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JLA:Superpower and the Notion of Hubris

A moral or ethical work conveys its message most effectively by showing the real-world consequences that follow the decisions that we, as flawed human beings, make. While comics of the traditional model frequently took an escapist approach, allowing the protagonists just enough danger to prove their own impermeability, prior to their wandering off into the sunset with the villains nicely warehoused in convenient jails, a more serious body of material explores both the effects of the hero on the world he attempts to serve and the effect the hero's role may have on the man who wears the costume. DC Comics explored both themes, much more deeply than typical of superhero comics, in their prestige-format book JLA: Superpower from the late 1990s.

Much denser than the average prestige-format comic book, this tale deals only peripherally with the Justice League and places centrally the self destruction of a man named Mark Antaeus, whose crimes of rising above the station to which nature has destined him very much fit the model of a Greek tragedy, including the central tragic flaw of hubris.

The Engine behind Greek Tragedy

Hubris, generally understood as arrogance, pretension, or overreaching, drove Classical Greek tragedy as we understand it. For example, King Oedipus suffered ruination through his desire to know what lay behind the curse on his city (a question he had asked without considering that it might involve his own doings, a personal history which included killing his father, marrying his mother, and siring children whom one could equally describe as siblings or offspring).

The worldview of the high era of Greek tragedy, one might infer from surviving works, involved a clear dividing line between the mortal and the divine. Extant myths that predate the tragic poets and dramatists confirm as much; consider, for instance, the tale of Daedelus and Icarus, who sought to escape imprisonment via sets of wings that Icarus, the Thomas Edison of Greek myths, fabricated from feathers and wax to allow the pair to fly to freedom. IkIcarusnwisely soared too high, where the sun could melt the wax holding his wings together, and fell into the sea and drowned. The symbolism needs little interpretation; had IkIcarusemained at the level he belonged, he would have avoided his own ruin. Similarly, the tale of Phaeton, who would drive the chariot of his father Helios - the veritable Chariot of the Sun itself - takes a similar tone of disapproval to those who, from a mortal nature, would attempt to butt into matters only the gods truly understood.

The tragic protagonist, however, remains blind to his own flaw, his own overreaching and intrusion into spheres that his person, however grand in a mortal context, tends to profane or defile from his mere mortal quality.

Such drama generally followed a pattern where the arrogance of the protagonist brought about his ruin as a means of evening the scales in a moral sense. Hellions ended his own tale self-blinded, homeless, destitute, and wandering, and his tragedy continued after his death with the destruction of his incestuously-conceived children, such as Antigone.

The Premise of JLA:Superpower

JLA:Superpower takes a tragic form after this model, tracing the destruction of Mark Antaeus through his own desire to do good on a scale larger than his nature allowed. Followed in a linear fashion, the story begins with Antaeus' early childhood, when his father had the lad enhanced to better-than-human capabilities through a number of technological (and, for purposes of the story, therefore unnatural) processes. Antaeus' ethos, furthermore, inclines him to the helping professions, and he becomes a policeman, idolizing the superheroic ilk in general and Superman in particular.

However, a tragic failure on his part disrupts the key balance between "man" and "hero" in his personality. While able to perform the occasional superhuman stunt, his abilities to run faster, jump higher, and take more damage than normal humans fails to give him the necessary punch to rescue a family from a burning building. Their deaths essentially unhinge the man, who gives himself over to a series of mechanical enhancements that distort his form to unlikely hyper-muscular dimensions and remove about half of the human features of his face to make way for add-ons and implants.

Once thusly enhanced, a combination of his firepower and relentless way with rescues and crimefighting draws attention to him from the Justice League. And, rapidly earning a place as a probationary member, Antaeus nonetheless raises the not-usually-very-impressive hackles of the young Green Lantern, who sees something wrong about the man. Lantern's protests, however, meet with a general contempt from the various Leaguers.

Antaeus' downfall begins to gather speed when he confronts the team about the problem of nations that make war on their citizens. Unlike some super-teams of the late nineties, such as the Authority, the Justice League generally eschews activities like overthrowing tyrants and slaughtering goon squads run by governments to terrorize their subjects. Antaeus, however, can't leave it at that; he asks "why" and doesn't care for the non-interventionist boilerplate that members of the League give him as an answer.

Finally, as his last deed within the norms of a mainstream hero, Mark pushes a project on the Justice League. Antaeus points their attention to the events in Vudistan, a country plagued by murderous tyrants and famine. He suggests disposing of its tyrant would do much to render the place fit to live in again, and immediately garners objections from Superman and Batman, the first on ethics grounds - Superman does not desire to "take out" anyone - and the second on logistics - Batman recognizes that the Vudistan situation represents a powder keg and that neither he nor anyone else in the Justice League knows what to expect if they cause this bomb to blow.

Angered at what he sees as indifference, ignorance, cowardice, and complacency in the Justice League, Antaeus storms away, only to attempt to remedy matters himself. He shoulders through the walls of the president's palace to arrest its genocidal dictator, only to find himself confronted by the dictator's stratagem: He takes a child hostage in order to compel Antaeus to surrender. The Justice League, concerned that Mark might do something ill-considered, follow to the beleaguered imaginary eastern European trouble spot, where they find Antaeus killed the dictator, acting to save the lives of hostages rather than as an expression of his earlier desire to act in ways traditionally foreclosed to the more conventional heroes.

Antaeus' arrogance, well-intentioned in its beginnings, catches up with him from that point onward. Declared and treated as a rogue, he finds his onetime allies acting towards him as toward just another super-powered criminal; but, not wishing to cause more destruction, the Justice League decide to expel him and defer bringing action against him when their rumble threatens to bring down buildings and cost lives.

Abandoning the linkage of good reputation represents another sundered connection between Antaeus and the human community, but purpose has, by this point, replaced much of his earlier human nature. However, reality itself bursts his delusion when he returns to the country he believed himself to have liberated; finding a scene of thousands of human corpses manipulated with bulldozers like so much junkyard rubbish in a mass grave, he finally recognizes his failure in its entirety. Then, sundering the coolant coils that serve his internal nuclear reactor (the central battery for his more energetic abilities), he revs his leg jets to maximum and flies until he explodes, an ending not qualitatively different than Oedipus putting out his eyes with a brooch.

Thus completes the cycle of hubris. A man attempts to reach beyond his station, and the world - often represented by personified forces, such as Greek gods - rises to slap him back down, to a place considerably below what he would have had before his tragic arrogance began the process of ruination.

Our modern word "hybrid" owes to a common root with the term hubris in a bit of nomenclature that suggests a preemptive disapproval of fusing one type of thing with another. And, through Antaeus' admixture of enhanced organic components and mechanical add-ons, he definitely fits the term "hybrid." In an attempt to remake himself as something more than human - as part of a policy of denying himself the human trait of failure - he crosses the line from his essence (ordinary, everyday humanity) to an unnatural superhuman state.

The Moral Problem of Heroes

Questions like Does a hero have a duty not to act sometimes? and the Hippocratic notion If you can do no good, at least do no harm permeate this work. The Silver Age DC superhero, even in more contemporary treatments, already has dealt with and answered these questions, internalizing the answers as strategies. The heroes of the sixties begged the Big Questions, but a work with more edifying ambitions can't afford to.

For newcomers to the heroic scene, the questions remain sometimes to ask, and so similarly the reader, confronted with the real world rather than the four-color cosmos of comics, might have to confront the ethical tangles they involve. Many of these questions will appear as problems of scale. For instance, we would expect the likes of a Superman not to bother with trifling matters like junior high students shoplifting candy bars from convenience stores when crashing planes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions have repercussions that spread wider.

While the role of the hero requires that he throw himself in the way of harms and menaces that seem greater than him, the role itself provides the imperative that he rise to his circumstances, but limits corral just how far this expansion can go. It falls, generally speaking, well short of apotheosis. For instance, we might expect a fireman to take risks and perform feats beyond the abilities of athletes, but for him to attempt, single-handedly, to arrest the firestorm of a nuclear bomb would represent folly, not heroism. His deeds at that stage would become posture and no substance; he would save no one; he would die horribly and possibly drag others down with him; and all of this centers around an acquired ignorance of the scale of how much he can, or indeed, should, affect by himself.

So we return to hubris, like the overreaching when Phaeton deemed himself to drive the chariot of the sun. Hubris degrades the hero to the role of a fool, so damaged by his delusions that they must ruin him.

The Road to Self-Destruction

In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Oedipus brings on his own destruction by vowing that he will uncover the sin that lay the curse on his city. In his arrogance, he never considered that his own deeds might have brought down the ill fate on his people, and the revelations that he has not only slaughtered his father Laius but sired children on his own mother Jocasta (or Epicaste) destroys him.

In later tragedies that owed somewhat to Classical origins, such as Shakespeare's King Lear, the tragic arrogance still serves an the engine that drives protagonists to ruin; in Lear's case, the unreasonable demand that he had a moral claim to dictate how much his daughters would love him, though not of a stylistic similarity to the destructive pride of a Greek tragic hero, nonetheless implicates a destructive pride.

Similarly, Antaeus' vow never again to fail represents an act of arrogance, inasmuch as human beings - even heavily modified ones pretending to rise above their own fallibility - inevitably must fail sometimes. Humans lack the power to declare that they will never again make mistakes, no matter what resources they have to dedicate to the crusade. And, we might note, the kernel of an appropriate desire does not suffice to absolve the arrogance behind carrying it to an extreme inappropriate to the scale of the players involved. As Lear might reasonably expect or desire a certain amount of love from his daughters, he nonetheless lapsed into overreaching in attempting to compel the emotional responses he desired. Antaeus, both after his failure as rescuer forced him to reappraise his role in the cosmos and when he confronted the question, with the Justice League, of what limits attach to the heroic role, made resolutions that inflated his role in the universe.

To begin with, whether we like it or not, flawed human beings have no particular escape from our inherent fallibility, though we can somewhat reduce its impact. After failing to rescue the apartment-dwellers during the episode with the fire, his resolution not to allow himself to fail represented an arrogant paradigm shift; to refuse to fail implies we actually have such a power. Take men of flesh and blood, however, and observe those who pretend to the inability to make errors, and what you see will include human beings engaged in self-deception and ruses to conceal rather than eliminate their potential for mistakes. One can observe the like in public officials who rationalize away their failures (we could, perhaps, include Richard Nixon's claims to having won the war in Vietnam until bad diplomacy lost the peace among such sophistry). The man who denies himself the ability to fail, although selective perception rather than actual perfection provides the mechanism for such pseudo-perfection through role-playing, denies himself the benefits of failure such as learning where one's own limits lie and what strategies tend to fail.

A distorted perception of one's own nature inherently taints all questions of one's own relationship to the universe that contains him, and we see as much in Mark Antaeus when he reappears, after his additional enhancements. The personable young man has vanished, perhaps since proclaiming his quest for perfection he severed his sympathy with his human fellows. And the pattern occurs on more than one magnitude. He required himself to stand above normal humanity, somewhat supported by the enhancements that gave him hyper-athletic (but sub-metanormal) abilities, as a policeman; and, though once he aspired to acceptance among the superhuman community that the Justice League represented, once he became a probationary Leaguer, he began conceiving methods to stand above them as well. In essence, he chose to proclaim that no problem - social, political, or military - lay beyond the remedy of supermen of good will.

Noting the habitual ineffectualness of superheroes when confronting matters like the wars tyrannical governments wage against their people, Antaeus proposed that the Justice League could intervene in places like Vudistan and Qurac, DC's imaginary nations that bridge some piece of an imaginary Asia. Rebuffed somewhat by the older, more cautious superheroes with worldviews owing more to Waid-era sentimental and moral concerns rather than the take-no-prisoners Image and Wildstorm models of heroism, Antaeus proceeds with a fairly innocent agenda of distributing food to starving locals whom the local tyrant brutalizes through means like planned starvation. His effort, however, brings the attention of local goons and the dictator himself, placing him in a situation where he must choose between slaying the tyrant (an acceptable and perhaps desirable outcome); and one sees the role of denial in his creative omission of a discussion of the events with the Justice League, who, particularly through the voice of Superman, express disapproval of his handling of the situation and the slaying of the tyrant.

This much, however, represents little more than a setback: Antaeus rumbles with Leaguers wishing to bring him in as a rogue hero, and fights to a standstill against superheroes who stop before their intramural conflicts cause too much damage to bystanders and the cities they live in. Having abandoned (at least in part) his kinship with normal humans, even as he takes unto himself the role of their protector, the loss of a peer-status with superheroes probably means little more to a man trying to transform himself into the avatar of a Higher Purpose. But we deal with hubris here, as described earlier; and this kind of pride has subversive powers that can undo the greatest works of the mighty, ultimately bringing about a collapse in proportion to what the flawed protagonist had, in the beginning, to fall from.

Awareness and Ruination

Antaeus collapses, not from his loss of the esteem of other superheroes, but from irrefutable proof of his own failure. For, instead of the desired results his dabbling in Vudistanish and Quraqi politics, he watches, through headlines and in person, the destabilization of an already-dangerous situation, degenerating from mere banana-republic style oppression to the full, sick ballet of genocide. Jails full of tortured and murdered political prisoners and starving subjects become the material of nostalgic daydreaming compared to what follows - methodical, systematic exterminations, the kind of ethnic cleansing that marked the twentieth century as a hundred-year festival of butchery cascade from the simple removal of a toxic dictator. And, in the end, Antaeus must face material evidence of what he has sown, walking through the site of a mass grave where bodies stand in great piles pending their concentration, via earth-moving equipment, in the kind of great trenches familiar to students of political mass murder.

Antaeus, having rejected the truth of his own finite abilities when such knowledge could have helped him (and tens of thousands of others), now faces both the very fault to which he refused to admit and his role as a catalyst in murder on the scale of nations. An Oedipus, armed with a man's will and muscles and a brooch, could only put out his eyes and become a cursed wanderer after similar revelations about himself; Antaeus, however, has elements that make him a hybrid of human tissue, hydraulics, chemical jet technology, and a small nuclear reactor. All of this allows him to execute his own destruction with a considerable degree of flash; and, disabling the cooling systems that keep his internal nuclear reactor under control, he flies away from the evidence of his failure and accelerates until he explodes like a bomb, leaving behind a mangled helmet for more ethically mature souls, such as Superman, to retain as a reminder of the consequences of his kind of failure.

This end is what tragic arrogance produces from the raw material of the hero. In the early flashbacks, we had a man who required himself to do more than ordinary men could, who put the well-being of others above his own but, knowing where to find the boundaries, he could turn his strong points to good effect. He stood above the ordinary and basked adulation, not unfairly. As such, he showed the kernel of heroism that first-tier DC heroes like Superman would respond to. But, through various drastic transformations, he proved unable to stop reaching for more than he could grasp, with the distance between what he wanted to achieve and what he could achieve providing the length of his fall when reality finally asserted itself, incontrovertibly, past the point of his delusion to fog. So instead of the heroism, the promise, the entire portfolio of superheroic virtues, all he left behind included one mangled helmet (of no particular beauty in perfect condition), a human abattoir, and a rapidly-dispersing radioactive cloud.

Should such a doom come to a bad man, we recognize the fitness of the fate. It requires a kind of moral blindness (or, perhaps, outright dementia) to shed tears over the collapse of Hitler's aspirations, for example. But the tragic centers on the ruination of men good but for hubris, as a warning against the lures of unconstrained pride. Therein lies the moral and ethical essence of tragedy of this form.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@yahoo.com.

Column 283. Completed 28-NOV-2001.