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Anticommunism as Schtick in 1963

Yesterday's obsession feeds tomorrow's ridicule. And, from 1993, one could view the comics of 1963 through the lens of a contemporary context, with some contrasts evoking admiration and others bringing about a head-shaking kind of incomprehension typical to those who attempt to understand times in which they did not live.

The year 1993 stands as a good point at which an observer might look back at the struggle between the Soviet Union and all those places that hoped, for the foreseeable future, to remain outside the USSR. Little remained of Russian communism but an exhausted debris; "the" Russia began the process of fragmenting into many smaller states, reversing the process of assimilation that generations of strong-arm treatment had yet failed to complete.

In 1993, one would assume that the term "communist enemy" belonged in a list of ludicrous, even humorous, oxymorons. Yet if one looked back to the comics of thirty years previously, particularly pieces like Iron Man stories (or the occasional episode in Fantastic Four), the newborn Marvel Universe seemed to teem with communist bogeymen in numbers fit to rival Marvel's contemporary population of mutants.

Depending on one's politics, the perceived communist enemy became something ridiculous either because of its datedness and obsolescence, or, in another interpretation, because it had never existed in the first place. So when Image Comics began their tribute to the Silver Age of Marvel Comics, they found they had to deal with an element that, while it made little sense to writers of their generation, they couldn't eliminate it altogether and remain true to the material to which they intended to direct homage.

What else, under the circumstances, could they do but turn it on it head? Thus Image Comics' "1963" books explored the ridiculous side of Kennedy-era anti-communism, sometimes so snidely that it might make one wince, and sometimes with a brilliance to earn it credit as a classical piece of political satire.

The Villains

N-Man and USA both confronted communist villains, though with nothing in these villains' design suggesting why their loyalties might make them villainous. Comrade Cockroach belonged to the tiresome tradition of Soviet revisionists of science and history - the folks who tended to backdate all scientific achievements since 1918 and claim them for Modern Bolshevism. The Red Brain, on the other hand, more directly pursued his own villainy, through spying, espionage and direct confrontation with superheroes.

These villains derive from a quick look at the communist villains of the early Marvel Silver Age, such as the ridiculous Red Ghost (who, with three cosmic-ray enhanced primates, sought to lead a parallel, communist version of the Fantastic Four against the originals). We find here the key word ridiculous - ridiculous like the villains, ridiculous like cosmic-ray-enhanced great apes, ridiculous like the invented charges history attributes to Senator Joe McCarthy, ridiculous like (evidently) the very idea of anticommunism.

And these villains do stand as surreal stereotypes, barely sentient, possessing, instead of rational brains, some kind of slogan-generating organ that has superceded and replaced them. At first look, we might shake our heads at such implausible figures - who can think of someone so inclined to heed dogma and ignore the evidence of his senses?

However, circa 2000, we indeed enjoy a similar parade of slogan-spouting buffoons. The slogans might change, but the buffoons themselves do not. So the caricatures here enter the territory of black humor; though politics have changed, the credulous aspect of human nature, sadly, has not.

The Ads

Alan Moore, et al, really got rolling once they started inserting the anticommunism jokes into the ads. Note the accompanying piece which hawks "giant-sized commies;" this parodies a ubiquitous ad that sold a 72-inch cardboard wall decoration that looked like Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster and had joints at the shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees. This piece would never have appeared in a sixties comic for several reasons: Stalin had died a decade previously and did not represent the current focus of anticommunist concerns; and the cut-out wall-monster came from a set of movie monsters which seemed altogether ludicrous and campy by the time vendors sought to sell them as cardboard wall-hangings. A cardboard Stalin well suits the humor of 1993 (and, perhaps, 2000), but not 1963.

These books, however, went on to no less than brilliance by fusing period anti-communism to the cartoon work of Big Daddy Roth, whose bizarre treatments of grotesque creatures in unlikely motor vehicles spawned a small industry, including plastic model kits and now-defunct genre magazines like Car-Toons. Roth had his own surreal vision, one of considerable idiosyncrasy, almost as inseparable from his person as the amazing facial caricatures that one thinks of when mentioning Basil Wolverton's name.

A particularly effective kind of parody, after all, not only mocks its target but makes it seem even more ridiculous by the juxtaposition onto things normally considered very separate from it. Roth's cartoons and the specialized verbal bombast of the Cold War seem particularly peculiar bedfellows, and this disparity makes the gag particularly brilliant.

The Bombast

At times, the humor of this sardonic vision centers on the political babble that anticommunism generated. While one can say, solemnly and with a straight face, "I don't like Stalin, or, for that matter, anyone else who murders that many people," a similar ability does not attach to statements like "Whatta dirty pink!" Cold War insults, particularly before anticommunism became a timid and self-conscious thing practiced mostly in private, contained a specialized jargon that today jangles the nerves and, in most contexts, sounds especially absurd, partially due to the cumulative effect of decades of ridicule.

On the other hand, the communist bombast receives little friendlier treatment. Its own specialized revolutionary cant, full of serious-sounding terminology either devoid of meaning, or pretentious and pompous, or hilariously euphemistic, evokes precisely the same kind of response as terms like "commsymp." That most modern leftists attempt to avoid cliched political jargon attests to the onus of ridiculousness that attaches to it; modern parlance much favors plain speaking, even where an argument intends to deceive. Polysyllabic poser-words do little to commend speakers in a cynical age.

Inasmuch as verbal bombast, particularly the kind Stan Lee used to deliver on a regular schedule, provided much of the appeal of Marvel Comics in their high era, political bombast does much to serve a similar purpose, even with tongues wedged firmly in cheeks.

Not Taking Sides

On the one hand, we have anticommunist good guys and communist bad guys and a clear understanding of which camp everyone belongs in. That, by itself, would suggest that the 1963 books intended to push some kind of agenda.

On the other hand, we have superheroes (and supervillains) made ludicrous by their flatulent outpourings of ideological babble. We have mortal enemies who theoretically represent opposite poles of politics but who do nothing to demonstrate why anyone should consider one political system more desirable - or less desirable - than another.

These books fail both as sermons in anticommunism and as lessons in anti-anticommunism precisely because they do not invite the reader to explore the faults of a political model. A piece that intended to sell anticommunism would not hesitate to demonstrate just the sort of meaty offenses against dignity that Aleksandr Solzenhitzyn chose to chronicle in The Gulag Archipelago; a piece that intended to expound anti-anticommunism would not pause before launching into atrocity tales of anticommunist zeal in Latin America and Asia, with HUAC thrown in for good measure.

We simply don't have that in the "1963" books. Instead, we have super-beings playing a political version of the dozens, an ideological form of "your mama so ugly" jokes, none of which implicates either rival power except as vectors for the transmission of output of a slogan-generating organ some human beings use to replace their brains.

Having failed to advocate (or denounce) anything much, therefore, this piece stays outside the domains of the reprehensible as well as the edifying, at least on a political level. These books might offend communist comics readers (if any exist to offend) only where such readers lack the necessary perspective to see the grotesque stereotyping as a deliberately over-the-top barb at the rhetorical excess of the comics of another generation. These books might offend anticommunists who have enough of a sense of humor to see that the jest cuts their way as well, but not enough of one to see the humor in the caricature.

Nothing here, however, seems likely to tempt anyone either to reject or embrace communism. These books never intended such advocacy in their scope. Though they dabble in the form of politics, they avoid its substance; they use Cold War themes to create, however snidely, an authenticity of tone not truly available in revisionist treatments that attempt to whitewash the original anticommunist overtones of the early comics of the Silver Age.