NYU Press Chapter Title: Epilogue: Marvelous Corpse Book Title: The New Mutants Book Subtitle: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics Book Author(s): RAMZI FAWAZ Published by: NYU Press. (2016) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15zc697.13 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms NYU Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The New Mutants This content downloaded from 128.148.254.57 on Thu, 13 Apr 2017 19:23:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Epilogue: Marvelous Corpse Under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right? What does the implementation of such a right tell us about the person who is thus put to death and about the relation of enmity that sets that person against his or her murderer? . Imagining politics as a form of war, we must ask: what place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power? —achille mbembe, “Necropolitics” (2003) Sharon Carter: “The rule of law is what this country is founded on.” Captain America: “No . it was founded on breaking the law. Because the law was wrong. The Registration Act is another step toward government control. And, while I love my country, I don’t trust many politicians. Not when they’re having their strings pulled by corporate donors. And not when they’re willing to trade freedom for security. ‘Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it.’” Sharon Carter: “Okay, how about this one—‘To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like giving medicine to the dead.’” —captain america #22 (January 2007) In April 2007 Captain America died. Where little more than a decade ear- lier Superman died a martyr to the human race, now the nation’s ultimate patriot would die a traitor to his country, assassinated on the steps of a New York City courthouse. Captain America’s patriotic legacy would be eclipsed by his support of the Superhuman Liberation Front against the regulatory powers of the U.S. government.1 In the months leading up to his demise, a civil war between Marvel Comics’ greatest heroes would place Captain America on the wrong side of the law with fatal results, fight- ing against a superhuman Registration Act requiring all masked super- heroes to list their identities with the government, becoming a new arm of the security state. In the early 1990s the death of Superman unfolded a story about the changing contours of national citizenship by projecting an expanded vision of who might legitimately count as part of the national “circle of we,” including racial and class minorities, youth, immigrants, and even yet-to-be-realized cyborgs. In the midst of a war on terror, the death of Captain America offered a scathing critique of the radical narrowing of This content downloaded from 128.148.254.57 on Thu, 13 Apr 2017 19:23:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 270 /epilogue citizenship to the mere exercise of state power in the years following 9/11. That Captain America, the paragon of citizenship, would die as a result of exercising his democratic right to dissent was an irony few could miss. Yet where DC’s controversial publicity stunt in killing its banner superhero had garnered widespread hostility for its glaring opportun- ism, Cap’s death was treated as a serious cultural critique of the war on terror and the dramatic undercutting of American civil liberties in the twenty-first century. Financially secure, Marvel Comics did not need to kill Captain America to boost comic book sales; rather the decision appeared to be an attempt to use the heightened cultural capital of the company as an opportunity to develop a genuine dialogue about the deleterious effects of American nationalism. The visual advertising for the story was telling in this respect. In its second printing the cover to Captain America #25 featured Cap bleeding out on the steps of the court- house, his body riddled with bullets while his colleague and lover Sharon Carter cradles his head (plate 27). They are surrounded by the dropped protest signs of the crowds who had only minutes before been demand- ing either his death or his release. The picture is framed by a white border with the words “Captain America: The Death of the Dream,” printed at the top against a folded American flag in an upside-down triangle. On the back cover a white page features this triangle insignia with the words “Where were you when Captain America died?” The cover links Captain America’s death to national public culture in at least two ways. First, it invokes the image of empty or hollow protest in the face of a violent security state. The front image displays Cap sur- rounded by the kind of dissent he believed American political culture should foster—indexed by the protest signs that appear at the edges of the frame—yet his dead body speaks to the evacuation of political mean- ing from these gestures of protest, less arguments for social change than battles over ownership of Cap’s symbolic history. At the same time, by placing Cap’s dying body on the steps of a New York City courthouse, the creators underscored the irony that the very institutions meant to pro- tect citizens and foster justice under the law had become sites of political violence and oppression. Second, the front cover symbolically links Cap- tain America’s death to that of another national icon, John F. Kennedy, and the back cover invokes the question most commonly associated with the president’s assassination: “Where were you when JFK died?” The repeated visual reference to the folded American flag, a traditional icon at the funerals of public officials and military personnel, associates Captain America with the highest levels of national service. This content downloaded from 128.148.254.57 on Thu, 13 Apr 2017 19:23:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms epilogue / 271 If JFK’s passing signaled the death of one kind of American dream—a vision of liberal progress defined by racial equality, economic prosperity, and political consensus projected by Kennedy’s New Frontier campaign in the early 1960s—Captain America’s demise signaled the death of a related dream, that of a democratic public life where dissent could galvanize social transformation. The meaning of Captain America’s death, however, was not limited merely to the unjust murder of a freedom fighter; the broader narrative surrounding his assassination unfolded an elaborate story about government corruption at the highest levels of power that threatens to undermine the political freedom of every American citizen. In the events leading up to Marvel’s civil war, Captain America traces a vast conspiracy orchestrated by his archnemesis, the Red Skull, to bring about the ruin of the United States. This conspiracy is linked to Kronas, a transnational cor- poration, and its global affiliates, all culled from former cold war alliances among a network of terrorist organizations, bribed politicians, and cor- rupt scientists. In this way the creative producers positioned Cap’s body as one node within a locus of points that collectively reveal a secret national history tying global capital, cold war political intrigue, and government corruption to the geopolitical realities of the post-9/11 period. In the deaths of Superman and Captain America we can identify a fig- ure that has propelled the American superhero into the new millennium, a marvelous corpse that unravels the national fantasies that attach to its previously vital skin, pointing us toward unsettled national identities, irreconcilable histories of state and corporate violence, and the visual politics that struggle to articulate them. Since the early 1990s the highly publicized deaths of iconic heroes like Superman and Captain America have garnered passionate responses from both non-comics-reading audiences and fans who have mourned the passing of these characters as symbolic of the loss of American political idealism. More important, the deaths of these iconic figures gained their cultural meaning alongside a broader trend in superhero comics to depict superhumans as perpetu- ally threatened by mass extinction, genocide, and hostile conflict with humankind. In the 1990s and 2000s the cosmopolitan world-making projects celebrated by superhero comics after World War II have been increasingly depicted as running up against the limits of postnational tolerance. I want to suggest that the contemporary obsession with images of the superheroic body subjected to physical torture or death is intimately related to public perceptions of citizenship as a bankrupt cat- egory of political life and the failure of postwar human rights discourse to prevent mass suffering and global violence. This content downloaded from 128.148.254.57 on Thu, 13 Apr 2017 19:23:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 272 /epilogue Simultaneously the narrative profusion of “crisis” events in postmil- lennial superhero comics symbolizes the full absorption of the comic book industry into the workings of neoliberal capital.