#SQUADGOALS (28)

By: Stephanie Burt
July 12, 2017

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars during 2017, on the subject of our favorite squads.

Superheroes are — or at least try hard to be — good for ordinary human beings. But they can be bad for infrastructure: their fights can level, undermine, or otherwise bust up buildings, roads and tunnels, and most heroes don’t have the wherewithal to make repairs. That’s where Damage Control comes in: the corporation and its most visible workers — dashing account executive John Porter, dapper CFO Albert Cleary, hyper-competent traffic manager Robin Chapel, and cigar-chewing foreman Lenny Ballinger among them — make money by putting parts of New York back together after super-battles tear them apart. Created by the late writer Dwayne McDuffie (a founder of Milestone Comics) and the versatile artist Ernie Colón, the Flatiron Building-based company had its own series of twelve comic books (technically three sets of four issues, or mini-series) from 1989 to 1991; they have made occasional Marvel Universe appearances since.

Damage Control’s “adventures” were, mostly, broad satire, slapstick, and sitcom-style workplace comedy. A steamshovel operator digs up a green sphere, exclaims “Suddenly I am filled with power,” and flies off; his foreman muses “we lose more employees this way…” The sphere’s discoverer returns to Earth as a super-being obsessed with cleanliness, who tries to seal heroes into clear plastic bags: a parody of comic book collectors. When he wasn’t making fun of comics culture, McDuffie aimed jokes at economic injustice, at corporate takeovers, and at New York. A dinosaur smashes the infamous Pan Am building (now the MetLife building), which blocks the view down Park Avenue: “Sure we can fix it,” Lenny remarks, “I just think it looks better the way it is.” A Hollywood film about Damage Control depicts Albert (who is, like McDuffie, African-American) as a jive-talking, pimp-suit-clad stereotype; the CFO exclaims “I was born in Grosse Pointe!” In the 2008 Damage Control revival (script by McDuffie, pencils by Salva Espin), the Chrysler Building comes to life and considers a move to L.A.: Porter convinces the edifice to stay on 42nd St., but with an annual vacation.

These stories were, in other words, self-consciously ridiculous. But costumed heroes are, from one point of view, ridiculous too. The real world’s most pressing problems — climate change, say, or Trumpism — do not generally involve malevolent, physically empowered individuals who can be defeated through the clever use of force. Some of those problems do, however, require the building and maintenance of cities; and if real metropolitan areas, from New York to Rio or Christchurch, come back from sea level rise, or endemic corruption, or massive earthquakes, it won’t be thanks to Iron Man or Thor. It may, however, be thanks to the skills, the diligence and the good humor of engineers, planners, accountants, and manual laborers, who raise foundations, put up scaffolds, replace pipes, and (not least) make sure that taxes are paid. Some of them (especially after disaster) will do it because they’re exceptional. But most of them will do it because it’s their job — and that looks like a job for Damage Control.

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