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Superheroes in the Age of Agnew

Where should we draw the line between satirical interpretation and defamation of character? Sometimes no clear point suggests itself. However, one piece of intercompany satire at the beginning of the seventies seemed quite willing to march across the line.

In Marvel Comics' Avengers series, a supervillain team called the Squadron Sinister appeared during one story as a kind of inside joke, in that characters constituting this team obviously owed to central members of DC Comics' Justice League of America. Where the Justice League had Superman, Green Lantern, the Flash, and Batman, the Squadron had Hyperion, Doctor Spectrum, the Whizzer, and Nighthawk. This one-shot gag became, over time, something bigger; not only a parody of DC's premier superheroes, but an attack on DC Comics, its readers, and a version of America that still galls many who remember it.

A spoof of the Justice League became an implication of a vision of America, and, in those times, the Spiro Agnew best represented this vision. The Squadron Supreme served as an accusation, then, against Agnew's America.

The Man and the Mouth

When Vice President Agnew died in the 1990s, political fixture Pat Buchanan eulogized the man as an inspiration to him. One could dismiss this as the simple polite tribute to another member of the Nixon administration - Buchanan served as one of Nixon's speechwriters while Agnew served as Vice President - but, to look at the distinguishing features of both men, we can conclude that Buchanan spoke clearly and literally here.

In Nixon's day, Nixon somewhat used the Presidency and Vice Presidency in a good-cop/bad-cop bit of spin in which Nixon sought to shepherd the American center while Agnew corralled the American right. Thus, while Nixon might make more toned-down public statements, Agnew went out into the field and delivered political speeches that received the same welcome one might expect of a kidney punch.

Nixon, here, did not draft an unwilling man to this task. Agnew had become a celebrity around 1968 when he called prominent civil rights leaders to task following riots on the East Coast. In a day when polite society impugned neither the methods nor the agenda of the civil rights movement (for fear of receiving the brand of segregationist, racist, reactionary, or whatever), Agnew spoke loudly and confidently. He clearly raised a voice against the downside of the upheavals of the sixties; the term "reactionary," if one could use it without the load of pejorative emotion that attaches to it, would describe his style well, since he tilted against the windmill of changes that not all Americans found positive nor inevitable.

Agnew's stunt in telling off civil rights leaders - some stories say he summoned them into his office as Governor of Maryland and chewed them out like a drill instructor, but we might suspect some embellishment here - made him the voice of a subset of Americans who thought politicians had abandoned them in 1932, with Roosevelt all subsequent presidents. Nixon, therefore, in a strategy of courting "un-Black, un-poor, un-young" voters, thought Agnew a perfect "bad cop" to offset his "good cop" stance.

The Nixon-Agnew ticket barely squeaked past Hubert Humphrey in 1968, then roared past McGovern's doomed candidacy in 1972 just in time for scandals to bring down the entire ticket. Nixon would resign in disgrace over charges that no longer bring presidents down; Agnew would precede Nixon's departure by some months over a tax evasion charge to which he pleaded "no contest." By 1975, America no longer had either Nixon or Agnew to contend with; congressman Gerald Ford and governor Nelson Rockefeller had assumed the presidency and vice-presidency, respectively.

What Did Marvel Mean to Say Here?

To someone who connected to the youth culture of the sixties, or wanted to do so, all of the following traits seemed to connect: unhip, old, reactionary, bigoted, patriotic, and anticommunist. Never mind that many talents of DC and Marvel came out of the 1920s (Stan Lee; Gil Kane; Curt Swan; Gene Colan; John Severin; John Buscema; Nick Cardy; and others) and therefore all really belonged to a single generation. Marvel considered itself "hip" and slower-moving DC "unhip." One property created a cascade of all the others.

Therefore, older publisher DC, which, fairly enough, had not internalized the ethic of the Cult of Cool, in spite of the absorption of younger talent like Dennis O'Neil, Neal Adams, Cary Bates, and Elliot Maggin, could, under these assumptions, remain vulnerable to all these other charges.

Roy Thomas and Marvel Comics, then, took a broadside at both DC's heroes and its readers in their interpretation of the Justice League of America. In one motion, he implied that DC's heroes liked Spiro Agnew (and maybe even George Wallace), and, possibly, so did the people who read about them.

Why so harsh? Why such malice? In part, such cruel jibes derived from the long-past publisher loyalty fans expressed, particularly Marvel fans. Readers tended to consider themselves as fans of product lines like Marvel or DC, rather than fans of the medium itself. Plus, again, those on one side of the cultural changes of the day preferred to think of themselves as the vanguard of an inevitable and absolutely necessary new order; only ignorance, simple stupidity, conscious evil, or insanity could incline someone to question such an order in the eyes of those who failed to consider that simple human fallibility could affect everything, including their notions of social, political, and economic reform.

Do not take this to mean that political arrogance only existed on one side of the fence, though. Much of what defined Agnevian politics comes out in the mouthings of American Eagle, although as a straw man he does not speak with the clarity or eloquence that at one time invested Vice President Agnew with a small though dedicated following. Prior to Watergate, a political screaming match had become the norm in public discourse, until the specter of impeachment quieted the voices that might have preferred Agnew's vision of America for some time. In the long reckoning, national public figures would eschew the bellicose style that made Agnew such a bogeyman; but talk radio hosts would, in some ways, come to echo the themes of a man few would care to acknowledge as their conceptual forefather.

The Long-Term Picture

What began as a nasty stab at DC Comics (including characters, creators, and readers) subsequently became part of the Squadron Supreme formula. The politics of their situation would, through the seventies, define their milieu; and, ultimately, in the Squadron Supreme maxi series, form a cornerstone of their story.

In the shorter-term, though, since the Squadron played in the context of an alternate universe, we can note the changes from their world to the conventional Marvel universe. The Avengers only came to encounter the Squadron after an error in attempting to return from Arkon's domain brought them into the wrong world, and clues lay here and there to indicate what had happened. For instance, a newspaper named President Humphrey (rather than Nixon) in one panel.

Later on, in the early days of Perez' first run as artist on Avengers, the Squadron returned as mind-controlled puppets of the evil President Nelson Rockefeller (contemporary with the presidency of Ford on our own world). Note, here, that this intends something extremely sinister; though America survived Rockefeller's vice presidency without becoming a totalitarian nightmare, Rockefeller in specific and his family in general had played central roles in a variety of conspiracy theories, acting as a target for accusations of communism and predatory capitalism (sometimes in the same theory). Add to this his controversial deeds as Governor of New York in the Attica riots and we have something that, in its day, seemed particularly sinister.

The combination of the intemperate right-wing politics of members of the Squadron Supreme to a native habitat cobbled together out of various paranoid political urban legends meant that politics would, in the long run, play an important role in the Squadron Supreme concept. Also, the diligence of writers would take this team, on the shoulders of Roy Thomas, then Jim Shooter, then Mark Gruenwald, into a bigger story space; they would ultimately move beyond a blunt smear against DC (heroes, fans, and talent) into statements about the human condition.

Until the concept evolved to such a level, though, the Squadron Supreme would play the role of political straw man in order to create, for many readers, a slightly wicked pleasure in the form of a multilayered caricature.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 201. Completed 04-NOV-2000.