Heroes and Villains

If the intersection between comic books and punk rock runs deep, it's because we know: Fitting in is fine, but being a misfit is a superpower.

Panels from some of the earliest Wonder Woman comic books.

I.

My older brother wanted to humiliate me when he stood in front of those kids and told them about The Masked Hero that day. That’s simply what he wanted to do. I couldn’t have been any older than seven, and like most kids my age in the early 1980s, I collected comic books and played out some of my superhero fantasies at home—flinging myself from chair to chair as if I had some sort of special ability to jump, landing on the ground with a graceful tumble, always successfully deflecting whatever bullets came my way. The Masked Hero was my secret identity; it was something that was completely mine. And whenever I transformed into him, I felt a kind of power that I knew I didn’t have access to in my everyday life—whether it was being pressed by the thumb of my overbearing parents or succumbing to the pressures of trying to be a model immigrant family or the way I never felt like I fully belonged anywhere. For my brother to tell anyone about my secret identity felt like a betrayal. The Masked Hero may not have saved anyone outside of my imagination, but he rescued a part of me.

What happened that afternoon, in the gymnasium of the school we shared, is still an unshakeable memory. As he stood in the middle of a circle of friends, my brother began sharing the details of a world I kept private: the mask, the cape, and most of all, the bracelets. He punctuated each part of the story with a cackle, saving the most pertinent detail for last. “He stretches his arms out and then spins around like an idiot until he becomes… The Masked Hero,” he told them. “But who does that sound like to you?”

“Holy shit, he thinks he’s Wonder Woman!” one boy reckoned, and before long, all of the assembled kids started laughing at me. Pointing at me. Shaming me. With my face turning red, practically burning, only one thing became clear to me at that moment: It wasn’t the fact that I pretended to be a superhero that was so unacceptable. It was the fact that I modeled myself after a woman.

But also, I did want to be Wonder Woman. And I did model The Masked Hero after her—down to the golden lasso and the easy-to-pretend Invisible Jet. Some boys my age fought to play Batman, but I couldn’t relate with Bruce Wayne, the millionaire orphan philanthropist. Other boys clamored to be Superman, but I never understood how Clark Kent—a tall, handsome, muscular man—was supposed to pass for a nerd like me. Wonder Woman, though, she was different at her core. She was a woman living in a place they literally called Man’s World, the world outside of the Amazonian Paradise Island, where she came from. (In my mind, she was essentially an immigrant.) She was repeatedly underestimated by cocky men who operated on the assumption that strength and intelligence were exclusively masculine traits, and she repeatedly embarrassed those men with her effortless wit and power. Wonder Woman, ultimately, understood the strategies of the oppressors and she used that knowledge to empower the oppressed—and unlike most superheroes of the era, that mattered because she knew that being a woman in Man’s World meant that she belonged to the same group she often fought to protect.

It’s not likely that the grade-school version of myself could have articulated those thoughts into words, but I can say with absolute certainty that the points I could articulate were meaningful to me: I was an immigrant’s kid. I was a bookish, vaguely effeminate boy. I felt like an outsider in my own world. And even at seven years old, I knew I had another secret identity that I wouldn’t go on to reveal for almost two decades. Long before I’d ever heard of punk, superhero stories provided an important vehicle for coping with my freakishness as a child because they allowed me to reframe my alienation through a more constructive lens: Being different, they taught me, is a superpower.

Patrick Kindlon, live with Drug Church. Amityville Music Hall. Amityville, Long Island. July 20, 2024. Photo by Michael Dubin.

II.

From Gary Panter’s “punk everyman” character Jimbo first appearing in a 1977 issue of the legendary Slash fanzine (and later becoming the inspiration for Matt Groening’s Bart Simpson) to Gerard Way’s The Umbrella Academy comic series and Netflix franchise—and everything in between—the intersection between comic books and punk kids runs deep. It’s not a coincidence. So many young kids submerge themselves in a comic-created universe as a way to think deeply about or experiment with notions of identity and belonging; many of us, including myself, were attracted to hardcore for its potential to become a three-dimensional site for exactly that same kind of exploration. When I was in high school, for example, I had literally no friends except for one of the campus security guards who happened to be a skinhead. But on the weekend, whenever I went to shows, I was a different person. I had no shortage of friends. I felt like I could show pieces of myself that I could never share at home or in school. I could finally take off my glasses and wear my cape.

Patrick Kindlon, best known as the singer for Drug Church and Self-Defense Family, is one of those hardcore kids who found his way back to the world of superheroes and comics—where he currently works as the co-author of titles like Frontiersman and Antioch, among others. Growing up in Albany, New York, Patrick has distinct memories of buying 75-cent comics at the local pharmacy and reading more mature titles, like The Punisher, when he was only six years old. But when Patrick tells me about the superhero that he related with the most as a child, I was genuinely moved by his reasoning.

“Famously, the appeal of Spider-Man is that he’s just a kid,” he explains, for a conversation that will be published in full on Thursday. “I grew up going to Catholic school. My family was not particularly religious; my mother’s not even Catholic. But we went to Catholic school. And the thing I like about that lazy Catholicism, that many Latin Mass Catholics don’t like, is this idea that you should just try your best, right? That makes sense to me! My brain is totally incapable of thinking about how to apply religion to my own life, but the thing I do like about lapsed Catholicism is the idea that you just try to do more good than bad. Just do your best. And Spider-Man was one of those [superheroes] for me, where the constant through-line in his character is that he’s trying his best and sometimes he fails in that. He set out to be as responsible and as good a hero as he could that day when he put on his mask, but he couldn’t save everybody. So maybe that’s the power of longform storytelling: Whether you like it or not, the hero is always forgiven because he’s the protagonist in each issue.”

To be honest, it’s an assessment that made me rethink my entire appraisal of Spider-Man. Presented under this light, what hardcore kid can’t see some part of themselves in Peter Parker, the patron superhero of fucking up?

III.

Being punk, regardless of which branch of our family tree you cling to most tightly, begins with the feeling of being different. That much is evident. But whether or not you become a punk is largely contingent on a separate and potentially non-negotiable sentiment: the suspicion that being different is good, that difference itself has value, and that our differences from the so-called “normal” people we grew up with—and from each other, for that matter—are worth celebrating. For many of us, discovering punk or hardcore is akin to having an a-ha moment about where we deviate from the rest of the world. It’s about finding a place where we can let go of the weight of those differences and reveal what makes us truly special. And in the same way that not all superheroes have the same superpowers, neither do we. That’s why coalitions like the Justice League and the Avengers came to exist: to perpetuate the idea that, ultimately, we all still need each other. (That two different hardcore and punk bands separately assumed the names of both of those comics is, once again, telling.)

As for the Masked Hero, he managed to deflect those bullets from my brother and the older kids for another year or so, until I decided I didn’t need him anymore. It was one of the first times where I can remember thinking that I truly did not give a fuck—about being laughed at, about being called a sissy, about losing whatever little social cachet I had. Every hero needs a villain, after all. So if the mission was to humiliate me into becoming a “real boy,” it didn’t work—or at least not quite in the way my brother imagined.

One of the most common tropes of the superhero story is the hero’s recurring struggle between giving into their desire to be “normal” versus embracing the reality of their secret identity. In each case, the hero argues that leading a “normal” life would be so much easier than having to carry the weight and responsibility of their superpowers, and in each case, the hero eventually comes to terms with the truth that their differences are, in fact, the best things about them. As it is with punk, sometimes those very same qualities that make us feel alienated from society are the qualities that hold the power to help people, change people, and even save people’s lives. I think about that struggle whenever I find myself questioning the life that I’ve chosen—off the beaten path and quite often weighed down by uncertainty. But then I think about a song by Negative Approach that translates this conflict into a simple forty-second argument for the person I’ve been trying so hard to be all this time. Its title, a straightforward question: “Why Be Something That You’re Not?”

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Patrick Kindlon of Drug Church.

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