Opinion | POW! WHAM! TAKE THAT, UNCLE SAM (2024)

"Rogers was thoroughly briefed and is now ready for the experiment," says the head of the military's Project Super Soldier, just before a scrawny Steve Rogers drinks the serum that will forever transform him into Captain America, a blond mountain of Nazi-fighting muscle in star-spangled spandex. Armed with his new powers, our hero is then immediately dispatched to Europe where he fights against fascism.

In last month's issue of "Team 7" the government handles matters a little differently. The shadowy director of a CIA-like organization called I.O. doesn't inform anyone about anything. He orders a few army platoons into a fake battle and then ruthlessly gasses them with an experimental chemical agent called "gen-factor." The gas gives nine soldiers enhanced psychic abilities but kills everyone else. Surveying the landscape of dead bodies, the I.O. director, aptly named Mr. Craven, says that the general who sacrificed these men will not mind the body count. "{He} won't complain, these guys were all draftees," he says.

Armed with their new powers, our heros are then immediately dispatched to an "east African sinkhole" where they are ordered to overthrow the government. Why? The Team 7 narrator has three guesses: "Oil. Chromium. A decent surfing beach."

Al Gore, are you out there? The real U.S. government doesn't need reinventing half as bad as the one now found in comic books, a place where Nixonian double-dealing, paranoia and abuse of power are the norm. Then again, you wouldn't reinvent the Mafia; you'd just round it all up and put it in jail. Or better yet, you'd find a superhero who'd do the job for you -- which is what frequently happens in comics today. They may have gotten their start whupping slimy underworld villains and foreigners in the name of truth, justice and the American way, but for some of today's popular superheros the U.S. government is no longer an ally, and sometimes it is the enemy itself.

Think of it as an adolescent's version of talk radio. A good superhero comic book, after all, has an audience of well over 750,000 readers, nearly all of whom are male, white and between 10 and 16 years old. According to Wizard magazine, the comic industry's leading trade publication, between 5 and 10 million teenagers read superhero comic books each month.

The Team 7 gassing was only the latest episode in a decades-long decline. Back in the '40s and '50s, superheros virtually embodied the government. Superman was like Jimmy Stewart with steroids and a leotard. Captain America throttled Nazis and Japs alongside of the U.S. Army for years; when the Cold War got going, the legend on the cover introduced him as a "Commie Smasher." Batman was a vigilante but Commissioner Gordon understood that the Caped Crusader fought for the well-being of law-abiding citizens.

The comic's era of do-gooder jingoism came to an end in 1954 when the portentously titled Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency held hearings to figure out whether comic books were corrupting America's youth. The committee later quietly dropped the subject, but the episode made the industry nervous enough to launch the Comics Code Authority, a self-censoring body that was supposed to eliminate all traces of crime, horror, violence and sex. Marvel Comics actually retired Captain America, Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch in 1955. Superhero comics all but disappeared for the next four years.

The trauma of '54 is sometimes blamed for putting comic writers in an anti-government mood, but the '60s started amicably enough. When a group of teenage mutants called the X-Men were introduced in 1963 they worked hand in hand with the FBI. Three years later, however, we got a foretaste of what was coming when Iron Man's alter ego, Tony Stark, a wealthy weapons-maker, was put through the wringer by a Senate committee that accused him of being emotionally unstable and unworthy of winning army munitions contracts.

Matters soon got uglier. In the '70s, Captain America was framed for murder by a group calling itself the Secret Empire, which wanted to take over the country and replace Cap with a costumed hireling whom the Empire fully controlled. Unmistakable Watergate references pepper this tale. Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President (or CREEP), for instance, was echoed in the Secret Empire's public front, the Committee to Re-establish American Principles (or CRAP). The story line ended with Captain America foiling the scheme and chasing the head of the Secret Empire around the White House lawn and right into the Oval Office where the villain reveals his identity and commits suicide. We never saw the guy's face, but the strong implication was that he was the president. Cap was so depressed he hung up his cape for a few months.

This Watergate allegory contained a new theme: The superheros knew what was good for the country and our leaders did not. The most critically acclaimed comic of the '80s, a Batman series called the "Dark Knight Returns," cast Batman as an embittered and misunderstood anti-hero hunted by both city officials and a doddering, folksy U.S. president who looks and sounds strikingly like Ronald Reagan. Batman just wants to clean up Gotham's mean streets, but the Big Brotherish government, which has outlawed all superheros except for a subservient version of Superman, wants him dead or in prison.

By the '90s, government wickedness reaches absurd new heights. In "Team Youngblood" a band of twentysomething superheros are hired and exploited by a White House chief of staff conniving enough to make H.R. Haldeman seem guileless. In "Spawn" the eponymous hero is a former government-trained assassin who is pitted against Jason Wynn, the head of an organization that looks a lot like the FBI. And whereas comic books in the past tried to be vague about specific politicians, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole share a belittling cameo in a recent issue of "UltraForce." When the UltraForce team makes a deal with Clinton that allows its members some latitude in dealing with bad guys, Dole sidles up to the president and deadpans "I'll back you up . . . at least until this turns into something I can use against you."

And on it goes. Crooked senators and judges in "Superman," scheming mayors in "Icon," a military plan to kill the entire Apache nation in "Give Me Liberty."

Of course, comic books exaggerated the can-do positive attitudes about government back in the '40s and '50s, so it's hardly surprising that they would exaggerate the can't-do negativity today; the mirror that this medium holds up is naturally the distorting carnival variety. And figures like Jason Wynn seem inevitable, given the availability of real-life antecedents like J. Edgar Hoover. But today's comic books are starting to look unusually fatalistic, even when compared to Captain America's Secret Empire travails in the '70s. Back then, the subtext was that government was being subverted by bad people and would otherwise be doing great things. Today, the implication is that government is simply filled with bad people.

Naturally, comic book authors are products of their age. The people behind the '40s golden age heros were weaned on the New Deal and wrote while the American government was beating back the Third Reich and, later on, sending thousands of ex-servicemen to college on the GI Bill. It's not surprising that the most acerbic books these days are those written by the youngest writers. The creator and author of "Spawn" is 33 years old and Rob Liefeld, the artist and author of "Team Youngblood," is 27.

"I grew up watching the end of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran-contra affair," says Liefeld in a telephone interview. "Now that the Soviets are gone, the biggest, most terrifying thing out there is the U.S. government."

There are three "Team Youngblood" books each month and they sell a combined total of 900,000 issues. "Spawn" has 750,000 readers. It's enough to make you wonder: If voters in November seemed dubious about government, what about when today's comic book readers are old enough to go to the polls?

David Segal is a former Washington Monthly editor.