "from the future", the difficulty surrounding her name suddenly vanished. It now made perfect sense for a person from that hellish dystopia of the 22nd century to idealize the America of the past. Her ideal past, of course, is our present. And her love of "Americana" will show up in many other ways, from a love of jazz music and Raymond Chandler's languageto the trappings of the Western. The word "Americana" also has a Gothic element to it, suggesting stories with elements of horror, such as those found in Garth Ennis' Preacher. This would be a good way to ensure my Flagsuit was never dismissed as a mere "four color stunt." These would be challenging stories, stories that create shock and wonder as well as social awareness.
This will be a comic book that you can read while listening to Johnny Cash.