The Function of the Superhero
Or, How to stage a nightmare as an opportunity for personal growth
Superheroes have undoubtedly demonstrated their potential for organic contribution of positive cultural value in contemporary society as a secular equivalent to the fables, myths, fairytales, parables, folklore, and other traditional narratives that, in historical societies, served a similar function of contributing to personal and societal development. Just as those traditional narratives conveyed moral lessons in the past, superheroes’ struggles with complex choices and ethical dilemmas communicate moral values to their readers, and initiate critical discussions about right and wrong. Their journeys of self-discovery mirror the ancient function of myth in offering audiences a model through which the individual can relate to the world, while at the same time demonstrating that courage and perseverance can enable the individual to triumph despite overwhelming odds. Such tales help inspire readers to confront their own difficulties (and those of society) with determination—even while seeming only to provide escapism.
Perhaps it’s because of this—because of the importance I ascribe to stories in reference to which people both craft their own identities and interpret our shared world—that the niche controversy of Comicsgate became such a hobby horse for me. As frequent readers have seen, however, it didn’t take long for that amusement to develop into a genuine concern about social engineering in the arts and entertainment and its deleterious effects on contemporary culture, undermining (in the case of comic books) the potential for the organic positive impact of the superhero genre.
But certainly the importance I ascribe to stories accounts for why I’ve seeded the outline of a narrative into the captions for some of the AI-generated images with which I’ve decorated Radio Free Pizza’s dispatches.
As best I can tell, “Pizza-Man” delivers meals among unhappy victims of American duopoly, all of them dressed in ragged camouflage as they wander one of many U.S. cities decaying after decades of austerity and neglect. On the balcony of a luxury penthouse above them, “the Corporatarchs” of the capital order drink cocktails while devising economic policies that maintain structural imbalances for their own profit even as they impoverish the masses. These technocrats employ operators from “the Alphabet Agency” to provoke the super-powered “Woke Folks” into transforming into hulking juggernauts of outrage who upend civil society and whose outbursts prevent the unhappy masses from uniting to overthrow their unelected overlords. Meanwhile, third-world workers are chained to the assembly line on a factory floor as they manufacture identities for first-world consumers to purchase and discard with abandon, though in fact these products fuel the aforementioned outbursts. Additional characters include the humanoid “Mystery Woman” assembled from modular components—perhaps, indeed, from those same products1—and “the Ubiquitous Communist” with an ideology so dangerous that the capital order redefines it as synonymous with its historical antonyms to prevent him from advocating for it2.
Makes perfect sense to me! Though if I told anyone that story and described it as an allegory for modern American society, they might call it a long reach. It’s silly, of course, and I can’t claim to have planned that story out in any fashion. Instead, I generated each image ad hoc, according to whatever “necessity” I perceived at the time to include a visual complement at a given point in the text. (Remember of course that I said I’ve “decorated” these dispatches with them, with everything that word implies about their necessity.)
The above narrative’s cohesion—such as it is—arises naturally enough. Though naming conventions imply he’s a superhero, Pizza-Man (an apparent self-insert, though I don’t deliver pizzas nor fantasize about it) doesn’t perform too many heroic acts, or do much of anything besides cook food and deliver it: in fact, I believe the only other thing he’s done so far is stand off against the Woke Folks while operators from the Alphabet Agency observe that confrontation. (I must have been afraid of getting canceled or something, to imagine that some progressive activist might come for me.) But that’s at least enough to infer—since every hero needs a villain—that Pizza-Man’s rogues’ gallery comprises the Woke Folks, the Alphabet Agency that provokes them, and the Corporatarchs who engineered their abusive relationship.
Therefore, I present that narrative as an example of how superhero stories fulfill the same function as the ancient fable: Pizza-Man’s relationship to society’s difficulties (as symbolized in his rogues’ gallery) both stages the modern context of working-class life under late-stage American capitalism, and provides a bare-bones template with which readers can take their own account of how they themselves relate to the forces staged in that narrative.
Of course, the allegory isn’t a perfect match to proven reality. As I recall, I couldn’t irrefutably demonstrate that the U.S. intelligence community (symbolized in the Alphabet Agency) has any links to the organizations and public figures that have advocated in the last decade for social justice within the framework of identity politics (symbolized in the Woke Folks); neither do I think I’ve yet investigated whether or not the personalities of a supranational predator class imposing a neoliberal technocratic ideology (symbolized in the Corporatarchs) have any command over intelligence agencies.
That’s all to say I’d do well to avoid painting everything with the same brush. It’s absurd to imagine that, for example, some board of authoritarian plutocrats issued a secret edict informing broadcast anchors, liberal politicians, and ChatGPT programmers of an updated definition for “woman” with the specific intent of redirecting the energies of progressive reformists away from economic populism. Certainly, one shouldn’t mistake the allegory for a clinical account: and despite what the narrative available in these captions may imply, I know of no intelligence agency operating any cyber command to enforce a standardized language or prevent the use of a minor dialect with the explicit goal of limiting public discourse.3
Nonetheless, the setting and characters of the allegorical narrative communicate both the tensions between the individual and society, and those between the forces shaping that society. Thus, the narrative invites its audience to critically consider them all, both in isolation and in concert. Whatever imperfections a given allegory might have, comprehending and reflecting critically on its narrative still serves a useful purpose.
To further explore that function of the narrative—to explore, that is, how the staging of those tensions within a story invites its audience to critically evaluate the figures symbolized within it—and how this function operates within the superhero genre, I’ll turn to a constructionist model of ethics known as the theory of dyadic morality.
Interestingly, my introduction to the theory comes with a distant connection to one event from the past decade that galvanized some of the loudest demands for social justice from the American public: the 2020 murder of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. The following year, while covering the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, a director for a local broadcast station spoke to me under condition of anonymity—meaning, the director didn’t want to talk about it on Better Futures—on what was then, I suppose, an event controversial enough to warrant concern about reprisals for speaking one’s mind. Off the record, that director suggested that the initial public outcry over Floyd’s murder and the later outcome of Chauvin’s trial both stemmed from the success of the news media (in the case of the former) and of state prosecutors (in the case of the latter) in leveraging narrative frames to encourage a particular moral judgment.
For more information, that director referred me to “The Theory of Dyadic Morality: Reinventing Moral Judgment by Redefining Harm” (2017) by Chelsea Schein and Kurt Gray. In their analysis, the proper understanding of harm as “an intuitively perceived continuum” implies that “acts are condemned [in proportion] to three elements: norm violations, negative affect, and—importantly—perceived harm. This harm is dyadic, involving an intentional agent causing damage to a vulnerable patient.”
In brief, their research finds that moral judgment arises from the intuitive perception of harm that one person imposes on another as the result of an act that both violates a norm and provokes a negative emotional response in the observer. (Given how the first years of this decade involved the coordinated efforts of the so-called liberal democracies to coerce their populations into consenting in mass to experimental medical treatments, I think it’s worth noting their use of the word “patient” for the party who suffered harm at the hands of agents who intended to violate norms—in that case, of informed consent.) The intensity of that negative emotional response will vary according to how important the observer perceives the norm that’s being violated; this will in turn shift the severity of the perceived harm and, therefore, of the observer’s condemnation.
From my own notes dating to the director’s recommendation, I believe that director intended to suggest that the perceived harm of an act (in the eyes of the public) may shift from the “intentional agent” violating a norm while causing harm to the “vulnerable patient” according to the perceived potential for harm resulting from a patient’s own norm violations, in the past—depending, of course, on the severity of that potential harm, and on the perceived importance of the norms that vulnerable party has violated. In the context of Derek Chauvin’s trial, the guilty verdict reflected (in part) the failure of his defense and other supporters in persuading the court and the public that the norms which George Floyd violated were more important than those that Chauvin violated in killing him.
That, of course, seems like the proper calculus: the disregard of an agent pressing his knee down against the neck of a suspected counterfeiter, until the vulnerable suspect bled from his mouth, seems reckless enough to rise to apparent intent.
I write as an observer, and that’s the point. The conclusion I reach, and how I arrive at it, offers an object lesson in the theory of dyadic morality, matching the other example available in the trial’s outcome. Assuming, of course, that the legal conventions through which the court reached its verdict sufficiently model the intuitive moral judgment of the dyadic theory: otherwise, it’s a lucky coincidence.
Seeing the benefit of considering dyadic morality in the public perception of criminal trials, I believe we may find it similarly fruitful to view parables, folklore, and myth through the same lens. In the interest of testing that suspicion, let’s take another look at the Pizza-Man saga.
In delivering pizzas to unhappy citizens living in a decaying metropolis, we could say at least that Pizza-Man fulfills the role of the superhero in another way besides his name. To invert the dyadic model described above, our hero acts as an intentional agent to supply some benefit to a vulnerable population, and fulfills a (desirable) social norm in doing so.
Both Pizza-Man and the unhappy citizens, however, suffer harm from the disruptive outbursts of the Woke Folks, upending civil society in outrage over the harm suffered as a result of injustice perceived as a social norm. But the Woke Folks are themselves vulnerable patients subject to the intentional influence of the Alphabet Agency, which itself violates other norms in provoking the Woke Folks’ outbursts and which also harms the city as a whole with their service to the Corporatarchs, who bear the responsibility for the harm resulting the city’s decay as the intentional agents who engineered that decline in order to profit from it.
(I’ve suddenly realized that this saga is missing any characters to represent proponents of traditionalist-reactionary ideologies. I’ll have to correct that.)
While the forces symbolized in Pizza-Man’s rogues’ gallery4 are perhaps too niche of a concern for the hero to become an internationally recognized cultural touchstone—and if that’s not the obstacle, surely another will hinder that ascent—here we see nonetheless how the superhero genre fulfills another function of ancient folklore in staging social concerns. These narratives address contemporary issues such as social justice, discrimination, and environmental crises. (See the hyperlinks for my chosen examples of superheroes whose sagas stage each concern.) In doing so, they turn a mirror to society, and encourage their audiences to reflect critically on the challenges they face as a collective, and how they relate to those challenges personally.
Though I champion here the value of the superhero genre as a platform for contemporary social commentary, the narrative of the Pizza-Man saga—the social, political, and economic forces it stages, and the moral judgments that this staging provokes—reveals my opinion of social engineering. As the subtitle of this dispatch implies, I consider it nightmarish: both the conditions that allow for it, and those that result from it.
In the case of Comicsgate, my negative emotional response to the thought of social engineering in the editorial boards of mainstream superhero comics outweighs my support for inclusivity, particularly since the surrounding demands for managing intellectual property render that corporate progressivism difficult for me to accept as genuine. But my negative reaction there stands meek in the shadow of my disgust at another example of social engineering in the history of superhero comics: the genre’s use as an instrument of state propaganda in World War II and in the present day.
For a deeper analysis of superhero comics within that historical context, I suggest turning to Nat Yonce’s Collective Action Comics. This fantastic podcast analyzes superhero comics from a radical perspective, with its first season covering Justice League (1987)—renamed Justice League International in issue #7—written by Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis, with pencils by Kevin Maguire and inks by Terry Austin.
The podcast’s “Vol. 1 Issue #2” provides an excellent summary (at ~0:06:09) for why, even if you don’t like superheroes or comics, it still might be worth your time exploring the genre and medium’s historic use as an instrument of social engineering and state propaganda:
What makes comic books both the reflection and the vanguard of the zeitgeist? That’s actually an easy one: they take a month to make. They can respond much more nimbly to cultural currents than any other medium […] Generally speaking, TV shows take a year per season, and movies operate on a two-year schedule. How can we possibly expect them to keep up?
Yonce goes on to detail how DeMatteis and Giffen’s Justice League stages the geopolitical rivals of the U.S. in the 1980s as agents acting with malicious intent. The narrative’s depiction of these symbolic representations, Yonce argues, primes the audience of these stories to morally condemn those figures symbolized in the villains, and to support a U.S. geopolitical agenda which seems to counter that of its rivals whether or not it serves the domestic population.
As its first season continues, Collective Action Comics speaks also to why the conventional elements of superhero comics, in addition to its production demands, make these stories such useful windows into the popular unconscious. “Vol 1. Issue #7” explains it nicely (at ~0:05:25) with reference to the explicit text of the DeMatteis and Giffen’s Justice League, the historical and political context of that late ’80s run, and the material and economic conditions dominating that period of U.S. history:
The reason superheroes make such good metaphors […] is power. What is power? […] Beyond “superpowers” we’ve explored a few specific meanings of the idea over the course of this podcast so far. In episode one, we characterized this comic book as “a product of its time”: it’s a […] reflection of the power that shaped it: shallow and materialistic heroes fighting […] against a group of ’60s radicals protesting at the UN for an end to poverty and oppression […] Since then, the book has caricaturized revolutionary leaders […] and broad-stroked entire cultures as being mindless zealots […] this League, as we’ve seen and shall see, also has a strangely comfortable relationship with corporate influence […] we’ve even gotten a few glimpses into the somewhat backwards view of power this book has when it comes to anger, mass movements, and entrenched gatekeeping […] So what do all these things have in common? […] It’s not simply a “cultural hegemony” or “soft power” but it’s also a material power: it’s wealth, and resources, and the means to defend that […] The people with material power establish systems that further entrench it, and they summon enforcers in large enough numbers with sophisticated enough weaponry to protect it […] This is a podcast about power and weakness, accumulation and distribution, good and evil: this is a podcast about heroes, but more importantly, it’s about villains.
Clearly, Yonce implies that those with wealth and resources, who engineer a political establishment to protect their positions as distant outliers on the curve of wealth distribution, constitute the proper villains of any faithful allegory for the modern world. In the theory of dyadic morality, these are the intentional agents causing harm to a vulnerable population through policies devised and implemented to encourage mass scarcity in defense of their private abundance.
(Obviously this inspires a negative emotional response, but, cynically, I think the question of whether they violate any norm remains open.)
However, Yonce has another prerogative besides nominating villains for the audience to condemn. At the close of that same episode concluding the first season, we receive instead (at ~1:57:16) an injunction to deploy another manifestation of “power” that fulfills social norms while benefitting our neighbors:
More than a fun shared laugh at a comic book that enjoys far more popularity than it should, this podcast has been and will continue to be a call to action. Get out there and organize around an issue in your community that you stand for […] Protect the vulnerable. Protect your community. Protect each other. A better world is possible, and there has never been a better time to start your own origin stories, and become the heroes we all need. Become your own Justice League.
That, of course, is a call to action we can commend to any audience.
As we’ve seen, the function of the superhero genre doesn’t abide solely in whimsical escapism, but in staging the complex interplay of social, political, and economic forces in modern society, in order to dramatizes the ethical challenges and moral dilemmas its citizens face and thereby communicate its values. Much like the fables, myths, and folklore of old, superhero stories serve as modern parables, inviting us to engage in critical discussions about right and wrong in the contemporary context.
In these narratives, we witness the dynamics of dyadic morality, with intentional agents causing harm to vulnerable populations through the violation of social norms: the precise formula (so long as most observers feel negatively about it) for generating an intuitive moral condemnation. But we witness too those heroic figures who protect and benefit the vulnerable while modeling desirable norms: a recipe for winning ethical accolades. Just as traditional narratives explored the condemnable evil and the commendable good, superhero stories tackle the same enduring topics in amplified resonance with the circumstances of our society today.
Of course, it's crucial for audiences to remain discerning. Not all narratives are perfect allegories for reality. While I see the potential (sometimes fulfilled) for superhero stories to inspire positive change and social awareness, their use in mainstream entertainment as tools for state propaganda and social engineering undermine that potential. So long as the primary producers of superhero stories in mainstream culture remain the same multinational corporations that ascended within the 20th century’s global capital order, they’ll possess the same interests and incentives to impose a cultural austerity that limits the capacity of our popular narratives to address the challenges our society actually faces.
Therefore, as we navigate the complex landscape of superhero narratives and their societal implications, we should not just heed the call to action from Collective Action Comics to become the heroes our society truly needs, but also recognize and work to meet another challenge too: that of creating the stories which will inspire us to become them.
The potential connection between a shifting definition for “woman” in the professional-managerial dialect and a model of identity-as-product hadn’t actually occurred to me then, but (among other phenomena) the existence of a cosmetics industry oriented toward women suggests that it’s a link worth exploring sometime.
This, too, hasn’t appeared explicitly, either in the captions for the AI-generated images or as any assertion in my dispatch on the meaning of “communism” in the traditionalist-reactionary dialect, but the social engineering implied in such a redefinition resonates too well with the existing narrative, even without (for now) real-world evidence of intent.
But for the plot of a comic book, I think it’s an awesome idea, and though I didn’t originally consider the speculative entertainment of that caption as belonging to the same narrative, I’m glad to incorporate it now into the Pizza-Man saga. Our hero fears the Alphabet Agency may confuse public speech so completely that no one can order any pizza: wasn’t that obvious from the start? (Definitely not to me.)
As of this dispatch, that rogues’ gallery now includes an alt-right paramilitary fraternal organization called “the Knights of Cuckistan” that the Alphabet Agency manipulates into violent rebellions to justify expanding the security state protecting the capital order on behalf of the Corporatarchs.