The Short Life and Slow Death of Captain Euro 1
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Saunders • The Short Life and Slow Death of Captain Euro 1 The Short Life and Slow Death of Captain Euro Popular Geopolitics and the Pitfalls of the Generic European Superhero Robert A. Saunders Farmingdale State College Abstract Hoping to inculcate a sense of Europeanness among Anglophone youth in advance of the introduction of a common currency and the deepening of European integration, Twelve Stars Communications launched the Captain Euro project as part of its larger strategy of branding the European Union. This article is a study of identity and geopolitical imagination in that short-lived series of Internet-based comics, which appeared in the late 1990s. While the comic ultimately foundered, Captain Euro represents a trenchant example of popular geopolitical representation and the attempted use of costumed superheroes to create national narratives that are attractive to and instruct youthful readers. The forms of geopolitical meaning explored herein include the construction of a common identity based on Celtic and pagan pre-history, the temporal othering of non-territorial European minorities and the spatial othering of Turkey, and the visual privileging of key spaces associated with a pan-European ideal. This is accomplished through analysis of the visual and textual content of Captain Euro and its critical reception, as well as interviews conducted with series creator Nicholas De Santis. Aether Vol. xii, 1–22, December 2012 © Copyright 2012, The Center for Geographic Studies • California State University, Northridge 2 Aether: The Journal of Media Geography • Fall 2012 Hoping to germinate Europhilia among British and Anglophone European youth, Twelve Stars Communications, acting on behalf of its client the European Parliament, launched a team of superheroes in 1997. Their mission would be to defend “European values” against those seeking to sow division and undermine the European Union. Enter Captain Euro, his band of super-allies, and a host of enemies of a united Europe. The Captain Euro multimedia project, available online at www.captaineuro. com, includes two full-length digital comics, profiles of heroes and villains, links to information about the euro, and an online currency converter. Despite a relatively short period of activity, Captain Euro represents an interesting, albeit ineffectual component of the larger youth-oriented strategy to prepare Europeans for a deepening of integration and the impending introduction of a common currency. It also exposes the problems associated with teaching Europeanness to minors, particularly given the complexity of supranational identity and the sensitivity involved in representing place and space in contemporary Europe. Given the prevalence of post-Maastricht fears about the purported decline of the nation-state (Mann 1993), a generalized Europhobia (Kristeva 1998), and worries about comic books’ negative impact on impressionable youth (Wertham 1954), the launch of Captain Euro prompted condemnation from a number of camps, particularly British Eurosceptics. The campaign director of the Democracy Movement, Marc Glendening, described the Captain Euro site (Figure 1) as the grand guignol of the EU’s “ceaseless campaign designed to indoctrinate its citizens (including schoolchildren)” with the virtues of a quasi-fascist “Euro-authoritarianism” (2001, 28). Edward MacMillan “Teddy” Taylor, then a member of the British Parliament, described the comic as a “dangerous” publicity stunt that should be “killed” (Frank 1998). Despite the hopes of its creator Nicholas De Santis and its supporters, Captain Euro, after an initial flurry of mostly negative media attention, went nowhere. Only two installments of the comic were produced, and the site has changed little over the past decade, despite the ebbs and flows of the popularity of the European project. However, it is important to note that the Captain Euro web site has not been removed from the Internet, thus turning the project into a sort of cyberspatial stele: a digital commemoration frozen in time. This has allowed for cultural critics to continue utilize Captain Euro for their own purposes, thus adding new, often incongruous qualities to Europe’s first generic superhero. Considering the relatively short period of activity of Captain Euro, the undertaking is surprisingly pregnant with meaning and a highly relevant example of contrived popular geopolitics, one which elucidates a host of timely topics associated with national identity and geopolitical power in contemporary Europe. This essay examines the project through the lens of popular geopolitics with the aim of explaining why Captain Euro failed as a tool of supranational narration and contemporary mythmaking, yet continues to linger in cyberspace as a revenant of embryonic Europeanness. Given the fact that Twelve Stars, now known as Corporate Vision Strategists, is considering Saunders • The Short Life and Slow Death of Captain Euro 3 Figure 1 Captain Euro inviting young readers to submit their email addresses to gain access to the comics. ©Corporate Vision Strategists 2010. (used with permission) relaunching Captain Euro in response to the current challenges facing the European project and particularly the economic union (De Santis 2011a), the relevance of a costumed European “superhero,” particularly one without superpowers who relies on technology and will to defend the “nation,” underlines the role of popular culture in shaping politics. In order to contextualize why Twelve Stars initially developed a “flagged” hero, the article examines the history of comic book heroes and nationalism in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain. The essay then turns to the visual and textual content of the Captain Euro series and the nettlesome issues that certain plotlines and depictions raise in the context of contemporary European identity. The conclusion interrogates the difficulties of inculcating supranational identity through what is, in essence, a contrived advertisement rather than a genuine work of popular culture. Beflagged Heroes: Nationalist Mythmaking, Comics, and Popular Geopolitics Any nation is constructed through imagined ties of kinship between a people who believe they share a common history, language, and culture (Gellner 1983 and Anderson 1991). Emotional attachment to a particular state or territory, either in the present of the past, is a necessary component of nationhood. In the words of philosopher John Stuart Mill: A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others—which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be a government by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively (1861 [2001], 143) The doyen of nationalism, Anthony Smith (1991), stipulates that any definition of the nation should, at a minimum, include the following: a named human population; a mass 4 Aether: The Journal of Media Geography • Fall 2012 public culture; common rights and responsibilities for all members; and a common economy with territorial mobility for all members. Gellner reminds us that mutual recognition is also a necessity: “Two men [sic] are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation” (1983, 7). Scholars such as Hobsbawm (1992) reject the idea that the nation exists outside of history, but should rather be viewed as an “invented tradition” which promotes pragmatic outcomes and draws on certain common attributes, including but not limited to language, shared experiences, etc. Given the rather functionalist analysis of the nation that was en vogue in the late twentieth century (and putting aside the bedeviling questions of language, common language, etc., at least for now), constructing a constitutive myth that would bind Europeans together into a single (supra-)nation might have seemed tantalizingly simple. And how better to accomplish such a feat than through a merger of political speech and popular culture, what Chris Murray (2000) calls propaganda, in the form of a costumed crusader. From Superman to Wolverine, the influence of comic book superheroes is undeniable. In both North America and Western Europe, successive generations of youth have been influenced by the medium of comics; this is particularly true in terms of how comics shape political culture, imbue patriotism, and shape one’s views on foreign lands and peoples. Comics have acute socialization and didactic capabilities which “help create structures of expectations that consequently influence the way readers view the world and locate their own place…within it” (Dittmer 2005, 627). Captain America, as an example par excellence of the comic book’s role in constructing national identity, reinforcing power relations, and imagining geopolitical space, was instrumental in inculcating American youth with certain World War II-era values, such as material conservation and recycling, both of which “allowed young readers to feel that they were part of the war effort” (Mallory 2002, 57). Given such capacities, graphic narratives represent not only a genuine “artifact of culture” (Vessels 2010), but also one of the purest forms of popular geopolitics (Dunnett 2009), i.e., non-political, popular texts (films, novels, songs, Internet sites, etc.) that are instrumental in producing everyday representations of spaces and places, and particularly how citizens conceive