The Short Life and Slow Death of Captain Euro 1

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.

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 of and speak about geographies beyond their own shores. Such a bold assertion reflects the capacity of comics to map territorial space in new, inventive, and deeply meaningful ways, while simultaneously creating, perpetuating, and revising geopolitical stereotypes. As an increasing number of authors (Christiansen 2000; Wright 2003; Emad 2006; Dittmer 2007; Scott 2007; Groensteen 2009; and Dunnett 2009) have pointed out, comics and other forms of graphic, sequential art possess certain traits that endow the medium with enhanced tools to influence the “scopic regime” (see Rose 2001) and influence ideology (McAllister, Sewell, and Gordon 2001) from seriality to the logic of figuration to the manipulation of geometric perspective. Through the constructive capacity of the medium, that is, the ability to distort images and influence “ways of Saunders • The Short Life and Slow Death of Captain Euro 5 seeing,” comic books are able to shape perception of the “real,” creating consumable and reproducible simulacra that are often more meaningful than lived reality (see Lefebvre 1991). Given the recent assertion that “ongoing and phenomenal production and circulation of popular culture makes world politics what it currently is” (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009, 157), understanding the role of comics in national and global politics is more important than ever. Ideological manipulation is particularly effective in comic books that are national in form. According to cultural historian Ryan Edwardson, “Distinctively national comic books are vessels for transmitting national myths, symbols, ideologies, and value. They popularize and perpetuate key elements of the national identity and ingrain them into their young readers—especially, given the primary readership, younger generations experiences elements of that identity for the first time” (2003, 186). In a somewhat more critical analysis of the medium, Dittmer argues that comic books are often a “favored tool” of governments and statist elites to convey “geopolitical scripts to the public, especially children” and are “used to influence geopolitical imaginations” (2007, 247-248). When used effectively and combined with statist legerdemain, it is even possible for governments to mobilize popular support for “elite identity narratives underpinning state foreign policy by shifting the location of their apparent emergence to the people” (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009, 158). According to geographer Kyle Grayson, such mythmaking is increasingly operationalized through “premeditated branding, performative discursive practices, and new circuits of distribution” associated with satellite television, YouTube, and other forms of new media (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009, 158). Consequently, the ongoing cross-pollination of media products through the Internet, next-generation mobile phones, and vertically- and horizontally- integrated global content distributors portends an explosion in new and unexpected forms of national (and supranational) mythmaking. However, it is also important to note that the new rules of distribution and interactive communication tools allow fans new mechanisms for contesting elite attempts at political manipulation, from ezine spoofs to critical blogs, thus supporting a variety of different—often oppositional— readings. Following Dittmer’s (2007) analysis of superheroes and the “cult of the flag,” I define “national” heroes as those whose costumes “flag” the nation and/or have been put in service by their respective national governments for purposes of protecting the “homeland.” Here I reference the work of Billig, who argues that in nations where citizenship is construed through a common creed and citizenship (rather than blood), there is a continual “flagging” or mental reinforcing of nationhood: “In so many little ways, the citizenry are daily reminded of their national place in the world of nations” (1995, 8).The X-Men, Spider-Man, and Batman, while frequently defending the American homeland or the nation as a whole, do not meet either criterion (more liminal superheroes include Wonder Woman, an “Americanized immigrant” whose 6 Aether: The Journal of Media Geography • Fall 2012

costume was fashioned out of an American flag, and Superman, another “immigrant” whose costume incorporates the red and blue of the American flag and who fights for “truth, justice, and the American way”). Cord Scott (2007) points out that World War II-era comics in the United States were notable for the overt connection between superheroes and the American flag, particularly through the use of red, white, and blue in their uniforms. Such flagging is further supported by the very nature of the comic book medium, which some have argued creates “a closed ideological text, imposing on the reader preferred meanings” (McAllister, Sewell, and Gordon 2001, 3) that reify and reinforce national values. However, as numerous scholars (Smith 2001; Althouse 2001; Dittmer and Larsen 2007; and Dittmer 2008) have proved, the polysemy of comic book heroes is legion. During World War II and the early 1950s, the use of national superheroes in American comic books peaked. Thereafter, the fallout from McCarthyism and, more importantly, the culture wars of the Vietnam era made patently patriotic superheroes a risky and ultimately unprofitable undertaking, particularly in the United States. As identity politics emerged as the new ideological battleground, the old moral geographies based on simplistic binaries of “us,” i.e., freedom-loving, peaceful Americans and “them,” i.e., aggressive, totalitarian Nazis and Soviets, dissolved (although there has been a modest resurgence of such trends in the wake of 9/11, based instead on religio- civilizational identity). During the 1960s and early 1970s, Marvel Comics’ raft of new, counter-culture superheroes—including The Hulk, X-Men, Silver Surfer, Daredevil, and Ghost Rider—and DC Comics’ embrace of social activism (best personified by Green Arrow) and darkening of its plotlines (particularly through the Batman franchise) evinced a shift away from the flag-waving geopolitical activism of the Golden Age of comics (Wright 2003). While the red, white, and blue-donned Captain America soldiered on through the 1970s, his history was altered through a retroactive change in continuity, which stipulated that the red-baiting, Commie-smashing Cap of the 1950s was an imposter (see Dittmer 2010). Despite the “taming” of Captain America’s patriotism in the 1970s, two self- consciously patriotic, flag-bearing superheroes entered into service elsewhere in the Anglosphere: Comely Comix’s Captain Canuck in Canada (1975) and Marvel Comics’ Captain Britain in the UK (1976). In the subsequent decade, these overtly national comic book heroes would be followed by Canadian superheroes Alpha Flight (Marvel Comics, 1983) and Northguard/Protecteur (New Triumph, 1984), as well as Australian government-founded superhero team The Southern Squadron (Cyclone Comics, 1988); however, Captains Canuck and Britain retained their respective epitomizing statuses. Dittmer and Larsen (2007 and 2008) have demonstrated how these flagged heroes served to ignite and focus Canadian and British nationalism among youth at a time when American hegemony was increasingly questioned in the Anglophone world. However, in both cases, these heroes came under fire from certain quarters of their Saunders • The Short Life and Slow Death of Captain Euro 7

audiences for failing to adequately represent the diversity of their “nations” (particularly, French-speaking Quebecois in Canada and the Celtic peoples of the United Kingdom, respectively). This unpopular “foregrounding of some narratives and the silencing of others” (Dittmer and Larsen 2007, 738), which inevitably characterizes explicitly nationalistic comic book narratives, proved to be just one of the problems that would confound the creators of Captain Euro in the late 1990s.

Captain Euro’s Adventures: Scripting the Future by Sculpting the Past In order to provide the reader who might be unfamiliar with the Captain Euro comic series, a brief précis of the delivery medium, the plot, and key players is provided herein. Rather than creating an expensive and labor-intensive print comic, Twelve Stars ceo Nicholas De Santis instead opted to develop the comic series in cyberspace, employing Macromedia’s Flash application (now Adobe Shockwave). This multimedia player is available for free downloads via the Internet and thus, in theory, made Captain Euro more accessible both in terms of price and physical availability than a print publication, which would have required a distribution channel covering more than a dozen countries. The first issue ofCaptain Euro boldly declares the Twelve Stars team to be “the new ambassadors of global peace…bearing the European message with them wherever they go” (De Santis 2010a). Captain Euro’s real name, Adam Andros, signals both classical—andras is Modern Greek for ‘man’—and Adamic origins, thus providing the character with a nomenclature that, like the Renaissance-era art of Michelangelo, mixes Græco-Roman humanism with Judeo-Christian traditions. According to Andros’ back- story, he spent much of his early life traveling the world’s capitals with his parents, “a famous European Ambassador and a professor of paleontology” (De Santis 2010b). On its face, Captain Euro’s mission is straightforward: “to protect Europe and carry Europe’s message of goodwill around the world” (De Santis 2010b). As a herald of the Habermasian bourgeois public sphere at the transnational level (see Johnson 2006), Captain Euro endeavors to use intellect, culture, and logic—not violence—to achieve these aims, thus reflecting a well-established tradition among other Anglophone “national superheroes” to contrast a thoughtful heroism against the pugilistic tendencies of the U.S. (see Edwardson 2003 and Dittmer and Larsen 2007). Reflecting the ostensible gender equality of the new Europe, Adam Andros is paired with a female companion Donna Eden (note the analogous, though inverted, semiotic references to the Judaic creation myth and donna, Italian for ‘woman’), rather than acting alone or being aided by a younger, male sidekick. In the first issue, the two begin their adventures at opposite ends of the Mediterranean: Andros in Majorca at a paleontology conference and Eden in Greece, searching for the resting place of Agamemnon. Apparently simultaneous seismic activity and the discovery of mysterious totems, a Celtic battleaxe and a runic tablet, provide a bit of suspense before the story turns north, where Andros’ father has discovered a 8 Aether: The Journal of Media Geography • Fall 2012

Viking ship encased in a Baltic iceberg. Unbeknownst to the Androses and Eden (who inexplicably joins the father-and-son team in northern Europe), Dr. David Viderius (Figure 2), the “ruthless speculator, curator, and ancient curiosity collector” (De Santis 2010f ), has assembled a team to pilfer the relics. Poignantly, Andros and Eden are presented as publicly-minded preservers of history and culture, while Viderius seeks only capital accumulation and personal gain. In the Baltic, the runic tablet is accidentally smashed to form twelve perfectly interlocking stars, thus symbolically reinforcing the scopic imagining of European states as stars. In the ship’s hold, Adam Andros discovers an ancient spirit who claims to be “the arms of your mother; the wood and earth walls of your first shelter; the pigment in your paintings; the paper of the pages of past books; the pixels on your computer screens” (De Santis 2010c), before revealing her true identity as “the Spirit of Europe.” She then bestows the golden star of Europe upon Adam Andros. Shortly thereafter, Dr. D. Vider (pronounced “divider,” the same David Viderius mentioned above) and his vivacious consort, Mala Glamora, arrive on the scene, triggering the death of Adam’s father. After being rescued by a wolf that had been conspicuously loitering since the ship’s discovery, the protagonist declares: “Adam Andros and Donna Eaden [sic] no longer exist. From now on we must fight for the memory of my father… We must use [the star’s] power and fight for humankind. From now on we shall be known as Captain Euro, Europa and Lupo” (De Santis 2010c). With its imagery and dialogue, the first issue ofCaptain Euro pays homage to the originary myth of a primordial and pagan Europe, linked together by the peripatetic Celts, who left their mark on everything from the Skelligs to the shrine at Delphi. Drawing together pre-Christian symbols from Baltic, Greece, and the Balearics, the stage is set for the appearance of the alternately beautiful and horrific (feminine) “Spirit of Europe,” who sets Adam Andros on the path toward his destiny, i.e., defender of the pan-European project. As Michael Dietler has argued, the use of symbols of Europe’s ancient Celtic past

Figure 2 International financier and foe of a united Europe, David Viderius, a.k.a., Dr. D. Vider. ©Corporate Vision Strategists 2010. (used with permission) Saunders • The Short Life and Slow Death of Captain Euro 9

is uniquely suited to the promotion of “pan-European unity in the context of the evolving European Community” while paradoxically buttressing “nationalism within member states of the community” and advancing “regional resistance to nationalist hegemony” (1994, 584). While the Celtic imagery may be read as politically innocuous, the growing trend of anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic Celticism in contemporary Europe (see Gardell 2003) raises some interesting questions about the use of such symbols, particularly in conjunction with Captain Euro’s focus on paganism. A survey of the glossary of Captain Euro finds that nearly half of the entries are related to pagan heroes or gods, including entries for Thor, Avagddu, Ceridwen, Elphin, Agamemnon, Cronos, and Gaia. Europe’s “Christian” heritage, so vociferously debated in advance of the drafting of the Treaty of Lisbon, remains absent from Captain Euro, with paganism seeming to function as natural default faith for the Continent. Add to this the additional paradox that modern European transnational is rooted in Franco-Germanic-Italian Christian Democratic collaboration to move beyond the divisive “power politics” of the past (see Taras 2009), and the intellectual disconnect becomes even more acute. The literal triangulation of Europe through the use of three peninsulas—Iberian, Balkan, and Scandinavian—should not be overlooked; in fact, it can be argued that geography itself acts like a character in the Captain Euro comics, presented as an organic, cohesive force that keeps the team bonded even when they are physically separated. Geopolitical imaginaries in Captain Euro play up fears of otherness as well. Dittmer (2005) describes the use of imagery of to construct scripted geographies of privilege (Figure 3), i.e., those pieces of territory worth defending. Captain Euro engages in such scripting by stoking long-simmering European fears of the proximate, yet alien presence of Turkey as a Muslim bridgehead to Europe. As Murray Pratt states, “The first frame of the ‘Intro’ section of Captain Euro shows ‘the rest of the world’ in clouds, the sun shining on Europe, and—no joke—storm clouds brewing over Turkey” (Pratt 2005, 12).

Figure 3 A Brussels-centric Europe with Russia and Turkey in a shadow- draped periphery. ©Corporate Vision Strategists 2010. (used with permission) 10 Aether: The Journal of Media Geography • Fall 2012

Here, we see an unambiguous othering of “non-European” space, as Turkey is posited as the place from which danger springs, whether in the form of unwanted migrants, pandemics, or anti-European sentiment, while Europe proper becomes an “exalted spatial entity” through a jaundiced geopolitical optic (see Yorgason and Chen 2008). Despite its proximity to Turkey and long common history with the geographic space of Anatolia, Greece is carefully marked with this exaltation through its glossary entry which reads: “Classical Greek culture was probably the greatest formative influence in the development of European civilization” (De Santis 2011b). Captain Euro’s second adventure, “The Grand Canal,” opens at the hero’s secret headquarters, the Atomium building in Brussels. Conceived by the architect André Waterkeyn, this curious structure is geographically evocative for two reasons: its location in the purported “Capital of Europe,” i.e., the site of many of the European Union institutions, and its modernist, scientific mien. Built for the 1958 World’s Fair and renovated in 2006, the edifice resembles a unit cell of an iron crystal standing 100 meters tall and measuring 20 meters in diameter. This construct exemplifies a dynamic yet permanent relation among indivisible units, thus providing a prognosticatory fillip to idea of the EU as a “network polity and space of connection, movement, and interdependence” (Bachmann and Sidaway 2008, 94). According to the Atomium web site, the structure serves as a “seminal totem in the Brussels skyline; neither tower, nor pyramid, a little bit cubic, a little bit spherical, half-way between sculpture and architecture, a relic of the past with a determinedly futuristic look…the Atomium is, at once, an object, a place, a space, a Utopia and the only symbol of its kind in the world which eludes any kind of classification” (Atomium 2010). Unabashed in their declaration of the importance of the construct’s role in European identity, the site’s authors aver that the Atomium is dedicated to “cultural programming,” specifically engaging its visitors in the debate over “What kind of future do we want for tomorrow?” (Atomium 2010). With its reference to Atomium, Captain Euro makes the reader aware of the duplicitous power of the atom, suggesting that, unlike the Americans and Soviets whose nuclear pursuits turned Trinity, Nagasaki, and Semipalatinsk into irradiated nightmares, the European atomic ideal remains utopian, peaceful and progressive. While alluring, this expedient myth requires the “historical forgetting” (see Pettman 1996) of Mururoa, Maralinga, Ekker, and other geographically distant (and non-European) tests sites for the British and French nuclear programs. After showcasing the Atomium, Europa (née Donna Eden) convinces Captain Euro that he needs a break from defending the Union and the two head off to “La Serenissima,” i.e., Venice, for carnival. As the Twelve Stars’ team leaders—now decked out in “costumes” that rather resemble those of European Union police officers—tour the city’s museums, they fail to notice the presence of the nefarious Dr. D. Vider, who villainously declares his intentions for “cultural sabotage” (De Santis 2010d). His plan involves draining Venice’s canals, thus depriving the “City of Water” of its most Saunders • The Short Life and Slow Death of Captain Euro 11

characteristic attribute. Venetians, within moments of the plan’s implementation, are brought to the edge of riot for fear of looming unemployment. While the Twelve Stars team—including a new character, Marcus—is busy solving the problem of the canals, Dr. D. Vider’s “Baddies” set about stealing a van Gogh painting and otherwise threatening European culture. After discovering the ruse, the team defeats Mala and the newly introduced villains: Ninot, a dwarf ventriloquist, and the twin contortionists, Castor and Pollux. The second and final episode ends with Ninot sitting in the sewers of Venice, covered in feces.

Wanted: Citizens of Europe (No Nomads Need Apply) Both issues of Captain Euro are rife with essentialist cultural and ethnic stereotypes. In “The Origins,” Andros’ traveling companions include a Bavarian tourist sporting nineteenth-century mountaineer’s garb including a feathered cap (Figure 4) , while a Midwestern American woman ponders if the “folks back home” would even know the meaning of the word “polyglot” (De Santis 2010c). In “The Grand Canal,” a portly Japanese calls his wife “my butterfly” and peppers his conversations with the interjection “ah so” (De Santis 2010c). More subtly offensive, however, is the treatment of the Italians, who are rendered as superstitious, overly emotional, and dense (Figure 5): in one instance, a Venetian sillily thinks a closed umbrella is a gun. The codified and exaggerated renderings of the classic national “types” evident in Captain Euro are reminiscent of the Astérix le Gaulois comics (1959-2009). According to Jonathan Wylie, when Astérix leaves his “irreducible” Gallo-Roman village, he finds himself “among Britons who eat boiled boar with mint sauce (washing it down with warm brew), Helvetians fond of clean floors and melted cheese… Spaniards by turns effusive and disdainful, Goths in demented helmets, [and] burly Vinland-bound

Figure 4 An anachronistic depiction of a German tourist in a traditional Tirol hat. ©Corporate Vision Strategists 2010. (used with permission) 12 Aether: The Journal of Media Geography • Fall 2012

Figure 5 A paternalistic Captain Euro tries to calm hysterical Italians in stereotypical attire. ©Corporate Vision Strategists 2010. (used with permission)

Vikings all of whose o’s are ø’s and a’s are å’s’ (1979, 797). For Astérix, such stereotyping served the constituent national narrative of the Fifth Republic, producing a sublime critique of foreigners in even-numbered issues and a sardonic veneration of the Gallic character in odd-numbered issues. However, such ethnographic scripting subverts the stated mission of Captain Euro, as it perpetuates the constructed quiddities of each European nationality rather than celebrating Europe’s purported postnational hybridity. Oom-pah band Germans and Italians in straw gondolier hats annunciate an unchanging Europe, one where Europeans conceived and lived space as divided between the “races.” While this scripting might prompt some to read in a message of “unity through diversity,” Captain Euro’s paternalism suggests that these unreconstructed “Europeans” are underdeveloped remnants of an earlier time and must be taught how to behave “properly” (thus providing further evidence of Captain Euro’s pedagogical mission). The most egregious perpetuations of stereotypes are evident in the makeup of Captain Euro’s foes, the so-called “Baddies.” The reader learns that Dr. D. Vider assembled his dividex team through the acquisition of the Global Touring Circus. The allusion to Roma (Gypsies) is unmistakable as this marginalized people have long been associated with traveling circuses in the Western mind. Officially, Twelve Stars Communications denied that Captain Euro’s “circus folk” are Gypsies, stating simply they are “nomads” (Servin and Vamos 2000). The use of the term “nomads” is, on its face, curious given the geopolitical nature of contemporary Europe, where a single currency and the Schengen Agreement support continent-wide mobility for EU citizens. According to one commentator, “[I]t remains unclear just what Captain Euro is promoting. A single currency? Sure. But with his strong jaw and clean-cut morals, there is something more. Is Captain Euro a proponent of fortress Europe, an us-and-them world, secure for the haves and inaccessible to the have-nots? Asylum-seekers, take note” Saunders • The Short Life and Slow Death of Captain Euro 13

(Glaister 1999). The swarthy complexions of all the villains prompted criticisms of the strip as racist, especially when contrasted against the predominately Aryan attributes of the Twelve Stars team. The setting of the first story, “Origins,” in Nordic Europe can easily be read as a textual allusion to late-nineteenth century racial theory and the “authentic Europeanness” of the region’s population, as the Baltic Rim is home to both the world’s highest concentration of light–haired and light-eyed peoples. By contrast, the figuration of the hook-nosed financier David Viderius (Dr. D. Vider) as the enemy of a united Europe has led others to liken Captain Euro to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ vilification of Jewish bankers in interwar Germany (Prest 1998). Reacting to the stark presentations of good and evil in ethnic form, the Ye s Me n , a group of culture jamming satirists who have targeted Captain Euro and Twelve Stars in their activist high jinks, state: “Unlike Captain America, who was created to hurt Hitler, Captain Euro was created to help him—or at least to leverage some of his nasty racist ideas” (Bichlbaum and Bonanno 2006). The anti-fascist British periodicalSearchlight summed it up nicely: “The enemies of white European civilization are a bunch of criminals, clearly from the Middle East or Asia and southern Europe, and including a gnome-like figure that looks like it has crept off the pages of Grimm’s anti-Semitic fairy tales” Yorkshire( Post 1998). The dividex team—though their Balkanesque infighting, geographic liminality and visible “otherness”—represent shadowy alter-egos to the Twelve Stars team who are ever loyal, uncomplicated, and mainstream. Historically, the use of racial and ethnic imaging in comics has historically promoted “deceptively soothing stereotypes…lurking behind veneers of diversity” (Singer 2002, 110). As Marc Singer states, “Comic books, and particularly the dominant genre of superhero comic books, have proven fertile ground for stereotypical depictions of race. Comics rely upon visually codified representations in which characters are continually reduced to their appearances, and this reductionism is especially prevalent in superhero comics, whose characters are wholly externalized into their costumes and aliases” (Singer 2002, 107). As a medium, comics are particularly suited to the development and maintenance of a pristine and idealized culture and people. Correspondingly, the construction of “others,” whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and reinterpretation of their so-called “differences,” finds fertile ground in the textual-visual symbiosis of sequential art. As alluded to above, it is paradoxical that Captain Euro uses the optic of non-territorial minorities—namely, Jews and Gypsies—to create threats to “Europeanness,” since the postmodern European project is itself built on mobility and cosmopolitanism. Roma and Jews are considered to be exemplars of the Council of Europe definition of “non-territorial minorities” who have been granted special cultural and linguistic rights. These groups are categorically distinct from “regional minorities” (Welsh, Sámi, Basques, etc.) and “immigrant minorities” (Arabs, Turks, South Asians, etc.). As a result, Captain Euro’s “temporal othering” (Said 1993, 131) of “nomads,” which 14 Aether: The Journal of Media Geography • Fall 2012 employs modern, rather than postmodern, threats to the nation-state, is anachronistic and ultimately self-defeating in the context of a deterritorialized European construct. Twelve Stars chairman Eduardo De Santis, however, defends the symbology of the “Baddies,” claiming they represent the centuries-old concept of the “divider” evident in the folkloric traditions of Europe, Asia, and the Americas. For De Santis, the divider of modern-day Europe lies within the consciousness of Europeans themselves, contesting “all progress, all ideas, [and] the future” (Servin and Vamos 2000). To do battle with this insidious influence, “The EU needs a man, a symbol of the countries of Europe [speaking] in one voice: Captain Euro” (Servin and Vamos 2000). But how to represent Europe with one voice? De Santis’ vision is clearly forged in whiteness, a trait which no longer accurately represents Britain or most other Western European nations. According to Diez, “Whatever Europe is, it is certainly diverse, and some have indeed taken this diversity to be at the very core of its identity. At the same time, this diversity makes it rather difficult to pitch ‘Europe’ against other international ‘identities’” (Diez 2004, 319). Captain Euro falls flat on this account. The Twelve Stars team is sadly lacking in diversity, save for a rarely used character, Marcus, whose “blackness” is negated by his android-like demeanor. His profile on the Captain Euro web site reads: Some members of the team think that, so intense is his relationship with technology, Marcus sometimes resembles an automaton of his own invention. It is certainly true that he is not ruled by regular sleep patterns. With fanatical professional absorption, he often works round the clock without even a break to eat (De Santis 2010e).

Though probably inadvertently, Twelve Stars fashioned the one non-white member of the team as a veritable slave, drudging up the ghosts of Europe’s historical role in the Atlantic trade in human bondage. As a consequence of this unfortunate construction of European whiteness, Captain Euro presents hidebound representations of good and evil reminiscent of 1950s comics where the hero “was always a white-skinned ‘Nordic’ type, while villains were black, brown, or yellow or possessed long noses and foreign accents” (Wright 2003, 159- 60). The indistinguishable nature of Twelve Stars Euro Team is compounded by their nearly identical blue-and-white uniforms, their bland personalities and unquestioned dedication to the “mission.” Unfortunately for its creators (and the EU), Captain Euro failed to understand the zeitgeist of the young Europeans to which they are catering. The current generation of Europeans are exceptionally individualistic and possess complex, multi-layered identities, thus rendering them polar opposites of Euro, Europa, and the other “Goodies.”

Euro-Didactics: Branding Europe, Branded Europeans While De Santis’ commitment to establishing a “single voice” for Europe is commendable in a marketing executive, it is Captain Euro’s didactic ethos that proves to be the character’s Saunders • The Short Life and Slow Death of Captain Euro 15

Achilles heel. In the milieu of comic book fantasy, the superhero’s job is to maintain the status quo, while the villain is eternally attempting to remake the world. “Superheroes are not called upon to act as the protagonists of individual plots. They function essentially as antagonists, foils for the true star of each story, the villain” (Reynolds 1994, 51). As a champion of change (i.e., the Europeanization of Europe), Captain Euro creates a crisis of cognitive dissonance. Subconsciously, the reader is perplexed by the transposition of “good” and “evil” as the former equals change, while the latter is represented by stasis. Magneto (X-Men), Ra’s al Ghul (Batman) and Ozymandias (Watchme n) are all marked as villains in their respective comic universes; however, each one embraces a heuristic messianism aimed at changing the world for the better, at least as they perceive it. This systemic structure is quite evident in the reimagining of Superman as a Soviet, rather than American, superhero in Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son (2003). The popular miniseries which weas reprinted as a graphic novel supposes an alternative reality where an infant Kal-El (the future Superman) lands in Soviet Ukraine rather than Smallville, Kansas. In this series, Superman’s uniform is adorned with a stylized, red hammer-and- sickle, thus making him an exemplar of the “national superhero,” albeit Soviet—rather than American—in form. In the comic, Superman assumes a normative mission, i.e., “champion of the common worker who fights a never-ending battle for Stalin, socialism, and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact” (Millar 2003, 13), and in his struggle to change the world, he ultimately emerges as the inevitable protagonist in the story arc. This results in Superman being cast as the villain, while a rebranded Lex Luthor, Superman’s longtime nemesis, acts to preserve what is left of democracy and the “American way.” An even more obvious example of this phenomenon is Captain America’s occasional enemy, Flag Smasher, who bears a remarkable similarity to Captain Euro. Flag Smasher, who debuted in Captain America #312 (December 1985), is the scion of wealthy Swiss banking family whose father went into “world politics.” After his father’s death, Flag Smasher decided to use his family fortune to end the destructive nationalist obsessions of those who only “care about the petty little countries of their birth” (Gruenwald and Neary 1985, 11). Inevitably, Flag Smasher does battle with Captain America, America’s “greatest living national symbol” (Dougall 2006, 99), at a patriot rally, where he declares: I am against the very concept of countries! I believe all men are brother, sprung from the same primal parent. Tribalism, ethnicism, nationalism— these are all latter-day concepts that in our nuclear-powered world have become outmoded and dangerous…. If we were to erase national boundaries and accept the essential unity of mankind, the world would be a better place! (Gruenwald and Neary 1985, 18).

Not surprisingly given the time period, he is attacked as “Commie” by the Americans gathered at the rally. To which, he defends his actions stating: “I hate what the Soviet Union stands for as much as I hate what America stands for!” (Gruenwald and Neary 16 Aether: The Journal of Media Geography • Fall 2012

1985, 18). After a scuffle with Captain America, he is apprehended. Just like Captain Euro, Flag Smasher is the polyglot son of a European diplomat whose life is changed by his father’s violent death at the hands of divisive elements within global society. And while Flag Smasher uses the “universal language of violence” (Gruenwald and Neary 1985, 12) as opposed to soft power-wielding Captain Euro, the two have strikingly similar goals for future of the world and can be positioned in diametric opposition to Captain America, the flag-draped defender of legitimacy of the nation, state, and Westphalian international system (see Dittmer 2007). In effect,Captain Euro’s job is to brand Europe for a new generation of Europeans who do not live in the shadow of either renewed Franco-German hostilities or the threat of invasion by the Warsaw Pact. The branding effort associated with Captain Euro’s genesis is explicit. Nicolas De Santis, Captain Euro’s creator, spent more than a year in the employ of the European Parliament researching European identity only to determine it is absent (Frank 1998). After months of wrangling with the Parliament about an appropriate mascot that would affect the right imagery for the European brand, De Santis conceived of Captain Euro (initially, Twelve Stars toyed with the notion of using an animal to represent the European Union, but found that nearly every possible option had been taken with the exception of the cow). Hoping to replicate the success of the perennial comic book superhero Captain America, Twelve Stars created Captain Euro to craft a novel public memory for young Europeans. Defending his brainchild, Nicholas De Santis states:

The concept of Europe is too complicated. It’s too big, there’s too many institutions, too many dates, too many things going on. The public cannot follow this. We have made it into a grassroots, lighthearted concept that people can finally understand…. We want to be a lighthearted, commercial, and entertaining approach to Europe. The people are rejecting these approaches of political discussion. They’re not interested. It’s boring. Making Europe fun and interesting—that’s our objective (Servin and Vamos 2000).

Twelve Stars Communications—a brand management agency whose client list includes Philip Morris and Heineken—was forced from the onset to provide a narrative for the emergent European “nation.” Captain Euro, like John Bull, Uncle Sam, and other anthropomorphized national symbols, is meant to bring into focus the spirit of a people while concurrently affecting particular images to be associated with that people. But what sort of script can simultaneously satisfy the Scot, the Sicilian and the Silesian? Confident in its success in marketing global products, Twelve Stars was unfazed by the challenges presented by this paradox. However, national or state branding is a more sensitive issue than branding a pair of trainers, a beer, or a bag of crisps. Certainly, the European Union has been a source of attraction based on its successful integration which has brought about peace and prosperity, creating what some have termed a “postmodern paradise” (Kagan 2004) that exerts a “stabilizing Saunders • The Short Life and Slow Death of Captain Euro 17 influence on the international system” (Bachmann and Sidaway 2008, 97). In fact, the “magnetic allure” of Europe is so strong that it “compels countries to rewrite their laws and constitutions to meet European standards” (Khanna 2004, 68). Echoing this sentiment, nation branding specialist J. E. Peterson states:

Perhaps no example is more striking than that of the European Union (EU), an artificial creation that relies upon extensive branding to underpin its legitimacy. The EU has achieved recognition as a distinct entity with its own logo, the circle of stars on a blue background, and has fostered the term “euro” to apply to nearly everything from song contests (“Eurovision”) to the rail connection of Britain with mainland Europe (“Eurostar”) to even a common currency. The European Union proclaims to its clientele that buying its product—in this case, belonging—represents security and sophistication, as well as a sense of self and belonging (Peterson 2006, 746).

Despite the positive perception of “Brand Europe” abroad, there has clearly been a communications breakdown when it comes to branding “Europeanness” at home, particularly among the youth of Britain and the Continent. Peter van Ham argues that Europe has failed to “find a new, post-modernraison d’être which inspires is own populace and appeals to the wider world as well” (2005, 122). This partially stems from the lack of a potent or even generally agreed upon purpose or identity within Europe. In the words of Ray Taras, “Despite national trends, Europe has yet to embrace supranationalism, which challenges the raison d’être of the nation-state, while borrowing and expanding on its ideology, Euronationalism is an example of feeble supranationalism that seeks to be inclusionary and, simultaneously, territorially bounded” (2009, 71). Euronationalism thus represents a “non-national form” of nationalism, which values reflexivity and engages in self-critique (Taras 2009, 71). As a result of the historically bureaucratic nature of the EU’s branding efforts, which focus on hard data and statistics, not the alluring intangibles that are so important in the beginning of any romance, Euronationalism possesses neither the undying magnetism of a hoary mythomoteur nor the satisfying emotional tug of a more recent quickening of the nation. European branding efforts have produced lackluster results because the focus has been on “knowing the EU” rather than “loving it” (van Ham 2005, 123). Nation branding guru Simon Anholt states, “For young people especially, Europe is undergoing something of an identity crisis. It would certainly be most convenient if Europe suddenly found itself able to unite under a single slogan or a single logo” (Anholt 2009, 109). Thus far, the blue and yellow flag has not achieved this outcome, at least among the original twelve members of the Union (though new and aspirant members of the EU do tend to revere the symbolism of the EU flag). Given the weakness of internal symbolic branding in the EU, the most effective approach has thus far been the utopian-tinged efforts at creating a Homo Sapiens Europæus, or a lifelong European learning citizen, who, through proper instruction, will come to identify with Europe first and above all other identity anchors (Kuhn 18 Aether: The Journal of Media Geography • Fall 2012 and Sultana 2006). This so-called “European dimension” recognizes the ineffectuality of attempts to force Europeanness down the throats of Germans, French and other nationalities in the lead up to Maastricht. Given the “bleakness of institutional governance without a corresponding demos,” tuition in the rights and responsibility of citizens in Europe, rather than as European citizens, has emerged as a plausible tool for buttressing European identity among young people (Field and Murphy 2006, 70). Such efforts are most effective when carefully constructed against the global neo- liberal “other,” i.e., Americans and Japanese, rather than the local ethno-religious other, i.e., immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, as well as their descendents. With its archaic presentation of the “threats” to Europe, the all-encompassing failure of Captain Euro is exposed once again. Clearly, De Santis set out to instruct Anglophone youth on the merits of Europeanization; however, as a brand marketer, he failed to understand that a little Europeanness goes a long way and ultimately made a mockery of the very cause he sought to champion.

Conclusion Dating the phenomenon to its most incipient form, the European project is now more than two millennia old. Each successive pan-European enterprise has had its apotheosis, one which simultaneously evinced Europe’s common identity, as well as the promise of something greater. During the classical period, the Roman legionnaire served as the physical representation of Pax Romana. In medieval Christendom, the peripatetic monk embodied the spirit of a continent united by faith and able to exchange ideas through the transnational medium of Latin. The multi-talented “Renaissance Man” functioned as the human indicia of a civilization recovering its Greco-Roman heritage from the shadows of the “Dark Ages.” In each case, these paragons of Europeanness possessed a translocal identity, an (often inchoate) belief in the commonality of all Europeans (though, of course, a certain pecking order existed among these peoples), and a commitment to the contemporary mission civilatrice. Captain Euro is a latter-day embodiment of this tradition, though more self-cognizant of his “European” mission and didactic in approach than previous iterations of this paragon. Despite the pitfalls associated with teaching European youth how to be European, Twelve Stars launched headfirst into the debate on the expanded European Union with Captain Euro. As a comic book hero, Captain Euro must maintain the status quo and not attempt to remake the world. As a representative of contemporary Europe, he and his team must represent the ethno-religious diversity of contemporary Europe’s citizenry, not project a revisionist phantasm of the lost “purity” of the past. As an agent of the open, tolerant, and intercultural “European dimension,” Captain Euro must inculcate the values of citizenship in Europe rather than demand that citizens act as Europeans. As a flagged, popular cultural icon, Captain Euro is tasked with linking the “abstract body politic of the nation with the body of the hero in the imaginations of young reader” (Dittmer Saunders • The Short Life and Slow Death of Captain Euro 19

2008, 72). On all accounts, Captain Euro failed in his mission, primarily due to the fact the project was marked as overtly didactic in nature. While comic books, like all forms of popular culture, are a “child of propaganda,” to be successful, that is, to produce a preferred reading, any comic must avoid being seen as propaganda (Duncan and Smith 2009, 248-49). Consequently, the costumed crusader for Europeanness represents little more than a footnote in the history of the European project. Yet, like many good footnotes, Captain Euro continues to serve the intrepid scholar, as evidenced by renewed interest in him among Eurosceptics, evidenced by one British MP’s recent suggestion that seeking Captain Euro’s help with the Eurozone mess is more advisable than loaning Greece more money (see Carswell 2011). Despite its failings, the Captain Euro project represents a denotive and provocative example of contrived popular geopolitics and “propaganda” mythmaking, and one with much to teach social scientists and scholars of nationalism. As we have seen, Twelve Stars’ Captain Euro represents an overt attempt at creating identity through the medium of Flash comics. In the first part of the paper, I have argued that national or “flagged” superheroes once represented extremely effective tools for shaping geographic imaginaries of spaces and nations. However, socio-cultural changes associated with Western societies have undermined their pedagogical capacities in recent decades. Undeterred by this paradigm shift, Nicholas De Santis attempted to use a costumed superhero to represent the values and aspirations of a united Europe. However, the comic’s clumsy propaganda and the unfortunate use of ethnic stereotypes ultimately negated the very project Twelve Stars Communications sought to undertake. In the end, Captain Euro was hoisted on its own petard, as the images—geographic and ethnographic—conjured up a Europe more reminiscent of the internecine interwar era rather than evoking the postmodern paradise that post-Maastricht Europe intended to become. It remains to be seen if Captain Euro, if he does indeed return to serve the EU as De Santis promises, will be rebranded for the real Europe.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Joel Vessels for introducing me to the “Captain” and for his thoughtful critique of this project from start to finish. I also wish to thank Jason Dittmer and the anonymous referees of this essay and the editors of Aether for their comments and suggestions.

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