The Next Villain
As a kid, I collected comic books. I still have them, several thousand, in residence at my mother’s house to protect them from any “eBay moments”. Fond memories.
And currently I am reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the novel that earned Michael Chabon his Pulitzer, well deserved. Read it. It’s about the lives of two Golden Age comic book creators, one a Holocaust escapee.
Kavalier and Clay’s first blockbuster hero, “The Escapist,” premiered before WWII and continued to be published after, in the story. Kommandant X was the chief villain, and Chabon points out that the evil X “quite easily made the transition from Nazi to Commie” after the war. This got me thinking. Naturally, children’s literature would reflect the contemporary heroes and villains of its day. But what happened after the 1950s, I wonder? What heros and villains did the comics of my day portray?
My comic book heroes, in the 1980s, were The X-Men (no relation to the Kommandant). The X-Men were created in 1969 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Who were the X-Men, and who were their villains? The face of “evil” didn’t seem to map any longer to the consensus enemy of the day. In ‘69, the US was trying to save Vietnam from the Commies, but the consensus had evaporated.
The X-Men were mutant “freaks,” who often looked different and (as is the superhero mandate) were possessed of super powers. They ended up that way as a result of genetic mutations, the story goes. Their enemies were not generally the political enemies of the United States, but rather the villainous embodiments of intolerance to the freaks themselves. 1969.
I haven’t read a comic book, or its “mature” cousin the graphic novel, in a long time. I can only guess that today’s villains are terrorists, thinly veiled from 6 o’clock news terrorism, if disguised at all. I might have to look into that.
Who, I wonder, will the next villain be? And how distinct, this time, the line between good and evil? The emotional health of a society depends on its ability to properly identify the enemy.
Ka-POW!