The Type 0 Superhero Society aka The Golden Age

In comics, there have been many ages. But first was the golden age. Superheroes, in the beginning, didn’t need powers. They needed a tragic backstory, a flashy costume, and a willingness to commit extra-judicial violence.
Yeah, that’s the baseline for a superhero.

Your everyday heroes, police, fireman, or nurse, works inside the rules. But the superhero is, at its heart, about operating outside the system. It’s a power fantasy about making things right without depending on the mechanisms of normal society to fix problems and protect loved ones.

The Golden Age of comics laid a foundation for mainstream comics that didn’t change to much in subsequent ages. If anything the only thing that really escalated was the level of violence willing to be committed. But ultimately, as we discuss how superheroes shape and create their own society, this is a story about people who seek power in order to make change.

The Golden Age took place primarily in the US from 1938-1956. Coming from the adventure comics and pulp novels of the previous decades superheroes mix that with the beginning of the technological revolution, the birth of the mental sciences, and the mysticism that was still gaining popularity from the earlier century, all of which had grown in the popular mindscape during the Great Depression which had just ended. This era took place over the recovery of the world’s economy, a Second World War, the Holocaust, and into the rise of Communism and the start of the Cold War. But throughout that period superheroes more or less the same.
Most heroes were, and to some extent are, underdogs that suffer some kind of tragic loss and then through a consequence of birth or training take up a mission to act for justice where there was an absence. But it’s interesting who creators at the time chose to put into the role of the superhero.

Rich White Guys!

Obviously the audiences considered by the creators at the time were white audiences. Obviously creators of color weren’t allowed to create superheroes for American audiences. Obviously, the creators that were allowed to produce didn’t include any superheroes of color. And those people would have been those with the lived experience that was the furthest away from the ideas of peace and justice that were espoused in these comic books and so you would think they would make the best underdogs to include. But that didn’t happen. And it wouldn’t really happen until the Modern Age of comics.

But even in the white population at the time there were plenty of underdogs to chose from. Where’s farmer who lost his farm in the Great Depression? Where’s unemployed? Where are the workers kept under the lash of the industrialist or fighting against mobbed up Union leaders? Often these are the people being saved, usually from something far more silly and ridiculous then the actual problems they were going to face in their lives, but they weren’t given the role of protagonist.

Instead they pulled from the celebrities of the time. Industrialists, the super rich, scientists, and performers. They chose people that weren’t necessarily ever in true danger from falling into the weak spots of society, but instead are people that are mostly secure in their position but take power, usually gifted through a consequence of birth or training, and uses that power to right some wrong personal to them that then leads them to take on other similar goals as their career goes on. Heroes like Batman, the original Green Lantern and the original Flash are all great examples. They get their mandate for justice either from tragedy or out of a need to protect the status quo.

So what is a Type 0 Superhuman Society? It’s individuals within an existing human society granted power to perpetuate that society. These heroes aren’t interested in righting wrongs or combating the ailments of society. Instead they are “fighting crime”? But not in a capacity to prevent crime or ask why their villains might commit criminal acts, but only to prevent people from committing acts that might change the status quo. In the beginning that’s primarily through an exploration of WW2, but ultimately it’s about maintaining what currently exists. And that fits with the world that was going on during the Golden Age. So this is the foundation for what comes next. Heroes maintain, and are empowered to do so.