Political Superheroes

The latest seasons of Daredevil and The Boys seem to be a telling commentary on the current US political dispensation

Kabir Singh Bhandari

It’s superhero season currently on OTT. And US President Donald Trump seems to be very much on the minds of the creators. The Boys, which returned for its fifth and final season on Amazon Prime, is a satirical superhero television series about vigilantes combating superpowered individuals who actually abuse their powers and work for Vought International, a powerful company.

The most powerful and evil superhero here is Homelander, a corrupted, selfish version of Superman. While there is a fictional president, of course, the real power lies with Homelander. When he addresses a major rally of supporters, you witness a sea of red caps aggressively chanting for him, similar to when Republican supporters hoot for Trump during his rallies. Then there’s a TV show where Homelander appears for an interview, called The Truth Bomb, interestingly similar to Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, which was put together as a competitor to Twitter (now called X).

On the other hand, there’s Daredevil: Born Again on JioHotstar, revolving around the blind lawyer by day who fights crime as a masked vigilante by night. Currently, in it, the leader of the criminal underworld, Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin, has become the Mayor of New York. In order to rein in rising ‘crime levels’, Kingpin has started a heavily armed, black-clad Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF) — cops who are eerily similar to Trump’s real-life ICE agents due to their attire, method of detaining civilians, unbridled violence, and operation under the ‘Safer Streets’ Act.

While this seems to be the current flavour of the season, it isn’t something unique to American superheroes. The backstories and timelines of several superheroes have been spun around geopolitical situations, the most obvious of all being Captain America, the constitutionalist, patriotic figure created during World War II, poised as a super-soldier who fights alongside the U.S. forces against the Nazis. In fact, on the very first cover edition, Captain America is seen punching Adolf Hitler (see pic above).

Then there’s Iron Man, with the very first movie in 2008 depicting American technological optimism, where aggressive capitalization leads to Tony Stark discovering that the very weapons he manufactured to protect America are being used against it, similar to all the times when American interventionist tendencies led to the creation of terrorist organisations that came back to bite them later. X-Men, which came into being in the 1960s, was a direct allegory for the American Civil Rights Movement and the LGBTQ+ rights struggle, in this case being portrayed through their ‘mutant’ identity.

However, with Trump’s social media feed being a constant source of material for comedians around the world, time will tell whether any upcoming shows take a more direct jibe at the US President. Though, with each passing day, the worlds of fiction and reality seem to be blending at such a fast pace that we appear to be witnessing a dystopian reality playing out before our eyes on TV news screens rather than on some superhero show.