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Razzing the Dictators

In the Silver Age, apologists of the Golden Age might have noted the absence of a certain type of story in which the hero involved himself in the brewing mayhem of World War II in a manner that brought some justice into a world that seemed to have expended its supply.

Silver Age superheroes developed in a different time, where costumed goons provided better enemy fodder than the political enemies of the culture. Indeed, in the sixties consensus fractured about who to cast as enemies.

In the forties, perhaps, we used a simpler and clearer measure. Look at who pointed the guns, and you had an excellent set of candidates for Sources of the Trouble. In one type of story characteristic to the period, furthermore, four-color heroes would go deal with the Goon Dictators of the twentieth century, just as they might dispatch any other criminal, and rightly so.

In general, once some bully-turned-leader becomes too powerful for the average Man in the Street to express his displeasure with a rude gesture right to the Fearless Leader's face, said leader has outstripped any valid conceivable moral mandate to lead and needs someone to deflate his ego and divest him of the delusions of adequacy that seem to have anesthetized his ethical sensibilities.

The cartoonist, if he chose to use them, had various techniques to undermine the pompous. The newly-invented costumed hero could simply deal with such dictator-types as another kind of hoodlum, grabbing them up by their collars and delivering them to the appropriate authority; or a hero might show how a thinly-veiled proxy for the dictator could come to an end by the very ethos he sold as policy; or, alternately, a cartoonist could refuse to deal with dictator-folk seriously at all, recognizing that they deserved not even the dignity afforded by a criminal role in a heroic adventure strip.

Calling a Spade a Spade

Some things definitely seemed clearer to the common man in a previous age. We can include the character of dictators in these insights. If you have countries from which people flee to protect their lives, they recognized, you probably had a country in the grip of one of the great dictator-goons.

Prior to America's entry into the Second World War, comics tended to treat Stalin and Hitler as roughly-interchangeable tyrants attempting to drag the entire planet into war.

Thus, in the forties, you might see unselfconscious and unabashed pieces like the story where Superman simply went to Europe, grabbed both dictators by the scruffs of their necks, and hauled them in to stand trial - a nicer end than either man actually got to enjoy, compared to Hitler's death from a gunshot would (presumably a suicide, and good riddance) and Stalin's death by poison (a murder, and, again, good riddance).

Folks in the forties, after all, could recognize a goon as a goon and a killer as a killer, should they choose to invest the necessary attention in the subject; it would take a later age to quietly ignore Stalin's murders or attempt to rewrite Hitler's out of history. That most people sanely sneer at attempts to rehabilitate Hitler as a historical figure much commends modern moral judgment. That many quietly change the subject when it comes to Stalin does not.

Direct Slaps

We can see in an early Superman strip a classic piece of the type. Naturally enough, this specimen predates American entry into World War II; by the time Congress declared war on Japan in December, 1941, Germany had already betrayed its non-aggression pact with Russia with half a year of trademark brutal warfare. Only in a pre- or post-involvement comic would we expect to see a superhero deal harshly with the leader of a state with whom we forged an important wartime alliance.

Regardless of subsequent relationships, circa 1940, Americans might rightfully sneer at the attempts of Stalin and Hitler to partition Poland, and, by such an example, set a model for the partitioning of any conveniently near portions of Europe and Asia they might deem ripe for conquest.

Superman, in the manner characteristic of his earliest, often-activist interpretation, went to the kernel of the problem in one story. Seeing the War, and squinting heroically towards probable causes, Superman simply traveled to the scenes of the crimes, retrieved the culprits by the scruffs of their collars, and brought them in for crimes against humanity.

One might look wistfully at such a tale, wishing that we could resolve - even prevent - massive human catastrophes with such measures rather than with the expenditure of millions of human lives.

Assaults on Proxies

In Eisner's strip "The Spirit," we see another tack taken in the process of cutting pretenders to absolute rule down to size. A Spirit story, circa 1940, has the Spirit deal with a European dictator-type who intends to serve as ruler of North and South America (after, of course, their conquest) by forcing him to live with the consequences of his ideology.

That this figure, Nargoff, has written a book of his conqueror's philosophy strongly identifies him with Hitler, regardless of his Russian-sounding name; however, this combination of Russian and Hitlerlike traits most likely intended to impugn the dictators of 1940 - specifically Hitler and Stalin - collectively through a single proxy.

In one of the Spirit's international missions, prior to America's official declaration of war against Japan, Eisner's hero attempts to bring Nargoff to justice. Nargoff and a sailor escape from a general conflagration caused by the Spirit torching the island they had organized as a beachhead for invasion only to find themselves sharing a small boat with the Spirit, who does whatever he can to induce them to fail to get along peaceably, consistent with the conqueror's philosophy in Nargoff's dime-store version of Mein Kampf.

Stranded on a small craft at sea, the Spirit climbs a mast with his own supplies and leaves the dictator, and an oversized goon, down at the waterline to work things out among themselves. The bigger man quickly reallocates all water to himself. Called upon to intervene, however, the Spirit declines, arguing that the dictator's own philosophy recognizes the confiscation of all the water as the legitimate behavior of a stronger agent against a smaller one.

Realizing that he faces greater force and lacking the remedy of the Spirit's intervention, the dictator begins to struggle - literally for his life - for the precious canteen, and, in the process, the two combatants spill its contents and effectively guarantee their own doom, a death that need not have occurred in a political cosmos guided by a fair and sane ethos. Instead of enduring until a rescue plane found the craft (by which means the Spirit himself returned to civilization), the political thugs struggled until cast into the water by their fighting, where some not-too-particular sharks recycled them for their fat and protein content.

In a more just universe, such a fate might have spared humanity the consequences of the continued survival of a number of twentieth-century despots whose deeds threatened to flood the land with spilled blood.

Denigration via Toon

Since it frequently behooves me to include material not everyone gets to see, whenever the occasion and my own inventories work together to make it possible, let us consider slights against the dictator-goons of the twentieth century in the context of humor strips - in this case, a one-shot piece by Basil Wolverton from the forties.

"Supersonic Sammy" appeared as a humor piece, probably contemporaneous with Wolverton's space-opera pieces such as "Starhawk" and variants which appear in the Dark Horse trade paperback Wolverton in Space. In this piece, the eponymous hero travels to Earth as part of a Martian eugenics program banishing anyone with a brain small enough that his head measures less than two feet across. By a simple error brought about by his own limited intelligence, Sammy accidentally travels to the wrong hemisphere, passing through Russia and picking up Stalin in a misguided attempt to put out a fire Stalin built to burn some American newspapers with which his pipe had shipped.

The sudden encounter with an extraterrestrial discombobulates Stalin for a moment or two, but he resumes his bullying and windbaggery promptly, in spite of losing his clothing to the fantastic winds encountered by riders in a saucer like Sammy's. Unfortunately, Sammy lands them in the middle of a forties-era American city, where the pantsless Stalin quickly encounters difficulties with the local constabulary. Annoyed by the argument that ensues when Stalin starts claiming Constitutional protections against his own arrest for walking around like an idiot with no pants on, Sammy deposits the Soviet dictator back in his saucer and has it return him to Russia, no longer to trouble Sammy nor the locals with his boisterous verbiage.

In essence, Sammy puts the dictator out on the curb with the other garbage and, via flying saucer, returns him to a dump he did a great deal to create.

Workable Today?

For such a story to work today would require, if not a uniform opinion about the objects of derision, at least a significant plurality in our culture, something that we achieved only temporarily during the Second World War itself. Even across a political spectrum, for instance, we could get the idea about the character of Hitler; and before the morally problematic alliance with Stalin, we could, somewhat, agree that such a man represented less than an ideal in humane leadership.

However, in a Babel-like proliferation of alliances and ideologies, a modern writer of comics would have considerable difficulty picking a target that would not alienate some potential bloc of readers or thoroughly offend another. This pattern applies equally to dictators and political movements, with little consensus on a definition of something theoretically comprehensible as the notion of terror or of terrorism. How, after all, can we define "atrocity" so that the definitions excludes the atrocities of agents for whom we enjoy some feeling of common purpose?

This leaves limited options open to comics that fear to offend someone. The first option allows some general disapproval to appear concerning the behavior of dictators, but specifically long-dead ones. Thus, we have the Fantastic Four defeating Hitler (in his guise as the Hate-Monger). And we have the original Human Torch, in a seventies story penned by Roy Thomas, defeating (and killing) Hitler. And we have Liberty Belle, in Golden Age, defeating and killing Hitler. Where Hitler himself becomes too busy to appear for the amusement of readers who wish to see some other superhero or heroine kill him (again), his proxies step in, either in literal form (as in too many comics, especially those featuring Captain America) or via surrogates (HYDRA agents, whose organization originated from the machinations of an escaped Nazi war criminal; the white supremacist terror group du jour; or simple generic all-purpose fascists with slightly modified names and dress codes that nonetheless implicate their origins).

But with the consensus, the unashamed glee faded away; now, when a comic takes on some loathsome dime-store Napoleon, we have more of a guilty pleasure than a shared experience in the resonant denunciation of those who would soak their native soil with the blood of the people for whom they pretend to the role of protector.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 209. Completed 24-DEC-2000.