‘You’re a refugee, are you not?’ ‘Extraordinary bodies’, monstrous outsiders and US refugee policies in superhero comics

Abstract

In the 1970s and 1980s, comic book publishing giants DC and Marvel sought to diversify their cast of superheroes to better represent their US readership. While the publishers’ increasingly diverse cast of numerous US constituencies sought to reflect a shift towards greater representation, the flow of migrants/immigrants/refugees that marked the cold war years of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s remained largely out of the pages of mainstream comics. However, Marvel’s Chris Claremont and DC’s Marv Wolfman and George Perez introduced Vietnamese refugees to two teenage teams in the early 1980s. This article seeks to examine the way these characters, Marvel’s Karma and DC’s Thunder and Lightning, reflect US political rhetoric concerning the South East Asian refugee crisis in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Marvel’s and DC’s characters represent two poles of political thought concerning refugees; Karma is depicted as a victim of communism who is rescued by the United States, while Thunder and Lightning are villains who seek to upend US patriarchal relationships with Asian nations. Using comic studies’ scholarship and current discussions in critical refugee studies, this article argues that the depictions of these refugees reflect national discourse concerning the ideals of the United States.