Paul Ryan (3) (1949–2016)

Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme collects issues nos. 1-12 of the titular series that were published between September 1985 and August 1986 as well as Captain America no. 314 from February 1986. The team originally appeared as the Squadron Sinister in Avengers no. 70 as a pastiche of the Justice League of America, but here Gruenwald tells a story examining the logical result of a superpowered group dedicating itself to bettering the world. Hyperion, a Superman-like character, leads the team in creating a Utopia Program to assume control of the United States government and fundamentally reshape society. Nighthawk, a Batman-type character, votes against the plan and leaves the team, later creating his own superpowered group to resist the Squadron.

Over the course of a year, the Squadron Supreme institutes massive changes to American society, beginning with the public reveal of their secret identities in order to gain the public’s trust. They disarm the public and then the military, create behavior-modification technology to re-program the minds of convicted criminals, and, when genius Tom Thumb cannot find a cure for all disease, the Squadron creates a form of cryogenic preservation in order to preserve the dead until such time as a cure may be found. Gruenwald examines the temptation for his all-too-human heroes to exploit these technologies, with Golden Archer (Green Arrow) using the behavior modification device to make Lady Lark (Black Canary) love him. Nuke discovers that his parents’ deadly cancer was caused by his powers and dies fighting Doctor Spectrum (Green Lantern). When Nighthawk brings his group to confront the Squadron, the final conflict results in seven more deaths, representing the consequences of such ideological conflict.

Gruenwald’s miniseries appeared slightly before Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, though it remains overshadowed by that later work. Gruenwald engaged with many of the same issues and offered a similarly serious take on the superhero genre, portraying his characters with domestic lives, moral conflicts, sexuality, and capable of dying. His Squadron Supreme deserves the same level of recognition for how it subverted the familiar superhero tropes, in many ways dramatizing the transition of the Bronze Age of comics to the Modern Age. This edition of Squadron Supreme appeared shortly after Mark Gruenwald’s death and features tributes from Tom DeFalco, Mike Carlin, Alex Ross, Mark Waid, Kurt Busiek, Ralph Macchio, and Gruenwald’s widow, Catherine, who explains in her introduction that, per Mark’s last wishes, his ashes were “mixed in with the printer’s ink during the printing process” of this volume.… (més)