On popular art predicting the present

With some frequency people taking a deep dive into pop culture older than a few decades stumble on “predictions” of shocking current events. There is a mix of admiration at these authors’ prescience and an almost glib denouncing of the present’s absurdity. What launched me on this train of though was comics writer Tim Seeley re-reading Grant Morrison’s Batman run and finding this panel:

I then remembered that last year, after Rob Cobb’s passing, cartoonist Derf started a thread similarly praising the late cartoonists vision. Rightfully so, many of his ’60s and ’70s satires could just as well be made today.

The early Trump presidency had readers uncover a trove of Trumpish figures, be it Judge Caligula from early ’80s Judge Dredd:

the portrayal of Luthor in 1989’s Lex Luthor: The Unauthorized Biography by James D. Hudnall and Eduardo Barreto:

the President from Al Ewing and Henry Flint’s second Zombo strip in 2012:

the Mayor of Buenos Aires in a geopolitical reversed world from mid-2015s Americatown:

or even various explicit Trumps, like in Peter Kuper’s The Wall, published in 1990 in Heavy Metal:

During the pandemic I read a lot of ’70s and ’80s comics only to find plenty of only too contemporary situations in unexpected places such as Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema’s Captain America and The Falcon:

Steve Gerber and Sal Buscema, again, in The Defenders had all sorts of socially conscious moments. The Sons of the Serpent ranting on TV about how the country is ruined by “minorities” is just the most blatant one.

A more subtle bit that I liked a lot is implicating Nighthawk, a Batman analogue, in the racists’ plot simply by him being wealthy. Even if sketchy, it underscores cleanly and clearly how wealth is not static, but a function of the whole economy oriented to serve a minority of individuals to the detriment of the many others who are exploited or rejected. This short sequence is also very funny to me, because in just three panels it closes off a silly perennial debate on Twitter about how Bruce Wayne should deal with crime through his wealth.

But there’s more! Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Moon Knight:

It’s not all Marvel. John Ostrander and Kim Yale’s Suicide Squad is filled with similar examples:

It’s obvious they weren’t prescient, they were just perceptive. They weren’t painting a hyperbolical satire of the world to come(okay, maybe Kirby did, but that’s why he’s the King), anticipating the aggravated state we’re in, they were just talking about their world and their time, which didn’t progress much.

Trump had for decades been propagating nationalist and racist views, as well as having had a history of anti-vaxx sentiment. He’s been courting running for office since the late ’80s, and in 2000, prodded by Roger Stone, attempted to run for the Presidency on the Reform Party ticket, fragmenting it in the process. Trump is only one such figure.

This is why, and how, John Wagner created the ultimate Trump parody all the way back in 1997.

To my mind this sequence is so strong that it would still be one of the best Trump parodies even if were made today. It’s humor goes deep, comes if not from an understanding of the contradictions at the heart of far-right movement, then at least from a very powerful intuition about them. But considering that it was made more than two decades ago there’s something we can actually learn from it, not just letting us be momentarily amused. Wagner didn’t have visions of the futures, he isn’t a precog, rather he was aware enough about how the world works to go beyond the “lying politician” cliché and carve it with a really sharp edge, pointing out the direction of those lies, who they were benefiting and how. In just a few pages it throws in political economy, personal hypocrisy, politics as a spectacle and the way law enforcement aids and protects the far-right.

With time, I find myself less and less in awe at the “prescience” of creators such as those above and more angry at the mechanisms that obfuscate their observations and make each generation have to rediscover basic truths about our society or to forget the history of certain personages.

We shouldn’t look at pop culture and point at instances of corporate corruption, global warming, white supremacy and populist figures as if they’re a neat reference we’ve uncovered or as if they’re Easter eggs in a Marvel movie; nor should we fall in awe at the prowess of creators to anticipate problems we’re confronting today as if these very problems aren’t a continuation of those they faced themselves.

It’s not prescience what’s to be appreciated about them, it’s acuity of vision, it’s courage to speak about those subjects and the craft to make them compelling still. If these present moments appeared as satire in media decades old we should question who are the actors and institutions who made us think meaningful progress was happening while shepherding the eschatological visions of years past.