Epic Fail: Marshal Law

Meet The Boys’ Daddy.’ I’ve come to loath him.

Today this comic book makes my skin crawl like it’s just been licked by a corpse. However, when I was young and profoundly stupid I thought it was satirical, cool, and edgy, and that the people who made it, didn’t really hate superheroes like that.  I also thought that Neil Gaiman couldn’t possibly be all that obsessed with hebephilia, incest, and sadism no matter what his writing strongly indicated. 

It took me a long damn time but I finally did find out that if someone tells you “I am this thing” then they are “that thing.” 

Marshal Law was the first canary to fall off its perch in the comic book mines. He was the first warning of everything that was going to go so hideously wrong with the entire American comic book industry.

It was also the first of the blatantly evil Superman tropes to befoul what should have been perfectly good comic book printing paper. The obsessions with sexual sadism, worn-out contrivances, and jealous hatred of America and all things American required a special touch that could only be found on the Island of Albion. 

Patrick Mills is a Brit Baby Boomer and failed Christian who really seems to resent the fact that UK Communists like himself had to miss out on all the drama trauma of Vietnam. He is the one who rounded up a bunch of 1970s cliches, put them in a gimp mask and gay leather then named this conglomeration eye-searing awfulness, Marshal Law.

“I’m a hero hunter. I hunt heroes. I haven’t found any yet.”  Catchphrase! And one that wore out its welcome pretty damn quick.

After Watchmen and Dark Knight the comic book industry decided that deconstruction of superheroes was depth of thought.  If the comic books adopted seething self-loathing that means we finally grew up right? We too can at last go to the kind of party that’s full of conceited nihilists that couldn’t get into law school. 

Pat Mills clearly detested the idea of superheroes as mythic. They were just propaganda so far as he was concerned. The first story arc was published by Marvel’s 80s indie imprint, Epic Comics.  Some of them were great. Not this one, but some of them were. 

Marshal Law takes place in a city called San Futuro.  After a “the big one” leveled San Francisco a dystopia was built in its place that looks almost as bad as current year SF. There was some war or another where Americans were gleefully burning third-world babies and were given gene-engineered superpowers to do it better.  After the war, they all go nuts like veterans always do and it’s Marshal Law’s job to hunt them down and kill them.  Which he does with sadistic joy. The story arc follows Marshal Law’s hunt for a super powered serial killer rapist called Sleepman. 

Public Spirit is Marshal Law’s prime suspect and he was Homelander before Homelander was a thing. He looks like the product of an imagination that was subjected to homosexual abuse at a Catholic Boys school by a priest with a Superman fetish, but that’s just my own guess.  We’re supposed to hate Public Spirit because Marshal Law hates him and he’s a ridiculously obvious red herring.

Marshal had two helpers; a polite mass-monster called Kiloton and Danny the cripple who is clearly and obviously Sleepman. He’s Public Spirit’s bastard son by some Wonder Woman stand-in called Virago, who he tried to kill because she got sloppy with her birth control.  She gets her son to rape and murder woman who are dressed like Public Spirit’s current girlfriend who is a younger hotter version of herself.  I think Mills thought this was authentic female motivation rather than a strong indication she would throw herself at Public Spirit’s feet if he even hinted he would take her back.

The plot is introduced, then filler happens for six issues until Public Spirit is defeated by Marshal Law and killed by the authorities because Superman was always the real villain because Father Sean, why me?!?!?! WHY MEEEEEE!?!?!

Just looking this stuff over now makes me feel sticky, dirty, and deeply embarrassed that I ever thought this was good.

Is there anything I like about it?  No, but I’ll give it one thing.  It’s honest about itself in a way that The Boys isn’t.  There’s NO smirking here. It’s just raw hatred of American exceptionalism’s ultimate expression in the forms of Superman and Captain America.  It’s a statement of loathing for the very concept of the heroic archetype as a heaven-sent deliverer.   

Watchman gets all the credit for being the first deconstruction of superheroes. While I am on the record as loathing this practice I can’t place that crown of thorns on Alan Moore’s head because by complete accident he created an uncompromising, stoic, Byronic superhero in Rorschach.* But Marshal Law was pure in its evil, I have to give it that.

There’s no denying that Marshal Law had a legacy. A fetid and feculent one to be sure but it had one. It was too angry to ever build, it could only burn. Its diseased DNA corrupted everything it touched. 

Or at least it tried to.

Because here’s the big thing. The superhero was never a fascist enforcer in a cape. He was and remains an incorruptible tower of strength in a fallen world that is still falling. He is Gallahad,  Momotoru, Hector, Beowulf, Rama, Guan Yu, and Christ.  

He is also Steve Rogers and Clark Kent.

Let me know if you want me to write a series in defense of the superhero in the comments below

*And he was actually created by Steve Diko.