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Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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Are superheroes cops?
Yes. Sometimes they fight fascism but even then it is only ever to protect liberalism. Other times they are just the fascists themselves.
I could go through a list of them and why they are cops but instead I will just point out that the only communist characters in comic books are always villains and that should tell you everything you need to know.
The only major exception that I can think of is The Doctor from Doctor Who when they met Stalin. It was an old-ass episode^[It was in the short story Closing the Account] where they told Stalin that he would be vilified, but in in the end everyone would see he did the right thing despite his mistakes.
Still, not a superhero comic book story.
I couldn't tell you what the comic book versions of them are like (which are many and varied) but superheroes as modern stuff like The Avengers films, I'd say they are more like spec ops / CIA than cops but that doesn't make it any better. They often work in narratives that justify their extrajudicial use of force by making the villain be someone who is comically evil, which is shared with other copaganda.
As a cultural phenomenon, I think superheroes largely came out of US imperialism at its height, so that should tell you something about the nature of them. For good or ill, an expression of the US grappling with the idea of being so powerful it can use force to resolve just about any situation and so into violence that it is willing to do that. From there, it's a matter of whether you couch it in a narrative that justifies the violence, or you reject that narrative and play with the idea of the superhero who causes more problems than they solve.
Either way, I've never heard of, like, a superhero whose power is being really good at diplomacy or something like that. It seems to always be powers that, even if not directly related to combat, could be very useful in a fight. I don't think superheroes make much sense in a context where crime is uncommon and society actively addresses common sources of crime, like by fixing poverty and such. From that standpoint, you could argue they are a bit like super cops, since cops (though they are always needed in some form even if they're called community defense or whatever) are needed a lot less if society is peaceful and equitable.
That's a really good idea. It would be the superhero equivalent of a spreadsheet simulator game lol.
But I think a pretty important part of defining superheroes is by individualism, which is the bread and butter of Western culture. If there's not violence, there's still individualism. Like, think modern Sherlock Holmes. He doesn't commit a lot of violent acts, but he's still pretty much defined by being impossibly smart, almost to the point of having a "superpower".
The original Sherlock wasn't like this. Maybe I'm reaching, but maybe there was some influence from superhero stuff. He used to be an amazing detective, but had big gaps in his knowledge (like he didn't know the Earth revolved the Sun). Newer adaptations kind of make him a superhero in a sense.
I don't know if it's necessarily individualism that is the source of interesting stories or if it is cultural hegemony. I think it would be interesting to read some Marxist-inspired story where some group of workers build a party from the ground up.
That's an interesting point. Sherlock Holmes might actually be something of a precursor to the modern "great man" superhero style individualist figure. The original one (as I recall) is more down to earth than modern adaptations, but nevertheless, he has outsized ability for one person and gets called upon to solve problems that the cops can't, which is similar to superhero writing. The narrative style of it being from Watson's perspective also lends itself well to alluding to how "great" Holmes is without having to explicitly "prove" it in detailed writing.
Then modern adaptations tend to turn it into a dynamic that is something more like Batman/Robin, where Watson is a sidekick and Holmes is this high octane figure who we're actually seeing do some of the wild stuff that would normally be alluded to in the original stories. So his reasoning capability ends up more showy to the point it looks more explicitly like some kind of superpower. Whereas in the original narratives (if I remember right), part of the excuse for him being so clever as a detective was that not only did he know a lot of specialized things, certain observable details also contained narrower possibility within them. In the modern world, this more falls apart, like illustrated in the Pete Holmes comedy sketch about Sherlock Holmes that is clearly parodying the BBC Sherlock representation of him; he seizes repeatedly on mundane things and tries to extrapolate, only to be wrong over and over. In a way, it parodies Holmes almost as akin to a psychic; someone who is seizing on what they see, spinning narrative from it, and trying to awe the person they're talking to like it's a show.
This is probably more a reasonable critique/parody of the BBC portrayal than the original though. After all, the original emphasized stuff like "whenever you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Which has more in common with the scientific method and the null hypothesis than it does with showmanship, i.e. it's more about trying to prove yourself wrong first and then looking at what remains.
I think in general a "cop" is anyone who enforces the carceral systems of the status quo. Social workers are cops, people who work at homeless shelters can be cops, school teachers are cops. The primary role of superheroes is to "fight crime" and while they do have exploits against foreign terrorists, governments or even extra terrestrial or dimensional threats, that is just like a policeman joining the army in war time. They may be not acting in their role as a cop to fight an external threat but that doesn't change their character as an enforcer of the ruling class.
Depends on the hero.
Some are explicitly cops/spies/soldiers while others are mercenaries, vigilantes, or even revolutionaries.
99% of them end up working for some kind of state though, usually a capitalist one.
Depends.
Batman for one could be considered the bourgeoisie's personal vigilante, along with the fact that he works with the cops.
But that's one case and it depends.
At the very least, I don't think any superhero is interested in changing the status quo even if they don't do the job of the police, like commiejones said.
Superheros were born from Supermen (literally the Übermensch in english) as a subversion of the propagandized nietzschean gesalt of the man who has triumphed over slave morality and now can guilt-freed exploit others, basically saying “no, the strong man would protect the weak not exploit them”. Then it was culturally adapted by the empire as exhalation of the great man.
Its also not a coincidence that many of the paragons work as de facto cops and support the liberal status quo- the whole “you can do better senator” speech from the Falcon and the Winter Soldier being the epitome of that ideology (also like the whole lampshading of racism and pretending the stars-and-stripes is a symbol that stands for the world lol).
The eternal détournement ➡ recouperation ➡ détournement ➡ recouperation cycle.
Or I guess since history is dialectical and not cyclical, it's more like recouperation and détournement are in contradiction and are constantly switching places and transforming into each other, but that's harder to express in a single line of text 🤷♀️