Steve Englehart has no clear recollection of inventing the
suicide bomber.
“Two factors come into play to limit what I can give you here,”
he writes in response to my e-mail. “The story’s over 30 year[s]
old, and, it was, as noted, not one of the AVENGERS stories that’s
garnered a lot of attention in those 30+ years, so whatever
memories I may have have not been jogged much in the interim.”
The story in question appeared in Avengers 113, dated
July 1973 and titled “And Your Young Men Shall Slay Visions,”
during Englehart’s lengthy stint as scripter on what was then
Marvel Comics’ flagship superhero team. (The now-wildly popular
X-Men were then obscure.) Given Englehart’s workload in those days,
it’s not in itself surprising that a single issue of a single title
should slip his mind.
Between my own thirty-year-old memories and Englehart’s official gallery of every comic he ever wrote, I
estimate him as writing five comic issues a month in 1973, and
that’s probably missing one or two. Such a workload is rare in
today’s comic book industry, where writers get royalties, titles
are fewer and an order of magnitude more expensive, and stories are
written with an eye toward paperback reprint collections.
This pace was common back in the mid-seventies, but Englehart’s
work stood out. His books were popular. In addition to solid story
values and a palpable fondness for his protagonists, he specialized
in earnest social commentary and the kind of Asian-inflected
mysticism that would in after years go by the trade name New
Age.
Just as Steve Englehart wrote a lot of comics that faded from
memory, I’ve read a lot of comics that faded from memory. But
Avengers 113 stayed with me for thirty years, because of
its villains, the Living Bombs.
The story opens with two superheroes, the Scarlet Witch and the
Vision, kissing in public. Because the latter is an android, bigots
fear the romance will legitimize artificial intelligences and lead
to the eventual displacement of humanity by synthetic beings. Some
protest. A small number determine to kill the Vision before things
can proceed any further.
The problem is that he is a tremendously powerful android with
super-powered friends and they are fleshy civilians who can’t even
spell very well, as we learn from the hate mail Captain America
opens. Their solution is direct, ruthless and, as it turned out,
eerily prescient: They strap explosives to themselves and go
boom.
They also, in a fashion lapse, choose to detonate their
explosives with plunger-helmets, so the visual effect is unfortunately silly. But the idea itself was chilling
as a story then, and chilling as reality now. Even the rhetoric
echoes: The Living Bombs specifically refer to themselves as
“martyrs.”
The comics of the time were full of stories “torn,” screamed
their covers, “from today’s headlines!” But Avengers 113
was something different. Suicide bombings were not common features
of real life back in 1973. Terrorists tried to get away. There had
always been suicide operations in wartime, however ad hoc, finally
systematized in Japan’s kamikaze program. But there is a
qualitative difference between flying a plane into a warship during
a battle and walking up to someone on the street and blowing you
both up. In 1973, suicide bombing as we know it existed purely in
the imagination of a comic book writer. The real world waited until
1980 for the Tamil Tigers to use it as a terror tactic.
I’m not stupid enough to waste effort trying to find out if some
Sri Lankan kid paged through Avengers 113 and grew up to
put his reading into practice. Save that blind alley for some
latter-day Frederick Wertham. I was more interested in whether
Englehart was drawing on some concrete real-world example that had
somehow escaped notice.
“The reason for doing it,” he responds, ” — fanaticism great
enough to die for — is a trait of human nature that I’ve long been
aware of, having come of consciousness during Vietnam and the
various political assassinations, when passions ran higher in
America than they do today…My feeling is, it was my simple
attempt to provide superhero-level power for non-super people.”
The writer, that is, was engaged in the same sort of gruesome
problem-solving that must have animated the real-life authors of
the coming atrocities: How can we damage our much more powerful
opponent? Was the Englehart of 1973 aware of the Viet Minh
“death volunteers” who obliterated themselves along with
the barbed-wire fortifications around Dien Bien Phu? Were the Tamil
Tigers of 1980? If so, who inspired the Viet Minh? Who turned a
traditional tactic of desperation into a system?
The answer, I think, is that it doesn’t matter who.
Suicide-murder will present itself as the logical solution to
anyone who values the destruction of something else more than his
own life. That it provides the perpetrator with momentary
“superhero-level power,” in Englehart’s words, terrifies us.
We assuage our terror by pretending to find insanity in the
killer, and the people behind him. But we only mean that
suicide-killers are insane who aren’t going after the bad guys. We
root for the suicide mission of the Dirty Dozen to
succeed. And, not to violate Godwin’s law or anything, but, in
1944, Klaus Schenk von Stauffenberg left a briefcase
bomb near the Führer during a military briefing. Too much of
the heavy oak table got between Hitler and the blast. Had
Stauffenberg detonated the briefcase while shaking Hitler’s hand,
making sure of the kill at the cost of his own life, who would be
demented enough to hold him up as an example of German culture’s
“deep disregard for life?”
The historian Gerhard Weinberg pointed out that Japan’s kamikaze
program was a rational response to the country’s inability
to train qualified pilots. By late in the war, the average new
bomber pilot died on his first mission anyway. The Divine Wind was
simply a way to salvage something from that death.
The despicable thing about the Hamas shahid is not that
he kills himself, but that he kills restaurant-goers and bus
passengers. The targets make him evil. The method simply makes him
powerful, for the terrible moment of his conflagration.
Super-powerful, as Steve Englehart understood 31 years
ago. We can only trust that his understanding ran even deeper: in
the end the Living Bombs lost.
