Matthew
Hello and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. I’m joined by one of my favorite regular guests, Jessica Plummer. We’re talking about comic books, we’re talking about heroes, and the topic of today is one that — a lot of times happens — we’ve gone on a little bit of a journey with. About a month ago, one of my favorite creators put out a TikTok where he basically said, look, I know that everyone thinks that Cyclops from X-Men is a cop, but here’s all the reasons why he’s not a cop. And I thought that was interesting because I’ve heard many people say, oh yeah, of course, people think Cyclops from X-Men is a cop. So I mentioned this to Jessica and said, hey, should we talk about this?
And Jessica went, what do you mean Cyclops is a cop? Why would anyone ever say that? And I said, I hear people say that all the time. I did some Google searching and found article after article of “here’s why all the people saying that Cyclops is a cop are wrong.” What I couldn’t find is a single person actually saying Cyclops is a cop. I found a couple of pieces that were like, well, here are the good reasons for that argument — but also I think it’s wrong. Google told me there is some stuff out there, but I could not find any of it. It did stumble me into: well, are Green Lanterns cops? Is Green Lantern literally space cops?
And what does that mean? Jessica again had an eyebrow that went pretty far up. I only got an email, but I could sense how high that eyebrow went. It kind of led to this larger discussion about why do people label folks like Cyclops and Green Lantern cops, and what does it mean? Is there some level at which you could say most superheroes are cops? I think making a fairly safe assumption about a large part of my audience — that they are somewhere on the ACAB spectrum and not a huge fan of cops, but also pretty big fans of people who use violence to stop people from doing bad things — how do we reconcile all this? So Jessica, I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s start with the easy part: is Cyclops a cop?
Jessica
No. All right, episode over.
Matthew
We’re done. I did do some digging, and I think it’s part of the reason. I’ll admit — I’ve heard people mention it, but I haven’t seen it written down and I can’t find articles about it. I do think the reason is that at least in the Brian Michael Bendis run, and especially in the X-Men ’97 show, Cyclops is presented often as the cop in opposition — he’s the good guy in opposition to Wolverine as the rebel. He’s the rule follower. He’s the square. He’s the Boy Scout. He’s the one who wants to make sure you’re in bed by curfew while Wolverine wants to help you sneak out and go smoke cigarettes behind the garage.
Jessica
Yeah, I think there are two separate questions at play here. One is, is Cyclops a cop? And the other is, is Cyclops boring? And they’re not related. Just to establish where I’m coming from — I am still learning X-Men. I embarked on a project a couple of years ago to read every X-Men comic from the beginning, because I am incapable of moderation, and I’m only up to 1994. That’s 30 years under my belt. I’ve also read some more recent stuff — the Krakoa era, for listeners familiar with that — but I have a big gap of about 30 years in there.
So there are gaps in my knowledge. I will also admit to being a Cyclops apologist. I really like him. I think he’s a great character who is not served well by any adaptation I’ve seen. Adaptations really love to do that thing where they put him in opposition to Wolverine, where Wolverine’s really cool and Cyclops is like a boring square loser. And why doesn’t Jean Grey just dump him? It’s like, well, because she’s been in love with him since she was 16, and this extremely old man who smells like wet dog doesn’t know how to take no for an answer.
Matthew
It does seem that a lot of the anti-Scott stuff comes from the way that love triangle is often framed — and especially when Wolverine is your point-of-view character and Cyclops is the guy getting in the way.
Jessica
But when we look at which of those characters has actually worked as a fed, it’s not Scott Summers. And when you raised the question with me, I was bewildered, because Cyclops is the leader of a paramilitary organization of marginalized activists who are most of the time just trying to defend themselves, their community, and people — the most marginalized — from often the state. So it was bewildering for me. And then you were like, oh, because he’s boring. And I was like, oh, I get it. But still no. Which, also to be clear — he is boring. This is a man who thinks putting mayonnaise on a sandwich is getting a little too crazy. All true.
Matthew
Basically, two Jews from New York City wrote a Midwesterner, in terms of the creation. And I say that as a Jew from New York City who moved to the Midwest — where I meet people and they think mayo is a spice.
Jessica
He did grow up in Kansas. And in a torture orphanage. It was a really bad childhood.
Matthew
That’s fair. I think this is a good way to start discussing the larger question: what do we mean when we say someone’s a cop? And how does that play into feelings of ACAB? There are two different things we can mean. One is that they are actually part of the government-run carceral system — a state legal monopoly on violence that uses that violence to enforce state aims that are in theory law, justice, and goodness for all, but often tends toward the defense of property, of capital, and of white people. Secondly, within subcultures and communities that are fighting against the dominant culture, you do sometimes have struggles over: should we have rules or not, should we be anarchists or organized, what does that mean? That’s certainly been part of the X-Men. A lot of times in the X-Men, you have a sense of: we’re fighting against the law, we’re fighting the establishment, but we still have a leader named Professor X, we still have a Princess Leia, we still have a Superman running the Justice League. And someone is going to be the rebel even within that. Someone else is going to be like, Professor X made this rule, Logan — you’ve got to follow it. And that’s a role Cyclops often plays.
Jessica
It can be, absolutely. And the thing is, respectability politics is a big conversation in X-Men narratives. And it intersects a lot —
Matthew
Can you say more about what you mean by respectability politics?
Jessica
I’ll unpack it all together, but it intersects a lot with passing privilege and with various characters’ experiences of their own mutation. What I mean is: not all mutants are created equally. You have some who look totally normal and can turn off their powers — like Jean Grey. You’d never know she’s a mutant if she didn’t tell you. If you found out, she could erase that memory from your brain. She passes completely, and it’s her choice to be public about her mutation. Somebody like Cyclops passes pretty well as long as he has his special sunglasses on — and a big part of why he’s so repressed and tight-laced is because if his sunglasses fall off, he kills people. That’s a reasonable concern. And then you have characters who can turn their powers on and off, like Iceman — you can look totally normal or you can turn them on. But then you have people who are blue and furry, or who can’t ever touch anybody, because in the comics Rogue doesn’t kill people —
If she touches them, she just absorbs their powers and memories. And those are the photogenic ones — characters like Nightcrawler and Beast, who are blue and furry. Then there is a whole community of mutants called the Morlocks who live in the sewers who are like, yeah, I look like a giant slug and my power is that I kill people with my breath. So when a character who has an invisible or easily hidden mutation — and who is in most cases canonically straight, white, able-bodied, and conventionally attractive — says to the kid who’s green with bones growing out of his face, “no, that’s not the way you should behave as a mutant,” it doesn’t always land well.
It’s somewhat relevant with Wolverine because he’s like 200 years old and he’s been through it. Scott Summers has tried really hard to have as much trauma in 30 years as Wolverine has had in 200. He’s speedrunning it. He’s trying so hard. But being a mutant is very, very different for all of these characters. Professor X and Magneto are a great example — Charles Xavier grew up wealthy and privileged with a hidden mutation, and obviously Magneto’s is not hidden, but he did not have a privileged childhood, as we know.
Matthew
He grows up in the Holocaust, and when he uses his power it’s very apparent. Whereas when Professor X uses his, generally you can’t tell. And that’s where the respectability politics comes in. For anyone who doesn’t know that term — it comes up a lot within minority groups. I think it was originally coined within Black communities, but it’s also been used in queer communities: one group says, we need to clean up our language, we need to look respectable so that white society will take us seriously. Or in the queer community: we need to be 2.3 kids and a white picket fence and stop with all the crazy leather stuff and just look like straight America. That’s often respectability politics. And you can see a lot of that between Professor X and Magneto, especially in more recent years as Magneto is being seen as having a more sympathetic argument — even if his methods aren’t ones we agree with — and Professor X is kind of like, let’s just not scare people. Which can be a way of saying, people who look like slugs and kill with their breath — it’s not their fault, but that would scare people. So maybe it’s more appropriate to say that Scott isn’t a cop. He’s a narc. Because if he sees someone break the rules, he’s more likely to tell Professor X than Wolverine might be.
Jessica
I don’t think he needs to tell Professor X — he’s not running to daddy. He’s in charge. There’s no one to narc to. Also, this character has grown and changed a lot over 60 years, so how he started out is not necessarily how he is now. He’s become much more radical. I would say he is more radical than Professor X these days. In my understanding — and I have gaps in my reading — he’s certainly more ethical, but also he will do extreme things if he believes they’re necessary. Being that buttoned-up good boy is not so much part of his landscape anymore. Although it has been. I’m reading comics from the early 90s now, which are very much in keeping with the animated X-Men show that was on at the time. They’re so funny — he’s constantly being like, Jubilee, turn that racket down. He’s so square, and it’s hilarious. But at the same time, I think it’s perfectly legitimate to be like, that guy’s annoying and I don’t enjoy him. I want to protect him — this terribly abused man — but it’s totally valid to be like, this guy’s a pain in the ass and he’s always telling Jubilee to turn down her MTV. Or not to rollerblade inside the house, which he’s probably right about. I don’t think there’s a difference between finding a character personally annoying and thinking they’re doing something morally wrong.
Matthew
Yeah. The boring, square, awesome-sucks-dad part — that’s definitely part of it. And also the idea that the X-Men have rules, which in general I’m not the biggest fan of, but maybe when you adopt a bunch of troubled teenagers — I’m a father now and the idea of maybe not having completely rule-less things for kids is a little stronger in my head.
Jessica
Has the rollerblading inside the house already started?
Matthew
He’s 10 months old, but he has started doing an interim thing where I can’t just set him down two feet away from something very dangerous and know he won’t go near it, because he can — yeah, exactly. And Jessica is not allowed to get him rollerblades. But I think this gets at a larger issue: I think we need better language to describe this. I’m not going to defend cops by any means — I want to be very clear about that. But sometimes we have language that says oh, this person is the cop of the X-Men, the cop of the Justice League. Maybe that’s a bad thing or a good thing. But the whole point of ACAB, at least as I understand it, is that you’re connected to this larger government carceral system that Scott clearly is not connected to. And that using force to enforce rules on someone else is inherently problematic — but even if you want to say Scott is the rules enforcer of the X-Men, to me that is still very different from saying he is a cop with all the ACAB associations that has.
Jessica
Absolutely. And the problem with cops is not that they follow the rules — if cops rigidly followed the rules, we’d have fewer Black men being killed in the streets with unnecessary use of deadly force. The problem, I would add to your ACAB definition, is the blue wall of silence. It’s protecting cops who have broken the rules, whether through unnecessary use of force or corruption. I mean, there’s the thing where cops can just seize property if there’s any suspicion of drug connection —
Matthew
Yeah. And Aaron Pierre, the guy who is going to be playing John Stewart in the upcoming Green Lantern show, starred in this fantastic movie called Rebel Ridge that’s all about the ability of cops to seize property. And I think we can talk about how there are some superheroes who are basically not cops in principle, but are not cops because the cops aren’t being good at being cops — and so they’re trying to be better at being cops. And it’s because of corruption. I still don’t think Batman is ACAB, but he’s probably a lot closer than Scott Summers. And someone like the Punisher — the Punisher is not a cop by any means, but he’s also like, yeah, I don’t want to be a cop. The cops have to let the criminals live. Forget that.
Jessica
And part of that too is looking at how a particular character or franchise is designed — what’s their day-to-day. With Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and a ton of superheroes, the expected mode of operation is: they patrol, they see people doing crimes, they stop them, and they don’t typically have a means of incarcerating them. So they leave them for the cops to deal with. They are doing the job of the cops, whether it’s because the cops are corrupt or — often — they’re not. Commissioner Gordon is not supposed to be corrupt, and the Spider-Man comics typically don’t portray the NYPD as rampantly corrupt, whether or not they should. Spider-Man is still basically doing a police patrol. Whereas the X-Men — that’s just not what they do. If they see a bank being robbed, they’ll stop it because they can teleport and turn to metal and whatever. But that’s not their goal. Their goal is: uh oh, someone’s trying to genocide us again. They’re not generally tying people up and leaving them for the cops. That’s not really the structure of their stories.
Matthew
With Aaron Pierre in mind, let’s now shift to Green Lantern, because I’ll admit I don’t know much about Green Lantern. I know John Stewart primarily from the Justice League cartoon, which I thought was fantastic. I know the really bad movie with Ryan Reynolds — his Deadpool went back in time and stopped him from doing it. From the little I know — also some Wikipedia searches and conversations you and I had before — they feel like intergalactic Interpol. Am I close?
Jessica
Yes and no. It’s complicated and it depends on the era. I’m a big Green Lantern fan and I’m very well versed in those characters. I’ll say upfront: the first Green Lantern, Alan Scott from the World War II era, doesn’t have anything to do with the outer-space ones. We’re not talking about him. For the ones who are part of the Green Lantern Corps — from 1959 on — it is sort of inherent in the idea of the Corps, like the Marine Corps or the Peace Corps, that they represent authority. The Guardians — the aliens who give them their rings — literally created the Green Lantern Corps to spread order throughout the universe. So that element is absolutely there. And especially given that this concept really germinated in the early 1960s, which was a very Comics Code-heavy, pretty conservative time — Hal Jordan was stopping bank robbers and handing them over to the cops, working with the cops, with that sort of unthinking assumption that the police are always good and always right.
That said, he was more like a standard superhero, not doing a ton of stuff with the Green Lantern Corps specifically. He was on Earth doing Earth superhero stuff. And then he’d go to another planet and meet Tomar-Re — I was completely blanking, but yes, Tomar-Re, the Green Lantern of Krypton, who let Krypton be destroyed. But those guys are just the superhero of wherever they are. It’s a very standard superhero expression.
Matthew
My impression had been — from the little I remember from the comics and the cartoon and how it’s been passed along — that he was like a sheriff. The Green Lantern Corps gives each territory a sheriff, and they all have rules they follow. Sometimes someone tries to do basically intergalactic crime — rob Earth of its resources, kill a bunch of people, steal a princess — and he stops them. And there’s some sort of Green Lantern court system they bring criminals to. Is there some accuracy to that idea of space cop?
Jessica
Yeah, Green Lanterns as sheriffs is a really good way to put it. That’s the earlier feel — they’re kind of a lone superhero guarding their sector. It’s in more recent decades that the idea of Green Lanterns as space cops or space military has really ramped up. The Justice League cartoon was a really big influence on that. In the 1980s you start to get more stories featuring the Corps interacting, but it’s really Jeff Johns — the writer and also producer of that terrible Ryan Reynolds movie — who brought Hal Jordan back and brought the Green Lantern Corps back. He loves cops and the military. He loves them. And that became a much bigger part of the narrative. All of a sudden, instead of Green Lanterns being solo on patrol, they were partnered, which immediately turns everything into a buddy cop story. Hal didn’t have a military background before this — he was a test pilot, but for a private company. After this, he’s former Air Force. In 2011, Guy Gardner was retconned to be a former cop. Guy had not been a cop — he’d been a special ed gym teacher. That’s a big difference.
The cartoon — the Justice League cartoon, not the Green Lantern cartoon — did something noteworthy, which is that it made John Stewart a former Marine, which had not been his backstory in the comics. In the comics he was an architect. And in fact, his very first appearance in 1971 has him getting into a fight with a cop who is hassling a couple of old Black men for playing dominoes on the sidewalk. John — young and angry — steps in and says, is there a problem, officer? And Hal, who’s watching with a Guardian, is like, I don’t want to give him a ring. He’s got a chip on his shoulder. Over the decades, John’s personality shifted — honestly you see this with a lot of Black male characters introduced in the 1970s and early 80s, who were introduced as very angry and very sensitive to racial issues, understandably, and who later became the sensible, steady one. John is now the sensible one of our main Green Lanterns.
They really amped up this you-are-a-hard-military-policeman angle, with the exception of Kyle Rayner, who is an artist — that’s always been what he does. But they steered hard into this comradely brothers-in-arms thing, which is very compelling and a lot of it works really well. It’s a massive tonal shift from the Green Lanterns we were seeing in the 1960s and 70s. And when I’m hesitant to fully sign off on “yeah, they’re cops” — it’s not because that’s not how they’re presented now, it is. But I’m unwilling to cede that ground because it doesn’t have to be how they’re presented, and there’s precedent for it not being.
Matthew
And I think describing John Stewart as a former Marine in the early 70s is a very intentional and interesting choice that you can read in two very different ways.
Jessica
He wasn’t a Marine then, though — that was just the cartoon in 2003 that made him that.
Matthew
Right, and it’s interesting in a different way in 2003 than it would have been in the 70s. But still — the idea is, we’re going to stop making him street, we’re going to show you that he has authority, that he has capacities. He is not the stereotype of the angry young Black man from the streets. He is military. He’s all-American. And that can be done in a very good or a very bad way. One of the reasons people use ACAB — and I don’t want this conversation to be entirely about that, but we can’t not discuss it — is that in the United States, our police system was based on slave-catcher patrols. That was the origin. Racism, and the use of violence to keep Black people in their place, has been baked into American policing from its very inception. And that’s part of why telling a story about good cops can wind up functioning as a kind of pro-cop-agenda storytelling, like we’re not wrestling with the fact that policing in this country is fundamentally flawed. And I do think there’s something interesting in the question: can you have people empowered by a government to help enforce rules without all of that being baked in? Can you do that in an intergalactic setting? The problem is that requires an intentionality that’s almost never there. And probably it shouldn’t be white people telling that story in the first place. So yes, there are just so many different levels stacking up. Green Lantern doesn’t exactly map to all of that — you can put that lens over it and it partly fits, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on too.
Jessica
And your question of whether it’s possible to tell a story about people using force to preserve order established by some kind of authority — that’s a huge question. One thing I’ll say, which I don’t know whether it undercuts or supports it: this is relevant to both the X-Men and Green Lanterns. On one hand you have stories where that authority is followed unquestioningly — okay, authority said this, so it must be right. But more often what you have are stories where it turns out the authority is wrong or corrupt. I could not tell you how many Green Lantern stories there are where it turns out the Guardians are just horrible. The worst. And every time the Green Lanterns are like, what?! They’re always so surprised — you lied to us again about a terrible ancient evil from outer space. How could this be? And I mentioned earlier — I think Scott Summers is a much more ethical person than Charles Xavier. So: whose authority are we enforcing?
Matthew
I gotta be honest, that’s a low bar.
Jessica
You’re not wrong. But: absolute power corrupts absolutely. Is it possible to have an authority that is not corrupt? And if you don’t have that, if you’re just relying on the integrity of whoever your agent is — not to bring every episode of your show back to the Civil War movie, but you end up with Steve Rogers going, I can do whatever I want in any country because I’m sad about my friend and I’m nice. Which is not how that should work.
Matthew
And that’s always been my argument for at least considering team Tony — because when I hear Steve Rogers say, if you’re sure you’re right, you move — that’s exactly the reasoning the United States has used. We’re sad about the Nazis, we’re sad about the communists, we’re nice, so we’re going to police the whole world. And guess what? That means killing a lot of elected leaders and overthrowing governments and Vietnam and so on.
Jessica
And not that I think Tony Stark should be in charge of everything, but at least within the confines of the MCU, Tony Stark is capable of understanding that he makes mistakes. Steve Rogers does not seem to be — bless his heart. Tony will still make more mistakes, but at least he knows he’s capable of it.
Matthew
And that’s what I’ve always said. The reason I think there’s an argument for team Tony is that Tony’s initial argument is: we have to be accountable to someone besides ourselves. Maybe Scarlet Witch did nothing wrong or did the best possible thing, even though civilians died — but we can’t be the ones to decide that. Someone else has to look it over. Tony is right that they need accountability. Steve is right that the Sokovia Accords are a really dumb way to give them accountability, and there should be a better one. And that’s where the conflict lives. The superheroes I care about are always the ones wrestling with this. The Arrowverse gets a lot of criticism these days, but I think before it went pretty far off the rails it gave us some of the best superhero television we’ve seen. One thing it did really well was that each hero was part of a chosen family that held them accountable. So when Oliver — Oliver Queen — starts to go off the rails, his friends pull him back. When Diggle starts to go off the rails, his friends pull him back. Same with Sara, same with Supergirl.
Jessica
Was it the DEO, or was it Star Labs?
Matthew
Star Labs is the Flash. It was some version of the Department of Defense. But anyway — all of those stories fall into troubling patterns sometimes in really problematic ways. I’m not saying just having some buddies to tell you no makes it fine to go be a cop. But at least those stories are wrestling with it.
Jessica
It’s such a big question, and it’s complicated by the fact that these are massive, sprawling universes. What applies to one type of character doesn’t apply to another. Marvel Comics did Civil War before the MCU did, and the central question — the thing that caused the violence to break out — was very different, though it had the same basic idea of: superheroes can cause collateral damage and people can die, so they need to register. But that works very differently in a world where you have mutants. Because this is a persecuted minority and a lot of them are not fighting crime — they’re just going to seventh-grade math class — and now the government has a registry of them. That’s not going to go anywhere bad. What can work for one character does not necessarily apply to another. And I genuinely don’t know what an outside system holding superheroes accountable would or should look like. In terms of characters who do whatever they want and are accountable to no one — I said I was going to bring up Batman, and I feel like he’s a perfect example. And you could arguably say the same of Superman — certainly Superman has engaged in some very cop-ish behaviors, but he’s a much more sensible person. I mean, it depends on the version — there’s always Man of Steel.
Matthew
I’m always going to defend my friend Mr. Bruce Wayne, as deeply emotionally troubled as he is — but that’s kind of my point. They both lose their parents. One loses his parents before he’s old enough to remember them, let alone conceive of the idea of parents. The other has his parents shot in front of him because they wanted to leave a play because he was scared of bats — the Christopher Nolan interpretation, but still. Bruce Wayne has them shot in front of him in ways that are, quote-unquote, his fault.
Jessica
I know this isn’t what you meant, but the way you said it — “Bruce Wayne has them shot in front of him” — like he hired someone.
Matthew
No, no. He took them to a horrible play, then dragged them out of it. And then Superman is raised by the most all-American, sweet, wonderful, loving couple in the world. Bruce Wayne is raised by a psychotic British butler who thinks training him to fight is healthy — and maybe tries to stop him sometimes and is somewhat the person who holds him accountable, but you can’t hold accountable the person who pays your salary.
Jessica
It’s almost like when you have an eight-year-old who’s either discovering they can crush rocks into diamonds or is very angry about their dead parents — it’s better to say, hey, you have to be chill about this and be nice to people, rather than just being drily British-ly sarcastic about it.
Matthew
Yes. Did you ever see the TV show — Pennyworth? Penny Worth is called Pennyworth.
Jessica
Somehow that one didn’t draw me in.
Matthew
It was about Alfred being young in Britain at a time when the government was hanging people and then disemboweling them while being hung in this horribly brutal way that the camera loved. Very Tudor. Exactly. But I think you raise a really good point — it’s funny that Batman is often seen as very anti-cop. And I think he is, and I think Batman would look at policing today and be like, yeah, Derek Chauvin is horrible, the Minneapolis PD, the NYPD under Giuliani, the LAPD — these are all awful and terrible and have to go. But he’d also be like, because they’re not doing a good enough job arresting drug dealers and putting them in prison. And as you said, Commissioner Gordon is either — in Batman ’66 — like the police are fine, they’re kind of bumbling. Or — and this is pure cop-agenda storytelling in things like the Christopher Nolan movies — Gordon is the one person who wants to be a good cop, because of course there are good cops. Instead of a barrel of good apples with one bad one, he’s the one good apple in the bad-apple barrel. So he needs Batman to help him be the cop he’s trying to be. But it all rests on the idea that it is possible in the American political and legal system to have good cops, and that Batman would support them — just not the bad ones.
Jessica
And so often the words written on the page about Batman, or the dialogue spoken, are in direct opposition to what looks cool to draw or film — and what we’ve been trained by our media to think is really cool and badass. What we want to see is this billionaire driving his tank around, getting four inches to the gallon, flattening other cars, knocking over dog walkers, beating the crap out of clowns, dangling them from lampposts, shooting bazookas in the middle of the supermarket, breaking into wherever with absolutely no regard for anyone’s privacy, surveilling the entire city if not the entire planet including his friends — and then taking these criminals and dropping them into this torture asylum full of black mold and people whispering “you should kill again” into their ears all night. And then the dialogue will be like, but once they get out, the Wayne Foundation will support them. And people will say that as a gotcha. But it’s true — in every canon, we’re told over and over that Bruce Wayne is putting money and effort and the weight of his name behind much more compassionate and effective ways of improving the city. But we don’t see them, because they’re not interesting to draw and they don’t work visually. So there’s this constant tension between all of that and just showing him as a super-cop dressed like a bat.
Matthew
I think there are two parts to that. One is something we’ve talked about in other episodes — it’s the same reason you wouldn’t make a movie of Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. sitting at a conference table going, okay, the Sokovia Accords have some decent ideas but we need to take out amendments three and four. I would love that movie. You would. Maybe ten other people would watch it, and that’s about it. Bruce Wayne running an orphanage might make a decent TV show that very few people would watch — the people who did would love it, but it’s not going to be a $500 million movie. But the flip side is — and here I’m going to use the defense you’ve used for some of these characters — that man has changed a lot. In the same way we have to be careful not to apply Cyclops’s or Green Lantern’s 1960s attitudes toward policing to today, I do think the Batman stories have evolved to be a lot more about, hey, maybe we actually should be doing the charitable work not just alongside punching criminals, but because if you treat homeless ten-year-olds better, they don’t grow up to be working for the Joker because it’s their only option. Did you ever see The Batman — the most recent one?
Jessica
I haven’t. I keep meaning to.
Matthew
Well, I don’t want to spoil it —
Jessica
This is on me at this point.
Matthew
This is a big spoiler. The final third of the movie is about him stopping fighting the bad guys and instead rescuing their victims — literally carrying a torch that leads them out of the darkness into the light. I think it’s a very powerful symbol, because other people have challenged Bruce Wayne on why he isn’t doing more to protect and help. So I do think the Bruce Wayne story is slowly — and from behind — catching up to those things. I think Frank Castle still has a long way to go. Bruce Wayne has ways to go; Frank Castle has even further to go.
Jessica
And I’ll say — that sounds awesome, and maybe the cinematic narrative is changing. But that man is in ten comics a month and he’s still driving that tank over dog walkers.
Matthew
Yeah, like five different people are drawing and writing him and they’re not lining up. No argument there. Who are some other heroes — to help wrap us up — who you think have an interesting perspective on being close to or far away from cops? Let me ask you about Oliver Queen, because I know Green Arrow the comic character is one of your favorites. He’s shooting arrows, he’s trying to stop people from doing bad things — how does he do that without falling into the cop system?
Jessica
He was the first character I thought of when you raised that, because he is sort of the go-to when you’re thinking of a superhero who’s explicitly progressive and liberal. Since the 1970s there have been comics showing him in opposition to the police and saying this is a broken system. His characterization isn’t consistent — it’s written by lots of different people — but he is always, at least for DC, the first character they use to say ACAB. He’s the only actual superhero I can think of who would say ACAB out loud. He’d be proud to be called woke. That said, his ammo is going on patrol and then catching bad guys and then — I guess just tying them up and leaving them for the cops, because he’s not putting them in an Arrow Jail. He doesn’t have anywhere to put them. There’s a lot that’s not thought through. I’m thinking of a story from the late 1980s where he shoots a Black teenage boy with an arrow because he thought the kid had a real gun and it was a fake gun. He feels really bad about it afterward, but then everyone is like, stop beating yourself up, it was a mistake, and the moral of the story is that he moves on. And it’s like — no, you should probably not pick up that bow again.
Matthew
When was that story?
Jessica
The late 1980s, possibly the very early 1990s.
Matthew
Yeah, there were news stories around then about cops shooting Black teenagers who had water guns and toy guns.
Jessica
You notice that Black toy guns always have that red tip? It’s because that was happening a lot, and the cops were always like, oh, it’s not really your fault. That story was trying, but it aged very poorly and reads really badly today. I’m trying to think of other characters. One who springs to mind — not a major character, but Squirrel Girl. She’s a Marvel character, and she has all the powers of a squirrel. She’s amazing. Her whole thing is she’s the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl — she can beat anyone. She’s beaten Galactus.
Matthew
By holding him in the pockets of her cheeks.
Jessica
She could if she needed to. She has super strength. But in the 2010s — I think starting in 2014 — there was a series by Ryan North and Erica Henderson called The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. It’s a little tricky to track down because Marvel canceled all their comics and relaunched everything at number one, so within the same year there were two comics called The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl number one from the same creative team. Comics are very stupid. But these are great because they work really hard to have the character find solutions besides violence. She can beat anybody and win, and sometimes that’s demonstrated — but more often than not she will stop and talk to the villain and find out why they’re doing this antisocial thing and find another solution. It’s a comedy, so it’s entertaining in the way that sitting down and going over the Sokovia Accords line by line could be entertaining if the framing were right. But it’s also, I would say, one of the most quietly revolutionary superhero comics I’ve ever read, because it’s the only one I’ve seen that really puts in the work to decouple the necessity of violence from superhero storytelling.
Matthew
Well, if nothing else, I also highly recommend watching the movie Rebel Ridge, because it’ll get you very excited about Aaron Pierre — he’s fantastic and very nice to look at. But also because part of the point is that his character is a de-escalation expert. A lot of the movie is about how you break cycles of violence. He’s been falsely accused, and his goal isn’t to beat people up — it’s to use de-escalation tactics to prevent them from beating him up and to give him enough time to explain why they should be on his side. He’s using physical force, but in the way of knocking guns out of people’s hands and preventing harm rather than doing harm himself. Definitely watch it.
Jessica
And to that note — earlier I compared Superman and Batman, and I said Superman can be very policy-minded but he’s less of a loose cannon than Batman. But counterintuitively, it’s the scope of his power that makes him less of a metaphor for a cop on a violent spree. When Batman engages in violence, he’s using mostly real-world applications, just to a heightened extent. Superman is so much more powerful than an ordinary criminal that he can just pick them up by the scruff. He can de-escalate without harming people.
Matthew
He can heat up the gun so you drop it — with perfect accuracy.
Jessica
It’s like how with a toddler throwing a tantrum, you can pick them up without harming them and say, no, we’re going to sit on the bed. You can’t do that to an adult because you’re on the same strength level. I’m not saying all we need are cops with super strength — but it struck me in the way you phrased that, like, oh yeah, that’s probably why. Because he doesn’t have to get into the mud.
Matthew
So true. Well, as always, Jessica, this has been a great conversation. For people who want to know more about your take on comics and everything else, where can they find you?
Jessica
You can find me at my website and blog, JessicaPlummerWrites.com. I write about superheroes a lot there. I also do a lot of writing about comics on BookRiot.com.
Matthew
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. All those links will be in the show notes. As always, friends, let us know what you think — we love to hear your thoughts. We are also doing episode-by-episode coverage, often two episodes a week, on the Darth Maul show. Check it out, check out all of our coverage, and of course please tune in for more episodes. Tell your friends, help us spread the word, let us know what you think. We want to hear it. I’m Matthew, she’s Jessica, and thanks to all of you great people. May the Force be with you.
