Associatively Pynchon

[Mark Kohut]

from a PACIFIC STANDARD magazine review of THE NEW MUTANTS:

When DC Comics writer Gardner Fox debuted the Justice League in 1960
in the Brave and the Bold #28, the series was an inventive and
subversive choice for Cold War America. Amid the rise of the security
state, McCarthyism’s domestic panic, and communist-containment
policies abroad, the comic re-envisioned America’s saviors as a band
of international immigrants and exiles. Most members of the Justice
League worked for the state; yet they were often misunderstood or
oppressed by the very organization they believed in. In “nearly every
instance” of conflict between the JLA and official representatives of
the law, Fawaz writes, the government was portrayed as a bumbling,
bureaucratic dinosaur. This wasn’t the only sly anti-administration
subtext for discerning readers. The villains were often portrayed as
evil because they were abusing scientific talents to develop weapons
for the military—a moral argument against the military-industrial
complex that preceded Eisenhower’s famous speech about the associated
economic perils.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l