Day Eighty-Four: Reign of the Supermen
There have been a whole lot of comics published with the premise of "What would happen if superheroes existed in our world?". The big one, of course, is Watchmen, which - for the non-comics-readers among you, if any there so be - is regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, comics ever published in the English language. In it, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons showed the world in the grip of a cold war, with America staving off annihilation with their state-controlled hero Doctor Manhattan, while all the time other heroes were making their plays for good or for ill. DC's future dystopian series Kingdom Come also looked at the terrible effect that super-powered folks would have on the world, and the famous and sadly out of print Marvelman/Miracleman series explored superhuman power from the perspective of one being.
Before all of these, though, there was the Squadron Supreme. Marvel had created these guys a few years earlier as villains for the Avengers. They were based incredibly closely on DC's Justice League, with characters like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman being reborn as Hyperion, Nighthawk and Power Princess. In 1983, though, writer Mark Gruenwald came up with the plot of the Squadron Supreme 12-issue maxi-series - if superhumans have all this power, but don't use it to stop wars and make the world a better place, isn't that not only hypocritical, but massively irresponsible? What would happen if the Justice League of America decided that they were going to bring peace and prosperity to Earth, by force if necessary? What if they decided that in humanity's best interests, they would have to take over the world?
This was a series that was asking questions that just hadn't been posed before. Superman could stop a tidal wave, so why didn't he wipe out world hunger while he was at it? The reason, as the Squadron Supreme series showed, was that if he were to try to do that then he would be getting his hands dirty beyond what any reasonable person would call heroic. Once the Squadron ensure that everyone has enough food in the USA, they set about forcibly disarming the populace; next up are criminals, whose minds are altered by the Squadron's technology to remove all immoral tendencies, and quite incidentally trampling all over their civil rights and liberties at the same time. Only Batman analogue Nighthawk, who quits the team at the point when this plan of action is decided upon, is in a place to make a stand against his former team-mates by organising a subversive group of former villains to bring down the Squadron, who are dragging the world into Hell one good intention at a time.
Gruenwald's story is one which has been imitated and looked to for inspiration many times since. The Justice Lords of the JLU show, mentioned here the other day, bear the obvious influence of the Squadron, and the mental reprogramming of criminals was a major plot point in DC's Identity Crisis series. Ironically, it's at Marvel that the Squadron's influence has been least felt, as they've turned up since only a handful of times, and then usually only to fight the Avengers.
Gruenwald has been known for many years as a safe pair of hands - when you pick up an old Gruenwald Captain America or Marvel Two-In-One, you know you're going to get a slice of old-school Marvel superheroics. Squadron Supreme showed that he had more than one string to his bow, and it is still regarded as the late writer's best work, twenty-four years on. Indeed, when Gruenwald died in 1996, Marvel reprinted the series in trade paperback form in tribute to him, and per his last request his wife arranged for Gruenwald's ashes to be added to the printer's ink for the first edition of the reprinted collection. It's a bit icky, but it shows that Gruenwald had a good sense of humour - although anyone who's read his Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe knew that already.
Marvel recently brought the Squadron back, with a clean-slate continuity reboot under writer J Michael Straczynski. The book updated the story and made the whole thing darker in tone and upped the intensity level, but after 18 issues the book was cancelled and relaunched as a less adults-only version. Sadly, by that point the distinctly unspeedy storyline hadn't even got as far as the team being formed, and the change in penciller from Gary Frank to Mike Deodato Jr, and the subsequent complete grinding to a halt of the publication schedule, means that the spark has completely gone out of the project. Just goes to show, really, that messing with the classics isn't something you can do half-cocked. The original Squadron Supreme has stood the test of time, and been hugely influential to boot. In more ways than one, they rule.
