Comics in Context #14: Continuity/Discontinuity

GRUENWALD SQUADRON

Mark Gruenwald's twelve-issue Squadron Supreme limited series was his masterpiece in his long career as a comics writer. Mark was as strongly influenced by the Silver Age DC superhero comics edited by Julius Schwartz as he was by Stan Lee's Marvel stories of the 1960s. Gardner Fox, the author of the classic first years of Justice League of America, one of Schwartz's series, was one of Mark's heroes. (Indeed, the President of the United States in the Squadron limited series, President Gardner, is drawn with Fox's likeness.) Though it was common to claim that the classic DC heroes had only one-dimensional personalities, Gruenwald disagreed. You can see this in how he explores the characterizations of their counterparts, like the Whizzer, a conservative Midwesterner, and Dr. Spectrum, presented as a "Right Stuff"-style astronaut.

Ironically, in that period DC was not doing the classic Justice League, the team of its greatest superheroes. This was the period of the Justice League as "superhero sitcom" in the hands of editor Andy Helfer, writer J. Marc de Matteis, and co-plotter/penciler Keith Giffen, with the likes of goofballs Booster Gold, Blue Beetle and Guy Gardner as members. This was entertaining in its own way (and the DeMatteis/Giffen version is now being revived in its own series), but it wasn't what people traditionally think of as the Justice League. As is often the case when a series strays too far from its conceptual roots, in time the pendulum swung back, and the Justice League, in both the comics and the Cartoon Network animated series, is once again recognizable as Schwartz and Fox's creation.

Gruenwald did not treat the Squadron as a joke or as pawns in someone else's conspiracy. Although his Squadron series was clearly a homage to Fox's Justice League, he was not just doing disguised versions of DC's characters. Gruenwald's Squadron depicted what would happen if characters reminiscent of DC's great Silver Age heroes had evolved in the Marvel Universe. This meant that their personalities became more complicated and more nuanced: in Gruenwald's hands the members of the Squadron finally became identifiably real, three-dimensional people. This also meant that the world in which they existed was more complex, and that there was no longer an absolute division between good and evil or right and wrong.

In the limited series Gruenwald continued exploring political themes as Englehart had with the Squadron. But Gruenwald went further, and the Squadron Supreme limited series is a superhero adventure story that is simultaneously an investigation of ethics. It is an illustration of the maxim that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Gruenwald picks up where DeMatteis had left off: following the devastation wreaked by Null and the Over-Mind, the United States is in a state of collapse and crisis, beset by crime and famine and numerous other ills. The Squadron resolves not only to restore the nation to working order and stability, but to go further, and to solve the country's greatest problems once and for all. They intend to turn the United States into a utopia, a paradise on Earth. (I don't know if Mark had this in mind, but this makes me think of the Silver Age classic Superman Red and Superman Blue.) But to do so, they must temporarily take absolute control of the nation's government. Demonstrating a total faith in their heroes, so characteristic of the people in Silver Age DC books, President Gardner and the federal government happily turn sovereignty over to the Squadron Supreme. The lone important dissenter is the former President, Kyle Richmond, who was once the superhero Nighthawk.

So it is that the Squadron, confident in the rightness of their "Utopia Program," begin to transform the United States. They provide food to the starving. They confiscate all firearms from the entire population. They alter the minds of captured criminals to turn them into productive members of society (just as the famed proto-superhero of the pulps, Doc Savage, used to do).

And from this you should see that the Squadron, acting from the best intentions, quickly become a threat to the nation's liberty., They are a benevolent dictatorship, but a dictatorship nonetheless. Eventually Kyle Richmond returns to his identity of Nighthawk to organize a band of rebels � a fallen hero, young new heroes, and outlaws � to overthrow the Squadron and restore freedom to their country. Hyperion's Squadron and Nighthawk's Redeemers inevitably meet in final combat, just as Superman's and Batman's rival teams will in the later Kingdom Come, and Superman and Batman themselves clashed in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. The climactic battle in the final issue of Squadron was a new Revolutionary War, and also a Civil War: friend fought friend, and friends died.

This is the principal story running through the Squadron Supreme limited series. But there was so much more. For one thing, Gruenwald made the series an examination of love and the forms it can take. There was the love of family, exemplified by Arcanna and her brood of children. There was romantic love, touchingly depicted in the marriage of Power Princess and her husband, a counterpart to Wonder Woman's Steve Trevor, who had grown elderly while his still devoted wife remained eternally young. And then there was the dark side of love, displayed as the Golden Archer secretly uses the mind-control machine on Lady Lark rather than lose her love.

Perhaps the best individual issue focused on Tom Thumb and his desperate race against � and, thanks to a time machine, through � time to find a cure for cancer, not only for the benefit of humanity but to save himself. His quest was doomed, and this issue is one of the rare examples of genuine tragedy in the entire superhero genre.

Gruenwald did a subsequent graphic novel about the Squadron and moved them to mainstream Marvel-Earth to guest star in another series he wrote, Quasar, to keep them around. He had plans to write a new Squadron limited series, which would explore religious themes, but, unfortunately, never got to do it. After his unexpected and sudden death, the story of Tom Thumb's demise in Squadron appears even more haunting.

Following Mark's wishes, after his death, his ashes were mixed with the printing inks for the trade paperback edition of the Squadron Supreme limited series; now that is putting one's heart, body and soul into one's work, literally as well as figuratively. Alex Ross, who had not read Squadron before doing his own Kingdom Come, acknowledged that in Squadron Mark had anticipated much of the later series (including Batman leading villains in rebellion against Superman's world order). In tribute Ross contributed a splendid painted cover for the book. Following in Mark's path, Len Kaminski wrote the one-shot Squadron Supreme: New World Order, published in 1998.

This brings us to the present and to J. Michael Straczynski's take on the Squadron. Most of Supreme Power #1 concerns the childhood of Hyperion, the Squadron member inspired by Superman.

The saga of Superman's childhood entails tragedy on a scale that is impossible to fully comprehend: not just the death of the hero's parents but the obliteration of the entire population of his native world. (Has anyone ever interpreted the destruction of Krypton, first depicted by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1938, as an anticipation of the Holocaust?) And yet the various versions of the tale of Superman's childhood are also idyllic: he is found by the most loving of foster parents, a saintly couple who believe in, practice and teach traditional American ideals, and he grows to adulthood in an idealized small town America. (The fact that super-villains keep turning up in some versions does not take away from the fact that Smallville is still a Norman Rockwell fantasy once young Clark puts the bad guys in their place.) Even Superman's deceased parents are idealized, loving, self-sacrificing figures, or, in John Byrne's version, his father is, anyway. (Superman's mother Lara in Byrne's Man of Steel revamp is as emotionally repressed as all other Byrne-style Kryptonians of that time, save his father, Jor-El.)