In Praise of the Cadmus Arc

I thought that the edition of Assassin’s Creed: Origins that I bought on sale, came with the expansions. It does not. Which is fine, really, because the season pass goes on sale often, and it’s a ways before I finish the main game anyway. I am currently reading Red Seas Under Red Skies, which I’m pretty excited about, and a couple of comics this weekend.

This was a contender for last week’s Saturday Note, but I wasn’t finished with the season when I started writing, so I thought I’d give it a week to sit in my head. And I almost forgot about the idea! But it’s cool, it’s back.

In Praise of the Cadmus Arc

I’ve been re-watching Justice League Unlimited, and in my opinion the Project Cadmus arc remains one of the high points in the history of superhero storytelling. Very little comes close to being as high-stakes and well-written to me, with a conflict that makes sense, and I understand the viewpoint of both sides.

The plot goeth thusly: there are certain parties who are worried about the possibility of Superman and the Justice League going rogue. This is not an entirely crazy idea in the DC Animated Universe; towards the end of Superman: The Animated Series, Superman is kidnapped and brainwashed by Darkseid into leading an invasion force to Earth (he gets better, obviously). One episode of Justice League has the team visit a parallel dimension in which the League fought a President Lex Luthor, eventually killing him and taking over the world.

In short, we have plenty of evidence in-universe that, if the heroes went rogue, we’d be screwed. Moreso in Unlimited, when the League expands to have over fifty members.

Project Cadmus is revealed to be an off-the-books government division dedicated to fighting metahumans, the League in particular, should they go rogue. They create a lot of safeguards in the form of government-created metahumans and technology, so they could fight the League on equal terms should the League go to war with the US government.

I will admit that nostalgia colors my vision of this particular storyline. Watching it again now, I realize that Amanda Waller, the head of Cadmus, is nowhere near as competent as I remembered. Just about every major endeavor Cadmus pursues backfires horribly, causing problems the League has to fix. There’s also this line that keeps getting repeated, “The League’s been acting sketchy lately!”, which has no truth to it. There’s one thing they maybe have legitimate cause for concern about–the giant space laser–except everyone acts like they fired it in the desert for funzies, but it was used to delay an evil alien nanotech virus from eating everything on the planet.

[Also! Hey! Waller? What did you think would happen when you told Eiling, “I don’t care how, get it done!”? Why are you surprised he decided to send in a nuke? This feels very much like, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome Kryptonian?”]

But this arc revolves around questions of what is the role of powerful superheroes and international superhero teams, in regards to world governments (and the US government in particular)? How much power should superheroes have in regards to governments? Should the government get involved in the business of superheroes? What could go wrong with superheroes that answer to the government? What could go wrong with superheroes that don’t? These are questions that it seems to me that superhero fiction of late are remarkably bad at delivering answers to.

In Spider-Man: Far From Home, Peter Parker is given a piece of technology by Tony Stark’s will that lets him hack any piece of technology, as well as have an array of hundreds of killer drones that can kill someone on a whim, and that’s fine. In the CBS/CW Supergirl series, the titular hero is a Kryptonian who ends up working for a secret government agency as law enforcement, and that’s fine. In the film Black Adam, the Justice Society either answers to or works closely with Amanda Waller, a government official mostly known for coercing supervillains, through the threat of instant execution, to go on black ops missions off the books, and that’s fine.

It seems like none of these writers have seen the Cadmus arc to me. They are not questioning the idea that superheroes have all this power, or that the government has sway over superheroes, they just take these ideas as cool things without examining any of the problems that stem from them in a meaningful way. The Cadmus arc talks about these issues, or things very much like them, in a way that’s memorable, nuanced, and actually raises legitimate points! Yeah, it’s disrupted by Braniac popping out of Lex Luthor’s abs, but still! They’re talked about! In a show, aimed at kids!

Well, kind of. It’s kind of aimed at kids.

There are discussions of what happens if superheroes seriously tried to fight the government! There are government-mandated superheroes! There’s an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate! There’s Superman storming a government facility! There’s Batman intercepting a nuke! It’s AMAZING!

And then it gives us that one line that absolutely haunts my nightmares to this day: “President?! Do you have any idea how much power I would have to give up to be President?!”

It is memorable, and exciting, and deep, and everything that a modern superhero story is trying to be when it’s trying to be relevant. And it mostly knocks it out of the park. The Marvel Cinematic Universe WISHES it could do storytelling this good.

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