Icons of Survival: Metahumanism As Planetary Defense." Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture

Lioi, Anthony. "Icons of Survival: Metahumanism as Planetary Defense." Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 169–196. Environmental Cultures. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 25 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474219730.ch-007>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 25 September 2021, 20:32 UTC. Copyright © Anthony Lioi 2016. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 6 Icons of Survival: Metahumanism as Planetary Defense In which I argue that superhero comics, the most maligned of nerd genres, theorize the transformation of ethics and politics necessary to the project of planetary defense. The figure of the “metahuman,” the human with superpowers and purpose, embodies the transfigured nerd whose defects—intellect, swarm-behavior, abnormality, flux, and love of machines—become virtues of survival in the twenty-first century. The conflict among capitalism, fascism, and communism, which drove the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, also drove the Golden and Silver Ages of Comics. In the era of planetary emergency, these forces reconfigure themselves as different versions of world-destruction. The metahuman also signifies going “beyond” these economic and political systems into orders that preserve democracy without destroying the biosphere. Therefore, the styles of metahuman figuration represent an appeal to tradition and a technique of transformation. I call these strategies the iconic style and metamorphic style. The iconic style, more typical of DC Comics, makes the hero an icon of virtue, and metahuman powers manifest as visible signs: the “S” of Superman, the tiara and golden lasso of Wonder Woman. The metamorphic style, more typical of Marvel Comics, represents the process of change itself, turning the vice of flux into the power of transformation. As characters change in their capacity to defend the world, so does their appearance. These styles transfigure the nerd as avatar of virtue and incarnation of flux using all three aesthetics of the queer, the uncanny, and the monstrous. Though fan culture sometimes dualizes these representational strategies, they form the visual vocabulary for a metahumanism of planetary defense. Understood as a nerdist technology, the superhero becomes a seed of environmental culture. 170 Nerd Ecology In the fourth decade of life, when I ought to be beyond such things, I pick up an issue of Planetary, a comic book written by Warren Ellis and drawn by John Cassaday. Planetary is published by the WildStorm imprint of DC Comics, giving it the latitude to do something unusual. It tells the story of superpowered investigators who roam the world uncovering the mysteries passed off as the stuff of junk culture: Japanese monster islands, the ghost of Marilyn Monroe, the traces left by the planet’s true rulers disguised as “super-villains” in stories told for children. Like Buffy and Firefly, Planetary is historiographic metafiction, a story that explains the history of the story it appears, at first, to be. I am reading Chapter 10, “Magic and Loss,” named after Lou Reed’s confrontation with death. In his introduction to the story- arc Planetary: The Fourth Man, Joss Whedon comments: “No one who loves comics can get through issue #10, ‘Magic and Loss,’ without a true thrill of childlike dread” (Whedon, Introduction n.p.). I know what he means. Issue #10 finds Elijah Snow and his team in the lair of an Illuminatus who corresponds to Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four. In his encounter with this figure, Snow was nearly killed for getting too close to the truth about the true shape of history, the signal beyond the puppet theater. The Illuminatus leaves Snow to stew while his team investigates the artifacts in the abandoned facility, a version of the Baxter Building in the New York of Marvel Comics. The team has recovered three mysterious artifacts: a red cape or blanket; a pair of golden arm bands; and a blue, metallic lantern. One investigator says to another, “Where the hell do you suppose the Four got this stuff from? And why bother keeping it?” The issue answers that question. The blanket that would have become Superman’s cape arrived in a ship that crashed in Kansas, carrying the infant from Krypton. In this timeline, a secret operative intercepts it and burns the child to death. The arm bands belong to Princess Diana of Paradise Island, murdered as she stepped into Man’s World to become Wonder Woman. For a moment, I stop breathing, aware of the void in my heart where these stories had been before breath returns. This is how real myths work: they become part of our spiritual architecture, the magnetosphere of the soul that shields it from solar flares, making patterns in the sky visible from certain latitudes of the imagination. The lantern evokes a particular kind of pain. In flashback, Ellis and Cassaday show us a great hall on another world, a scene of ritual investiture. Icons of Survival: Metahumanism as Planetary Defense 171 A creature that resembles electrified wire wrapped in crimson sepals, the speaker of the group, laments the death of Krypton, telling the assembly that this is the kind of world their league was formed to save. The color of the lantern has changed to indicate a different brane in the multiverse, but this is a meeting of the Green Lanterns, a corps of planetary guardians who defend each sector of the universe using the energy of courage. The leader recounts their history, displaying an image of a lone man with a blue lantern suspended from a staff. “The first of us was born upon a world choked by pollution and damaged weather. The continent he worked upon was shrouded in fog, mist, thick gas. He was known as space’s first policeman. To light his way he wore a lamp whose element glowed perfect blue. His was the light of reason. The light we should have shown upon that world. But living worlds are many and we are yet too few.” For this reason a new hero is commissioned: the blue lantern fuses with his body, its light shining from his heart. He is sent to Earth as its cosmic guardian, but the killers of Kal-El and Princess Diana intercept him, too. We see him in the present, dead on a dissection table, the lantern cut out of his chest to be engineered into weaponry for the archons of our world. The loss of the Lantern hits especially close to home. Ellis has rewritten the space-cops to evoke the Green politics in the lantern, the common heart of planetary defense, forged on a world destroyed by toxic waste and climate disaster. The first Lantern wandered like the Diogenes the Cynic, searching his world for a just man. Had Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern survived, they would have formed the Justice League, a band of heroes the beleaguered folk of Planetary cannot imagine. Cassady and Warren invite us to experience that dilemma from the inside. What if there were no myths of resistance to the Powers That Be? How would it feel to be denied the narratives of virtue that make planetary defense possible? How could one cultivate such virtues in a world where the virtuous are killed before they have a chance to change us? Kamala Khan, the hero of Marvel’s new series Ms. Marvel, has the opposite problem. A longtime fan of Carol Danvers, the Avenger formerly known as Ms. Marvel, Kamala suffers from the classic nerd problem: she can’t get there from here. Here is Jersey City, New Jersey, which sits across the Hudson from Manhattan. Like Danvers herself, Manhattan seems farther away because it is so close; her life is shaped differently than an Avenger’s. Kamala’s parents 172 Nerd Ecology moved from Pakistan to New Jersey to provide their daughter a top-notch education, and like generations of immigrant parents, they expect Kamala to get straight as in her magnet high school, never be late for dinner, and marry a Muslim doctor after avoiding boys at all costs. Unbeknownst to them, the Khan family carries dormant Inhuman genes. The Inhumans are a race of superpowered humanoids hidden from humanity by the Kree, aliens who experimented on humans to breed a slave race of living weapons. The Inhumans were the result of this failed experiment. Abandoned by the Kree, they live in hidden refugia across the world, including Attilan, the city that recently landed in the bay between Jersey City and Manhattan. When a political disaster causes the release of the Terrigen Mist from Attilan, this teratogen covers the world, activating dormant Inhuman genes in unsuspecting fangirls. Like Peter Parker and his radioactive spider-bite, Kamala’s encounter with the Mist bestows superpowers: strength, resilience, healing, and a slightly ridiculous ability to change shape. Suddenly able to become her idol, Kamala stalks the shadows of Jersey City, a brown girl pretending to be a blonde Avenger. Like the antiheroes of Planetary, Kamala does not understand how a person like her can occupy the persona of the hero. She possesses the power to defend the world, but does not know how to use it. Her first attempts result in a eugenic farce in which an Inhuman tries to emulate the successful weapon that Captain Marvel finally became. The same genetic pattern that gave Kamala powers also made it hard to find the right person to become. Kamala mistakes Captain Marvel’s features for her virtues, but discovers that the look of the hero is not the practice of heroism.

Load more