Nerdery

Tomorrow is the election for the next President of the United States of America.  In honor of this, I thought I’d put together a brief history of politics and comics.

First off, this is Senator President Barack Obama speaking at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner last month.

Politics have been in comics since the Golden Age.  Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, all of the superheroes of the late thirties/early forties fought Nazis.

Captain America punches Hitler on the cover of his first appearance.

The early comics were fairly simple, using Nazis (and later Communists) as easy villains.  As time passed and comics “grew up” a bit, the political stories became more nuanced.

Captain America was the obvious choice to explore many of these themes and stories.  The Secret Empire storyline of the 1970s culminated with Cap discovering the head the conspiracy was the President himself, who committed suicide in the Oval Office.

(An interesting aside– I once read that when there’s a Republican in office, there are more shady government stories than during Democratic administrations.  It explains the eighties and the last few years, huh?)

Watchmen, the Dark Knight Returns, Transmetropolitan, pretty much the entirety of Claremont’s X-Men run, Ex Machina, Green Arrow… The list goes on and on.

For the most part, Marvel plays with politics more than DC.  Though there are exceptions.  DC famously put Lex Luthor in the White House in 2000.  And the recent DCU: Decisions limited series revealed the political leanings of many of its capes.  (I thought it was interesting to have a conservative, Bill Wilmingham, and a liberal, Judd Winick, cowrite that series to keep it relatively free of bias.)

Of course, Marvel’s Civil War event gave superheroes their own version of the Patriot Act.  While it sacrificed subtlety and nuiance for big action, the story has affected most, if not everything, Marvel’s done since.

One last thing, and then I’m off to bed (waking up at five a.m. to vote, volunteering for the Obama campaign and then an election results watch party at McCoy’s Public House):

Another reason to vote Obama.