POLITICS AND POLITICIANS 475
Although not all of Captain America’s adventures in the political realm were so dark,
they did often continue to refl ect a dissatisfaction with the limitations of the status quo
in American politics. In the waning days of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Captain Amer-
ica even mulled a run at the nation’s highest offi ce himself. Captain America #250 (1980),
written by Roger Stern and Don Perlin, features a story in which the New Populist
Party seeks to recruit the hero to run on their ticket and defy the deeply entrenched
two-party system. As one enthusiastic NPP member tells him, “People wouldn’t have to
settle for the lesser of two evils—they’d actually have someone to vote for! ” Cap eventu-
ally decides against running, believing that he is better suited to preserve the American
dream than to engage with the daily compromises of political reality.
Few politically focused comics of the 1980s shared the mostly upbeat attitude of
Stern’s Captain America. British comics scribe Alan Moore extrapolated from Prime
Minister Margaret Th atcher’s extreme conservatism to create the bleak, dystopian
future England of V for Vendetta (1982–88), while his run on Swamp Th ing featured
a character, Nukeface, who becomes poisonous to those around him when he unwit-
tingly drinks improperly stored toxic waste; pages crowded with newspaper clippings
about the dangers of toxic waste suggested the urgency of the problem (#35–36, 1985).
In Th e Dark Knight Returns (1986), Frank Miller portrays Superman as the passive
dupe of a corrupt United States government led by a glib Ronald Reagan. Th e 1980s
also saw the rise of alternative comics ; distributed through the burgeoning direct
market but creator-driven and unaffi liated with the major publishers, alternative comics
faced few impediments to engaging with political questions in a sophisticated manner.
Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! (1983–89) satirized a United States in which
government-controlled mass culture had robbed American citizens of their ability to
uphold the responsibilities of participatory democracy. In the fi rst volume of Love and
Rockets (1982–96) many of Gilbert Hernandez’s “Palomar” stories critiqued United
States involvement in Latin America. Dave Sim’s Cerebus (1977–2004) began as a pulp
genre pastiche but eventually became a complicated and controversial treatment of the
themes of corrupting power, the intersection of religion and politics, gender roles, and
the relationship between politics and art. Another important creator from the world
of alternative comics, Paul Chadwick, began in the 1990s to use his sensitive man-
monster Concrete to explore political questions. Th e most notable result was Concrete:
Th ink Like a Mountain (1996) a miniseries which dealt with the ethical implications of
extremism in the environmental movement.
In recent years, treatments of political questions in comics have often been inspired
by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11,
2001 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as by domestic de-
bates over civil rights. Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) not only
refl ects upon the trauma of 9/11 but also criticizes the way in which the George W.
Bush administration exploited the attacks for political gain. Superheroes, always
potent metaphors for the uses and abuses of power, have often been pressed into the
service of political narratives. Superman villain Lex Luthor briefl y served as President
