I have been a huge comic book reader all of my life and although it dropped off a bit in college and my twenties (there was pressure to be cool - in a get drunk, get laid, fail all your classes kind of way), I have been receiving a monthly order from my favorite comic shop for several years now. (Famous Faces in Melbourne, Fl - 321-259-3575. Tell Rick that Colleen sent you.) I'm mostly a DC girl; I lost my heart to Batman over twenty years ago and our disfunctional relationship is pretty much set in stone. But I do read a lot of independent comics (I have made my love for Oni Press quite clear in the past) and also some of the other major non-DC superheroes. (Astonishing X-Men, as written by Joss Whedon, rocks my world.) But I'm not much of a Marvel girl, never have been.

Until now of course.

Luke Cage is Power Man, the most significant African American superhero that has ever been written in mainstream comics. He's been around since 1972 and was in a team with Iron Fist for ages. Cage has unbreakable skin and superhuman strength and has been a member off and on of the Avengers (Captain America, Thor, etc.) Recently he and Jessica Jones, a retired superhero, had a baby and decided to get married (in that order). For awhile Jessica had her own title, Alias, in which she was a detective. The writing in that series was incredible - if you like a good mystery you will love Alias (Jenny D I'm thinking of you!). It was more intense, more dramatic, more significant then anything I have read in superhero comics in a long long time. In case you ever wondered just what a supervillain would do if he had mind control, well then read this series. It's the first a comic's writer admitted just how bad it can get.

But I digress.

In the latest big arc for the Avengers there has been a massive tragedy involving a stupid group of reality stars/superheroes who tried to make the big time and ran into a bad guy who blew himself, the heroes and part of a CT town up during the fight. In response Congress is demanding that all superheroes register with the government, revealing their powers and secret identities. They will work for the US now - exclusively. (They even get benefits says Iron Man!) But you have to trust the feds to know everything about you and you have to sign in or you become an enemy of the state. You become a bad guy, just like that.

They're calling this arc "Civil War" because some heroes in the Marvel Universe are signing and some are not. In issue 21 of New Avengers they come after Captain America because he will not sign - he feels it is an attack on his civil liberties. In issue 22 it comes down to Luke Cage who has a midnight deadline for signing and he sees something altogether different and wrong about it. Iron Man comes to persuade him to sign and they have the following exchange:

IM: Luke, I need to know, will you sign on?
LC: Guess we'll find out at midnight.
IM: Luke they will come to your home and they will take you out of here. And if that doesn't work, they'll call us in next. Do you want that? Is that your goal?
LC: Oh. Is it Mississippi in the 1950s now?
IM: Oh come on!
LC: The difference is?
IM: Stop it! Will you stop?
LC: Getting pulled out of you home in the middle of the night for being different is the same now as it was then.
IM. No. This is about breaking the law.
LC. Slavery used to be a law.
IM: You're twisting the and I won't hear it!
LC: You should hear it. You should turn those robot ears on real loud, because it is what it is baby. You're perverting it all. You're distorting the ideas you said we stand for to the point that when you're done with all of this..the ideas won't mean anything. You'll stand for nothing except whatever "they" tell you.

Luke doesn't sign and they come for him at midnight. As to what happens next, well you have to read New Avengers to see, but it is great. It's everything great about standing up and being an example of someone who stands up.

Here's the thing, usually I just read comics for the same reason I read anything - the stories are good. But sometimes they do tackle greater and larger truths that really make me think. (You did know the X-men are all about the years under the sway of Sen. Joe McCarthy when communists had to register in this country and then had their lives ruined, right?) The "Civil War" storyline is taking a hard look at all the things about keeping us safe, about Guantanamo and racial profiling and why a cabal of "Islamic facists" are blamed for attacks against western countries but God loving Protestant boys who rape and murder while wearing the uniform of a US soldier are aberrations - or suffering from stress.

And please, don't dare question my patriotism for writing that.

Luke Cage is a comic book character and I know comics are not real. However, the federal government wants to listen in to the telephone calls of the "bad people" and lock up without a trial more "bad people" and cheer the bombing into submission of yet more "bad people".

And they decide who the bad people are.

Mississippi 1950. That's when bad people were determined by the color of their skin. California 1942. That's when bad people were determined by their ethnicity. Now it is who you pray to. I am not so naive that I think there are not terrorists, that Osama bin Laden is just misunderstood or that there are not active plots right now going on to kill Americans. But civil liberties have to mean something to everyone if they are to mean something to anyone.

It could be you one day, remember that. They could come for you one midnight because you refused to sign a piece of paper.

Real or not, Luke Cage is my hero.