Marvel's Dark Reign Was the Perfect Trump-Era Preview

When I read Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels last year, I noted how Wolk drew a comparison between the Dark Reign storyline, in which Spider-Man's arch nemesis Norman Osborn becomes the de facto ruler of the US, and the first Trump administration. This past week I got to see for myself what Wolk was talking about, when I read the X-Men issues that took place during Dark Reign.

Wolk makes the point that Dark Reign is just an imagining of how to apply the authoritarian playbook, which I think accounts for the similarities. But the similarities really are striking: Osborn responds to a flashpoint of political violence in San Francisco by sending in his fake Avengers (similar to the Thunderbolts, a group of villains disguised as heroes). He then uses that as an excuse to suspend civil rights and puts the city on lockdown, portraying SF as an ungovernable hellhole that only he can solve.

Obviously in real life this stuff has happened elsewhere, mostly Portland and Washington DC. And as far as I can tell, none of the things the Trump administration is responding to involved anti-mutant protests or the introduction of bio-Sentinel robots designed to trigger when in the presence of mutants.

But as I say, the similarities are striking, especially when they're rendered against the backdrop of Union Square and other parts of SF that I know. Reading these issues I didn't get a sense that this was back in 2009, long before most people were worried about the far-right or about fascist takeovers.

It's also a good encapsulation of how Wolk sees the various modes of resistance: fighting back doesn't work, especially when it's a small group, like when Hellion gathers a bunch of mutants together and they get their asses kicked by Emma Frost's Dark X-Men; hunkering down also doesn't work, as when Cyclops first locks down the X-Men's base in the Marin Headlands and then raises Asteroid M to serve as a separate mutant state; nor does Emma Frost's attempt to moderate the chaos from the inside do much, as she finds herself arresting Hellion's group and delivering them to Osborn's base to be tortured.

It doesn't come up in the X-Men parts, but Wolk notes that what brings down Osborn at the end of Dark Reign (apart from getting beaten up by Iron Man, Thor and Captain America) is journalism. That is to say, documenting his administration's misdeeds, who they hurt, and where they're getting their funding from, among other questions, is what lays bare the truth of Osborn's plan. The implication is clear: exposing everything they're trying to hide is the main thing that'll help us.

Too bad Obama can't step in at the end, like in Dark Reign, and put a stop to it in one fell swoop.