You Can Run
Thanks to my local source of second-hand comics I have now become acquainted with Marshal Law. This was a difficult comic, and I mean that in both the positive and negative senses of the term.
The first thing you have to understand is that Marshal Law is not an ultraviolent send-up of the superhero genre. By modern standards, I’d say it barely qualifies as megaviolent. No, what we have here is a book of social commentary in which superheroes are just metaphors for class and privilege. Metaphors which can rip each other’s arms off and beat people to death with ‘em.
The book is really about hierarchy: how some people are seen as more important than others. There’s also quite a bit in there about how social order is maintained, showing how it’s not just a matter of rules being set from above but also of individual complicity in maintaining the power structure. Martial Law is set in San Francisco but was obviously written by a Brit; American comics don’t generally examine society in the same way.
Tying the whole story together is a feminist critique of the very concept of a superhero. Unfortunately, despite this social awareness the women in Martial Law don’t make out any better than in any other contemporary superhero title. All the real conflict in the story happens between men. Women exist only to fuel this conflict. Women are defined largely by their sexual desirability. Every single female character in the story gets killed by a male character. The male villain, on the other hand, gets dead man defrosted almost immediately. Was all of this done intentionally to draw our attention to the way women are treated in comics? If so, it was a dumbass way to go about things.
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