Redd the Sock said:
Therumancer said:
At the same time, it's easy to complain people are against you if a choice is made you don't like. More often than not our own biases and perceptions cloud things.
Take Civil war. You seem to ascribe that it's an "evil right wing" Iron Man vs a "good left wing" Captian America. Based on the War on Terror, that may be justifiable, but look at it in a different light: Iron Man was for creating a big government program that put restrictions, standards and expectations on heroes while Cap fought for individual freedom for heroes and to not be forced into a controling government. Who's left and right wing now? And the end moral of things was that the big beurcratcy a) didn't work and b) got derailed by someone with an alternative agenda.
Still, I won't argue a lift leaning bent is the nature of the superhero comic. The whole premis is based on the idea of people with great power feeling they should help others with it for no reward, or learing that self serving motives get them nowhere (Spider-Man, Booster Gold). On the other hand, how much of that is due to the silence of the right. I don't mean they haven't complained about balance loud enough. I mean they don't seem to try for their own creative works. If, as they claim, the demand is out there with 50% of the population, they'd be doing a service and proably make a few bucks in the process. The same goes with taking on "liberal Hopllywood". If an overweight pothead from Jersey can become a world fameous director, a few more on the right could give it a try instead of bitching that other people alter their creative visions to appeal to their worldview. There is room for both sides to exist, but someone has to create the other side, and it isn't likely to be someone that doesn't honestly beleive in it.
Well, it's like this.
Originally in The Civil War, they set it up to be a situation where both sides were equally right.
The Pro-Registration crowd was pretty much argueing that like it or not super beings are incredibly dangerous, and that it's ridiculous to say that they should not be accountable to anyone except for themselves, and that society should just have to deal with that. Basically the attitude was that all super heroes should operate under similar guidelines to the The Avengers, or The Fantastic Four. Unlike various X-men titles, this was not some kind of cover for a shady genocide plan, nor was it singling out Mutants since pretty much anyone with exceptional powers whether they be based on mutation, scientific alteration, or heck just highly advanced weaponry, would be handled the same way. Someone has a problem with a super hero, they can then find out who it was, and have them served papers much like has happened to both The Fantastic Four and The Avengers at various points.
The Anti-Registration crowd was pretty much making an arguement based not just around individual liberty, but also the basic arguement that if heroes were made accountable for their actions or hunted down actively, it would make dealing with a lot of super villains substantially more difficult. After all your typical hero dons his mask to break the law and probably commits dozens of crimes a night, ranging from breaking and entering, to illegal surveillance, to assault. In a world where villains like Doctor Doom have diplomatic immunity, do you really want heroes to worry about the law? What's more, when it comes to say saving a hundred people, do you want a hero to avoid taking action because his plan might involve say trashing someone's car by using it as a projectile, which could get him taken to court? The basic arguement being that super heroism would become impossible for largely the same reasons you saw at the beginning of the movie "The Incredibles", except unlike that movie you'd probably start seeing cities flattened almost immediatly if the heroes weren't quick and effective in their response.
The original point being that both sides were correct within the context of that world. Of the two sides, part of the point was that the Pro-registration side is arguably more sane, which to begin with was intended as a kind of counter-point to all of the stuf floating around in the X-titles, along with the specific mention that you had all of these super heroes who WERE operating in an accountable fashion without any real problems.
The situation became de-railed and turned into yet another X-men scenario rather than being anything differant, by writers wanting to make it more of a "liberty vs. security" issue and try and make it seem like the paranoid persecution of "maybe" terrorists, and similar things. Totally forgetting that we're not usually dealing with "maybe" cases here, but guys already known to go walking around in masks and break the law every 10 seconds or so, in the context of the scenario as presented the guys involved are guilty, and admit to being guilty, the arguement being "should these people be above the law?" which was rapidly forgotten in the course of creating things like a thinly veiled analogy to Gitmo (even advertised that way in a comic-book sales catalog for shops), and similar things. Before the official launch we even had Luke Cage going off to Iron Man about slavery in one of the most "WTF" moments in comics I've ever read, and I think once we started seeing things like that... though arguably beforehand as well, any semblance of this being the awesome event and analysis of the super hero genere that we had hoped for kind of went out the door.
Iron Man pretty much became an avatar of so called "right wing paranoia" where Captain America became an analogy for personal liberty and oddly enough what is presented as sanity and normality. The sides became analogous to political positions in the real world, and it even read that way, as opposed to dealing with the situations as they existed in that fictional world with those issues. The original point being made by using characters like The Fantastic Four or Iron Man once he stopped having a secret identity, characters who are effective heroes despite their accountability, and comparing them to heroes who are accountable to nobody but themselves and slink around in the shadows meting out what they think is jutice... well that never happened. Especially given that we're dealing with the ideal of vigilantism in a comic book world, where unlike reality we are dealing with guys that are trying to destroy the world every 48 hours, and have to examine the issue from that fantastic perspective. I mean the idea of someone like "Doctor Doom" is crazy to begin with, but "Doctor Doom" with diplomatic immunity which he's had in the comics for a while now? Yeah... the Anti-Registration guys have a valid point in being critical of a system that let that one happen.
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As far as the rest goes, it's like this. The industry took what were popular, conservative leaning characters, and whenever possible retired and/or replaced them outright. It's a situation where it's not a matter of nobody liking those characters or nobody created them, but an attempt to surpress or erase them. Things like HEAT kind of demonstrated how there has been substnatial opposition to things like this, even if people want to call them "paranoid wierdos" and "conspiricy theorists" the overall evidence demonstrates it. Someone like Bob would probably tell you that it's a matter of the industry growing up, or something like that, but really it's more a matter of a house cleaning and an intentional political move. Right now it's pretty unlikely that you would find anyone to publish a character with some pretty extreme conservative leanings as a straighforward, non-comedy relief good guy, who was not going to get one upped by a liberal every 15 seconds. Remember this is an industry that had Superman renounce US citizenship not too long ago... a character that is defined as fighting for "Truth, Justice, and The AMERICAN" way.
See, the point being that right now despite the divide in the country your not going to find very many super heroes who would say put a group of mexicans illegally crossing the border back on their own side of the border with a stern warning not to do it again after say saving them from criminals out to rob and murder them or something.
Take any BIG issue ranging from border control, to gay rights, or well... anything, and these issues are big because of the nation being divided. Guaranteed when reading comics the hero is almost inevitably going to be on the left wing side of the fence, and the bad guys or the "obviously wrong" party will be on the right.
As Bob pointed out, there was a time when you could have comic characters with differant political leanings teaming up and having a dialogue about such things, that's no longer really the case. Anyone with right wing beliefs, or who complains about this kind of thing, is generally treated like a redneck cartoon character within the geekdom community. While I get a lot of harsh responses on forums like these, I also occasionally get some positive ones even from people that disagree with me because really the geekdom community has become so insulated from the right wing that people are shocked when then run into someone in these circles who can defend the other side, many not even realizing that the other side even had any valid points that COULD be debated.
The basic point here is that I think the issue isn't really one where there is a lack of anyone who would or could write right wing characters, or those with that point of view, but a situation where the industry had been carefully setting itself up to prevent it from happening on anything like a large scale.
