Gilmore Guy
Marshal Law as a mirror of Reagan's America
My last post was triggered by the realization that a Transformers episode from forty years ago today could be interpreted as an attack on religion - telecast during the peak of America’s Religious Right!
"These Fools Worship Transformers!"
Today is the fortieth anniversary of episode 39 of The Transformers, “The God Gambit” by Buzz Dixon (with uncredited revisions by Ron Friedman).
If only the Moral Majority had noticed …
The Moral Majority was an organization made up of conservative Christian political action committees which campaigned on issues its personnel believed were important to maintaining its Christian conception of moral law. They believed this represented the opinions of the majority of Americans (hence the movement’s name). With a membership of millions, the Moral Majority became one of the largest conservative lobby groups in the United States and at its height, it claimed more than four million members and over two million donors. These members were spread among about twenty state organizations, of which Washington State’s was the largest.
Across the Atlantic, writer Pat Mills and artist Kevin O’Neill1 did notice a shift toward the Religious Right in America - which they relentlessly mocked in Marshal Law (1987).
Can you believe I was oblivious to the pun in the title character’s name until last night? Now you see why some child jail warden declared that I was not very bright … but maybe, just maybe, if I worked hard, I could possibly achieve something. Like a Substack with almost no readers?
Back to fantasy: Under the mask, Marshal Law is Joe Gilmore2, who grew up in an America disturbingly like the real one in the eighties but with a big difference. Superheroes were real.
Joe bought into their piety - their mythology:
Their morality:
In the immortal words of Nancy Reagan.
Joe said “yes” to Doctor Shocc (born Mendel - as in Gregor3) -
- and to the USSA military, which sent him to The Zone in Latin America:
Joe returned from The Zone a changed man. A lawman.
Using his powers against rogue superbeings at home instead of against Marxists4 abroad.
“Home” was San Futuro, the “City of the Future”t built beside the ruins of San Francisco after The Big One struck:
In the shining towers on the right is the same old human slime - often made superhuman by SHOCC5 treatment.
The ‘best’ - or should I say the worst of the superhumans - was also the very first. The Public Spirit - an obvious Superman analogue.
Marshal Law’s world is full of such analogues.
Do you recognize the Marvel pantheon?
Bruce Wayne Scott Brennan a.k.a. Batman Private Eye:
Superboy Public Spirit Jr. and the Legion of Super-Heroes League of Heroes:
Extra credit if you can identify all the … influences on the original Jesus Society of America from the 1940s.
What Marshal Law’s world is NOT full of is heroism. Real heroism. Except perhaps embodied by the supercop himself … whose own girlfriend Lynn Evans can’t stand his other identity:
Joe Gilmore/Marshal Law is perpetually disgusted. He works for the very regime that warped him. Used him. Still uses him - against others it had once used. His boss Commissioner McGland wants him disciplining Surps - surplus superheroes who had lost their purpose after returning from The Zone.
And almost nobody but Joe’s girlfriend recognizes the sickness that permeates society. The inversion. The worship of devils as gods.
At least Joe can punch out a false god every once in a while.
That’s not an option for us regular humans. The minority of us who sees through the fraud can only futilely complain while titans battle and the masses cheer, unable to spot kayfabe.
Mills and O’Neill put their complaints into comic book form, and their outrage remains relevant today, long after Reagan and his ilk have left the stage. America isn’t a Christian conservative’s dream6 - but it is still stuck in a cult of soterism. Hero worship. Obama! Sanders! Trump! Putin! Bobby! ♥ANCE! Even Zohran Mamdani, whom The Daily Show was pushing hard tonight.7
Marshal Law, on the other hand, is asoteric.
The Asoteric do not believe in any messiahs - human, machine, or institutional. No leader, no computer, no church or state.
Their anthem is the Stranglers’ “No More Heroes”.
I leave you with Marshal Law’s last words from the end of his first series:
I’m a hero hunter.
I hunt heroes.
Haven’t found any yet.
I was sad to learn tonight that Kevin O’Neill had passed away in 2002. None of the comics fans I know had said anything, at least as far as I know. I don’t know any admirers of O’Neill other than myself.
This Gilmore guy is no (known) relation to the Gilmore girls - Lorelai and Rory.
I would become a fan of their show in 2019, decades after I first read Marshal Law.
Dr. Mendel/Shocc was clearly … inspired by Dr. Strangelove.
“Ze” man and woman in that picture had been transformed at Super-Life Laboratory.
It’s hard for me to resist the urge to post more panels. The writing and art in Marshal Law complement each other in a way I rarely see in comics. There’s genius here - and Reagan’s America didn’t give it the appreciation it deserved when it was first published in the States. Wikipedia says its first miniseries “sold well”, but it certainly was no threat to, say, the X-Men, and the publisher, Marvel Comics’ Epic imprint,
received several complaints about the art, as well as forcing Mills and O’Neill to change the characters in the Marshal Law Takes Manhattan one-shot from the familiar Marvel Comics characters as they intended to use to thinly disguised duplicates of heroes such as Captain America, Spider-Man and The Punisher.
That one-shot was the last of Marshal Law at Epic. If Marshal Law had been popular, it would have become a regular series.
Joe and other enhanced soldiers - mass-produced Captain Americas - were sent to stop the “Sovietization” of Latin America - an extrapolation of Reagan’s anti-Sandinista policy:
In the aftermath of the Nicaraguan Revolution, where the political dynasty (1936–1979) of the Somoza family was overthrown by the Sandinistas, various groups [i.e., the Contras] were formed in opposition to the Sandinistas, including by Samoza allies and former members of the National Guard, and also by Anti-Somozistas’ groups whom had previously been aligned with and fought alongside the Sandinistas. The United States and several other countries provided military assistance and financial aid to the Contras. In 1981, the CIA and Argentina’s Secretariat of Intelligence persuaded several Contra groups to unite into the larger Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN). In 1986, the Boland Amendment was passed to end U.S. aid to the Contras; yet the Reagan administration continued to illegally fund the Contras, which resulted in a scandal known as the Iran–Contra affair.
[…]
During the war, the Contras’ tactics featured terrorism and human rights violations against civilians. […] The Global Terrorism Database reports that Contras carried out more than 1,300 terrorist attacks.
Of course, parallels could also be drawn with Vietnam, though that was before Reagan’s time.
Super Hero Operational Command and Control.
Although I’ve seen Christianity on the rise among the Rightist Americans I know, the USSA is still far from the über-Christian (and VERY Catholic) country depicted in Marshal Law.
I saw The Daily Show by accident between broadcasts of Beavis and Butt-Head.