He doesn't fight the criminal element...
he terminates it!"
Another find from the fifty cent bins, another serendipitous foray into the past of our pop culture. This one is published by DC, in April of 1988. The cover has a costumed figure, in yellow and black armor, faceless, about to smash the windshield of a car where a hostage has a gun to his head. There is a lot going on, just on the cover.
The story was created by Paul Kupperberg, as writer, and Steve Erwin, as penciller. John Byrne, for reasons unknown, gets a creator credit, and it is possible to see his fingerprints on this story---but that is true of almost all of Marvel and DC's output during the 1980s.
The story starts with a man exploding a suitcase bomb on the trading floor of the Chicago stock exchange. While that mystery percolates, a woman is talking with an old friend on the beach in New York City. Or perhaps not a friend, more of a frenemy, because he sedates her and takes her to a top secret building. Don't worry though---nothing nefarious. He just wants to take her on a tour of his secret organization's high tech base. The woman is Thorn, apparently, a vigilante in the DC Universe, and the thing you want in the secret base of your secret government agency is a vigilante that you kidnapped, who you then reveal the organization chart of your secret organization. Sorry, my cynicism at this sillyness got away with me there. Anyway, we are back to Chicago, where it turns out the suitcase bomb is the result of a neonazi group's scheme, and they also have an FBI informant tied up. Luckily, they are being scoped out by a "knight" from the secret organization, "Checkmate", which has a bunch of cute chess terminology for their secret operations. He comes busting in, and after a short fight, and a short car chase (as depicted on the cover), he defeats the neonazis, and saves the informant. One of the neonazis shrieks "Fools! None of this matters! In a few days, the entire world will hear our message of White Supremacy!", so most probably, the story will continue.
Oh, but here is another thing: while beating up the neonazis, the "Knight" takes off a single glove, revealing that he is black. Oh, the delicious irony. At the end of the comic, we hear a little bit of his life story and philosophy.
I had 12 years of active duty on the NYPD...guess that last part of my resume was what got me join up with Checkmate. I was tire d of following a rulebook that favored the criminals. The rules are different here...
This, despite being a bit early, was an early example of grim and gritty. Dark and edgy. These were cops who had to take the law into their own hands, and who didn't play by the rules. There are two major problems with this. The first is stylistic. As I have mentioned previously, comic book writers and artists who aim for noir and grit and serious business realism always have their plans derailed by the chance to illustrate backflips and underground bases. It is hard to take the stories attempts at being a thriller/espionage story seriously when it has to incorporate all the cute chess talk and improbable jump kicks.
The second complaint, somewhat related, but much more serious, is the message that the story sends about civil rights and law enforcement. The protagonist, and the secret organization he works for, both have to "play by their own rules", because crime is such a problem. I have been mocking these "grim and gritty" comic books for a while now, without pointing out one of the most obvious reasons I dislike them: they often have a violent, authoritarian subtext. "Subtext" is a charitable way to put it: many of them have pretty explicit messages that in a violent, cynical world we need violent, cynical antiheroes to keep control. This story has a black police officer beating up and arresting some neonazis, all while dressed in a high-tech costume and engaging in theatrical fisticuffs. The reality of what it looks like when law enforcement decides to invade people's homes because they are tired of playing by the rules looks a lot different than how comic books portray it.
It is a bit unfair, in the year 2020, to blame a comic book from 32 years ago for the social message it sends today. Especially since I found this comic book well-done, and the story of a black man defeating nazis show that the creators sympathies were not some right-wing fever dream. But there was a generation of people in the 1980s, teenagers or in their early 20s at the time, who grew up on grim and gritty, dark and edgy stories where the city was a warzone, and cops were an embattled minority trying to control things by any means necessary. And thirty years later, we are still dealing with that narrative.