The Bomb Was an Idea (DC The New Frontier + JSA The Golden Age)

Commissioned by Clarence Drilling

“Before the bomb was a bomb, the bomb was an idea. Superman, however, was a faster, stronger, better idea.”

-Grant Morrison

Things The Golden Age isn't
interested in: People of Color.
Also silence.

Even if the commission wasn’t for me to contrast these two works, reading The Golden Age brings up so many parallels with The New Frontier. Mainly, that one wishes they were reading Darwin Cooke’s seminal comic book instead. For those who haven’t read either book, a brief explanation: James Robinson and Paul Smith’s The Golden Age tells of an alternate past of the DC universe where Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman never existed and instead focused on the superhero team the JSA in a political thriller whose main politics are “McCarthyism is kin to Hitler.” Indeed, there’s not much interest in exploring the implications of “So HUAC was actually part of a secret ploy by the Ultra-Humanite and the brain of Adolf Hitler to take over the world” in the story. The politics are largely background noise that isn’t as developed as it could have been.

Conversely, The New Frontier has Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman in the mud of the 50’s. It’s about the softening of the Superhero in the face of the silver age, yes. But there’s also an edge to the story. There’s the famous Wonder Woman leading a group of Vietnamese women to slaughter the men who had enslaved them, but less talked about is Superman’s ultimate character arc of rejecting being an agent of the American government on the grounds that the philosophy of “My country no matter what” is complete bunk. And that’s not even getting into the John Henry subplot.

All of which to say is that The New Frontier is ultimately a better text that The Golden Age because it has a modicum of ambition. Of course, you’d probably expect something more out of a comparison between the two than less than 300 words, and as such let’s look at the most interesting idea The Golden Age has: The connection between the atom bomb and the superhero. Many a writer has discussed the connection between the two, most recently Al Ewing in The Immortal Hulk. But where Ewing ties the bomb specifically to the Hulk due to the nature of his origin, Robinson takes it one step further by claiming the bomb is the natural extension of the superhero.

There is an argument to be made for this. The bomb, much like the superhero, changed the world forever by its mere presence. As David Lynch and Mark Frost argue in the eighth episode of Twin Peaks The Return, dropping the bomb solely as a test to see its capabilities is enough to change the world for the worse. Because the reality of the bomb is such an existential horror of mass genocide sped up to mere seconds that only a monster would think lightly on dropping it once, let alone twice. The bomb is a coercive presence in the American psyche, one that has its tendrils in practically every aspect of the American imagination.

Though the bomb isn’t as prominent in The New Frontier as it is in The Golden Age, its impact certainly is. The obvious one to look at would be McCarthyism. While Superman and Batman aren’t taken to speak at HUAC, the vibe of that era’s paranoia (which The Golden Age apes over all else) is felt throughout the series. It’s in the racist shitheels lynching John Henry and the President advocating Wonder Woman not preach her revolutionary beliefs and the government bringing nukes into space in case the Martians want to start a war.

On that note, the very presence of aliens is another impact of the bomb. While there were cases of alien abductions prior to the bomb, the “threat” of some alien kidnapping you for nefarious purposes increased tenfold after the bomb exploded. In the past, such experiences would be considered contact with a higher power, but the genre shifted after the bomb. Science fiction had a boom in the wake of the bomb, focusing on stories that talk of real science that doesn’t believe in the unknown. Where rationality devoid of “feelings” can defeat any obstacle. Truly, it was a golden age of science fiction, when men were allowed to be men and women were seen, but not heard.

But at the same time as exploring these lurking ideas birthed by the bomb, The New Frontier doesn’t provide a solution to these problems. As with The Golden Age, whose musings on the bomb’s relationship with the superhero are ultimately underdeveloped as the rest of its ideas, The New Frontier lobs solutions to the next age of superheroes, the Silver Age as it were. Superman may not be an agent of the US government, but that doesn’t mean he’s actually going to fight against it in this softer age of camp villains and starfish aliens.

That’s not to say the comic is blind to such problems. Indeed, the ending montage works against the teleological read of “everything is better now” by contrasting the JFK speech that gives the book its title, specifically “Today some would say that those struggles are over—that all the horizons have been explored—that all the battles have been won—that there is no longer an American frontier,” with an image of a black child walking away from a guarded water fountain that says “White Only.” But that still leaves us with the void of a solution. The void of the path forward.

Superhero utopianism is a nice idea. It’s one that more writers should explore. Both The Golden Age and The New Frontier ultimately gesture towards this direction, but their failures ultimately come from assuming the superhero is inherently a good idea. Sure, Superman is a better idea than the bomb, but at the same time all ideas have their limits. Many have made the case for the superhero being a terrible idea that does more harm than good. Some of them have even been good cases that don’t fit into the typical strawman argument that the comics fandom has fashioned out of Seduction of the Innocent.

Ultimately, despite what Grant Morrison might say, Superman isn’t enough to beat the bomb. Because, tragically, we made the bomb up, and it came true anyway. That's the funny part.