July 27, 2006
Henry Jenkins -
The online edition of The American Prospect published an article comparing the Bush administration's current policy in the Middle East to comic books -- specifically, to the Green Lantern Corps. Here's what they had to say:
The trouble is that a broad swathe of hawkish opinion, taking in most conservatives and a tragically large number of liberals, have bought into a comic book view of how international relations works.
I refer, of course, to the Green Lantern Corps, DC Comics' interstellar police force assembled by the Guardians of Oa. Here's how the Corps works: Each member is equipped with a power ring, the ultimate weapon in the universe. The ring makes green stuff -- energy blasts, force fields, protective bubbles, giant hammers, elephants, chairs, cute rabbits, whatever -- under the control of the bearer. When it's fully charged, the only limits to the ring's power (besides the proviso that the stuff must be green) are the user's will and imagination. Historically, the rings couldn't affect yellow objects, but in recent years it's been revealed that this was the "parallax fear anomaly" (don't ask) and that the problem could be overcome by overcoming fear -- which is to say, with more willpower.
This is an OK premise for a comic book. Sadly, it's a piss-poor premise for a foreign policy.
Without getting into the specifics of Bush's current foreign policy (or for that matter, the current run of Green Lantern), this statement seems grossly unfair -- to comic books. I understand why Bush's world view full of its talk about capturing "evil-Doers" who are hell-bent on destroying the "American way of life" reminds some people of comic book superheroes -- it is colorful, broadly drawn, larger than life, and sometimes a little punch-drunk. But the reality is that contemporary comic books have offered a much more nuanced depiction of our current political realities and have adopted a pretty consistently progressive framing of these events than The American Prospect and its readers might imagine.