Black Summer #7

[superboyprime]

"This is the freedom of doing a piece of superhero fiction outside the auspices of company ownership or the weight of continuity: the big questions can be asked in a very direct and brutal manner." - Warren Ellis

Comments

[wizardru]

I have such mixed feelings about this series. It's not wrong, I suppose. It certainly works as a criticism of superheroes, though unlike a lot of Ennis' material, you can tell that Ellis doesn't hate the genre...he clearly just feels that sometimes it could be smarter or better.

Obviously this sort of thing couldn't sustain a long form story, but at this many issues, it was just about right.

[baihu]

The thing is how much suspension of disbelief can one really do. The average comicbook reader now is smart, even just on the common sense level. We know the world is fucked up in various ways, corruption in politics is just the tip of the iceberg. We know that the fairytale idea, of killing the head of the serpent i.e. the head of the government, wouldn't work. Because the organism that makes up a country and government is too complex for that.

Horus here was wrong obviously, from a common sense level this would not work at all. But then again what's the solution? We have comicbooks filled with people with supposed super-brains, and none of them seem to ever figure out the 'what now'? How do you fix the real-world issues of corrupt government, bureaucracy, nepotism, warmongering, economic disparity and so on and so on?

More so, what writer truly wants to tackle that? Write a thesis on good governance and put it through action with some kind of superhero? Do we even want to read that? We really don't, because we know it's not going to work.

So yeah, The Authority taking over the USA and essentially ruling through fear. That was stupid, but all things considered, if I had to pretend the world worked like that, it was serviceable, what they did.

On that note, if someone legit wrote something like a House of Cards meets people with superpowers in politics actually using those powers (telepathy being amazing) to advance in the system and political maneuvering, that would be interesting. You can't punch the president, but you can ruin him.

[q99]

There a series called Strong Female Protagonist that really *does* focus on 'what now,' especially for a superbrick out of supervillains to punch.

[philippos42]

I like that at the end, it's not actually anti-superhero. Not really. It's more like a rebuke to anti-social fanboy ideas of how superheroes should work.

I've met way too many dumb sci-fi fans who think you can just dump annoying people out an airlock, or think that Superman could just go out and murder his way to King of the World.

Ellis, for all his tough-guy posturing, actually has more social intelligence than to really think that.

[stolisomancer]

One of the interesting things about the story's setup is, in fact, that the Guns have been about as successful as superheroes can hope to be, within the specific area in which one could hope a superhero would be successful. They formed specifically to combat crime and open corruption in their city, and as far as we know, they succeeded.

Viewed through that light, Black Summer is about what happens when superheroes try to expand beyond that limited purview in which they're most effective, and try to make "hitting things" into a widespread political gesture. And it really, really does not work.

[glprime]

Gotta agree with a lot of Tom's criticisms there. This is where a lot of stuff like you'd see in The Authority just breaks down. No, you can't just strong arm your way into power and expect people to be better. If their nature leads to corruption in a system, you can't force it out of them by killing a few corrupt figures and saying "now the rest of you be good or else." It's just enslavement under a dictatorship.

[halloweenjack]

I've never liked this series, particularly, but it does work (in its overwritten, overdrawn sort of way) as a sort of counter to The Authority, which as far as I'm concerned could have just as well ended at the end of Ellis and Hitch's run.

[lordultimus]

How ironic that this was posted so soon after Justice League: Gods and Monsters was leaked.

[sanctaphrax]

Well said, Tom.