Squadron Supreme (Mark Gruenwald) - C or D?

i should get back on MU at some pt, good call

I wrote this comment on another site a while ago on the first SS maxi-series, might as well repost it here:
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WARNING! MAJOR SPOILERS ABOUT THE PLOT AND ENDING OF THE SERIES!
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I'm not sure if it was intentional, but even though Squadron Supreme are ultimately the bad guys of the story, they sure come across much better than Nighthawk and his crew. Yes, the whole brain-washing thing is quite dodgy, but it's made clear in the story no one is forced to go through it, it's voluntary. (When Golden Archer forces it on Lady Lark, he gets condemned by everyone.) And with most of the criminals we see in the story, the behaviour modification certainly seems to be way more beneficial than harmful. Some of the supervillains even like their new lives so much, they decide to side with SS even after they've been de-brainwashed!

Other than that, everything SS is shown doing in the series is totally beneficial. They get rid of guns, provide the cops effective, non-lethal mean of handling criminals, repair the economy, get rid of hunger, come up with the cryosleep chambers for those with an incurable disease... We see some people protesting against the cryo thing, but again, it's made clear the process is voluntary, and no one is forced to do it if they don't want to. At the end of the series they hand the power back to the civilian government, and it never seems anything they did caused any significant harm to anyone, except for some fringe gun nuts being offended that they can't shoot people anymore.

Compared to that, Nighthawk sides with known killers and rapists, and his action result in several people (including himself) getting killed at the end of the series. But ultimately SS seem to agree Nighthawk, and they promise to return everything back to the way it was, which includes destroying the cryochambers and bringing back guns! How the heck is that gonna benefit anyone? And what if the civilian government (which is never shown to opposes SS’s point of view) thinks those changes are actually for the good? Will SS still destroy all the technological advancements they brought to people and force gun factories to open again?

To be sure, I’m a left-wing anarchist, and I take the issue of personal liberty very seriously, but in my opinion Gruenwald fails to convince the reader that Nighthawk’s libertarianism is commendable, since most of what SS does appears to benefit the people. Gruenwald has some lofty goals for this series, but ultimately it fails as a thought experiment. He puts way to much focus on the interpersonal ethical conflicts between SS members, but we never properly see how those ethics affect ordinary people. The Squadron become a bunch of authoritarians, for sure, but the potential negative effects of their authoritarianism are never properly explored, besides some super-villains being kinda inconvenienced by their behaviour modification. That’s hardly enough.

Basically, the main difference between the "what if superheroes were real" approach between SS and Watchmen is that while Moore deconstructs the sort of righ-wing libertarianism inherent in vigilante heroes like Rorschach, Gruenwald totally agrees with Rorschach's point of view. Of course Moore was/is a leftist, but he's respectful enough of the reader to make both Rorschach (the libertarian "realist") and Ozymandias (the left-wing utopian) come across as villains, and let the reader himself decide who (if anyone) was right.

But Gruenwald has no such ear for nuance, in his story Nightwing (the Batman/Rorschach analogue) is completely justified, to the point that when the SS realise their utopia was "wrong", they even promise to bring back guns, which they'd previously destroyed. So Gruenwald's right-wing point of view goes as far as saying that it can't be utopia if people aren't allowed to shoot each other. It's just ridiculous.

Since SS was published so little before Watchmen (the last issue of SS came out a month before the first issue of Watchmen), I don't think Moore was much influenced by it when writing his series, but it's certainly interesting to think of Watchmen as a corrective to SS. They have a lot of the same themes, but Moore treats them with more nuance and goes much further than Gruenwald, who still has one foot in traditional superhero fiction while writing SS, so you get typical supervillain schemes and hero-vs-hero misunderstanding fights in midst of the more groundbreaking political themes.

Since Gruenwald continued writing mainstream Marvel comics afterwards (with the exception of the SS one-shot "Death of a Universe", but that one is much more in line with stereotypical superhero fiction than the maxi-series, with no politics in sight), I think it's fair to say that despite adding some "realism" to the genre, he wasn't really the person to take it to its darker extremes, he had too much love for its traditions and conventions. It took non-American outsiders like Moore and Pat Mills to do that, presumably they had less problems in tearing the genre conventions down and making superheroes look really ugly.

Sorry, I meant Nighthawk of course, not Nightwing.

The behavior modification is "voluntary" only insofar as convicts are told they'll have to stay in jail if they don't submit to it... pretty heavy externalities acting upon that "choice" there.

Also btw I don't think it's at all so clear that Gruenwald "sides" with Nighthawk or portrays the band of criminals and misfits he assembles as the "good guys." In fact one of the things I think G. does really well is make everyone look deeply "compromised" at the end.

In fact (thinking about this a little more), Ione of the most skillful moves MG makes is to have you rooting for / "liking" the Squadron members most of the time, despite the deep sketchiness of some (but, importantly, not all) of what they're up to. And then he shifts focus to Nighthawk, and has you "rooting" for him and his team, as well... so when the final showdown comes, the reader is torn in both directions, and no one comes out "the winner." This ambiguity around the protagonists is very well executed.

I also thought the very end of the story (literally, the final panel) is very nice, and a welcome counterpoint to the deeply cynical (to me) ending of "Watchmen."

I didn't come away with any particularly strong sense of Gruenwald's politics; and while his handling of the series' politcal/ethical ideas may often be somewhat facile, I thought he did every bit as good a job as Moore when it comes to complicating the reader's identification with the characters, and sense of "who's right." And in some ways, I think MG is more "honest" (with the reader) than Moore... (without wanting to turn this into "SS vs. Watchmen").

A+ panel

https://i.imgur.com/AJfCEIs.png

Imgur!!!!!!!!!!

Tinypic is safer:

http://i64.tinypic.com/2q3bzx1.jpg

startling revive

lol, how does that even happen?