Teaching the NEW GUARDIANS

Comics for credits

Misericordia professors use class to show how comic books have portrayed or influenced views on gender, class and raceFlipping through the pages of comic books is like thumbing through a history book. The colorful panels with words capture the moral and societal feelings and struggles of the time.

Misericordia University professors Allan Austin and Patrick Hamilton have transformed their love of comic books, history and literature into an upper-level college course focusing on how society has been portrayed in comic books the past 70 years.And:A key piece of the course is reviewing the 1980s comic book series “New Guardians.” With international superheroes, all stereotyped, Austin called it “a 1980s attempt at multiculturalism that’s gone pretty terribly wrong.”

Hamilton, 35, of Wilkes-Barre, said the intent was to “attempt to do sort of a multicultural super team, and they thought they’d do that by just having a bunch of ethnic characters in the theme, but they’re all just massive stereotypes.”

He said this reflects the 1980s and what was going on in society.

“These comics are formed by the cultural attitudes of their time period,” Hamilton said. “New Guardians is such an artifact of ’80s multiculturalism ... we simply have to have ethnic peoples represented and that will somehow create tolerance. You see in New Guardians the limitations of that.”New GuardiansNew Guardians is a series published by DC Comics coming out of the Millennium event, it ran from 1988 through 1989 and only lasted twelve issues before being canceled. It is also the name of the group of characters who appeared in the series. The characters first appeared in Millennium #1, (January 1988), written by Steve Engelhart and drawn by Joe Staton.The members included:Thomas Kalmaku--An Inuit, Tom originally turned down the Guardian's offer of advancement, but later developed the super power to "bring out the best in people." He subsequently left the team and has shown no further signs of possessing such powers.Comment:  I applaud the use of comics to teach. But I'm mystified at the notion of building the course around the NEW GUARDIANS comic book. This was a minor, unsuccessful, short-lived series of the 1980s. You literally could find a thousand comics that illustrate the concept of multiculturalism better.

It's not clear to me what Austin and Hamilton are saying about NEW GUARDIANS. Are they saying it failed because of its multicultural theme? Or because it implemented its multicultural theme so badly?

The correct answer is the latter. The series didn't fail because its characters were multicultural. Or because they were stereotypical, although they undoubtedly were. It failed because:

1) The New Guardians were poorly conceived as superheroes. If you read their descriptions, you'll see they're hugely powerful but their powers are ill-defined. Both factors are recipes for disaster. A superhero group works best when most characters have limited and well-defined abilities--e.g., Batman, Wolverine, Captain America.

2) The stories were poorly conceived and executed. The DC Universe already had the Justice League of America and several other superhero teams. Which menaces were the New Guardians supposed to tackle? Apparently the goofy ones that were beneath everyone else's notice.

3) There were too many members. Seven is the ideal number for a group, but the team had eight.

A good writer could've taken the same multicultural characters and made them work. Possible solutions included: 1) Keeping the characters' nationalities and ethnicities but reducing and defining their powers. 2) Giving them some sort of mission or sphere of influence. For instance, they could've tackled environmental problems or UN-style peacekeeping missions. 3) Getting rid of at least one character, perhaps Harbinger.

For more on the subject, see Comic Books Featuring Indians.