Star Spangled Squadron: An Adventure in Counter-Spoliation

You can whine about Hollywood, or you can create a new pop culture.

What is meant by the spoliation of American popular culture? Alexander Macris, author of the right-wing Substack Contemplations on the Tree of Woe, thinks he has an answer. Here is how he explains it in a post from October of 2021, occasioned by DC Comics’ decision to alter Superman’s motto from “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” to “Truth, Justice, and a Better World.”

Spoliation means “incorporating art into a setting culturally or chronologically different from that of its creation.” The term derives from Classical Latin word spolium, a singular noun which literally means “the skin or hide stripped from an animal.” The plural, spolia, came into figurative use by Latin writers such as Cicero to refer to plunder, from which we derive the English phrase “the spoils of war.” Whenever the Romans conquered a nation, they brought back war trophies as proof of their victory…

In contemporary usage, spoliation is “a practice consisting of a transference of power from the past through a taking over of its cultural expressions and incorporating them into one’s own. The purpose of appropriation [is] to convert the object of appropriation to one’s own purposes…

Spoliation, then, works like this:

1. A conqueror defeats a rival.

2. The conqueror identifies the defeated rival’s most valuable cultural expressions (artwork, artifacts, buildings, monuments, stories, etc.).

3. The conqueror appropriates those expressions and reuses them in its own cultural expressions, thereby transferring power to itself.

Does that process seem familiar? It should….

Macris certainly isn’t the first person to complain about the way that left-wing politics leads to bad art. Nor is he the first to notice that wokesters – unable to create good art themselves – have settled for spoliating the products of an earlier, more creative era, with (for instance) the all-female Ghostbusters remake that flopped back in 2016, or Amazon’s Rings of Power series with its wildly implausible handling of race (over and over again you see a black or Asian elf, hobbit, or dwarf popping up in an otherwise-white village with no explanation.) And that’s before I even get into the woke values of the remakes. I could go on, but it would be tedious, and I trust that my readers get the point.

What is one to do? Unfortunately, one of the commonest responses of right-wingers is simply to complain. But this isn’t everyone’s response. Macris himself prefers “counter-spoliation.” (“Fighting Back in the Culture War Means Creating a New Pop Culture.”)

And Macris has lived by his own principles. By now he is the lead designer of several board games, as well as two tabletop role-playing games with a dozen manuals between them, each comprising about five hundred pages of lore and combat mechanics. By his own confession, the Adventurer Conqueror King System is his masterpiece, but the work I’ll be reviewing today is the graphic novel Star Spangled Squadron, written to accompany Ascendent, his second most ambitious RPG.

Ascendent: Star Spangled Squadron is set in a world where, beginning around the year 2016, a select few men and women have “ascended” – that is, suddenly developed superhuman powers. This can happen in response to drugs in a top secret military program, but it can also happen ‘in the wild’ at moments of extreme hardship.

The people who come out of this process are technically called “humans of mass destruction.” But the US military, which is assembling its own ascendent team as the story begins, is cagey about using this term in public. Basically, they’ve realized that somebody will need to protect the American public from rogue and foreign HMDs. And while dressing those somebodies in ordinary military uniforms and playing their role straight would frighten and perhaps disgust the citizens of western democracies, having them wear capes instead and work under code-names like “Dr. Quantum” or “American Eagle” would be a lot more agreeable, whatwith everyone being used to superheroes acting like that in comic-books. (Not only this premise, but also a great many of the jokes in the series, are meant as satires on the way that media influences reality.)

Star Spangled Squadron picks up in a secret military lab beneath Fort Leavenworth Maximum Security Prison, where we meet our first supervillain – a disgraced former soldier doing a life sentence for crimes committed in Iraq, who has volunteered to be experimented upon as part of “Project Ascendent.” After being injected with some controlled substances, the soldier wakes up as… Manticore. A literal manticore, with the head of a man, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion.

After a brutal fight in which 412 people are killed and 704 injured (passed off as a “bombing” in the press), Manticore is stunned by a missile launched from a helicopter. The authorities consider finishing him off, but decide to transport him to Guantánamo Bay instead, whence he soon escapes. Manticore then goes rampaging in downtown Atlanta before coming face to face with our first hero, American Eagle.

Here is how Macris describes American Eagle, in a podcast with Thomas Umstattd of Author Media where the two men are discussing “post-modern subversion fatigue:”

[American Eagle is] a firefighter whose superpowers manifest while he’s rescuing children from a burning school. He’s a married Christian father of two who coaches Little League, and when his powers develop, he goes and loyally serves the U.S. Government.

Readers often ask me, “Okay, what’s the twist?”

My response is, “The plot twist is that there’s no plot twist. He’s simply a good dude who loves his family, his wife, and his country.” To my surprise, when I polled readers, he was the number one most popular character in the book.

I have other characters like the sexy bad girl, the wisecracker, and the antihero, but American Eagle was the guy people loved.

After the battle between Manticore and American Eagle, the readers are introduced to the rest of the Star Spangled Squadron. There’s Stilleto, the “sexy bad girl,” plus the aforementioned Dr. Quantum, as well as Stronghold, Warp, and Aurora. (Aurora is a gorgeous, somewhat ditzy blonde model who, when asked what her power is, simply says “I’m a star.” She turns out to be, in my opinion, the funniest character in the story.)

The members of the Squadron all dress like classic superheroes, but they’re under military command, since each of the six is a commissioned officer in the United States Coast Guard. (“…because the Coast Guard is the only Armed Service that can fight overseas and also enforce laws domestically. This instantly makes the US Coast Guard the most powerful and prestigious armed service in the world.”)

The story follows the Star Spangled Squadron as they prepares for and fight an even bigger battle with a group of villainous Humans of Mass Destruction who have taken over Area 51. All of the common superhero tropes show up. (If you were looking for a highly-original, high-brow work of literature… this is not it.)

The villains also have their own backstories, though you’ll have to look for them in the RPG manual, not the graphic novel. (For instance, Free Radical is “an anti-nuclear activist who developed nuclear powers after being exposed to a meltdown and is now a self-hating nuclear-powered anti-nuclear activist.”)

The main differences between Macris’ work, and the stuff that Marvel and DC Comics are putting out these days, are that (1) The jokes are unwoke, and therefore much funnier, and (2) the whole series is written with a solidly conservative subtext, where the heroes are patriots who believe that America is worth defending, but are also level-headed enough to realize that incompetence and hare-brained ideologies within their own government are often a bigger problem than foreign threats.

Readers who finish Star Spangled Squadron, and who want to experience more of Macris’ creation, will have no trouble finding it – if they purchase the Ascendent role-playing game with its 496-page manual full of art, detailed game mechanics, and lore. Here is how Macris described it, in another podcast with Umstattd:

In my business, Autarch, we create tabletop role-playing games that compete with Dungeons and Dragons, and we publish graphic novels. These graphic novels are set in the same universe as our role-playing games. When I set out to create my most recent role-playing game, Ascendant, which is a superhero-themed game, I decided to build an entire comic book universe around it.

The game itself uses logarithmic math, allowing players to scale to any superhero power level. It’s very detailed and “crunchy,” with tables and quantized stats for everything. When I started working on this game, people thought I was crazy because most big publishers were shifting toward a female audience, making games more narrative-driven, story-focused, and softer, [but in] my game… everything is quantified. For example, you can say that American Eagle can lift exactly a certain amount, throw it a specific distance, and at a defined speed.

When I released Ascendant, it became an instant number-one bestseller on DriveThruRPG and my most successful Kickstarter to date. It’s even spawned two graphic novels. Similarly, my tabletop role-playing game, Adventure Conqueror King System, also goes against the grain. It’s set in a fantasy version of Rome called the Arn Empire and is highly detailed with robust economic systems and military tactics. You can play it as a war game on the table or as a traditional RPG. This is completely contrary to the direction companies like Wizards of the Coast are taking, which focuses on making games easier to access by reducing complexity and emphasizing the story. I chose the opposite approach, and it led to a $300,000 Kickstarter campaign.

(This market success is all the more impressive when you consider that Macris’ right-wing politics have gotten him blacklisted by a lot of respectable retailers, and even the gaming forum RPGnet and the RPG subreddit have banned any mentions of the games he has worked on.)

All of Alexander Macris’ creations follow the ideals of an artistic movement called Romantic Realism, where good art is “awe-inspiring, alluring, beautiful, heroic, majestic, sensual, and sublime,” and bad art is “cynical, deconstructive, demoralizing, dispiriting, and/or ugly.” While he sympathizes with the Respectable Realism that dominated American mass media in the mid-20^th century (the era of Norman Rockwell, the Hays Code, and the Comic Code) he thinks that that style was only suitable for the kind of high-trust society that we no longer have, and that, nowadays, Romantic Realism is the only alternative to the Transgressive Realism and the even worse Dystrophic Realism that became dominant as the Left won the culture wars. (If you don’t know what those phrases mean, it’s because you haven’t read Macris’ lengthy 2024 essay “A Digression into Aesthetics.”)

If you’re reading this, and you happen to enjoy superhero stories or tabletop fantasy games, then you should definitely check out Alexander Macris’ oeuvre. But there’s also a good chance that you are the kind of person who is bored out of his mind by that kind of pop culture, who deems superhero comics and perhaps even graphic novels in general incredibly trashy, and who wouldn’t even dream of interacting with a twenty-sided die.

In that case, you should think long and hard about what kinds of cultural products you do like – and then find “counter-spoliators” who work in those genres, and support their work. Or, better yet, follow Alexander Macris’ example and create art and literature of your own.

The results of last year’s elections – plus the extreme tepidness of the Left’s protests against the second Trump administration when compared to what happened back in 2016 and 2017 – have shown that most Americans are fed up with the Democrats’ entire worldview, and want something different. But right-wing politics can’t win in a vacuum. People don’t just need good laws and good government; they also need stories to tell and heroes to admire. And the future belongs to those who do the work of providing these things.

A shorter version of this essay appears at the American Thinker.