When I sat down to read this comic this morning, I was not expecting it to be quite so stellar. The story itself is slightly trite, with Superman being sent from country to country to stop 8 evil magicians from raising an ancient enemy of Dr. Mist. Along the way, the Man of Steel has to team up with heroes from each of those countries. One of the difficulties I've always had with the DCU is that international heroes, inevitably, are somehow stereotyped to their particular land of origin. In this comic, for example, Greece has The Olympian. Denmark has The Little Mermaid. And while this could have been a really terrible, utterly mediocre story, E. Nelson Bridwell manages to pop so much mythic resonance into these characters that it was like I was reading basically everything I've been teaching my class this term.
The Seraph, Israel's superhero, wields both the Staff of Moses and the Ring of Solomon. The Olympian's cowl and cape are fashioned from the Golden Fleece retrieved by Jason and the Argonauts. Jack O'Lantern has a companion who is a tiny member of the fairy race. Their nemeses are similarly inflected, with the Mermaid's enemy a troll, obviously culled from Danish myth. The Green Fury's opposite number is El Dorado, who commands a pair of ghostly jaguars. In Bridwell's hands, what could have been the clash of the stereotypes instead becomes a lesson in how our myths travel down the years and into our popular culture. The question it really begs, and one that I've spent far too long pondering, is where does this put Superman? He's obviously not emblematic of the myths and legends of Native Americans, so his mythic status is not quite the same as those of the Global Guardians. What he is then, I would (briefly) argue, is a consolidation of exile/immigrant myth. He takes notions wrapped up around displacement, about adopting a homeland, and puts a bright blue suit on them. This is not to say that there's not some deeply problematic things going on if we consider him a representative of American myth, but he's definitely got the qualifications to stand with the rest of these heroes.
So, rather than simply stereotypes, the Global Guardians turn out to be distillations of the myths of their respective countries.That's pretty cool.
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