I found an AnCap superhero comic

[Libertad]

It's called the Voluntaryist, and judging by their YouTube channel the comic's been around for a while.

It's a pretty small and sparse production, being chiefly funded on IndieGogo. Looking it up on Google search shows it making the rounds in a few online Libertarian circles but nothing more mainstream.

I read some free samples. It's rough, and tells more than it shows and there's not really much in the way of character development when they simply have the characters preach talking points. The only good thing I can say about it is that it shows the protagonists sabotaging US drone strikes from killing civilians in the Middle East, which I don't really see very often in the genre (not only highlighting the US govt doing bad things, but more specifically using contemporary critiques of the War on Terror in a direct fashion).

Samples:

https://voluntaryists.files.wordpress.c ... elease.pdf

https://voluntaryists.files.wordpress.c ... dition.pdf

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Wow, the art is a lot better than I expected. It certainly isn't good, but I guess ancaps are able to hire competent artists.

Holy shit is the leader of the statists literally Satan?

[Libertad]

Wow, the art is a lot better than I expected. It certainly isn't good, but I guess ancaps are able to hire competent artists.

Holy shit is the leader of the statists literally Satan?

Well, how else are you going to describe whatever sadistic mind came up with the TSA?

[hyzmarca]

I see some problems with this comic.

1) The Voluntaryists wear uniforms that declare their affiliation. The Statists dress in unique outfits. Should be the other way around.

2) Related to the first, the Voluntaryists are bland and generic while that Statist look cool. I mean, there's a demon and a gorilla. I don't need to know anything more. The good guys instead are just generic good looking people wearing forgettable domino masks. There's the guy who looks like some sort of giant rodent, but he gets only one panel.

3) It's possible to do subtle propaganda. Other books have done it. Some of them are even good. But far too often bad propagandists just hit you over the head with a sledgehammer because they don't know how to present their opponents as three dimensional people.

4) Relating to 3, there is an actual not terrible page that references the war on drugs. You could take that and expand it into an entire 12 issue mini-series. It wouldn't be difficult. It's a good issue to focus on when the topic is government overreach. But it is swiftly discarded. Meanwhile, 4 pages are spent on an abstract philosophical debate over the nature of wealth. This isn't a way to get converts.

[Dogbert]

This comic reads almost like a self-parody, like the "Straw Feminists In The Closet" pages from Kate Beaton's Hark, A Vagrant! old webcomic.

Each "action" page is a textbook example for a "Show, Don't Tell" class on how NOT to do things. Hell, these guys make Jack Chick's work look smooth.

Hilariously terribad.

[Username17]

I think that hoping for subtlety or deep thinking from Anarcho-Capitalists is the kind of hope that leads to crushing disappointment.

If you look at the Drug War or Mass Incarceration or the endless wars in the Middle East and your conclusion is that the American State in particular or even the Westphalian Nation State in general is a force for evil in the modern era, I can't fault you for that. That's... a pretty reasonable point of view.

If your conclusion from that is that the core problem with modern society is that there are any checks at all on the powers and whims of Murdoch, Zuckerberg, or Koch... I just don't know what to say. That's certainly a point of view, it's just so obviously a dipshit point of view that I can't really imagine people making an argument for it that wasn't inherently dumb as hell.

-Username17

[Pseudo Stupidity]

This comic reads almost like a self-parody, like the "Straw Feminists In The Closet" pages from Kate Beaton's Hark, A Vagrant! old webcomic.

I'd go so far as to say this comic is self-parody, but unintentional self-parody. I read them blasting zombies for a bit and it's something a heavy-handed satire writer would throw together. And ancaps are the best at making fun of their own position. It's like that classic Reddit post where the guy starts with "now I'm not a pedophile, but I am a libertarian..." Completely unintentional hilarity.

[DSMatticus]

1) The Voluntaryists wear uniforms that declare their affiliation. The Statists dress in unique outfits. Should be the other way around.

All right-wing political philosophy is fascism-adjacent, and in fascism individuality is not a personal liberty to be protected but the principle cause of the decline of civilization.

Now, you might think that a political philosophy which literally derives its name from the concept of individual liberty and takes that concept to a self-destructive extreme might be completely incompatible with a political philosophy that blames the exercise of individual liberty with destroying civilization, and you would be right - if there were an ounce of intellectual good faith in any of the movement's philosophical figureheads. The truth is that the modern take on libertarianism is barely older than I am and was invented by oligarches in order to legitimize policies that would empower those same oligarches. It's a corporate cutout for corruption, period. And since the same oligarches funding the development of libertarian thought have made common cause with fascists, actual libertarian discourse is by necessity either apathetic to the social issues on which they would clash with fascists or actively seeks to twist itself to justify breaking bread with fascists on those issues.

So you have people like Stefan Molyneux doing the libertarian podcast circuit and not-so-subtly insinuating that black people might not even be the same species as white people. That's what discourse on race looks like in libertarian circles - not about methods by which private-sector racism might be restrained in a system which legally permits it, but about whether or not certain minorities are endowed with natural rights by the libertarian fairies the way good ol' white boys are, with the overall community mood being somewhere between "lulz good joke very edgy I like how it triggered the libs" and "they obviously weren't and we should genocide them."

Anyway, point is fascistic influences are in every variety of right-wing thought, so it really isn't surprising to find that an amateur right-wing propagandist thinks cookie cutter, standardized heroes are awesome and empowering instead of boring. Fascism is the fantasy of belonging to something special, not the fantasy of being someone special. Here, have this fun little gem from there terminology index: "GENERATIONS (Gs): A measure of power based on the average increase in human energy strength in each generation that lives in a world of Voluntaryist norms."

[Lago PARANOIA]

3) It's possible to do subtle propaganda. Other books have done it. Some of them are even good. But far too often bad propagandists just hit you over the head with a sledgehammer because they don't know how to present their opponents as three dimensional people.

It's impossible for reactionaries to do subtle propaganda. The ones that can are either deep-cover left-liberals or are recent converts. And there's a reason why Buckley-conservatives and Internet 1.0 libertarians are better at (but still bad with) subtlety than MAGA chuds and religious fundamentalists.

And the reason is this: all right-wing philosophy isn't so much ideology as it is therapy. What's it therapy for? The fear of loss. Right-wing philosophy isn't about stasis or greed or dominance or even sadism, it's about fear of loss. The way they comfort themselves in fear of loss is through reifying and strengthening hierarchies. The hierarchy (or father-figure if you want to get Freudian) is supposed to protect against this fear, and anything that undermines the hierarchy's power undermines the hierarchy's ability to protect and thus accelerates their fear.

That said, you might have noticed something circular about this therapy. Reactionaries turn to authoritarianism to soothe their fears, but hierarchies (especially when run by social dominators) justify themselves by heightening their fear of loss. It creates a feedback effect that destroys the reactionary's empathy and theory of mind. And thus subtlety.

The speed at which this happens of course depends on how much fear and submission to the protectors from their fears an individual right-wing philosophy does. Fascism demands more fear and submission than movement conservatism, which demands yet more than pre-Reagan conservatism. But make no mistake, it's a feedback loop inherent to all reactionary ideologies.

[Dogbert]

I read them blasting zombies for a bit and it's something a heavy-handed satire writer would throw together.

Makes me glad I didn't commit the career suicide of doing comics around "paizombies" and "dndrones," though, because now I see how I'd have looked like.

[Darth Rabbitt]

So you have people like Stefan Molyneux

I'm not sure you can call him a person. He looks like he was rendered and animated in a mid-2000s game engine.

[Libertad]

So you have people like Stefan Molyneux

I'm not sure you can call him a person. He looks like he was rendered and animated in a mid-2000s game engine.

And that game engine? Fable.

I think that hoping for subtlety or deep thinking from Anarcho-Capitalists is the kind of hope that leads to crushing disappointment.

If you look at the Drug War or Mass Incarceration or the endless wars in the Middle East and your conclusion is that the American State in particular or even the Westphalian Nation State in general is a force for evil in the modern era, I can't fault you for that. That's... a pretty reasonable point of view.

If your conclusion from that is that the core problem with modern society is that there are any checks at all on the powers and whims of Murdoch, Zuckerberg, or Koch... I just don't know what to say. That's certainly a point of view, it's just so obviously a dipshit point of view that I can't really imagine people making an argument for it that wasn't inherently dumb as hell.

-Username17

Against my better judgment I bought the only two published comics for this series on Kindle. It was meant to be the origin story for the protagonist, and it kind of has a lot of talk and not much action until the second issue. And oddly enough the AnCap ideology doesn't really get mentioned overtly save by the protagonist's father talking about reading up on the Federal Reserve, and the revelation that the US military is developing superpowered super-soldiers to stage a false flag "alien invasion" to unite the world under a one-world government.

Heck, the hero even lives on a small ranch which is being ground out by big agribusiness who are bribing members of Congress to change the laws in their favor which doesn't leave room for honest competition. Granted the characters refer to it as cronyism, but it can very easily be read as an indictment of corporate overreach.

A big mark against against the two comics are that huge portions are filled with advertisements for minor libertarian and AnCap sites and channels of which I've never even heard; they even repeated the same ad twice! The first issue was 31 pages, two of those a front and back cover, 7 of those ads, and 22 of those actual story content. Combine this with pages chock full of speech balloons like this and it really feels like almost nothing at all has happened:

This comic reads almost like a self-parody, like the "Straw Feminists In The Closet" pages from Kate Beaton's Hark, A Vagrant! old webcomic.

I'd go so far as to say this comic is self-parody, but unintentional self-parody. I read them blasting zombies for a bit and it's something a heavy-handed satire writer would throw together. And ancaps are the best at making fun of their own position. It's like that classic Reddit post where the guy starts with "now I'm not a pedophile, but I am a libertarian..." Completely unintentional hilarity.

It's weird; the previews likely were made at a much earlier date; the art style in the purchased comics, while full of word-vomit balloons, has improved, and there's nothing as blatant as ROAD ZOMBIES.

I get the feeling the author realized you can't get flies with vinegar so ended up toning things down.

[Dogbert]

I get the feeling the author realized you can't get flies with vinegar

I still see a lot of vinegar in that page... mainly the stupid balloon placement that not only tells me that hack doesn't know even the very basics of lettering... it actually -strains- my eyes. I've never seen a balloon placement so bad that it does that.

[Username17]

Heck, the hero even lives on a small ranch which is being ground out by big agribusiness who are bribing members of Congress to change the laws in their favor which doesn't leave room for honest competition. Granted the characters refer to it as cronyism, but it can very easily be read as an indictment of corporate overreach.

Atlas Shrugged runs aground on exactly the same problem. Accumulated wealth can, has, is, and will be used to corrupt the processes of society. And AnCap's only answer to that is "But if society does not have any process, the process can't be corrupted!" And that's such a Saturday morning cartoon stupid answer that even repeating it sounds like you must be strawmanning.

But yes, that's really it. Having acknowledged that Bear Stearns getting away with fraud by paying the SEC to look the other way, AnCap's suggestion... is for he SEC to not try to look in the first place. As if the bribery payments were the problem rather than the corrupt result achieved with those payments.

Libertarians are stuck claiming that the problem with regulatory capture is that there are any regulations to capture. They have to argue that. The fact that this argument is hella dumb is just part and parcel of why their ideology is not particularly compelling.

Their arguments to legalize prostitution and drugs and stuff are much stronger. Like, if we don't like the criminal gangs that do secret drug trafficking, legalization would take the wind out of their sales. It unfortunately isn't that simple, but the five minute pitch is pretty strong. You can make a TED talk about this and be pretty persuasive. The arguments for using deregulation to combat corrupt practices that are already legal are... much weaker. Removing laws on air pollution obviously isn't going to make the air any cleaner, and arguments to the contrary are starting on the back foot. Way back.

-Username17