Neal Curtis, ‘Doom’s Law: Spaces of Sovereignty in THE COMICS GRID Marvel’s Secret Wars’ (2017) 7(1): 9 The Comics Journal of comics scholarship Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, DOI: https:// doi.org/10.16995/cg.90 RESEARCH Doom’s Law: Spaces of Sovereignty in Marvel’s Secret Wars Neal Curtis University of Auckland, NZ
[email protected] Sovereignty is both the foundation and source of law and the determination of the territory to which the law applies. In this latter sense, sovereignty and the law it supports are an explicitly spatial phenomenon, as can be seen in the meanings of the Greek word nomos, which aside from the law can also refer to a division that marks out a specific territory. This article posits that the Marvel crossover event entitled Secret Wars (2015, 2016) encapsulates the ways in which superhero comics might help us to understand the spatiality of sovereignty. It also considers how resistance to Doom’s law was focused on the transgression of borders and the creation of alternative spatial arrangements. Keywords: Agamben; graphic justice; law; political theory; Schmitt Introduction: When the World Goes Rogue Fifteen years of a ‘War on Terror’ have been an especially fruitful time for studying superhero comics. The exceptional politics of the Bush Doctrine encouraged numerous scholars to return to important questions about the relationship between law and violence, and the nature of a state of emergency that are central to both the superhero mythos and an understanding of sovereign power. At a time when states themselves became rogue or took on the role of the vigilante—at least from the perspective of established International Law—scholars naturally gravitated towards thinking about what the exceptional status of the superhero might tell us.