Another writer who did this was Steve Englehart, who devised a story arc for Captain America involving the subversive organization, the Secret Empire, that served as an incisive commentary on the contemporary Watergate scandal in government. On discovering that the conspiracy reached into the Oval Office, Captain America was so shocked and demoralized as to abandon his costumed identity, thereby reflecting many of his readers; disillusionment with the status quo in government. In Cap Englehart introduced Hugh Jones, CEO of the Roxxon Oil corporation, which for years thereafter would be Marvel writers' favorite symbol of corporate greed and wrongdoing.
Englehart used his Squadron Supreme arc in Avengers, drawn by George Perez, to criticize the misuse of power by elements of corporate America and their allies in government. Roxxon's Hugh Jones was now the possessor of the Serpent Crown, an ancient object of mystical power that Roy Thomas had introduced in Sub-Mariner. There was also a Serpent Crown on the alternate Earth of the Squadron Supreme, and there it was worn by Nelson Rockefeller, one of the wealthiest men in America, who had become President of the United States of that world. (In the real world Nelson Rockefeller was indeed a real person, and a member of one of America's richest and most powerful families, who had been governor of New York State and run unsuccessfully for the presidency; he became vice president under Gerald Ford, and is now deceased.) Since Rockefeller was head of state, the Squadron followed his orders without questioning, blind to the possibility that his motives and goals were not in the best interests of their country.
And so the Avengers found themselves in battle against the Squadron once more, and Englehart added a counterpart to Aquaman, Amphibion (yes, that is spelled correctly). Continuing the tradition of making jokes at the JLA's expense, he renamed the Squadron's Hawkeye the "Golden Archer," presumably an allusion to McDonald's "Golden Arches." That was appropriate, since Englehart's Squadron had become pawns of corrupt politicians and corporate executives.
This, I take it, was Englehart's comment not just on the dangers of unquestioning trust in whatever the government says, but also on the traditional DC concept of superheroes. Englehart loved the Justice League, too, and, all too briefly, wrote one of the greatest runs of JLA stories in their history. But the Justice League of the Silver Age (1950s-1960s) never took issue with the government or delved into social issues; not until O'Neil and Adams broke the ice with Green Lantern/Green Arrow would DC heroes begin to investigate social and political evils.
Meanwhile, from the early 1960s onward, Stan Lee and Marvel writers had shown their heroes in conflict with the law, big corporations, the mass media, the armed forces, and sometimes the federal government. In pitting the Squadron against the Avengers in this arc, Englehart was depicting a clash between two generations of superheroes: one that never disputed authority, and another (including the Captain America who had gone through that Watergate story) who had learned to question it. (Steve, are you out there? Am I right?)
In the end the Avengers persuaded the Squadron of the perfidy of Rockefeller and his corporate allies, and they brought him to justice, setting up the next phase of their history.
One of the few comics stories I have written was a "Saga of the Serpent Crown" two-parter that is actually an addendum to Englehart's Squadron Supreme story. I showed what the members of the Squadron whom Englehart didn't use were doing while the Avengers story was taking place. (In some cases, like Arcanna, that was because the character had not been created at the time Englehart write the story, but according to continuity, the character would indeed have been around at the time.) I also gave Hugh Jones an otherdimensional cabal of allies in the form of Squadron-Earth counterparts of various corporate villains from past Marvel stories, like Lee and Kirby's Gregory Gideon. Englehart's wariness of corporate power was not unprecedented in the Marvel canon.) Nighthawk and the others thwart the Serpent Cartel, as I dubbed the cabal, thereby freeing the Squadron members who were in Englehart's story from the Cartel's mental influence.
A Decade under the Influence concludes by showing how the innovative filmmakers of the 1970s only had their creative freedom for a relatively brief time. Two more members of that generation, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, turned their efforts to revitalizing film genres that had long been in low repute, like the space opera and monster movie. The new filmgoing generation of Baby Boomers, though, loved fantasy and science fiction, and Jaws and Star Wars stunned Hollywood by making extraordinarily huge amounts of money. The studios now saw the way to big bucks was through big budget sequels to hit adventure movies and imitations thereof. The kind of personal films that the other 1970s directors made could not compete commercially with the blockbusters and faded from the scene, not to be reincarnated until the rise of the contemporary independent film movement. Ironically, Lucas's and Spielberg's action-adventure films are personal works of art expressing their own distinct sensibilities, but you and I have seen plenty of imitations that do not begin to live up to their examples.
Again, I see numerous parallels between the movies of the 1970s and the comics of the 1970s. DC, in dire straits, took chances with members of comics' New Wave, resulting in classics like Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' Green Lantern/Green Arrow series and Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's Swamp Thing (the latter being the ancestor of today's Vertigo books). Still, at DC the experiments were few and far between at first, though O'Neil and Adams were then allowed to wreak a lasting transformation on the artistically moribund Batman series. The New Wave had a freer hand at Marvel. Stan Lee was no longer writing comics and eventually passed the editorial torch to Roy Thomas, and Thomas, in turn, to others. Marvel writers at this time had extraordinary creative freedom; as long as the books sold, they could do pretty much what they wanted within the bounds of the newly revised Comics Code (and in the black and white magazines, that didn't apply), and no one expected the books to bring in big bucks. And so we had Roy Thomas's Conan books, Marv Wolfman's Tomb of Dracula, Steve Englehart's Avengers, Captain America, and Doctor Strange, Steve Gerber's Man-Thing and Howard the Duck, Don McGregor's Black Panther and Killraven, Doug Moench's Master of Kung Fu and Werewolf by Night, and many more.
Then the comics business changed much like the movie business did. Instead of reaching into new genres, Marvel started cloning its successes: Amazing Spider-Man spawned Marvel Team-Up, then Spectacular Spider-Man, and then Web of Spider-Man, and more. Uncanny X-Men became so, shall we say, extraordinarily successful that it gave rise to an entire family of books; Chris Claremont and former X-Men editor Louise Simonson could write the initial spin-offs, maintaining their personal feel, but there were soon far too many for them to write or control. Secret Wars launched the era of the epic crossover blockbuster series. Simultaneously, and for good reasons, Marvel, under editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, replaced its previous laissez-faire editorial system with an editorial hierarchy that exerted tighter control. DC and Marvel found ways to take editorial control back from the many writer-editors who supervised their own books. And the reign of the New Wave was over.
The next writer to revive the Squadron was J. M. DeMatteis in the pages of The Defenders. Nighthawk, in his civilian identity of multimillionaire Kyle Richmond (paralleling Bruce Wayne) had become President of Squadron-Earth's United States, thereby succeeding the discredited Rockefeller. DeMatteis introduced yet more Squadron members: Arcanna (a variation on Zatanna), Nuke (inspired by new DC hero Firestorm), and Power Princess (the Squadron's long-overdue counterpart to Wonder Woman).
DeMatteis's story, though, was neither joke nor homage, nor was it particularly good. Now President Richmond and the Squadron members, except for Hyperion, had fallen under the mental domination of a malevolent alien called the Over-Mind, who was working in concert with a demonic entity known as Null the Living Darkness. The Over-Mind likewise took control of the minds of every important political, military and corporate leader in the United States. President Richmond then declared war against any nation on Earth that did not accept United States supremacy. Since the Over-Mind had also been busy taking over the minds of foreign leaders, every nation quickly surrendered. Hyperion had escaped to the Avengers' Earth and brought the Defenders back as allies. The Defenders freed the Squadron from the Over-Mind's control, and together the two teams defeated the Over-Mind and Null, freeing Earth.
I suppose that this story arc, too, may have political connotations, conjuring up the image of what might happen if the United States became Earth's sole super-power nation (as indeed it has!) and turned aggressor. But this idea is not treated as more than plot mechanics: this arc was just a rather uninspired twist on the old world conquest story line.
Moreover, it set a bad precedent. Keep turning the Squadron into the pawns of bad guys, and they start to look like fools. A few years back, when Kurt Busiek and George Perez had the Squadron fall under mental domination yet again, Busiek explicitly treated it as a joke, having characters ask on panel why the Squadron doesn't take protective measures against mind control after it has happened to them time and again.
There's hardly a living soul that doesn't have some level of...
