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Summer Again
It’s a lovely, sunny summer day. As if that wasn’t depressing enough, there’s not another cloudy day in sight until at least Thursday.
Blech! Hot
The dreadful thing about summertime is the unrelenting heat. I’m not a big fan of hot weather, as you may already know. It brings out the worst in me and, apparently, in society at large.
After weeks of ‘Rona lockdown, everybody’s cabin fever has boiled over. Social distancing has given way to social justicing. The same politicians and public health officials who have insisted that groups of 10 or 25 are the absolute maximum for safe gatherings are now proudly marching less than 6′ among crowds in their thousands.
Hypocritical much?
They have kindly put the lie to their words and unsanctioned actions. As much as the summer seems to be a season for unrest, I suspect it’s going to be a busy season for lawyers. Several governors need to be sued out of existence for their part in the COVID19 scam.
Yes, I’m sure the novel coronavirus is a real thing and people have died from it and all that. Yes, it’s a potentially lethal disease.
That being said, it’s no more contagious or broadly lethal than any of the “pandemics” that preceded it. The whole thing has been a costly hoax perpetrated on the well-meaning masses. Nobody wants to kill grandma. Nobody wants to overwhelm the healthcare infrastructure. Nobody wants any of the dire predictions to come true.
Well, they didn’t.
Why? Because of aggressive mitigation efforts by our awesome leadership?
Yeah, not so much. The thing allegedly had a 2% mortality rate from the get-go. The only thing required was to protect the 2% rather than locking down the 100%. This was never about health. It was about control and power.
Power can only be held under fear for so long. Even if you add raving mobs of social justice warriors and violent agents provocateur, you can only keep people cowed for a fixed period of time.
Somebody is risking all-out civil war just to see how far they can push the average citizen. Bad idea…
Mooks?
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Gangs are the cannon fodder of comic books. Whether they be realistic gangs based on historical or contemporary criminal organizations or simply assortments of malcontents who happen to hire on with a superhero’s current antagonist.
As far back as the origin of comic books in the 1930s, Superman and Batman were seen tangling with gangsters. These were old-school Capone-style gangsters in suits.
The classic image of Superman from Action Comics #1 shows the caped strongman demolishing the car of a gangster who had kidnapped Lois Lane after she dusted him off at a night club.
The first appearance of Batman from Detective Comics #27 shows the mysterious vigilante confronting gangsters to foil a literally hostile corporate takeover. The chemical syndicate were a collection of criminals who were hired to murder a guy’s business partners so he could have sole ownership of a valuable chemical company without paying for the acquisition.
As comics took a more war-oriented slant, it’s useful to remember that even the Nazis were originally a gang. In the chaotic streets of post-WWI Germany, the right-wing Nazis and the left-wing AntiFA fought it out for control. Eventually, the Nazis turned out to be the most brutally effective and took their criminal viewpoint to an international arena.
When comics returned to the homefront, gangs and independent street criminals reemerged as the default punching bag for costumed crusaders. Muggers, burglars, thieves and pushers are great as one-offs for a newly minted superhero, but even villains have friends.
Gangs often start off from a core collection of friends or relatives. As a couple of guys succeed in pulling off a bank heist or taking over a neighborhood, they start drawing in ambitious followers. Two brothers trying to plan a bank robbery might need to bring in a driver or another participant to cover the door. Suddenly, a core conspiracy leads to a gang. The more successful the gang is, the more people want to join in for a quick score.
The bigger a gang gets, the bigger their ambition grows and the more widespread the harm of their activities becomes. Innocent people, looking for relief from lawless gangs of malcontents may look to the police. In comics, as in life (unfortunately), this is all too often a vain hope.
The police may be corrupt and actually worse than the average gangster. They may be well-intentioned but overwhelmed. They may be well within their capacity to manage the crime effectively but are hamstrung by politicians bending before a zeitgeist or serving some unfathomable personal agenda.
Into this chaos, our costumed crusaders appear. Depending on their capabilities and motivations, they may pick off gangsters one or a few at a time as they work their way toward the dark heart of the matter or they may mow through them with military precision in pursuit of a personal vendetta.
In some respects, it’s not fair to simply write gang members off as low-hanging fruit for superheroes to practice on before they go after the big bads. Gang members are often economically disadvantaged youth who are enticed to join one group or another for self-preservation. Whether they join in their neighborhoods to avoid being victimized by the very group they’re joining or whether they’re obliged to pick a set in prison in order to survive their time in incarceration, gangs form a brutal fraternity for those who would otherwise be chewed up and spat out by the wretched environments that these people find themselves in.
In many respects, it’s absolutely fair to write gang members as low-hanging fruit for superheroes to practice on before they go after the big bads. Despite the reasons one may have for joining a gang, once you’re in you are still personally responsible for your conduct. Bad guys do bad things and, ultimately, bad things come back around. The bad things done by a gang are usually in evidence in small ways at the periphery. Protection rackets, muggings, drug dealing are the kind of stuff that keeps the gang afloat. The police might nibble at the edges of it until someone realizes that things get darker, the farther in they delve.
This is the bread and butter of street-level superheroes like Batman, Daredevil, Green Arrow and even Spider-Man. In the Sentinelsverse, there aren’t any supervillains (yet). As with its parallel universe analog (New York City), Empire City is rife with criminal gangs and has been since its inception. The Conclave isn’t really a collection of supervillains, as many big bads turn out to be. They’re simply criminal conspirators who have successfully hidden in the shadows for far longer than they deserve.
Reactions
Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. ~Amy Lowell
One of the reasons I started the Sentinels series back in 2005 is because I think I actually started writing the original story back around that time. I also have specific dates in mind for things to happen and characters to be particular ages at particular times. There’s no hard and fast reason for this to be the case and it would actually be easier to set it closer to the present time because I’m having a hard time remembering when certain technologies and slang became widely available.
Even so, the Sentinels came together as an officially sanctioned group in 1992. That’s the year I got married. Honestly, that’s all there is to it.
Authors usually have wonky reasons for doing what they do and how they do it. For me, starting the Sentinels as an official superhero team in 1992 simply anchors it to one of the most momentous occasions in my own life.
Another reason I’m writing the book in the recent past is to avoid having the tale seem strictly reactionary. It’s all too easy to write a book based on the events of the day. Whether as an illustrative allegory or a genuinely reactionary screed, authors will pick something that pricks their curiosity and spin a tale from it.
For me, I’d rather have the ability to look back and pick the threads I feel are relevant rather than reacting to something inflammatory in real-time. It’s a work of fiction. I’d like it to remain that way. Comic books often address trends of the day, but they’re also published in real-time. Novels take considerably longer to crank out than an issue of a comic book.
Assuming we actually survive the chaos of 2020, it will be interesting to be able to look back and spin what happened into an interesting story rather than bouncing around like the prognosticating polyhedron that floats in a Magic 8 Ball. If we don’t, then it won’t really matter what I write.
Sorry if that seems pessimistic but hot weather makes me cranky. There are enough things going on that piss me off without adding 80° days to the mix. Oh well, even Summer can’t last forever. It only feels like it…