I'm looking for a good superhero book and, if possible, a particular kind. In my second year of university, I took a great class about how superhero stories are often fundamentally conservative. They are not conservative in the sense that they oppose social justice; in fact, many mainstream superhero stories are full of open advocacy for social progress; instead, they are conservative in the sense that they never challenge the systems of inequality that destroy people's lives. In most stories, superheroes exist to fight "criminals," people who have violated the current social order and must be swiftly brought to justice, with these villains often being portrayed as cartoonishly evil masterminds, which is fine; I love Batman beating the Joker as much as anyone. However, in more egregious cases, the villain will correctly identify a social inequality, but in trying to fix it, they "go too far" and must be stopped by the superheroes (looking at you, Bane, Riddler and Killmonger) and thus the status quo is upheld. The unequal systems that created those villains get minor if any, fixes.
One of the worst examples of this is in Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Annual Vol 1 1, with the story of a homeless girl freezing to death while dreaming of meeting Spiderman; this is portrayed as a sad tragedy, but why? Spiderman knows gods and men with riches beyond measure; also, he's fucking Spiderman; if he wanted, he could run New York City politics, he could run New York state politics, even a hint of Spiderman's endorsement and you can choose what political office you want before even campaigning, he could end help homelessness without breaking a single law. But this is never brought up because it would challenge the status quo if he did. So, in a world where heroes save the planet every other week, they can't pool their unimaginable influence and tackle homelessness, starvation, and systemic inequalities? The Invincible TV Show did an excellent job highlighting this; the gay supervillain couple aren't bad people in the episode, quite the opposite, they're just fucking poor and need money to survive, and crime is a reliable way to make money. Without systemic change, they are trapped in an endless cycle where they get arrested, try to go legit, fail and need cash, then commit some crimes, rinse and repeat with nothing changing.
Okay, rant over, and maybe I'm overthinking it, and I do genuinely enjoy more mainstream superhero stories, but this stuff always annoyed me about superhero stuff, so I'm curious if there's a book that acknowledges this disconnect and tries to handle it. You can recommend any good mainstream superhero stories if there isn't one.
by bonafide8n