Rereading Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme: 4. Shoot them with the bop gun

When Nighthawk says he is going to legalise guns again, what kind of guns is he talking about?

We know that the police are now packing pacifier pistols (I alliterate to channel the spirit of Smilin’ Stan), which incapacitate by flooding the target with positive vibes. Now, when you think that Watchmen and Dark Knight are charging down the track towards us, at the time of publication, this is about the least 80s thing anyone could have come up with. Overcoming criminals with the power of pleasure! Wrangling wrongdoers with beams of bliss! Purveying a penalty of pleasure not punishment! It’s not very grimdark, is it? Not very “realistic” – and we are about to decide, at this point in the 80s, that we like our superheroes “realistic.”

Again, this is about releasing the reader from the Squadron’s world.

How could anyone – even Nighthawk – possibly think that giving people back firearms is a good idea? Unless what he means is, anyone can legally buy a pacifier pistol? Well, maybe. But that’s not really the thrust of what he’s saying. He wants to roll back everything the Squadron did – not everything “except those pacifier pistols, we’ll have those.”

Nighthawk’s tragedy is that he is an absolutist – and the problem with this kind of absolutism is the inability to see absolutes as historically contingent. That is, what seems utterly essential at point A in history may seem wholly bizarre at point B in history. A world in which firearms have gone – and pacifier pistols have appeared – can only be a good one, but this is a calculation Nighthawk cannot make.

Nighthawk is seeking a kind of narrative status quo ante. The clue is in the name – the Squadron’s Utopia Project. A place that is not, that cannot be. Two worlds are about to merge – that of the Squadron, and that of the reader. By rejecting the blissed out promise of the pacifier pistols – violence that is not violence, that literally replaces violence with bliss – Nighthawk moves the Squadron’s world back towards ours. You are leaving Utopia now, says Nighthawk to the reader. Even before you close the comic, your world has come back.