Virus X and Ending the Forever War

- By Jason Oliver Chang

(Action Comics. #363. DC Comics. May 1968.)

In the spring of 1968 Superman contracted “Virus X,” a disease cooked up by Lex Luthor in a prison laboratory. The #363 issue of DC’s Action Comics serial told a four-part story of a viral attack on the hero from planet Krypton. In the comic, the devious Luthor labels Superman as the “Leper from Krypton,” shaming him publicly and striking global fear of a “Virus X” pandemic. Were it not for the penetrating rays of white Kryptonite crystals, brought to him by unexpected allies, the disease might have taken Superman’s life. It nearly did. This Cold War superhero tale drew close parallels with an actual epidemic, in 1957 – the onset of the H2N2 viral infection, then labeled the “Asian flu.” In the comic, Luthor rehearsed the racist role of the diabolical oriental.

The intensification of anti-Asian pathogen racism with the COVID-19 pandemic is not an anomaly, nor an unfortunate response born out of unique conditions. This pattern follows a predictable script with three acts: an invasion of foreigners; the eradication of the enemy within; and a strengthening of the white body. This narrative is fundamental to understanding two core dimensions of the U.S. – capitalist empire and white supremacy.

The name of this narrative is Yellow Peril, a dangerous foreign threat, usually from Asia. Similar to philosopher Franz Fanon’s description of the phobogenic racial script that follows from the sight of black skin, the mere idea of Asia invokes disease. The Yellow Peril is derived from capitalist empire because the cycle of conquest and accumulation of capital demands a foe to vanquish. Yellow Peril discourse is distinguished from a generic notion of xenophobia by its historical development and use with U.S. imperial wars. Yellow Peril is based upon racial supremacy because it defines health on purity, division, and fear. The premonition of a foreign threat and passionate pursuit of its annihilation gives Yellow Peril its power; they are also why Americans are seduced by it, every time. But can we imagine healing without killing?[1]

One of the central narratives of this 1968 Superman story told of pandemic fears, the search for a vaccine, quarantine, and the interplanetary deportation of the infected hero alien. The writers of this comic took inspiration from their most recent pandemic, a decade earlier, setting up their hero to overcome the sinister disease. As reference, this 1957 Bridgeport Sunday Post article on the H2N2 virus stoked a racial polemic about a foreign threat, referring to the infection as an “invasion” and the vaccine as an “Anti-Asian” “counter-weapon.”[2] What’s remarkable about the “Virus X” serial in Action Comics is not just the reanimation of the 1957 H2N2 epidemic, but the prescient forecast of the 1968 H3N2 virus, the so-called Hong Kong Flu, that would begin only months after Superman’s recovery.

Caption: Alton Blakeslee. “Anti-Asian Flu Vaccine One of Modern Science’s Miracles.” 8 September 1957. Bridgeport Sunday Post. P. 14

In September of 1968, H3N2 began spreading among communities in Hong Kong and then quickly to other places in Southeast Asia. Because the viral infection gained momentum in the British colony, the disease was given the unceremonious name “Hong Kong Flu.” That year the British Chancellor of the colony, Huang Mong Hua, complained about the label, “It is giving Hong Kong a bad name, why don’t they call it by its proper name: China flu?”[3] Back in the U.S., a columnist in Pennsylvania wrote about Hua’s complaint noting that the “so-called Hong Kong flu actually started in Red China,” adding glibly, “Virus Warfare, eh?”[4] Like today, not only did many imagine the flu to be a weapon, the viral infection also represented an ideological struggle. Fighting the virus, then, was synonymous with Communist containment.

Superman’s infection with “Virus X” is a potent analogy for the ways that disease, race, and war have been entangled during and since the Cold War. The ominous “X” moniker for Luthor’s viral attack also references the algebraic notation that “x” is an interchangeable variable. Since the 1950s, flu viruses have been synonymous with Asia in the U.S. political and cultural imaginary. As long as there is an empire, the “X” will stand in for a mysterious foreign threat. In the 1960s, racist epidemiologists referred to the influenza as an “Asian-type flu,” or simply, “killer flu.”

What’s interesting about this 1968 superhero tale is that it tracks synchronously with the rapid decline of the U.S. War in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive and the negotiations that began that year in Paris, leading to the Peace Accords in 1973. Readers of Action Comics in 1968 would have followed the drama of Superman’s infection just as the U.S. began to agonize over losing its war. Then came Superman’s recovery, and a real viral infection that would be spread from the very same military service men returning from war. California newspapers identified marines aboard a U.S. Navy carrier in San Diego as the key vector for the arrival of the virus in the U.S.[5] Fighting a virus domestically transferred wartime jingoism and Red Scare anxieties to the homeland health arena, continuing the symbolic battle.

Not unlike the memes of COVID-19 pathogen racism, the Hong Kong flu was “speculated” to have been started by “Chinese ponies.” Harry Nelson, of the L.A. Times, engaged in “pure conjecture” to hypothesize that the H3N2 virus leaped from horses to humans from the “refugee-laden ponies coming out of China into Hong Kong.”[6] His hypothesis shows two reasons why viral disease is a consistent part of the Yellow Peril imagination. Asians are imagined as the vector: the infected ponies story exposes the ways that the H3N2 virus became a way to attach negative meaning to the millions of Southeast Asians – displaced from the failed Vietnam war and secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos – then being brought to the U.S. as refugees. This association of viral transmission between animals and humans is based on the racist belief that Asians are less than human and serve as a dangerous bridge to a wild array of strange diseases. The outlines of this story and other gendered and racial fictions are sadly all too predictable as they appear throughout the archival record and permeate our popular culture.

Charles McKinney. “Asian Flu May Hit You, So Get ‘Shot-Shot’.” 2 October 1968. The Indianapolis News. Indianapolis. P.1

The racist scripts of Yellow Peril pathogen racism are written by people. As such, they can be changed, but it’s up to us to author new scenes and tell our collective story differently, in order to subvert such tales. Part of undoing Yellow Peril’s power is to disconnect our imaginations from war. Americans love war stories, because rehearsing victorious tales is the sorrowful consolation for a society built on brutality and loss. One of the pathologies of white supremacy is the disbelief in its response to loss, failure, and disaster – and this is why scapegoats are essential to its survival.

What makes a foreign threat seductive is indeed pathological: you blame an externalized other for internal discontent and the sacrifices made to sustain a racist and capitalist empire. Imagining an enemy race makes you forget that there are no winners in war. Given this truth, how then do we hold such a system accountable, since it cannot admit wrongdoing or recognize loss? In times of border walls, a deadly pandemic, rising seas, economic collapse, and continued Black death, what would Superman do? The COVID-19 pandemic has harshly illustrated that an ethics of care is not only good for public health, but also a wise political philosophy. One source of alternative authority for us is the fact of our interdependence: economically, socially, culturally, ecologically – we are responsible to and for each other. So how do we begin a story that ends with us thriving?

In order for interdependence to acquire authority, it must be grounded in the evidence of our lives. We need to be curious about each other. How do you live? Why are you afraid? Who have you lost? What are we going to do? An ethics of care means taking stock of our interiority and being changed by recognizing a stranger’s. There is no guarantee that the next election, or any election, will yield a government capable of admitting wrongdoing or recognizing loss. We can’t expect policy to develop what can only grow when people get involved in each other’s struggles. If confidence is the earned result of successful repetition, then trust in interdependence will be the outcome of investing in each other’s flourishing and holding onto the receipts for each other’s loss. The only threat foreign to a faith in each other is forgetting. It is incumbent upon us to see beyond our own face masks, and beyond this pandemic, because the only cure for racial capitalism is a solidarity built on an experience of shared risk.

JASON OLIVER CHANG is Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut where he also serves as Director for the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute.