The Puritans were comic book heroes. Eg Samuel Morse: pastor’s son, expat networker extraordinaire, 1st US professor of painting, invents 3 key aspects of telegraphy (the single-wire basics, Morse code, & repeaters for maintaining signals over distance), demonstrates its functionality with all kinds of wacky stunts, makes SCOTUS forge modern patent law for him but refuses to sell off usage rights on lump-sum terms because he wants to be directly involved in every implementation of it so he devotes his final years to bitter moralistic recriminations against everyone actually helping his innovation take off & then basically kicks off nativist political activism.
The same goes for many other antebellum Puritans, & all the famous “robber baron” postbellum Yankees/WASPs (they all got their start under Lincoln with all kinds of wacky hijinks then directly implemented all their greatness, eg note that all the big nationwide industrial monopolies were held as personal trusts of their leaders). You can come up with all kinds of reasons for this: eg superheroes are canonically driven by something like predestination—“my purpose is proving myself worthy of my fate,” so they obsessively plow back immense privilege into spartan excellence—& clearly believe in “city on the hill” anti-statism ie charismatic Randianism.
They were forced underground by corrupt spiteful self-destructive big city political machines around when comic books began to be written. The rightful captains of these cities then donned masks, formed leagues with goofy alliterative names, & began fighting back against these monstrous foreign conspiracies in the name of temperance, patriotism, accountability, the can-do spirit, & so forth… but these conspiracies have taught us all for generations now to hate that oddly-named “Ku Klux Klan,” which anyway has fallen far from what it once was, though the hoods of justice will be ready for any red-blooded anglo boy willing to humbly restore his inheritance by personal example…
The same goes for many other antebellum Puritans, & all the famous “robber baron” postbellum Yankees/WASPs (they all got their start under Lincoln with all kinds of wacky hijinks then directly implemented all their greatness, eg note that all the big nationwide industrial monopolies were held as personal trusts of their leaders). You can come up with all kinds of reasons for this: eg superheroes are canonically driven by something like predestination—“my purpose is proving myself worthy of my fate,” so they obsessively plow back immense privilege into spartan excellence—& clearly believe in “city on the hill” anti-statism ie charismatic Randianism.
They were forced underground by corrupt spiteful self-destructive big city political machines around when comic books began to be written. The rightful captains of these cities then donned masks, formed leagues with goofy alliterative names, & began fighting back against these monstrous foreign conspiracies in the name of temperance, patriotism, accountability, the can-do spirit, & so forth… but these conspiracies have taught us all for generations now to hate that oddly-named “Ku Klux Klan,” which anyway has fallen far from what it once was, though the hoods of justice will be ready for any red-blooded anglo boy willing to humbly restore his inheritance by personal example…
https://x.com/CEBKCEBKCEBK/status/1829279509537014115
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