Playboy billionaire undergoes near-death experience and is reborn by grafting his war machine to his skin. Then fights creepy Asians who, because they are so primitive themselves, can only steal the Yankee’s technology.

Look, to get personal here for a minute, I would practically come to blows with folks who opposed the Afghanistan war after 9/11. However, the past four years in Iraq to say nothing of the flat out abandonment of the failed state that started it all has turned me 9o degrees. All I see here is the justification of hegemony over others by superior technology.

Is it imperialistic in here of is it just me?

With the second installment in the Spiderman movie franchise to be released this Wednesday, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my father when the first film was released. “So what’s the deal with this Spider-Man thing?” he asked, an odd question coming from my father. Odd in that this man who arrived in the States from Ireland in his twenties, making him constitutionally oblivious to American youth culture, was furrowing his brow at a Time magazine article featuring Stan Lee’s creation. Another oddity was how his accent picked up momentum; dusty pronunciations are unearthed when my father says words like Spider-Man.

But it was odder to see my father, a man of no small native wit, bewildered, simply unable to bend his mind around the idea of individuals handing over millions of dollars to see a guy in a red and blue suit climb walls. And seeing it broken down to its barest essentials I was hard pressed to answer myself, but even more interesting was that this literal urban legend had pulled even my pop-clueless father into its orbit.

Granted, he was overawed by the box office receipts, not the character’s cultural penetration. Still, one has to wonder how such an especially bizarre character, even by the genre’s standards, has such appeal. This wasn’t like other characters at all; Peter Parker wasn’t the last son of a distant, dying world like Superman, a mythological god such as Thor, or even Batman, a rich yet super-powerless, neurotic weirdo in a cape with a poorly concealed penchant for S&M. He wasn’t even to be found in a fictional setting like Gotham City or Metropolis, for chrissake. He was from Forest Hills. But that very ordinary Queens origin anchored him in our world and highlighted how small and powerless he often was, despite and at times because of his uncanny abilities.

I haven’t been an avid comics reader since adolescence. My warm and fuzzy memories of greedily pouring over a cache of comic titles like pirate booty had been shelved long ago. That was until I caught wind of Spiderman # 36, where he witnesses the attack on the World Trade Center. Featuring a black cover the issue deals with the tragedy, but as it occurred in real life, without warning or any larger than life individuals stepping in. The story is punctuated by helplessness, a child waiting in the rubble for a parent that will never return and exhausted firefighters filthy with soot huddled in corners to sleep. He is dwarfed by events and his superhuman powers and abilities serve only to make him appear smaller, more useless. A theme that the Spiderman myth retells perennially, a myth that underscores the passage to adulthood: dealing with events beyond your control like a man.

This story, this myth tethered to the here and now, is really very simple and anyone born in the Western hemisphere knows it. A young man orphaned as an infant and raised by his elderly aunt and uncle, grows to be a bookish young man in love with the girl next door but is mercilessly taunted by neighborhood bullies. But here it takes a less familiar turn in that he finds himself bitten by a radioactive spider and obtains its strength, speed and agility. Like any 15 year old would, he immediately decides to use his powers for personal gain, and filled with his own sense of entitlement lets a robber escape who later guns down his Uncle Ben. Filled with shame he remembers the last words his uncle said to him “With great power comes great responsibility.”

I’ve never heard a better or more concise expression of a credo for men and nations to live by, but in a way it’s a bit wasted here, because Peter Parker for all his amazing abilities is never truly in control of the events around him. With all the ink spilt in the psychiatric community over how comic books merely cater to adolescent power fantasies, Spider-Man is tortured by his inability to protect those he loves and falling just short of what the world expects of him. Powerful he isn’t.

Disappointing a parent as a young man is a slightly killing experience each time it happens. I’ve seen the presence of it in my own father’s eye more often than I’m comfortable admitting, but what separates men from the children they were is the ability and willingness to get up and try even if — especially if — you know you’ll likely fail. Risking sorrowful glances from those you love again and again, killing them just a little bit more with your frailties and sins. All you can do is put on your suit and do it again.

Speaking of economic disparities the Economist has something to add on how it shapes the immigration debate:

“How much of a jerk do you have to be to oppose immigration? That question is mischievously posed, and ingeniously answered, in a recent post on “YouNotSneaky”, an economics blog.

The blog’s author points out that a low-skilled worker can make $9.34 an hour in America, compared with just $2.56 in Mexico. He also assumes that migrants depress the wages of low-skilled Americans by 5%—a widely cited estimate. Thus Mexican workers gain dramatically by moving north, whereas low-skilled Americans lose out slightly at worst. To justify opposing immigration, the blog concludes, you must attach at least 20 times more weight to the well being of a native-born American than to a Mexican.”

Its something to consider.

No, that is not my wife and I but it is how we feel every time we tell anyone we’re having a home-birth and get a look that says “Hi we’re Martians come to eat your Mom’s Yummy brain!”

Which given this particular set of bad guys is certainly forgivable.

The USSR though was a less obvious evil and was also an ally in the conflict with Hitler. That the US would come into conflict the Soviet Union was likely an inevitability. Any state would that posed the only conceivable threat to US military superiority and defined itself as the antithesis and ultimate cure to bourgeoisie democracy. Also it posed as a rival to the America’s understanding of itself as the paladin of genuine modernism, a belief that dating as far back, at least, as the Lincoln presidency and was global in scope. It is in the last of these that we can find the source of comic anti-Communism.

In his seminal work of religious sociology, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Will Herberg uses the theories of Marcus Hansen to explain the multi-generational processes of assimilation and rediscovery of ethnic identities. Hansen’s Law of third generational return hold that the cultural attributes of first generation immigrants-meaning the first to arrive in America-are almost always discarded by their children’s generation. Their children’s children on the other hand will seek to return to those same discarded identities, but the demands of the melting pot are such that ethnicticy is abdicated in the quest for assimilation. However, an immigrant’s religion was never on the chopping block in such a way, so religion then acted as a vehicle for the third generation’s return.

There are some flaws in Herberg’s thesis, I think, although I really recommend Protestant, Catholic, Jew. One of the biggest reasons I do so is his use of Hansen’s work, to even greater effect than Hansen himself and compiling an excellent theory of immigration that also goes a long way toward providing a framework for comic book history.

While not using either Herberg or Hansen in his book Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, Gerard Jones comes across similar evidence and stumbles across Herberg’s findings without, however, drawing those lines directly himself.

Less animation and more electric comic book, this 1966 cartoon hits all the major notes of post-war, post-Hiroshima junk culture: nuclear fear, the Strangelovian-Curtis LeMay-like warmonger General Thunderbolt Ross and most inexplicably the presence of an evil and clearly Russian scientist. God, YouTube is making armchair cultural archaeologists of us all.

But back to Iron Man and comics proper.

Possibly, the most Cold War specific of the Marvel stable, he not only cut his teeth fighting bad guys like Titanium Man

but his origin itself was directly tied to real life super-power conflict. Before becoming Iron Man, Tony Stark was a playboy industrialist whose talents were in the employ of the US army.

Then of course he’s made to work for the North Vietnamese.

The “yellow menace” doesn’t end here of course.

I love the Fantastic Four’s high-tech, cosmic bickering, Spiderman’s tortured Everyman and have lit candles for the repose of Jack Kirby’s soul. I take the accoutrement’s of my dweebhood quite seriously.

At the risk of overthinking it though I have to ask some questions about the nature of some of the staples of the Marvel Universe. Namely, how ernestly so many characters and plots fit themselves within the Cold War discourse which positioned Good and Bad guys along Capitalist/Communist lines. Also this strongly ideolgical storytelling was deeply informed by race, but I’ll get to that in a later post.

I’m can hear what you’re thinking: More self-indulgent nonsense from so-called “students” in an oh-so-serious field. Let’s see some empirical research. What are those Kremlin archives too crowded? Calm yourselves my little straw-men and let me bowl you over with this:

Cold War history was considered something of a backwater. All too often it’s spent its time haggling over what sorts of documents were knocking around like billard balls in Washington, Moscow or Beijing. Historians in the field were just, as Charles Maier put it “marking time,” just paddling around and around in the same academic shallows. All the while gleefully ignoring the role of factors like culture. Now cultural critisism is notoriously mushy and too often dependent on what is of interest to whoever is doing the looking. However, when you narrow your focus to one element of culture, or subculture in this case, you can examine how it changed over time without muddying the waters too badly.

My question is this: What exactly drove the folks over at Marvel to fight the Cold War in their pulpy pages? Many just dismiss it as propaganda, but this isn’t Pravda; there’s no government agency demanding or directing the contents. Also, patterns can be seen. The more technologically oriented the title was, the more competition with World Communism provided the basis of stories.

Iron Man here is a great example.

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But then we’ve got this little SNL ditty here .

I came across this sentence in Joan Didion’s “The White Album” while I should have been working on my paper for my grad. class on the Cold War. Now, I’m not writing in order to pillory myself about how my time could be better spent. Actually doing that while blogging I’d risk creating a vortex of irony from which neither heat nor light could escape.

This time I got lucky though. This turned out to be one of the few times that my puttering came in handy. Ms. Didion’s comment on the need for narrative in order to function is no less true for history. Or to be more precise, historiography: The history of the writing of history. Historians attempt with varying amounts of success to arrive at capital T “Truth” all the while knowing–at least the more self-aware amongst them–the task is more or less Sisyphean. Which isn’t to say that they have succumbed to the smug nihilism that says all answers are equally valid. Usually this argument will orbit around some dimly understood idea of “subject positions.” On the other hand, acknowledging that some eureka moment isn’t in the cards for you can be oddly liberating.

Which brings us back to the need for stories.

Imposing narrative is what we do on the chaotic detritus of information that comes our way in any academic discipline, or even buying a used car for that matter. Not only accepting, but embracing a need for a multitude of stories or models, which corral and regiment data into tightly organized arguments is necessary in order to develop a broad set of analytical tools. Seeing as no single model is broad enough to coherently contain all the data available more have to be available to account for neglected connections or comparisons.

Hmmm, am I being clear?

This is what I’m wrestling with in my course work. Well at least when I’m not puttering around with quirky little essayists that make you feel smarter and cooler that you in fact are. To be more specific the U.S. orchestrated overthrow in 1953 of Mohammed Mossedeq, the democratically elected leader of Iran.

Well why did that happen? Was it because of policy makers engrossed in what one author describes as the “Cold War discourse” that overplayed Soviet influence there; thus creating a convenient excuse? Another is “dependence economics” which holds that the states of the capitalist “core” will seek to guarantee its access to vital resources–in this case petroleum–which allow both necessitates and insures its hegemony.

Needless to say this barely scratches the surface of possible reasons for the behavior of state actors and each is as deeply flawed, as it is useful. But even the ones that do get it wrong do so in some very interesting ways.