Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Life, Politics, and Secret Avengers
by Travis Hedge Coke
In 1913, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Mucker began serialization. The Return of the Mucker serialized from January to July of 1916. A spinoff of a secondary character followed, collected initially with an unrelated Ruritanian romance. Ever since, there has been criticism that the Mucker series, featuring pugilistic hero, Billy Byrne, is without narrative conclusion, an anxiety comics fans have become accustomed to, as more and more comics stories are considered “pointless,” unless they tie directly and narratively into one to seventeen other products. An anxiety which film fans are beginning to feel increasingly with the recurrent current rise of cinematic shared universes and serials.
Some serialization is not for the end of the serial but the parts.
The initial run of Secret Avengers, by originators, Mike Deodato and Ed Brubaker, is that kind of serial. A deliberate repurposing of men’s sweat aesthetics and the methods of pulp fiction from roughly one hundred years prior.
In June, 2020, I compiled notes for a column exploring the first three writers’ runs on Secret Avengers, after which the tone and conceit of the series changed radically. The last words I wrote, stopping with news about that third writer, Warren Ellis’ widespread manipulation and abuse, regarded his time travel story with Alex Maleev and Nick Filardi, were these: Does Warren Ellis understand consent?
What Ellis did in his personal life does not make those comics now bad, even if it does render some flaws more comprehendible, and scarier. What ER Burroughs believed or did in his personal life can equally be abstracted from his fiction work, to a similar, imperfect degree. And, as individuals, we can choose to highlight when one crosses into the other, particularly in terms of philosophy, moral causality, and the inherent manipulatory art of writing. As individuals, we can choose, too, to not read them, or to not read them again
How do we reconcile an artist’s bigotry with their oppositions to bigotry, especially if those overlap on the same subject?
Under Deodato and Brubaker, Secret Avengers explores proxies for elder gods, Martian tripods, John Carter, Doc Savage, for secret agent traditions, mysterious cult tropes, dime novel cowboys, pulp scientifiction, war stories, ExxonMobil and Fu Manchu. Writer, Nick Spencer, with penciler Scott Eaton, has his single issue stories bundled with a Cullen Bunn/Peter Vuong Nguyen oneshot, and those comics deliberately address the politics of heroic loss, heroic sacrifice, paring down early 20th Century American ficto-politics with 21st Century analysis. Warren Ellis and a select group of artists perform admirable done-in-one comics pairing older styles with modern efficacy, often indulging in ethics and practices no longer deemed acceptable by general audiences.
Any backwards-looking, future-looking, this-is-now art will highlight the regressive tendencies of all three eras. But, emphasizing past efficacies as modern fetish makes those past transgressions narratively real and in the narrative real.
Ed Brubaker is one of the most committed metatext writers in comics, and Mike Deodato an exemplar of Romantic Naturalism. Both are consistently political artists.
We forget, easily, that when cowboy stories were biggest, is when were were a lot of cowboys, punchers, ranch hands, who were reading them.
We always live in funny times.
Brubaker opens his run with commentary on how complex the world has become, how much of contemporary politics and war is secret and obscured, as if this has not persistently been the way, both of politics and warfare. The sense, for Americans, that there is a candid view of current war shown to all the public may come out of television broadcasts of Vietnam War footage, of Pulitzer-worthy war photography published in graphic detail by major magazines in the middle of the 20th Century. A flaw, here, is that this is American belief, American expectation, based on American presentation and presentiment.
Of course, these are American comics. Even if an artist or writer or letterer is not an American citizen or working, physically, within the United States, the comics are created, paid for, and distributed for an American audience before any.
In the first issues of Secret Avengers, Dubai is Dubai, but when we are in the United States, they never say, “United States” or “America.” It is, “Wilmington, Delaware.”
Brubaker is consciously not confronting American myths, American social politics, as much as affirming early 20th Century politic as if it was fresh in 2010. Maybe, it was.
After 9/11, American comics had a genuine conflict as to whether war comics were workable, in terms of audiences they appealed to and audiences which were not impressed by the kind of social shorthand and ugly exemptions that war comics usually need to appeal to that first group. A common joke was that war comics were dead, “except for Garth Ennis.” Some really painful Captain America runs and the comic, The Ultimates, embraced the ugly with fervor, because putting soldiers in costume seemed to deflect some umbrage. “It’s ironic,” became a cry of folks who were never sure what parts were or were not. What about terrorist comics like The Dark Knight Strikes Again, The Authority, The Brotherhood, or 1990s militance-superheroes books like Stormwatch (which Ellis transmuted into The Authority), or Peter David’s X-Factor?
Almost every time Chris Claremont has returned to writing X-Men, in the 21st Century, he has written them as fully-deputized and licensed law enforcement. In Earth X, Luke Cage and Spider-Man become New York City police.
It is not even true that 9/11 created this drive, this urge or wave. It did not reinstate it from the 1950s and Batman being licensed by the Gotham Police. If anything, many Americans and American markets wanted it and 9/11 became an excuse to open the floodgates from a flow to a torrent.
Secret Avengers may not have been created to be the simplification of that wave, but in practicality, this was its application. Secret Avengers re-stabilized America’s belief in America as a world police that was not as drab as police. It presaged the Marvel movie, as a type of entertainment, and how suddenly, now, Spider-Man just has drones and jokes about drone strikes, that everything is military-codified, yet Nazi Germany and the vestiges of Naziism have become primarily faux-n0stalgic jabs at extending a Soviet threat. In the Marvel-movie mode, when visiting a computerized Nazi surviving in clicks, whirrs, and bad graphics since the 1940s, the touchstone for audience has to be WarGames. When Russia is discussed in any context, it is the USSR which is discussed.
In order to deal with an ever-complexifying world, Secret Avengers simplifies and de-complicates. The nefarious secret enemy of the first three runs is not German Nazis or Soviet Russians, inexplicable Asians or multinational corporations, but them. No chance of our antagonism with them going away. No peace brokering and suddenly you should portray those people in a better light. The Shadow Council is that kind of them.
When Fu Manchu joins them, ol’ Fu is both not Fu Manchu anymore, but an out of touch zombie with a name Marvel can own outright, and being tied to them, allows the comics to both keep a sense of the group as permitting or arming dangerous foreigners and to critique the social and psychical damages of the Fu Manchu character and the orientalist attitudes which present in yellow terror form.
American men allied with the them of this series, like Max Fury and John Steele, can be unfortunate misunderstandings, men who are allied to evil out of necessity, a sense of duty, because some abstracted flaw in American politics has disenfranchised them just enough that we cannot compare it cleanly to any real life disenfranchisement.
The maguffins are brilliant updates of old motifs. An ancient crown which can possess its wearer now moves “between moments,” always appearing to have moved but in a way impossible to trace by naked eye or video recording. The soul-infused Eyes of the Dragon, magic stones that might as well be Akira Toriyama’s dragon balls. What to do, as militarized superheroes, with a city beneath an American city? How to return to the present by living a life defined in the qualifiers of Modesty Blaise comic strips. Liberating Washington, DC, from Nazi war automata using the contents of the Smithsonian Institution.
One of the great upgrades to cowboy stories, to mining town stories, to the private investigator tale, was sticking “on Mars” in. Cowboy story on Mars is how you get A Princess of Mars and, nearly a century later, Ghosts of Mars. Mining on the Moon, on Mars, and beyond fills hundreds of stories, many recouped from earlier eras, retelling the bare bone basics, only now with the shining veneer of space places.
J’onn J’onnz, the Manhunter from Mars, Green Lanterns, Shade the Changing Man, and the man called, Nova, who belongs to a Nova Corps, are all variations of space police. They owe something to the Lensman novels, but they also owe to Crusades and Foreign Legion.
Using the superhero tendency to resurrection to address the difference between death and the pain of death allows a unique opportunity to address how much the Comics Code of America had encouraged a downplaying of pain in combat, of lasting injury or the intensity, simply, of being struck by gunfire or an explosion.
Primarily white anglophone heroes and their good Asians no longer need to confront Fu Manchu. Now, they are united in confrontation with an Asian-faced terrorism, Terror itself, and Terror can be grandiosely pathetic, as he was a a caricature in The Authority and as he is, again, in Secret Avengers ten years later. A key difference, though, is that in Secret Avengers, the son of he-who-is-no-longer-Fu-Manchu can tell that this terrorism, this grand Terror, is not actually his father, just a couple white Americans using his father’s iconography and name.
For two years, Secret Avengers is more complex than it lets itself be seen as. Someone may be dismissed as, “the girlfriend,” or racist connections may seem to be made, but the stories, themselves, the consequences within the stories, defy these connections, belie these dismissive utterances. If nothing else, the creators of these comics recognize that our real life world is more complicated and serious than the fictions they make, but they do add to that, too, a consistent invitation to us, as distanced readers, to be critical of the simplicity of what is portrayed, to be critical of decisions made, of actions undertaken by anyone.
What Brubaker referred to as the comic wherein superheroes could say, “We think the Chinese have a fallen spaceship,” the comic apparently could not be that. It can be “high-octane espionage,” but it has to do so like a trailer for a Mission Impossible movie and still be not even only good; really good.
John Aman, the Amazing Man, the Green Mist, is not a classic and highly influential character in genre fiction. He is not a famous comic book superhero. John Aman only had a few short comics under his initial incarnation. He cannot be proxy, here, or proxy anywhere, for a strongly-recognizable genre type. He is a bit of the “trained by foreign monks,” and a bit superhero in a cape, a little jungle lordy, kind of the sidekick to an intrepid reporter, but what makes John Aman a fit, here, is that John Aman is probably the character created for comics, first introduced in comics, who exists in the most different comics universes, from the most different comics publishers. There is a Marvel version (also called, Prince of Orphans), there is a version from Centaur Publications, Dynamite Entertainment, Gallant Comics, Malibu Comics, and several published by DC Comics.
Revisiting Amazing Man and John Steele as predecessors to Luke Cage and to modern Captain America makes the eugenics ideology and the racist ideation of stories and characters we love explicit. Maybe not Amazing Man and John Steele, who many of us do not know enough to love, but there is a kind of pan-nationalist romance with Captain America, these days – periodically – which hits different the more you sit with context. A brutal Rubik’s Cube we fidget with like a Cotton in a Hellraiser movie. Context. Context.
John Aman, like John Steele, show a complexity and difficulty within the machine of fine-working action comics. The gears have to clack to work. The machine has to have lag built in. The ugliness is part of the energy.
Mike Deodato, Michael Lark, Jamie McKelvie draw their issues in open, comfortable, deliberately nostalgic styles. They evoke eras. Kev Walker and David Aja may draw some trippy scenes, but they make sure every one of them is easy-to-read. The colors by Jose Villarrubia and others always look classic and crisp. Even the murk is the crisp, apprehensible murk of the cynic.
Secret Avengers should not change your life or your politics. You go in, you let the comic do its job, you get out. Hopefully unnoticed. They run missions on you, but the mission is only to entertain.