Our villains are growing more theatrical while our heroes are shunned.
Our villains are growing more theatrical while our heroes are shunned.
P ity the poor citizens of Gotham. At any point a resident could just be walking down the street and some murderous theater kid in tights might start blowing up buildings. Gotham taxpayers’ life savings are constantly being stolen from city banks, so their FDIC budget is probably more than what they spend on national defense. There’s about an 80 percent chance any first date is ruined by a high-speed chase in which half the cop cars are on fire. And the citizens’ only hope for peace and quiet is to summon a billionaire in latex who only responds to requests made by spotlight.
For decades, comic books and superhero movies have been escapism; Americans could turn to them when trying not to think about the real problems of the world. But in the past, these tales of heroism and villainy lampooned real life. And now it’s real life that is starting to look disturbingly like the comics.
In New York — often cheekily referred to as Gotham — the comic-book world and the real world are merging. When 50-year-old health-insurance executive Brian Thompson was gunned down in Manhattan last week, it wasn’t by a vagrant short on medication or by a street criminal looking for cash. The suspect is an Ivy League–educated rich kid with a histrionic streak who left written messages on the bullets and dropped a backpack full of Monopoly cash as he fled. All that was missing was a purple suit adorned with question marks.
The crime Luigi Mangione is accused of stands out because he wasn’t committing violence to rob a bank or to get personal revenge (we think). He likely killed a man in cold blood as an act of showmanship, of toying with law enforcement. It’s straight out of the Joker’s antihero playbook, in which he earns the respect of like-minded citizens as he unleashes chaos.
(Also, if a scriptwriter for a comic-book movie turned in a draft in which the main character was named “Luigi Mangione,” the producers would likely throw it back at them and say “a little too on the nose, kid.”)
Some theatrical criminals aren’t motivated by politics. In another of Gotham’s quarters, earlier this year rapper “Razzlekhan,” known in court by her given name, Heather Morgan, was sentenced for taking part in the biggest heist in American history. She robbed Wall Street cryptocurrency investors blind.
In 2016, Morgan’s husband stole 119,754 bitcoin, the value of which has now topped $10 billion. In November, Morgan was sentenced to 18 months in prison for helping her spouse launder the money. (When you start washing $10 billion in cryptocurrency, people tend to notice.)
But it wasn’t the greed that was unique to the Bitcoin Bonnie and Clyde, it was Razzlekhan’s preposterous thirst for public attention as the crime was going down. She constantly posted videos of herself either unboxing Amazon purchases, giving her husband haircuts, or awkwardly rapping about vacuum cleaners while barely dressed (she even filmed a video explaining how the vacuum cleaner video was conceived and filmed).
Perhaps the cringiest of all her videos was the one accompanying her song “Versace Bedouin,” in which she dubs herself the “Crocodile of Wall Street” while strutting through the streets of lower Manhattan. The clip should come with a warning — if you watch it with the sound on in your house, it might kill the fish in your aquarium. (Even after her legal troubles began, she continued to post videos, including “Jail Song Written from Solitary Confinement.” Johnny Cash she ain’t.)
Of course, comics also have their heroes, and we don’t have to leave New York to find a common superhero trope in the real world. This week, Daniel Penny, a Marine veteran, was acquitted of the killing of a man who was menacing other riders on a New York subway in May 2023. Rather than receiving a commendation for heroically subduing Jordan Neely, a violent, deranged man threatening to kill people in the subway car, Penny was vilified, with District Attorney Alvin Bragg charging him with homicide.
This is the most basic superhero origin narrative: An individual looks around, sees the justice system can’t handle the criminality infesting the streets, and takes action on his own. The story then gives way to the second-most-common superhero trope: Though trying to rid the streets of crime, the hero is often shunned by the public after (a) something goes wrong during a rescue attempt, or (b) a major crime takes place when the hero has been captured and can’t prevent it from happening. (At the end of The Dark Knight, for instance, District Attorney Harvey Dent – a.k.a. “Two Face” — is credited with saving the city while police go on a manhunt for Batman for allegedly causing Dent’s death.)
And what would a long-running comic book be without a politician playing the role of villain? In one Superman story line, billionaire Lex Luthor even becomes president, using his newly earned office to seek revenge on his enemies. Sound familiar?
(Donald Trump’s fans, naturally, think it is Trump who is the bold vigilante coloring outside the lines of a broken political system; but in fact, he is one of the people who, as Bruce Wayne’s butler, Alfred, warned, “just want to watch the world burn.”)
One thing comic books are typically missing is how partisan politics plays a role in our perception of heroes and villains. In the real world, where you sit on the ideological spectrum influences how you feel about Mangione and Penny. For instance, scores of leftist lunatics have emerged to support Mangione, and other progressives have condemned Penny for committing a random act of public safety.
But that doesn’t mean comics are devoid of politics, as clearly Superman is a liberal and Batman is a conservative. Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, is a member of the dreaded liberal mainstream media, and his father, Jor-El, was one of Krypton’s most noted academics and scientists. Bruce Wayne is a Scarlet Pimpernel–type billionaire playboy whose father made his money in the real estate market before the economy collapsed and whose company, Wayne Enterprises, manufactures military weapons. Superman hangs out with reporters; Batman’s best buddy is a cop. Superman, an illegal immigrant, even once renounced his U.S. citizenship.
Was Mangione out to sow societal chaos? We may never know. He may be a young man with severe mental problems and not a criminal mastermind. Perhaps we are entering an era of 19th-century-style anarchism in which men with names like Giuseppe Spaghetti routinely set off bombs in front of the Securities and Exchange Commission building.
Villains acting out in search of attention, whether for themselves or a cause, may now enter a new phase. People deluded by an online world full of lies and conspiracies — we could soon be facing Pizzagates all the way down. America has already seen threats on the lives of former presidents and current Supreme Court justices; when internet stardom awaits successful assassins, who knows how many copycats we will see?
Unfortunately, in the real world, everyday heroism as displayed by Daniel Penny, and others like him who don’t make the news, can’t keep up with supervillainy. We have no Spiderman or Batman or Superman to save us. The term “comic” implies that the world within the pages of a graphic novel is fictional. Sadly, in America today, the threats are all too real.