Desire for power and demonstration of dominance has been the impetus of human history since the beginning of time. People want to conquer territory and be the very best, they want to be someone others are jealous of. In Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son, Millar demonstrates this desire for power and the consequences of these actions. The comic takes place during the Cold War and tells the tale of what would happen if Superman had landed in the Soviet Union instead of Smallville, Kansas. The comic takes place in the Superman elseworld, where different stories or events occur to pre-existing characters, which are not related to the DC canon universe. While it is not explicitly stated in the comic, Superman demonstrates the values of the Soviet …show more content…
In Red Son, the United States economy is in shambles as their effort to rival Superman prove fruitless. Lex Luthor is given a “ludicrous” amount of money for his anti-Superman program which proves to be a failure time and time again. Each new idea of Luthor seems good in practice but is always met with a strong rebuttal from Superman. Halfway through the comic, Luthor is at attempt 307 in his attempts to beat Superman, showing the grotesque number of attempts and resources that went into Luthor’s failed program. With government spending focused on the anti-Superman program the United States becomes unruly, there are riots in California, the White House gets bombed, and Texas and Detroit talk of independence. This section of the comic relates closely with the start of the Iraq war, which started just a year before the comics release. The United States entered the war due to the possibility of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, and the massive government spending on both nuclear weapons and the war caused public uproar globally. According to the BBC, “73% of the global population disapproved of U.S. handling of the Iraq War” (BBC), which could explain this comic’s negative outlook on war and weaponry. Much like the government spending of nuclear weapons and war, the United States’ government in the comic spends a ridiculous amount into a program with minimal pay-off. Nuclear economics professor Stephen I. Schwartz believes there is a point where government spending in nuclear arms becomes superfluous in his article, “The Costs of U.S. Nuclear Weapons”. In the article, Schwartz explains that the United States spending in nuclear arms is a way to demonstrate power, he explains that countries believe that if they have the most powerful weapons that other countries will agree to demands. Schwartz believes “at a minimum hundreds of
In a country like the United States of America, with a history of every individual having an equal opportunity to reach their dreams, it becomes harder and harder to grasp the reality that equal opportunity is diminishing as the years go on. The book Our Kids by Robert Putnam illustrates this reality and compares life during the 1950’s and today’s society and how it has gradually gotten to a point of inequality. In particular, he goes into two touching stories, one that shows the changes in the communities we live in and another that illustrates the change of family structure. In the end he shows how both stories contribute to the American dream slipping away from our hands.
The film uses a number of themes showing our less admirable responses to the Cold War period of the 50's and 60's. This time period was one of fear in which nuclear annihilation was ever-present in the minds of Americans and Russians. Kubrick chronicles the time period with its playing up of the arms race gaps by creating "Doomsday Device Gaps" and "Mine Shaft Gaps" to ridicule the two superpowers ever-increasing competition to have the most of everything. This constant drive to ensure that we had just as much destructive capability as the Russians drove both countries into huge amounts of debt. A large part of the national debt can be attributed to military over-spending. This competition to have to most weapons also gave us the capability to destroy the world many times over.
In the story Kingdom Come, the superheroes of old such as Superman, Green Lantern, and the Flash are living in a type of self imposed exile after a disastrous nuclear accident in Kansas state. When Superman and the other heroes come back to stop the new breed of heroes, meta-humans, who are doing more harm than good, the threat of the end of the Earth looms overhead. The climax of the graphic novel comes when the Gulag, the prison built to house the non-cooperating meta-humans, has been destroyed. As the old superheroes clash with the escaped meta-humans, Superman battles Captain Marvel who has been brainwashed by Lex Luthor and has turned against his former allies and friends.
Presently, the United States places a high value on its military power and often boasts of its strength in the news. Not only does
In the Historical fiction, “The Red Badge of Courage”, written by Stephen Crane; a young man try’s to find courage in himself in the time of war. After watching your commander die in war, would you stay and fight or return home and be a coward? Enlisting Himself into war Henry, to be more than the common man to prove worthyness and bravery. With the sergeant dead will Henry lead his men to victory, or withdraw his men in war. Not being the only are faced with the decision Jim and Wilson Henry’s platoons will have the same decision.
Scott D. Sagan, the author of chapter two of “More Will Be Worse”, looks back on the deep political hostilities, numerous crises, and a prolonged arms race in of the cold war, and questions “Why should we expect that the experience of future nuclear powers will be any different?” The author talks about counter arguments among scholars on the subject that the world is better off without nuclear weapons. In this chapter a scholar named Kenneth Waltz argues that “The further spread of nuclear weapons may well be a stabilizing factor in international relations.” He believes that the spread of nuclear weapons will have a positive implications in which the likely-hood of war decreases and deterrent and defensive capabilities increase. Although there
Nolan, Janne E. 1999. An Elusive Consensus: Nuclear Weapons and American Security After the Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press.
Superhero comic books post World War Two began to rapidly decline because the enemy within all of the storylines were Nazis and with the Nazi defeat, there was no enemy left. This left a void to be filled with many superhero comic books in the late 1940s and early 1950s moving towards anti-communism and the defeating of the Soviet Union. However, they had marginal success in this period, since the youth of America understood the soviets had gained the nuclear bomb, which meant the Soviets could not be defeated in one swoop, securing their survival. By the early 1950s, however, the Cold War was warming up, with China becoming Red, and war in Korea. Politicians, like Joseph McCarthy, used anti-communist
Millar, Mark [w], Johnson, Dave and Plunkett, Kilian [p]. Superman: Red Son. California: DC Comics. 2003. Print
The country^s taxes pay for the system, but some people may not want the money they pay to be used for violent reasons. While we are making the strongest weapons we could, the nation can do better things that will help not only us but the world. Too many weapons will cause us to get greedy and too powerful. Many other countries despise us. Countries like Russia, China, and even small ones like North Korea are powerful and the US doesn^t have really good relations with them.
In the following, I will present the hypothetical case of Superman vs. Lex Luthor; it is wrong for Superman to prevent Lex Luthor from obtaining his goal of world domination. Luthor is a villain, his actions are “evil,” which is the reason Superman and Luther are in conflict; but Luthor believes that “the ends justify the means” meaning although his actions are disagreeable, his end goal is to better humanity as a whole. I will then analyses the case according to three ethical theories, namely Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill.
The core of American myth is Superman consists of a few basic facts that remain unchanged throughout the infinitely varied ways in which the myth is told – facts with which everyone is familiar, however marginal their knowledge of the story. Superman is an orphan rocketed to Earth when his native planet Krypton explodes; he lands near Smallville and is adopted by Jonathan and Martha Kent, who inculcate in him their American middle-class ethic; as an adult he migrates to Metropolis there he defends America – no, the world! no, the universe – from all evil and harm while playing a romantic game in which, as Clark Kent, he hopelessly pursues Superman, who remains aloof until such time as Lois proves worthy of him by falling in live with his feigned identity as a weakling. That’s it. (Engle, 678).
And that's why he'd let Batman get a hold of some kryptonite, and why Superman won't dodge it as it's plunged into his chest.
Society favors the outlaw hero because we relate with that character more. We see ourselves more so in the outlaw hero than in the official hero. The outlaw hero has the child like talents that most of us wish we had as adults. To civilians it may seem that the outlaw hero lives more of a fantasy life that we all wish to have. Superman’s image has remained unchanged over the years. A blue suit accompanied by boots, a belt and cape have always been the Superman style, along with the Superman emblem on his chest. Superman’s real name is Kal-El, a descendant of the Kryptonian family of the house of El, with his father known as Jor-El and mother Lara. Krypton was discovered to be in the last seconds of life due to the coming supernova of its sun by Kal-El’s father. The other members of Krypton did not believe Jor-El could not tell others of his answers and examinations. Jor-El promised that neither he nor his wife would leave and with every last possible choice eliminated, Jor-El would send his newborn son to the planet Earth. Kal-El then crash landed into the care of Jonathan and Martha Kent, two farmers in Kansas. He then adopted the Kent family name,...
Morgenthau goes onto his third method of analysis which is reviewing a state’s usable and unusable power. The most popular example of this is the possession of nuclear weaponry. Nuclear capabilities and that threat of their use is a form of useable power for states like the US and Russia but not for states with underdeveloped nu...