Comic review: Secret Wars #5- Atheism, propaganda, dictatorship, democracy, truth and lies

Writer: Jonathan Hickman
Artist: Esad Ribic
Publisher: Disney/Marvel
Released: 12th August 2015



In my previous review (18 Days #2) I bemoaned the fact that contemporary neo-liberal corporate hegemony supporting comic books are pretty much all the same.

I moaned and complained that their narratives feature crazy dictators as the villains, and order following agents of democracy as the heroes. These ‘heroic’ agents of the state just want to bring ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ to the world and to stop evil dictators from killing their own people, or something.

‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’ (George Orwell)

The lie that democracy means freedom is the lie that allows western governments to propagandise their own populations and to enslave them to a centralised control system.

Through the repeated telling of this lie the numerous wars that have become ever more apparent since 2001 can be sold as wars for peace, and not the wars for resources, profit and control that they actually are.

The wars are now sold as protecting people (by bombing them) and bringing democracy, which of course equates to freedom, seeing as we are all so free in the west, cough Edward Snowden.

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it” (Adolf Hitler)

“All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.” (Upton Sinclair)

The first thing that we need to recognise is that we are living in a lie. Your life is a lie, and so is mine. The west is a lie, a lie that we drink, eat, and bathe in, daily. It washes over us, flowing from everything and everywhere, yet the lie is so big, and so relentlessly repeated that we come to think of the lie as truth itself. We work for the lie, we feed the lie, we caress the lie, we nurture the lie, we treasure the lie, we love the lie, and we get careers as writers, and repeat the lie until the day that we die.

Do I think that comic book writers working for Marvel, DC, Darkhorse or any of the other US comic book corporations care much about truth and lies? Perhaps in their personal lives, but I know one thing for sure, I know that it’s not coming out in their comic book career lives.

I read a lot of contemporary US comic books and it’s become very apparent to me that the writers don’t want to go anywhere near truth. They want to tell exciting stories, they want to please liberal, progressive minded readers and they want to keep reality, truth and the real world a million miles away from what they are doing in their comic books.

It’s a choice. They choose the easy life and they echo chamber the thoughts and beliefs of their left leaning audience back to them whilst dreaming of the big television or movie deal. I wish them the best of luck with that and hope that they make lots of money and win award after award after award. It’s meaningless, but as most of them are atheist, solipsist, Darwinian types, that isn’t really an insult to them, it’s just stating a fact about their collective mindsets. Rats in a cage, and they are happy to be so.

Secret Wars #5 is a mainstream American comic book written by Jonathan Hickman. The story is about an evil dictator, and there’s a bit of tame religion bashing going on as well, which is par for the course in contemporary comic books.

The book is beautifully illustrated by Esad Ribic, and doesn’t touch on any real world concerns of 2015. It is an uncontroversial book. It does what all of the other books do, but there’s a lack of jokes, puns and quips in it, meaning (I suppose) that it’s a ‘serious’ comic book.

The ideology that runs through the book compares God to a deceitful, murderous, petty, insecure dictator. It’s an ideology that atheistic neo-liberal types will agree with, and thus is just another continuance of the mainstream echo chamber that stifles all debate and doesn’t address the predominant lie of our times.

I didn’t hate the book. It’s just another lefty comic book. It looks nice, it toes the line, and it does what it is supposed to do. It keeps the neoliberal democratic lie intact, our heads submerged within the corporate matrix, and successfully farts out another unit for the Princess programming, unreality pushing, crazy as a Rihanna video, bathed in children’s blood Disney Corporation.


Rating: 6/10 (It’s all about Doom, how he’s not God, how he created the world and how he’s a big old mean dictator that needs to be taken down by the atheistic democracy squad)



Check out Rihanna's charming new pop video below. Yep, the mainstream sure is a crazy place these days.