The Superhero as Avatar V: Luke Cage and the 1970s

Luke Cage, Marvel's Power Man, enjoys a sleeper appeal that derives partially from a certain undeniable camp factor from his earliest treatments - including ridiculous pseudo-ethnic jargon with dubious expletives like "Christmas!" - and partially from a growing depth of character revealed by the efforts of talented writers like James Owsley (whom we know today as Christopher Priest).

He combined several endearing elements, depending on one's choice of poisons: an idiosyncratic vernacular that reflected the grating attempts at white writers to depict a streetwise Black superhero; the soul of a curmudgeon, that came out in his perpetual surliness and constant fretting over money; a take-no-prisoners attitude that proclaimed him The Man Most Likely to Bust Heads many years running (without sinking into the lurid bloodlust of characters like the Punisher); and a solid, if somewhat corny and dated, visual design.

His ability to combine such elements in a way that suggested both the times of the culture that produced him and the state of the comics medium which brought him to light make him the central contender for most representative superhero of the 1970s.

"Blaxploitation" and the Streetwise Hero

The original kernel of the Luke Cage character actually carries with it some insulting implications. Though other superheroes had begun as criminals and later turned to heroism - consider Iron Man's onetime enemy Hawkeye, who became a staple of Avengers and derivative titles - few if any had actually enjoyed the dubious pleasures of a life behind bars. That Marvel chose as its first ex-con (and, originally, escapee!) superhero one of African antecedents suggests a connection between race and crime that would get elected officials shouted out of office in these more easily-offended times.

Marvel had not drifted so far from the Silver Age model of heroism that it could invent a history for this character that included robbery, assault, murder, or drug dealing, so they created Luke Cage as a falsely convicted man given superpowers by unethical experiments in some improbable and dungeonlike prison laboratory. The company, back in those days, knew better than to try to peddle a common hoodlum as a superhero.

Making him a man falsely accused gave Luke Cage more credibility in the context of identity politics and also provided him with an ongoing and seemingly insoluble problem, in that he left prison as an escapee, not from completion of his sentence. Later stories, in a day when the character had put in more time as a hero and had developed a more solid personality, allowed him to clear his name and record and to dispense with much of the baggage of a life as an escaped convict. In the seventies, however, these elements remained important.

Whether one considers the concept of a Black ex-con superhero as more insulting or more realistic, it clearly represented an attempt to make superhero-comic inroads to an early-seventies genre of movie heroes like Shaft, Superfly, Dolomite, or Foxy Brown. In Luke Cage, we have a toned-down version of the more mainstream of such characters grafted on to the formulaic Marvel superhero.

The Mercenary Ethos

Earlier superheroes - and this covers over thirty years - had generally operated from benign motives even when sometimes they took extreme measures. Batman, for instance, warred on a culture of crime that had taken the lives of his parents. Superman leapfrogged the need for a rationale by taking for granted the obligation his powers imposed upon him to protect those not so gifted, and this pattern would endure in the mainstream comics hero. Altruism and the obligation of power moved earlier heroes and seemed like an indispensable component of the superheroic idiom.

Power Man, however, came on the scene as a mercenary, as suggested in the title of his first book: Luke Cage, Hero for Hire. This represented a considerable break with precedent and convention. Granted, high-mindedness never completely eluded Luke Cage. He kept slipping out of his mercantile mode and into crimefighting for its own sake, even in his earliest and most mercenary days. However, his circumstances and experiences inclined him to view per se benevolence as a secondary goal and a secondary means.

Cage wished, on one level, to retrieve something from a world that had taken much from him. On another, more immediate level, he wished to pay the rent and possibly such accessories as food, clothing, and the occasional beer. Cage lacked, after all, the gifts that heroes like Iron Man, Batman, and originally even Green Arrow might call upon for dealing with the relentless but mundane necessities of living.

Put bluntly, a man will - and perhaps should - feed himself before he gives all his cash to charity.

That a superhero could operate out of financial considerations, however, demonstrated that Marvel still cared to experiment with the superhero concept. This notion cut more from the inherited vocabulary of superheroism than had the soap-opera elements that Stan Lee had brought to the comics of the 1960s. The first birth cries of the angst-driven hero of the Marvel Revolution had burst the stoic facade of superheroes without really affecting the root ethic that underlay costumed heroes. Here, however, Marvel clearly dabbled in the dangerous waters of the post-iconic hero, a development that would later culminate in the creation of antiheroes such as Wolverine and the Punisher. From this seed, the antiheroic character would father the antiheroic story. In a sense, Luke Cage represented a step that connected Superman in 1938 to Watchmen in the 1980s.

Cult Appeal versus Commercial Appeal

Superhero comics suffered a recession in the mid-seventies. Luke Cage narrowly escaped the cancellations that would affect creations of the seventies at both DC Comics and Marvel Comics. He survived in print through an ingenious pairing with Iron Fist, a martial arts hero the late Gil Kane created.

Paired with Iron Fist, Luke Cage could gain some depth and dispense with some of the more ludicrous idiosyncratic jargon. Iron Fist provided a foil that could bring out his character without Cage having to use as much unfortunate verbiage. In the company of his longtime friend and professional partner, Cage could show his surliness through silence while Iron Fist carried on the dialog.

That Luke Cage, Hero for Hire and Power Man / Iron Fist did not enjoy runaway commercial success firmly pegs them in the middle of seventies culture in general. The seventies produced a number of interesting, and sometimes aberrant, cultural gems, and many that offer the most twenty and more years later did not fare well financially. Instead, those items which did strongly reflect the tenor of the times, or an undeniable echo of such a tone, in spite of the protestations of accountants, most appeal to cultural connoisseurs of the decade.

The Essential Luke Cage

We have in Luke Cage a superhero who wore seventies shirts, open to the navel, with disco collars; who wore a chain around his waist that puts to shame anything that Isaac Hayes used to wear in concert (could we really expect Mr. Hayes to perform in a sixty-pound metal belt?); who inhabited a world not of high finance and sanitized suburbia, but decaying streets that required of him street-smarts foreign to most superheroes of his day; and who could plausibly play the game of "mistreated Black man butting heads with the Man," attempting to pay the rent in the process.

"Relevance," as demonstrated by pieces like the Adams/O'Neil Green Lantern/Green Arrow, belonged to the sixties; in the seventies, comics moved beyond the philosophical argument and moral posturing into an urban realism (or, as we should call it in a superheroic context, urban surrealism). We might say that the ethos left the laboratory and went out into the field, where different rules applied. Luke Cage moved, and someday may move again, in the context of superheroic urban realism; he enjoys as much as his birthright and from his earliest comics tenure.

Visually, conceptually, and historically, Luke Cage stands at the intersection of various elements that define seventies superhero comics. He enjoys rich heritage in that regard that few others can claim to match. As such, Luke Cage stands as an exemplary figure of his times, and a fitting Avatar for the 1970s.