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GHM Online Columnist - Steve Higgins |
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.MAY 2003.
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.Squadron.Supreme.
by Mark Gruenwald
and Various
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Feedback is always appreciated!
E-mail me at vacuumboy9@hotmail.com
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June 6, 2003
"SQUADRON SUPREME"
Once upon a time, there was a superhero team that decided fighting crime wasn't enough. They finally realized that, if they really wanted to make a difference, they'd have to combat the ills of society, things like war, poverty, famine and disease. So they took over and started going about rebuilding society from the ground up, trying to turn their world into a utopia.
If the concept sounds vaguely familiar, it should. For years superhero comics have been exploring such moral questions as these, all the way back to the famous story "Must There Be A Superman?" In that tale, the man of steel wrestles with the fact that by doing so much to help society he might actually be holding them back from striving and succeeding on their own. In the end Superman decides that he will help the people of Earth with problems beyond their means like earthquakes and supervillains, but for the rest of it we were on our own.
Not so in the 1985 Marvel maxi-series Squadron Supreme. In this book, the heroes decide that we humans need someone to make decisions for us. So they usurp the government's power, take over America, and start fixing things the way they see fit. Now that description of the book makes it seem like these heroes are bad guys, but they're not. They're good people, heroes with the best of intentions. But you know what they say about the road to hell, right?
Pretty quickly one of the heroes speaks out against the rest of his team. He objects to the ideas of these heroes, stating that by taking control away from the common man, they are trampling on all the freedoms America stands for. But this hero is voted down by the rest, who say that a few of the individual's rights lost are nothing in the face of what will be gained by society as a whole. So this hero resigns from the team and starts planning a way to show the Squadron Supreme the error of their ways. And that hero is Batman.
Well, actually it's Nighthawk, but it might as well be Batman. It is well-documented that writer Mark Gruenwald was a huge fan of the Justice League and that, when he created the Squadron Supreme at Marvel, he was openly aping the DC team so he could play with the other company's toys in his own backyard. Even reading the names of some of these heroes you can see obvious parallels. Hyperion, Power Princess, Amphibian, Whizzer, Dr. Spectrum-the list goes on and on.
But Gruenwald takes the characters and makes them his own, drawing on the archetypes we're familiar with and taking their personalities to the inevitable conclusion. Each character stands out from the creation they were originally carbon-copied from. Golden Archer's obsessive love for Lady Lark stretches into darker corners than Ollie and Dinah's relationship ever did, and Nuke's youthful impetuousness is at times incredibly destructive, a far cry from Firestorm over in the JLA.
Apart from making the characters his own, Gruenwald similarly pulled no punches with the plot and showed that even the actions of superheroes have very real consequences. This story is mired in tragedy and heartbreak; as the story unfolds over the course of a year in this utopia, members of the Squadron Supreme quit the team, are forced out, and even die. The inevitable conclusion to the story is very much a predecessor to the widescreen action style we see in comics of today, yet its violence is not sensationalized or especially bloody. Characters are killed in horrific ways in this melee, not just for a cool fight scene but for a logical purpose, to drive the theme of the story home for the reader.
Dozens of stories since 1985 have taken this idea and run with it, and I freely admit that those books, books like Kingdom Come or The Authority, did the concept a bit better than Squadron Supreme does. The art here is uneven and juvenile at times; the dialogue is similarly a bit cheesy, as characters break into long speeches to debate the larger moral issues behind their actions without a hint of subtlety. But still this work is groundbreaking and many stories of today owe Squadron Supreme a great debt of gratitude. For this reason, and for many others, this book is worth your attention.
Unfortunately this graphic novel has never received the credit it so deserves to its initial release coming at almost the same time as Watchmen's. But with the new series Supreme Power by J. Michael Straczynski and Gary Frank on its way in August (supposedly set in the same universe and involving the same characters), now this story might finally be recognized for the paradigm-shattering masterpiece that it truly is.
All Content ©2003 Steve Higgins, All Rights Reserved.
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| :. ABOUT STEVE |
Steve Higgins is an English instructor who loves comics so much he offers a class on them in the spring. His wife Sarah hates comics with a passion and wishes Steve would stop spending so much money on them each week.
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| :. ABOUT STEVE ( CONTINUED) |
Favorite Comics: Doom Patrol, Y the Last Man, Alias, Queen and Country, X-Statix, 21 Down, Paradigm
Favorite Movies: The Fisher King, Heavenly Creatures
Favorite Bands: Radiohead, Counting Crows, Weezer
Favorite Writers: Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, Russell Banks
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| © 2003 - Gray Haven Magazine & All Authors. |
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