OFF-TOPIC (69)
By:
April 18, 2025
Off-Topic brings you over-the-transom, on-tangent essays, dialogues and subjective scholarship on an occasional, impulsive basis. This time, the second (or fourth) in an epoch-length series about how we protect pluralism by reference…
Critique smuggled out in metaphor or camouflaged in absurdity is a standard currency of art in totalitarian states. This can be conscious and strategic, or just instinctual, even utterly abstract and not intentionally connected — and indeed, fantasy itself is the counter to fascism’s restricted ideas and standard plots; the spring of creative thought. The current moment has provided us with figureheads who dwell in fantasy to begin with, and they can partially be fought on that plane.
Some artistic works are so aware of the changing shape of the world that they see it coming and start telling the story before it’s here. Wrapping up just last month but starting slightly ahead of Trump’s second election and probably conceived much earlier, with the latest (and last) arc of DC’s most recent Shazam! comic the series came to an end, but provided continuity to a time before. With mind-controlled masses and robot and monster rampages, this storyline magnified the danger as sensational pop expression will; this sketched the stakes as we inwardly see them, and provided a measure of what there is within (and amongst) us that might be greater.
While several prominent fictions already have dramatized what it feels like to be fighting MAGA (some of them catalogued here last month), writer Josie Campbell is the only one to depict what’s going on in the minds of those who wholeheartedly support or inevitably fall in with it (an affinity insidiously embedded even in the phrasing of the five-issue arc’s title, “Welcome to Our Overlords”).
The hurt of social neglect, exploited by those who supply a target to blame and attack while using you as the point of their spear to dispossess even more people; the resentments that can be amplified by the phantom voices of social media, corroborating conclusions you’ve come to in actual isolation; the certainty that the system is unfair, twisted cynically into a sense that competition for the unequal favor is the only option; all of this was mapped with an uncommon empathy (and courageous risk of cognitive exposure) by Campbell, and accomplished through an ingeniously simple narrative device. From the start, the text has been hijacked by vintage Shazam/Captain Marvel villain Mr. Mind, a powerful telepathic despot who presents as a tiny sentient worm; the captions themselves are his voiceover, hacking the comic we’re reading and aware that he’s being watched while demonstrating that it’s already too late for us.
While Campbell gets into the head of bitter supremacists, the villain, via this trope, has already gotten into hers and ours (within the story, he has literally crawled into the head of an influential social-media mogul; only in such disjointed times as these could the theme of a worm eating part of an influencer’s brain be so on the nose). That last part is done with maximum ick, and for this no artist could be more perfect than Dan McDaid, a master of visceral horror. But the “Marvel Family” canon is known for its uncommon simplicity and charm, and for that McDaid was rewardingly cast against type; his eccentricities are ideal for the humanizing imperfections of Billy, Mary and their fam, a funky, textured genuineness which by contrast accentuates the grotesquery of what’s brewing beneath the surface when it has to emerge.
I recommend this arc (Issues #16–21) like a prescription for anxiety and social ills, so I won’t spoil how it turns out, but what counts is the things the protagonists tell themselves to keep getting there: “The groups founded on cruelty never win. Because when the only thing holding you together is fear and greed, looking out for number one always becomes the better choice.” and “…to save the world, all you have to do is save the people in it.” Suffice it to say that, living to fight another day and with the next one not guaranteed, the Marvel Family fly out of the picture for now. But we know, for both storm and brightness, lightning can strike twice.
Over at Marvel the company, another hero associated with bolts from the sky is holding us in mind, in writer Al Ewing (and recently artist Jan Bazaldua)’s phenomenal run on The Immortal Thor. The god of thunder and lightning has been fighting off gathering clouds that coincide with the darkness encroaching on the Western psyche, as he heads toward existential crises for both himself and the Earth he is sworn to protect. His mother, Gaea (a convention of the comics’ version of Thor’s myth) is determined to wipe the slate clean of our species who have so affronted the ecosystem she personifies, with willing, clueless help from Thor foes like extinction-happy oligarch Dario Agger (one of comics’ best variant Trump/Musks). Allied with Gaea (and embodying a vengeful past we’re all now facing), the cosmos is being realigned by a cabal of ancient, atavistic gods that long precede Thor’s pantheon and are back with fearsomely unrestrained power even he may not survive. In Issue #21 his own impending death (personified as a delusion of Thanos) whispers discouragement in his cause and division from those he cares for, and he responds with a scripture of resistance that my soul needed about now. It’s both unsettling and reassuring to imagine that the clashes of our daily plane are mirrored, and perhaps in sync with, struggles going on in higher realms with profound influence. Victory is not assured, but it helps to think that some god is on our side.
MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2025 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern’s and Paolo Leandri’s comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: FAWLTY TOWERS | KICK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JACKIE McGEE | NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JOAN SEMMEL | SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRO and THE LEON SUITES | FIVE-O YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JULIA | FERB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: KIMBA THE WHITE LION | CARBONA YOUR ENTHUSIASM: WASHINGTON BULLETS | KLAATU YOU: SILENT RUNNING | CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM: QUINTET | TUBE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: HIGHWAY PATROL | #SQUADGOALS: KAMANDI’S FAMILY | QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: LUCKY NUMBER | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JIREL OF JOIRY | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: “Freedom” | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby’s Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti’s comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam’s posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE