The Enemy Is The Centre: The Dilemma of Normative Masculinity in Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier

The article explores Darwyn Cooke’s 2004 comic DC: The New Frontier as a retrospective history for DC’s comic book characters of the 1950s; though this history takes into account certain problematic aspects of 1950s American culture—in particular the problem of racism and fear of the minoritized other—the comic does not in any way produce a critique of normative American masculinity. Making use of a critical framework that discusses white masculinity, nostalgia, and the “falling” man, and the conceptual work of scholars such as Sally Robinson, Michael Kimmel, Elizabeth Anker, and Hamilton Carroll, this article argues that Cooke’s comic recenters the white male adventurer/hero not only as a product of nostalgia but also as a post-9/11 response to the idea of the “falling man.” Cooke promotes a fraternal code as a way to resolve the problematics of diversity, constructs the flyboy as a falling man, whose rehabilitation as an everyday hero reflects the text’s idealization of retrograde masculinity, and transforms narratives about othering into celebrations of colonialism and American manifest destiny