Why won't comics deal with terrorism?

September 11 has made comics writers reluctant to engage in any real way with global politics. But that doesn't make it an impossible issue.

Captain AmericaCaptain America: 'Gee whiz, Mr President ... ' Photograph: AP

Why are there no superheroes in Iraq? Back in the second world war, Captain America's fist and Hitler's face were together so often they could have signed a civil partnership and bought a puppy. Comics were benign propaganda. Today, that would be unthinkable.

Part of the problem is the conflict itself. As with Vietnam, there is too much anxiety about the Iraq war's aims and methods. No one wants to see Captain America take orders from Donald Rumsfeld and no one wants to see him accidentally bomb a wedding party.

More importantly, September 11 has made many writers reluctant to engage in any real way with global politics.

Firstly, to bring up the attacks would be to admit that it's a big deal when a New York skyscraper is destroyed, even though, in comics, this happens all the time.

Secondly, an evil robot called Ultron is not, suddenly, very scary when compared with five guys with boxcutters.

Thirdly, quite a few superheroes are powerful telepaths, yet apparently none of them can find Osama Bin Laden. Terrorism makes superheroes look ridiculous, and if you're ignoring terrorism, you can't do much with Iraq, either.

So Marvel and DC have been reluctant to admit that the war is even taking place in their respective fictional universes. There has been some dissent: Frank Miller has threatened to send Batman to Afghanistan. Warren Ellis, in the gory Black Summer, proposes that a superhero's logical response to a president who launched an illegal war would be to blow his head off, the same as any other arch criminal. Mark Waid, in Fantastic Four: Authoritative Action, had the team struggling to build democracy in Latveria after the fall of Dr Doom.

That's about it. We could take this as evidence of superhero triviality - if only prose fiction were doing any better. Has the English-speaking world yet produced a single convincing literary novel about the Iraq war?


Brian Wood's DMZ - of which the third paperback volume, Public Works, comes out next month - follows photojournalist Matty Roth, who crash-lands in the sniper-stalked no man's land that is New York City after a militia uprising rips America in half. Wood tells a great story, but he has a tendency to romanticise the conflict zone into a bohemian paradise full of pretty dreadlocked girls putting on art shows in vegan cafés. Yes, it's important to remember that people in Basra still have lives and hobbies, but this also swaddles the impact of DMZ's central question: how would you feel about the war if it were on your doorstep?

Latveria, Manhattan and Baghdad Zoo do such a good job of standing in for Iraq that you might overlook the occasional comic actually trying to depict the war itself. Karl Zinsmeister, the writer of Combat Zone: True Tales of GIs in Iraq, is also the director of Bush's Domestic Policy Council - you're not going to get much soul-searching about America's place in the world here, and indeed this gung-ho paratrooper story does not find room for a single Iraqi face or voice. David Axe's brief but interesting War Fix, meanwhile, makes a nice companion piece to Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

Best new graphic novel: although the publishers of Warren Ellis's Crécy are trying to flog it as yet another Iraq War allegory, they're stretching the point - it's really just a detailed history lesson about the 1346 Battle of Crécy, but about 300 times more entertaining than that sounds.