I.

I asked a question on Bluesky, and I’ll repeat it here: what happens to US superheroes when the US is obviously in imperial decline? (And, moving forward, I am only talking about mainstream superheroes, almost exclusively the ones owned by Marvel and DC. Indie comics are a wild and wonderful woolly world of weirdness and likely to remain so forever.) The response I got on Bluesky, since I used Captain America as an example, is that now and then, Cap will leave the role to someone else, such as during the Watergate Era. But my question wasn’t what would superheroes do when the US made a mistake but about American superheroes in an age of imperial decline (and despite a few instances when they do something, most of the time they are silent; Cap has yet to opine on an insurrectionist rapist being in the Oval Office currying favor with tyrants over democratically elected leaders being invaded by those tyrants… if Cap quit over a bit of light spying by Nixon, you’d think he’d quit over that, but times have changed.) I think it’s a question worth looking at, given the cache that superheroes have had on the global scene with the rise of the MCU.

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