The 8 Greatest Superheroes You’ve Never Heard Of

Ha ha, no, that title’s just clickbait

Fight Man

Jack Kirby and the Visual Logic of Superheroes

Part 2: Bif bam pow etc.

In Part 1, I talked about the fundamental structure of a fight scene. To recap, a fight scene is

a sequence of events caused by the aggressive and defensive (and other) actions of two or more combatants

To which the only sensible response can be: duh.

In this second part, I was going to get to Kirby, but that’s going to have to wait until Part 3. Here, I’m going to talk about how the demands of the fight scene constrain the imaginative space of superhero comics. So, a question: how many possible superpowers are there, and how many actual superpowers have appeared in comics?

To answer this, we first need to have a rough understanding of what makes a superpower, so:

a superpower is an agent’s ability which is (either explicitly or implicitly) the product of some non-natural cause

By “non-natural cause”, I mean some cause which either isn’t recognised by current science or is beyond current technological capability. That pretty much covers it, I think: Dr Strange uses magic to fly around and zap folks, the Hulk’s strength is caused by gamma rays, Thor is a god, Iron Man uses advanced technology, Spider-Man gets bitten by a radioactive spider and also invents his own advanced technology in the form of webbing, the Fantastic Four are transformed by cosmic rays, etc.

All right, so how many possible superpowers are there? Answer: infinitely many.

Let’s just start with one of the superpowers just mentioned — the Hulk’s superhuman strength. The Hulk is strong. Like, really, really strong. His strength is linked to how angry he is; the angrier he gets, the stronger. Various Marvel comics have even suggested that his strength is practically limitless (on the assumption that so is his anger). So that’s one superpower from one character.

Here’s another superpower, from a character that I just invented: he’s called the Thulk, and he’s just like the Hulk except that he only has superhuman strength on Thursdays.

Here’s another guy: the Wulk, who only has superhuman strength on Wednesdays.

Here’s another: the Fwulk, who only has superhuman strength on every fifth Wednesday.

And another: the Cfwulk, who only has superhuman strength on every fifth Wednesday, providing it was a crescent moon six nights ago.

And one more: the Rcfwulk, who only has superhuman strength on every fifth Wednesday, providing it was a crescent moon six nights ago, and the current US President is a Republican who has never eaten haloumi cheese.

Or we could generate possible superpowers a different way:

The Rulk, who has superhuman strength only when fighting Republicans

The Chulk, who has superhuman strength only when fighting chickens

The Dchulk, who has superhuman strength only when fighting chickens that are disco-dancing

I could go on all day, but you get the picture. We can generate infinitely many superpowers using just the idea of superhuman strength as our starting point. But most of these superpowers are also trivial and, well, silly. As a character, Rcwfulk probably has less storytelling potential than his more famous counterpart; Rcfwulk stories would quickly become as predictable as an episode of KnightboatMust defeat the evil plan of my arch-nemesis — but *choke* can I stop him before President Jeb Bush enters that cheese shop?!

So let’s try and open our minds in a different direction. The Doom Patrol of Grant Morrison and Richard Case (et al.) was one of the more outre superhero comics by a “mainstream” publisher, and featured plenty of offbeat powers. One of the more offbeat powers belonged to the Quiz, whose superpower was to have every superpower you haven’t thought of yet.  Among her powers were the power to turn people into toilets filled with flowers, and to make escape-proof spirit jars, but presumably she could also rewrite the complete works of Pierre Menard, read the minds of radiator heaters, and transform into a fifty-foot giant J. Wimpy Wellington with the wisdom of Stephen Hawkings and the strength of Nicolas Sarkozy. The Quiz belonged to the Brotherhood of Dada, which also included (inter alia) Mister Nobody — who could only ever be seen in the corner of people’s eyes, Alias the Blur — who ate time, and (my own favourite) Number None — who, in the words of Mister Nobody was “the person who bumps into you when you’re late for the train; the chair that collapses underneath you when you’re trying to make a good impression on your girlfriend’s parents; that man who seems thin but somehow you can’t get past him because he takes up the whole sidewalk”.

The worlds of superheroes are worlds that operate by different causal laws than our own universe. Sometimes those worlds have super-science, sometimes they have magic, but they all have characters that can do things we cannot. They can, potentially, do anything — so why do so few superheroes have the range of powers shown by the Brotherhood of Dada?

Let’s take a look at some superhero comics Marvel and DC will be publishing in August  — what superpowers do the protagonists in these comics have? (1)

***

Marvel

Nova — flies, shoots people with energy beams

Captain Marvel — flies, punches people, shoots people with energy beams

Superior Spider-Man — swings on webs, crawls on walls, punches people, shoots people with webs

Ultimate Spider-Man — ditto

Carnage — ditto, plus stabs people by changing his hands into knives

Venom — ditto, plus shoots people with normal guns

Scarlet Spider — as for the Spider-Men, plus burns people with his hands, stabs people with spikes in his arms

Morbius —  flies (kind of), punches people, bites people, scratches people

Captain America — punches people, throws shield at people, sometimes shoots people

Thor — flies, punches people, hits people with hammer, throws hammer at people, shoots lightning at people, fails to understand really quite simple principles of middle-English speech

Iron Man — flies, punches people, shoots people with repulsor rays

Hulk — punches people

Punisher — shoots people, sometimes stabs or explodes them

Daredevil — actually has interesting powers, usually just punches people anyway

Hawkeye — shoots people with arrows

Wolverine — stabs people with claws

Gambit — throws playing cards at people

Deadpool — stabs people with swords, shoots people

Kick-Ass — I assume ironically fails to do so

***

DC

Pandora — shoots people with magic guns

Phantom Stranger — does  ill-defined magic stuff

Constantine — ditto

Aquaman — swims, punches people, stabs people with a trident

Green Arrow — take a guess

Katana — see if you can guess this one, too

Justice League of America’s Vibe — shoots people with vibrations

The Flash — runs fast

Wonder Woman — flies in invisible plane, punches people

Superman — flies, punches people, shoots people with laser beams that come out of his eyes

Supergirl — ditto

Superboy — ditto

Batman — flies in Batcopter and Batplane, drives Batmobile, super-detective, still spends a lot of time punching people and throwing bat-shaped boomerangs at them

Batgirl — similar to Batman

Catwoman — punches people, scratches people

Talon — too much effort for me to find out, but I’d guess it’s the same as Catwoman

Batwing — similar to Batman

Nightwing — similar to Batman

Green Lantern — flies, has magic ring that can theoretically create anything from magic green energy, usually just shoots people with energy beams

Larfleeze — ditto, but coloured orange instead of green

Jonah Hex — shoots people

Animal Man — various animal powers, often does not punch or bite or stab people with them

Swamp Thing — as for Animal Man, but replace “animal” with “plant”

***

What do we learn from this brief survey? Three things:

(a) I have too much time on my hands, and am borderline OCD.

(b) Unexpectedly, DC’s superheroes are somewhat less punching-and-stabbing focussed than Marvel’s.

Then again, perhaps this is not so surprising when you consider some of the respective superhero highlights of the period that ultimately defined their respective worlds for later decades, the period from the late 50s through the 60s that myopic superhero fans generally call the “Silver Age” (2). Marvel has Kirby and Ditko, whose characters spend a lot of time punching each other. By contrast, DC has the Swan/Boring/Schaffenberger Superman group, whose hero does almost no punching, but instead spends an awful lot of time pulling elaborate hoaxes, working through gimmicky set-ups, or otherwise using his goofier superpowers such as super-ventriloquism and super-breath (3); the Forte/Swan Legion of Superheroes, whose members include Matter-Eater Lad — he does exactly what it says on the tin; and Infantino’s Flash, who also spends little time punching or hitting, instead using his powers in creative, non-aggressive ways. Then there’s DC’s second or third-tier (in terms of quality if not sales) comics from the period — e.g. the Haney/Fradon Metamorpho, “Bob Kane’s” Batman, and the Fradon Aquaman — a character so proverbially lame that his current writer felt the need to directly address this lameness in his new series, and who was made EXTREME in the 90s by chopping off his hand and replacing it with a kind of hook/trident thing.

He used it primarily to stab people.

On the other hand, let’s remember that two of their current comic books are about characters named after what they hit people with, part of a noble tradition of how to name your comic book — cf. Iron Fist, Savage Sword of Conan, Sword of the Atom, 100 Bullets... The TV show based on Green Arrow even drops the “Green” and is just plain Arrow. This is really quite weird when you think about it — why not call your comic book Punch or Gun?

And, even granting that there are some superheroes at DC whose powers are not primarily punching, zapping, or shooting, it’s worth noting that those are still the powers for most of them. And the highlights of “Silver Age” DC did also include the Anderson/Infantino Adam Strange, the Kubert/Anderson Hawkman, and Kane’s Atom and Green Lantern, all of whom spent a lot of time hitting people. Not to mention Kubert’s and Heath’s war characters such as the Haunted Tank, Enemy Ace, Unknown Soldier and Sgt. Rock.(4)

(c) Despite the theoretically infinite number of possible superpowers, the superpowers of most of the headlining characters are various ways to hit people. And if they’re not ways to hit people, they’re ways of not being hit, or not being hurt when they’re hit.

And this is just what we’d expect if we accept (the obvious fact) that the fight scene is the raison d’etre of superhero comics. For fight scenes, you need an Attacker who can

i) touch their opponent, in ways that

ii) hurt

and a Victim who can

iii) avoid being touched, and/or

iv) not be hurt

The vast majority of superheroes and supervillains have superpowers that fall into one of these four categories. And, generally, if they’re a superhero with their own comic book, they will have a combination of Attacker and Victim powers. If we take another quick look at the lists above, we generally have characters who, in addition to their attack powers, can also

  • avoid being touched by Attackers’ attacks, as per (iii). One method is to have some kind of protective force that stops attacks from directly hitting you: Iron Man’s suit of armour, Captain America’s shield, the force fields of Green Lantern and Larfleeze. Another is to have some special way of not being touched at all: the Flash’s superspeed, the acrobatic skills of the Spider-Man and Batman characters.
  • and/or not be harmed by attacks that would harm a normal human being, as per (iv). Many characters are just tough, impervious to even very powerful attacks: Thor, Superman, Hulk. Or they can recover quickly from attacks, with vastly accelerated healing, like Wolverine or Deadpool.

The fight scene determines everything in superhero comics, ultimately distilling all superpowers into two binaries: touching/not-touching and hurting/not-hurting. In the third, and final part of this essay, I’ll finally talk about how these two binaries dominate Kirby’s X-Men.

PS: No, fuck it, Thulk, Wulk, Fwulk, Cfwulk, Rcfwulk, Rulk, Chulk and Dchulk are the 8 greatest superheroes you’ve never heard of, copyright Jones, one of the Jones boys. Look for them soon in an upcoming series from Image Comics, where they’ll be, oh, let’s just say, retired assassins, or thieves who only steal from other thieves, or members of an age-old secret society, or spies for some marginally conceptually clever imaginary government agency.  Image Comics: where basic-cable pitches come to die.

PPS: This was only going to be a two-part series, but I thought I’d ape contemporary “mainstream” comics themselves and not show the guy whose name is in the title until the very last moment, nor explain what he has to do with it all. In other words, Part 3 is just going to be a final splash-page of Kirby showing up in a dramatic pose.

(1) I’m only using comics with a single protagonist here, because it would take way more extra effort to figure out who’s who and what they can do in the comics with more than one protagonist (e.g. Avengers, X-Men, Justice League).

(2) I discussed two obvious problems with this classification schema here.

(3) Really, super-ventriloquism is used as a major plot-point way more often than you’d think.

(4) Oddly, Rock and Easy Company — a unit in WWII — do much more punching than shooting, presumably due to the strictures of the Comics Code. The diegetic justifications for this are generally pretty feeble, along the lines of “Those goose-steppers can’t open fire for fear of hitting their own men, so let’s get ’em, Easy!”.

Image Attribution: Fight-Man, by Evan Dorkin, image from comics.org. Fight-Man created by Evan Dorkin, owned now and until the end of the universe by Marvel Entertainment, LLC, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.

Voices From the Archive: Marc Singer on the Morality of All-Star Superman

A while back I expressed skepticism about All-Star Superman; Marc Singer replied with a long and eloquent defense, which I’m reprinting here. His comment is below.

Thanks for the link and the comments, Noah.

Your point about ideals without content is well taken, but the call for placing superheroes in “some sort of coherent moral framework,” particularly the point about superheroes skirting “political or social engagement,” seems a little musty, a bad leftover (or hangover?) from the eighties. Comics have been doing that for twenty years, and they usually reach the same tired conclusions about fascism (Animal Man being one of the rare exceptions). It’s to Morrison’s credit that All Star Superman largely avoids that well-worn path. With the exception of Luthor, he avoids talking about crime and justice; maybe one or two other criminals appear in the series and they hold absolutely no importance. Decoupling the superhero comic from these serious, meaningful discussions of law and order, most of which end up with a guy in a costume hitting another guy in a costume anyway, is probably one of the freshest moves Morrison makes.

That isn’t to say he avoids the other issues you raise. Issue #9 tackles that hoary old idea, the fascist (or at least cultural imperialist) superman, and finds him wanting. But what superhero comic in the last two decades hasn’t tackled it? This is one of the reasons I was left so cold by the issue, until subsequent ones made it clear that the comic was doing another job as well, motivating Superman to increase his commitment to a different set of ideals.

What are they? As seen in the last four issues in particular: compassion (even for his rivals or enemies), forgiveness (ditto), progress (particularly through scientific research), responsibility for others’ well being, curiosity, creativity, and a commitment to put these other ideals into action. These aren’t tied to any political ideology, but they absolutely are ethical stances (and some of them, like Superman’s commitment to building a better future through scientific progress, imply certain political ideologies, at least in our current cultural moment).

No, this is not a party platform and it doesn’t offer the kind of explicit political engagement you call for. I’m not sure that a Superman comic needs to, for some of the very reasons you list. Superman is a long-lived character with a cultural meaning much larger than any one political ideology (even the two-fisted New Deal liberalism he started out with). Tying him down to a single politics would be both difficult and reductive, especially given the premise Morrison has chosen for his project–synthesizing all prior versions of the character into a seamless whole.

Superman now stands for a kind of general, free-floating concept of decency and inspiration, as seen by all those Obama comparisons I linked to in the previous post (and the many, many more I did not link to). It’s not tied to ideology, but to idealism–Obama’s fans see him as a good guy, as one of the most openly moral figures in liberal politics in decades, as someone who inspires their own hope, so they post a photograph or a video that explicitly compares him to Superman. QED. Superman has become one of the first figures our culture calls to mind when we thinks of these traits. (The other being Jesus, and Morrison does not shy away from Christian references and narrative structures any more than Obama or the Daily Show shy away from manger jokes.) Morrison did not invent this trait, obviously, but he knows the character comes with it and he’s chosen to make it the centerpiece of his comic, building his ethical argument where the character already stands.

The line about having to invent Superman ourselves was a too-cute reference to something that happens in issue #10, which attempts to supply the tradition you say he’s lacking. I have to agree with Nick–I think your post would have been written very differently had you read the last half of the series, especially the last four issues, where all this plays out. Which is not to say you would have liked it, but you would find it hard to say the comic doesn’t articulate any ideals or place anything at stake. Any vagueness in my review is mine, not Morrison’s. But then, an eloquent apologist would say that. :)

Actually, that may be the biggest error in your post–I don’t see myself as an apologist, eloquent or otherwise, because I don’t see All Star Superman as having anything to apologize for.

250px-All_Star_Superman_Cover

Smaller Than Life Soul

This first ran on Splice Today.
______________

04

 
“Love wars, no more love wars,” the chorus sings at the beginning of Womack & Womack ‘s 1983 debut. Explicit appeals to non-violence are notably rare in American popular culture, but if they make sense on any album, it’s this one. Cecil Womack (Bobby’s brother) and his wife Linda (Sam Cooke’s daughter) make R&B music not just for the middle-aged, but for the middle-aged with no mid-life crisis, thank you. Neither quite soul nor quite funk, Love Wars sits somewhere between the two, the songs blending one into another in a mélange of repetitive but not-too-urgent vocals and repetitive-but-not-too-urgent hooks, expressing easy relationship tension and easy relationship bliss in equally measured doses. When Linda declares, “Baby I’m Scared of You,” she doesn’t sound all that scared; when Cecil declares he can “really turn your lovin’ on,” he doesn’t necessarily sound like he needs to do so — a point emphasized by Linda’s (moderately) sassy response, “I can’t understand that baby.”

I’m sure for some folks, that all sounds dreadful — but for me, the self-effacing low key approach is definitely a feature, not a bug. For fairly obvious commercial reasons, pop and soul have always found it easier to do sweeping hyperbole than understatement; everybody likes melodrama, after all, with its big lows and big highs. If you’ve been unlucky in love, then you’re going to drown in your own tears and/or declare with stentorian vigor that you will survive.

But if Ray and Gloria are out there loving and losing with hearts out on their sleeve and up a flag-pole and blaring from loud-speakers, the Womacks are here to tell you that relationship drama can be quiet and boring too. “I got my do’s/and I got my don’t’s/you ain’t for real and I’m sure I won’t/a woman’s got to play it safe,” Linda sings in “Catch and Don’t Look Back,” explaining why she’s not falling for a player’s line. The whole song is about how nothing is happening. The music struts along, the funk undergirding a sweet, almost wistful melody, and you can almost miss the emotional center, where she mentions off-hand that she’s been burned before. There’s no catharsis; it’s not even clear whether we’re supposed to be happy or sad for her. Is she smarter and stronger or just damaged? The groove shrugs its shoulders like Linda musing, “oh, I’m hip to that.”

Cecil provides the same kind of smaller-than-life lament from the guy’s perspective. What other performers would compare a failed relationship, not to a knock-out, but to a “T.K.O.”? His light, raspy vocals drift over the slow-boiling backing, fitting the half-hearted aimlessness of the lyrics. “I think I better let her go,” he muses, before spiraling up into a falsetto yodel that bizarrely imitates one of those 80s smooth sax solos, as if the ambivalence of his predicament has actually physically transmuted him into soulless cheese.

I wouldn’t say that the low-stakes approach always works for the Womacks. Turning Mick Jagger’s exhausted dead-end “Angie” into a softly lilting chat between mildly discomfited lovers probably wasn’t such a great idea, for example. But then there’s the album closer, “Good Times,” a declaration of mutual love that includes the hilariously mild praise, “you’re not as bad as you make out to be.” The real message, though is in the harmonizing; Linda starts the song off with a series of “la-la-las,” and as she winds down, Cecil comes in with a stuttering counterpoint. It’s lovely and awkward and right. Passion and world-shattering love are appealing, of course, but I think for most of us middle-aged folks, the ideal is probably closer to what Womack and Womack offer here: a vision of two as one gracefully bumbling whole.

Utilitarian Review 6/21/13

News

As most folks probably know, Kim Thompson, co-publisher of Fantagraphics, died this week. I had my first ever troll battle with Kim; he showed up in my inbox after my piece on In the Shadow of No Towers came out to tell me I was rash and foolish and an idiot. It was actually a really fun conversation; he was extremely gracious while telling me what a fool I was. It’s a treasured memory.

I don’t feel like I knew him well enough, or was familiar enough with his legacy, to write a full obit, but…I did just want to say that I always felt lucky when he came by to comment on HU, often to tell me again that I was an idiot. He was a friendly acquaintance rather than a friend, but like lots and lots of folks who he met, briefly or otherwise, online or elsewhere, I’ll miss him.

For a better sense of what Kim meant to comics, a nice place to start is with Chris Mautner’s discussion over at Robot 6.
 
On HU

Featured Archive Post: Ted Rall: Not Mean, Just Dumb.

I argue that you should get rid of comments threads if you’re not going to moderate them.

Chris Gavaler on Joe Shuster’s drawings of rape and torture.

Jog on how After Earth has that thoughtful take on violence all the critics are bemoaning the lack of in Man of Steel and everything else.

Patrick Carland on what to remember and what to forget about Ralph Bakshi.

Owen Alldritt on the alternating charm and irritation of One Piece.

Richard Cook on Bioshock Infinite, violence, and video games’ crappy aesthetics. There’s an interesting comment thread too.

I wrote the best post ever on the Internet if you want it to be.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I talk about Nancy Friday, sexual violence, and sexual fantasy.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

The liberal dilemma in giving taxes to Obama.

The Bechdel Test and Emily Dickinson.

how misogyny leads to sexism against men.

 
Other Links

Inebriated Spook on Daft Punk.

Jason Thompson on Peepo Choo.

Dodai Stewart on Miley Cyrus appropriating black people.
 
220px-Random_Access_Memories

The Best Post Ever on the Internet If You Want It To Be

Thanks to the internets and the wonder of ever-increasing connectivity and what not, everyone can listen to the band that is the best all the time. This means that no one is listening to any of the other bands because they suck. Kanye and Beyonce and Kanye and Beyonce and also, maybe Metallica, I guess, on constant rotation, with Mick Jagger gagging, “Start me up!” as his ancient bony bits spurt ever new shiny new quality product.

Anyway, here’s a graph, showing that the most popular graphs are getting ever more of the clicks.

Krueger-ShareofRevenue

See? Just looking at that graph makes you hipper and more content-optimized.

But…does it? Just because it is the graph that all the wonks are looking at until other graphs turn green with envy and their trend lines droop with despair — does that mean that it is really the best of all possible graphs?

The answer is, shockingly, no. People look at the graph they look at just because that is the graph people look at. It doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the graph, or the freshness of Mick Jagger’s spurting. Here is a graph showing that that 1 Elvis fans is right only in the sense that he or she has correctly identified the website where the 49 million other Elvis fans hang out.
 

Krueger-popularity

 
In short, I could be Andrew Sullivan if I’d just supported the Iraq war at the right time.

Neil Irwin, whose graphs I stole, quotes Alan Krueger who is an economist and therefore has succeeded entirely by merit explaining that he is shocked (in a low-key way that won’t damage his brand) to learn that art is not about quality despite the sterling example of Tom Petty.

“In addition to talent, arbitrary factors can lead to success or failure, like whether another band happens to release a more popular song than your band at the same time,” said Krueger. “The difference between a Sugar Man, a Dylan and a Post Break Tragedy depends a lot more on luck than is commonly acknowledged.”

Mathematically, Dylan’s Dylan not because he’s great but because a bunch of people stochastically tuned in and everyone else dropped on after. We’re all just basically sheep slipping on the hillside and bathing our sheep ears in giant wads of everyone else’s sheep shit.

Or that’s one interpretation. Another possibility, though, is that we’re not quite as dumb as those sheep — or, perhaps, those sheep aren’t as dumb as we are. Or, at least, when we are together with the sheep, we revel in the earthy sheep power of bathing in shit together. We may be sliding down that hill, but it’s by choice.

This is somewhere in the vicinity of what Paul Lauter argues in his essay “Class, Caste, and Canon” (1981/87). Lauter starts his essay by talking about one time he was sitting listening to a feminist literary crit collective, as you end up doing sometimes when you’re a lefty literary critic, and they started to analyze a poem by Adrienne Rich, because all feminist literary crit collectives analyze poems by Adrienne Rich, and/or by Beyonce, depending. Lauter assures us that he likes Adrienne Rich (and/or Beyonce), but, he says, why always this thing? Why always the standard of meritocratic excellence and formal beauty? Why not instead follow in the well-worn boots of the working class, and embrace art that speaks to communal enthusiasms and needs and desires? Working class art, he says, is valuable because of its use [his italics] in the lives of the proletariat. Art is not to loose anarchy or Yeats, but to bind us together so we can overcome and love one another right now. It’s the song, not the singer.

These days, of course, the proletariat is exponentially less likely to be listening to Roll Jordan Roll than to be watching American Idol or the Voice where hopefully they’re not singing Roll, Jordan, Roll. But whose to say that the change is for the worse? After all, if the point of art is the community that it fosters, then it seems like any community will do. What does it matter if you’re singing authentic volk songs or reading Adrienne Rich or watching Mad Men with a billion friends on Twitter? The point is the use as communal totem. People aren’t confused when they choose the most popular graph as the best graph. On the contrary, they’ve got it just right. Art makes a culture a culture, and it does that by being the culture you take as your culture. Who can buck the trend when the trend is the trend?

There are sub-trends of course, and subcultures, whether built around Dr. Who or Foucault or Richard Linklater or (as Lauter would presumably have it) work songs and sea shanties. The polite fiction is that we enter communities of culture because of what we like, but that’s just a way of inserting ourselves into the algorithm whereby our art sells our community back to us as ourselves. “Quality” is a ghost that haunts our skulls; a mirage we worship like a mirror. The Internet’s just given us a bigger frame on which to be somebody, too.

Bioshock Infinite

bioshock_infinite_wallpaper

The original Bioshock is one of the most critically acclaimed games of the past decade, with an aggregate Metacritic score of 96 out of 100. It’s typically praised for its implicit criticism of Objectivist philosophy. The game is set in the hidden, underwater city of Rapture, which was established by an eccentric billionaire as a refuge away from the “parasites,” similar in concept to Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged. Of course, everything goes to shit and the city becomes overrun with psychotic killers who’ve been altering their genes to gain superhuman abilities. Unfortunately, the game is more clever than intelligent. Its critique of Objectivism is undermined by the gameplay’s emphasis on repetitive violence and overcoming all obstacles and opponents. In effect, the game suggests that Great Men who rely on money are foolish and/or wicked, but Great Men who slaughter their way through an entire city are still worthy of being the hero.* Bioshock Infinite adopts the same gameplay and storytelling approach as its predecessor and suffers from the same problem.

2013-03-26_00008

The sequel is more accurately described as a prequel, because while the first Bioshock takes place in the 1960’s, Bioshock Infinite is set in the second decade of the twentieth century. And instead of an underwater city Bioshock Infinite is set in the floating city of Columbia, hidden somewhere in the skies above the North Altantic. To picture Columbia, imagine a fusion of the Confederacy, Puritan New England, and Disneyland. Columbia was founded by a fanatical preacher named Comstock and an enigmatic scientist named Lutece. Lutece helped Comstock build a city away from the fallen “Sodom” of the surface, where he could create a fantasyland for WASPs: all white, all Protestant, and all middle class. But no pseudo-Confederacy could function without slaves, so Comstock was forced to purchase black and Irish prisoners from the mainland. Needless to say, this servile class resented its oppression, and as the plot begins the city of Columbia is already on the verge of a revolution.

The story follows Booker DeWitt, a former Pinkerton, who is hired by mysterious figures to rescue a girl name Elizabeth. Elizabeth is a prisoner in Columbia, but she’s also blessed with the power to open tears in space-time, and Comstock intends to use her in his master plan to rain fire on the corrupt world below. Excepting a few twists and turns, the story is basically an effort by Booker and Elizabeth to find a way off Columbia as they’re being pursued by Comstock’s men. Halfway into the story, Booker and Elizabeth aid the rebels, known as the Vox Populi, and help spark the revolution. And soon Booker and Elizabeth are also being pursued by the Vox, who view Elizabeth as a threat to their plans.

BioShock-Infinite-Elizabeth1

Video game critics have generally given high marks to Bioshock Infinite. IGN gave it a 9.4 out of 10. Game Spot gave it 90 out of 100. Adam Sessler of Revision3 gushed about its awesomeness. When looking at the competition, it’s not hard to see why critics would be so easily impressed. In comparison to low brow sci-fi like Halo, or militaristic propaganda like Call of Duty, Bioshock Infinite seems to be a thoughtful work of popular entertainment. And the game developers were genuinely interested in political theory, race relations, and the darker side of American history. In other words, the game has a shiny veneer of intelligence.

Bioshock_infinite_wallpapers_HD (1)

But a veneer is all there is. Bioshock Infinite is still a first person shooter, and like all FPS’s the whole point of the game is to run around and kill everything that moves. And gameplay can never be wholly separated from story or themes. The game developers are not kind in their depiction of Columbia, which embodies nearly every negative aspect of American culture: pervasive racism, jingoism, and a hostility toward anyone at the bottom of the economic heap. And the game developers have an unforgiving view of the Vox Populi as well, who are modeled after the Bolsheviks. The Vox may be slightly more sympathetic than Comstock, but their revolution has less to do with justice than with revenge and mass murder. In another context, this storyline might be taken as a general criticism of political violence, whether to oppress or to overthrow oppressors.

But Bioshock Infinite would never be mistaken for a pacifist manifesto. As Booker, the player spends nearly the entire game shooting, burning, electrocuting, and otherwise horribly mutilating anyone who gets in his way. Early in the story, Elizabeth objects to Booker’s casual approach to violence, but her objections are quickly swept aside and forgotten, all so the player can get back to the gory bits. Using violence to oppress your fellow man is bad, and using violence to overthrow the system is bad. But using violence to save the girl is just good clean fun.

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The game’s incoherent view of violence is just one example of its shallowness. Another example is the ridiculous finale. By the end of the game, Columbia is thoroughly wrecked by the war between Comstock and the Vox Populi. Rather than dealing with the consequences of the war, the game writers took the easy way out. They used an approach that’s been popular with hack sci-fi writers for decades. They created a multiverse, hence the name Bioshock Infinite, and thanks to Elizabeth’s powers the entire conflict was resolved as if it never happened. No doubt this ending was meant to be cerebral, but like too many other works of popular sci-fi it simply used technobabble and superpowers to avoid dealing with the complex issues raised in the story.

Strangely enough, a more low brow game would have been more enjoyable, as it would be lacking any pretensions besides offering a few cheap thrills. But Bioshock Infinite, in the less-than-sterling tradition of middle brow entertainment, aimed to be both entertaining and intellectual at the same time. It was only intermittently successful at being the former, and completely failed at being the latter.

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* And I’m not inclined to give the game that much credit for pointing out that Objectivism is terrible. If you’re looking for an ideology that deserves being eviscerated, Objectivism is the low hanging fruit.

 

One Piece: Rubber Man in a Rubber World

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When Noah suggested that I write something new for HU, I immediately thought of One Piece.(Official page from Viz here.) It is a monster of popular culture; the highest selling manga ever in Japan and one of the best selling worldwide. It competes handily for mainstream Japanese comics awards. Anything with this sort of momentum should be engaged seriously, if not taken seriously.  At twelve years of operation, it’s now an institution of modern day manga.

On top of its universal presence, I have real affection for One Piece. After watching the glorious auto-destruction of the Shonen genre in Gurren Lagann (an adoring commentary on shonen that I highly recommend), I thought that I was done with watching a team of young misfits gain exponential power. But Oda’s work has brought me back again and again.  Full disclosure: I’m not up to date on its decade-plus run so this will be written with only partial familiarity with the work.

The storyline of One Piece, while clever, is not exactly innovative. Monkey D. Luffy is a precocious young boy who lives in a planet that is covered in oceans and ruled by a corrupt world government who enforces its will through an omnipresent navy.  The navy is opposed by both good and bad pirates, the much revered heroes and villains of the world.  The greatest pirate of all time, Gol D. Roger, left his legendary treasure, the One Piece, at some mysterious location before he was executed by the world government. Now every pirate crew is looking to find it.  Luffy’s adventures start when he eats the mysterious Devil Fruit, which gives him the ability to manipulate his body as though he were rubber.  He sets off in search of the One Piece and acquires a crew along the way.

Much of the series does little to depart from Shonen tropes.  Luffy’s crew (the “Straw Hat Pirates”, named for Luffy’s treasured headgear) are a bunch of ambitious teenagers who all aim to be the very best in what they do.  Much of the series follows a predictable formula: the Straw Hats come into a situation en media res, the unjust bad guys seriously underestimate them, and they ultimately prevail through sheer strength of will.  He and his crew constantly amaze everyone that they come into contact with.  Although they encounter some setbacks at times, there’s never anything that feels like a truly insurmountable problem.  It even has a shapeshifting reindeer named Tony Tony Chopper who looks like he was created by a focus group who were asked to free associate on kawaii.
 

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Tony Tony Chopper in all his marketable glory.

 
Since this is Hooded Utilitarian, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Nami, the primary representative of womankind in a work that is avowedly written for young boys, is criminally underwritten. Oda handles gender issues with the familiar fumbling of a teenage boy. There are charming touches, like when Nami “outmans” the power fantasy character Zoro by drinking him under the table. But, tellingly, that moment is undermined when Zoro reveals that he was faking because a true swordsman would never get so drunk that they couldn’t be on guard. In my experience with the series, the most problematic narrative moment is during Nami’s origin arc, which starts with her attempting to assert her independence by stealing money from the rest of the crew and then returning to her home island to deal with her checkered past. Predictably, the rest of the (all male) Straw Hat pirates pursue her. Then we’re treated to a very interesting story about female independence with Belle-Mère, the adoptive mother of both Nami and her sister. Belle-Mère is a former marine who finds the girls on the battlefield and raises them alone with little to no mention of men.  Though her narrative is plagued with the same pre-teen ogling that is present on nearly every page of One Piece, it is an interesting departure from the norm.
 

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The story of Belle-Mère

 
This interesting attempt at a feminist backstory is undermined in the main narrative when Nami is entirely overwhelmed by her predicament with the fishman pirate lord Arlong. The key point in the story arc culminates with her collapsing like the little girl that Oda clearly thinks that she is. In that truly depressing scene, she is forced to ask the ever-capable Luffy for help. Predictably, Nami’s otherwise interminable problems with Arlong are quickly resolved when her male crewmates beat the living shit out of him and his crew. Where (relatively) deep female character fails, brute unthinking strength (and “friendship”) will always win.
 

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Nami gives up and lets the men do the work.

 

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I couldn’t resist including this page. It says so much.

 
This problematic view of female incompetence defines the dynamic of the Straw Hats throughout their adventures. When shit hits the fan, Nami is often consigned to a sideline role with the comically impotent (and troublingly Semitic?) Usopp.  This reaches its nadir during the climax of the Alabasta arc where the two characters have an uncomfortably frank “conversation” about their roles within the group.

 

While there might be some sort of feminist case here, I’m not about to make it.

 
By the time the super-powerful Nico Robin appears on the stage as a strong female character, the role of the women in the series is already tragically well established.

The work’s problems are only exaggerated by its adaptation for television. The anime version of many Shonen franchises are made worse for the transition, and One Piece is no exception.  While the bright colors bring Oda’s already eye-popping world to life in some interesting ways, the bulk of the series is glacially paced and full of unimaginative filler that dilutes the bouncy, free-roaming nature of the original work. As anyone familiar with the adaptations of Dragonball Z and Naruto knows,  watching a Shonen series is usually an excruciating experience.

Ethically and politically, One Piece is often an indulgently illiberal work.  The Straw Hat Pirates epitomize honor, loyalty, determination, strength, and self-sacrifice.  As mentioned above, the world government is something straight out of a libertarian nightmare. At one point, Luffy and his friends encounter a series of super-powerful pirates that have aligned themselves with the government. In exchange for being able to pillage with impunity, these “Seven Warlords of the Sea” agree to do the bidding of their naval establishment masters.  Again, problems are ultimately solved through brute force; though there are moments of emotional conflict, they often have to sit on the bench while the “real” battles are fought by Luffy and his bros.  The focus of the interminable Alabasta arc is on how idealists need the arms of strong and violent men in order to make their passion for peace into a reality.

There are exceptions.  The Arlong Park arc gingerly deals with issues of inequality.  Arlong himself is a fishman who thinks that his species is genetically superior to the human race.  He rationalizes his domination of the humans that live on the island alongside him with tones appropriated from both Thrasymachus and Darwin:
 

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Arlong doesn’t really understand Nietzsche

Though it’s clear what sort of world-view Arlong stands in for here, it’s not clear what his defeat at the hands of Luffy signifies.  Luffy beats Arlong at the end of a battle of attrition; he doesn’t find the key to his victory in Arlong’s arrogance or anything else other than his own infinite determination.  In this context, it seems like the point is a bizarrely Hobbesian one.  Be careful about asserting your superiority to the people you see as beneath you.  After all, there could always be someone that’s stronger.

For all of its obnoxious flaws and derivative character, I still love One Piece.  This is due in no small part to my affinity for Oda’s aesthetic sensibility.  Oda reportedly works every day of the week and sleeps an apocryphal four hours a night.  The work’s dialogue is utilitarian at best and inane at worst, but visually Oda and his team have refined a certain Shonen Jump style dating back to early Dragonball.  One Piece competes with Naruto for the attention of today’s manga-consuming youth, but a quick look at a page from both series will reveal why Oda’s book is the better one.  Naruto is a boring continuation of the most mundane visual elements of the genre as its been for the last 40 years.  One Piece has characters that look as though they stumbled in from wonderland. Oda’s characters bloat and burst at the seams.  They pose and explode with childlike joy.  In contrast to the null-environments of the Toriyama legacy, Oda lovingly constructs environments thick with unnecessary detail.   It only takes a look at one of the lush vignette cover pages to see how adroitly he and his reportedly small team of assistants overflow the page.  As a result, the travels of the Straw Hat Crew feel like real adventures.  It never seems like Luffy and his friends are going to the same place twice.
 

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The crew resting up.

 
I also find the emotional tone of the series nostalgically charming.  I am embarrassed to admit the number of times that I’ve bought into its sentimental juvenalia and found myself tearing up. I like to think that’s because for all of its over-the-top histrionics, One Piece still treats its protagonists like old friends.  The characters all manage a dimension of gripping personality (at times) and stick together through thick and thin.  In a pop comics environment where cynical egotism is often mistaken for realism, One Piece is often a breath of fresh air.

These are all surface expressions of the underlying problem of One Piece.  Like its protagonist, the world of One Piece is rubber.  It flexes to allow plots to develop, but quickly bounces back into shape.  There are very few deaths; even the worst villains are often simply removed from play for awhile.  The deaths that do happen are used to develop the emotional plot.  The characters of One Piece are sentimental and charming, but few things really touch them.  Almost every experience they have bounces off their well designed surfaces.  Their adventures, at best, are surreal daydreams on the beach.

I once told my friend (and fellow HU contributor) Jacob that you need to put some time into One Piece to see if you can love the characters.  If their playful and affectionate depiction charms you, you may really like the series. However, even if your sensibilities are a little too refined for One Piece‘s adolescent exuberance, I’d encourage you to page through the work online simply to see Oda’s indomitably energetic visual imagination in full bloom.
 

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Owen writes regularly at his blog The Inebriated Spook.