Certain Doom and Resolve:The True Power of the Superhero Myth

I just finished watching a pair of episodes from the 2001 Justice League cartoon, which is what inspired me to write this piece. The duology, entitled “Legends”, is from the series first season and is the first time the series creates a true emotional resonance with the audience, or at least the first time it did that to me. This story and its denouement  reminded me why I fell in love with superheroes in the first place by engendering in me feel a sense of wonder and admiration for what human being are capable of achieving and Being.

I suppose taking the time to explain the story preceding the affecting moment would be prudent, as the arc as a whole is quite outstanding. This two part story, which was the format for nearly every episode of the show before it was re-branded as Justice League Unlimited and followed a much more understandable one-shot format from then on, begins in-situ with a bog-standard battle between the Justice League and a rampaging robot being remote-controlled by Lex Luthor. This ill-fated machine is destroyed by the JL, but not before it sucks The Martian Manhunter, Flash, John Stewart and Hawkgirl into an alternate dimension in the resulting explosion. It is there that they meet and briefly confront, before finally hugging it out with - The Justice Guild of America. Their world is a representation of an idealized 1950’s America replete with self-enforcing sexism and casual racism. One of the Guild's members, Tom Turbine (voiced by Ted McGinley), a hero who utilizes a miniature dynamo on his belt to generate electricity which he then channels through his fists, delivers a cliche-defining one-liner before engaging Green Lantern and Flash,

“Perhaps you haven’t heard, but in Seaboard City - crime doesn’t pay.”

This innocuous and unabashedly cheesy introduction will become important later.

Now Mirror, Mirror story arcs are a dime a dozen these days, which makes sense, as they allow writers to play around with characters whose ideologies and personal characteristics are more or less set in stone. But this particular romp to an alternate earth takes a slightly different approach. While the characters our heroes meet are in some ways mirrors of characters we’re familiar with - The Streak to The Flash, Green Guardian to the Green Lantern, Catman to Batman - they aren’t meant to operate as direct parallels that serve to examine and deconstruct core parts of those characters personalities and mythos (such as The Crime Syndicate) but rather as a self-reflexive exercise mostly for the audience.

We find out fairly early on in the arc that John Stewart enjoyed lazy afternoons during his youth perusing comic stacks with his uncle, and that the Justice Guild was his favorite group of fictional superheroes. What’s more, the fictional forays of the Justice Guild played a large part in inspiring him to become a good man, and ultimately, a hero himself. Fancy that. The explanation is proffered that these characters, rather than being the result of a comic-writers overactive imagination, were instead real people with real lives and with whom the writer was able to connect on a psychic level, turning their reality into his worlds fantasy. This concept of psychic inception should be familiar enough to most of you, but it's not something I want to go into here - suffice it to say that’s a different topic for a different time.

If having a fictional world full of superheroes nestled inside yet another fictional world full of superheroes wasn’t feeling groovy enough, the end of the first episode introduces yet another interesting twist - the marked graves of Tom Turbine, Green Guardian and the rest of the Justice Guild, indicating that whoever our heroes have been interacting with are doppelgangers of some kind.
Near the end of the second episode the JGA’s plucky underage companion, Ray Thompson, is revealed to be an extremely powerful mutant who created the Justice Guild’s doppelgangers and the idyllic reality in which they currently inhabit, the originals having been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust some 40 years earlier. Despite the JGA being nothing more than figments of a fractured and despondent psyche, their autonomy, individuality, and personalities remain - and so they are faced with a choice. Do they remain steadfast in the ideals they have long sworn to uphold, and in doing so, erase themselves and the city they were sworn to protect from reality? Or do they retreat back into the fantasy world which they had so comfortably inhabited until that point to play an egotistically satisfying game of cat and mouse with their villainous counterparts?

Unsurprisingly, the choose the former - they are heroes after all. But it isn’t this choice which created this poignant emotional resonance in my mind, rather it is Tom Turbine’s delivery of the aforementioned quote as he is about to confront his creator, but this time without any of the cheese or flair of the prior utterance, but rather with a simple and stalwart solemnity,

“In Seaboard City - crime doesn’t pay.”

McGinley’s subtle gravitas in that moment is worth a thousand super-powered throw downs and ideal-ridden monologues. He has realized and come to terms with who and what he is, and in the face of utter desolation, he hold true to what he believes - that good will overcome evil, no matter the personal cost. And in doing so, he truly felt exactly what that utterance is supposed to mean for the first time since his reincarnation.

It is in those rare moments that these stories gain their power. The power to move us as well as the power to inspire us.

To be better, and to do better.
Perhaps the reason I was moved by this relatively brief moment in a cartoon that's over a decade old is due to a personal affinity for fiction which evokes pathos through its utilization of a theory of mind. It shows through means subtle and obvious what is going on in a character's head, why they act and feel the way they do, and does so without cheapening it through unnecessary melodrama or overt explanation. While it may just be me, I think this observation is of a quality all good stories share, and plays a large part in what makes a story and its characters truly worthwhile to a given audience. Had Tom Turbine stopped to explain that he had steeled himself against total obliteration in words, rather than showing it to the audience, I believe that moment would have lost all of its poignancy. It's not satisfying to hear such determinations. We need to see and feel them viscerally.