Chris Gavaler

The Imperial Superhero

Set in 1978, the year Edward Said published Orientalism , Salman Rushdies Midnights Children depicts “magic children” born in the first hour of August 15, 1947, “within the frontiers of the infant sovereign state of India” (1981, 226, 224). Through some “freak of biology” or “preternatural power,” the children receive “miraculous” abilities, including such superhero staples as flight, time-travel, and “a boy who could increase or reduce his size at will” (224, 227, 228). For his mind-reading narrator, Rushdie evokes the Shadows 1930s radio slogan: “the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men” (229). The American Shadow, like so many of his descendants and predecessors, gained his powers from the mythical Orient, but the fantastical abilities that Rushdie awards the first citizens born in independent India mark the end of colonial exploitation and the transfer of real-world political power from colonizers to the formerly colonized.

Dr. Doom’s philosophy of time

ABSTRACT People who contemplate the nature of time on conceptual grounds are philosophers. Although not usually counted as philosophers, the writers, artists and editors of Marvel Comics are nevertheless philosophers in the operative sense. In the pages of their comics, Marvel creators explore, investigate and hypothesize the realities and properties of time – including eternalism, presentism, the growing block view of time, branching time, and timelines as alternative universes (created or found). Unlike traditional philosophers, however, Marvel creators are not always explicit about the implications of their illustrated thought experiments. Instead, we are in their place. We trace conceptual contemplations about the nature of time in Marvel’s first two decades by focusing on stories involving Dr. Doom’s time machine, the plot device that established the trope of time travel in Marvel continuity. Doing so illuminates just how sophisticated Marvel’s stories are, philosophically. We begin in the early 1960s when Marvel introduced Doom’s machine, consider a series of subsequent stories involving the device, and conclude with the philosophical time-travel challenges facing the rebooted All-New, All-Different Marvel of 2015 and beyond.

The rise and fall of fascist superpowers

Viewed in their original context, comic book superheroes express the paradox that democratic utopianism can be defended only through anti-democratic means. Superheroes were conceived in response to fascism, achieved massive popularity with the expansion of a fascist-fighting war, and began to wane not at the close of that war but at the earliest signs of victory. The rise and fall of fascism does not coincidentally parallel the arc of the Golden Age character; the ideology informs the hero type’s conception, market surge, and eventual renunciation. After the fall of Nazi Germany, Communism proved an inadequately dire threat to justify the figure’s continuation, and those few superheroes who survived the industry’s Wertham-led, anti-fascist purging in the mid-fifties did so because they had been divorced from their authoritative violence. The historical relationship between Golden Age heroes and fascism was distanced in the early sixties when Silver Age creators reproduced the formulas apart from their originating context. While superheroes are not exclusively a fascist phenomenon, and while their enduring popularity is a product of myriad factors, their origins remain imbedded in the genre and continue to define the hero type.

The Ku Klux Klan and the birth of the superhero

Thomas Dixon Jr’s Ben Cameron, aka the Grand Dragon, represents the earliest twentieth-century incarnation of an American vigilante hero who assumes a costume and alias to hide his identity while waging his war for good – the formula adopted most famously by Siegel and Shuster for Superman. Dixon did not invent the figure of the costumed superhero; but the character type – as traced from The Clansman through The Birth of a Nation and the second Klan to pulp fiction and early comic books – is dependent on Dixon’s vision. The superhero, despite the character’s evolution into a champion of the oppressed, originated from an oppressive, racist impulse in American culture, and the formula codifies an ethics of vigilante extremism that still contradicts the superhero’s purported social mission.

THE EMPTY LOT: SPIRITUAL CONTACT IN LENAPE AND MORAVIAN RELIGIOUS BELIEFS

began in Pennsylvania during the 1740s and continued in Ohio until the early nineteenth century. The church established thirty-two North American mission towns populated exclusively by converts and missionary families. Unlike related Puritan efforts, the Moravian programs worked inside Indian territories, in full cooperative contact with tribal societies. Missionary leader David Zeisberger was the first European immigrant to cross the Forbidden Trail established by the Seneca to repel colonial expansion, and he later became an adopted member of the Lenape, serving on the chief council. As a result of such participation, the primary source of ethnographic data for Lenape culture is the Moravian records. As these two cultures interacted, their spiritual worlds inevitably collided. Though they certainly bore resemblances, Moravian and Lenape religious systems differed, particularly in their practices of spiritual communication. Much attention has been devoted to the significance of dreams and vision quests in Lenape and other Native American religions. Moravian practices, however, have received little analysis, especially their application of chance properties to ascertain divine will.