"Superstar artist Greg Land and master of action Chuck Dixon unleash America's new living weapons in the war against terror! They bomb civilians, hurt innocents, and spread fear... The next stage in human evolution will scour the globe and deliver justice!" - Solicitation copy for AMERICAN POWER: PREQUEL

Good old CrossGen. With AMERICAN POWER, their intended contribution to Free Comic Book Day, which may not see print, CrossGen have surpassed themselves. Not only have they come up with a comic that they literally can't give away, but they have proved HL Mencken wrong. You can go broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Of course, we haven't even seen AMERICAN POWER - only a cover and some solicitation copy, together with some comments by past and present CrossGen employees. Purists may argue that it's a bit premature to be drawing conclusions as to whether the book is any good. And, up to a point, that's fair enough.

On the other hand, we know the basic idea - an irony-free superhero book where American superheroes fight evil terrorists, written by Chuck Dixon. There's plenty of material in the public domain about Dixon's politics. We can make a fairly informed guess about what the book would have been like.

Dixon's fans have, perhaps understandably, been grumbling about censorship and hypocrisy on the part of the book's liberal critics. They're wrong, however, for two reasons.

'The criticism of AMERICAN POWER is that it's a really bad, tasteless idea.' Firstly, the book hasn't been censored. By all accounts, it's been pulled because CrossGen is a company desperate for cash. They need money, and their latest investor won't support the book. Now, we don't know why they weren't prepared to support it, but several possible reasons come to mind.

Perhaps they thought the book sucked and wasn't a worthwhile investment. Maybe they thought the controversy would backfire and do so much damage to CrossGen's public image that it would be an exceedingly bad business move. Neither of these reasons would have anything to do with censorship, merely a legitimate assessment of whether the book made for good business.

Or, admittedly, maybe they were just mortally offended by the whole premise - as a lot of people seem to be - and weren't prepared to invest their money in it. That, again, is not censorship. That is ethical investing. Remember, the main reason the book has been pulled isn't so much that the investors won't support it. The main reason is that CrossGen has no money and can't do it without them. Why is it the investors' duty to uncritically support every project a crippled company comes up with, regardless of taste or commercial prospects?

Secondly, the criticism of AMERICAN POWER is essentially that it's a really bad, tasteless idea. Debates along these lines often result in people screaming about the first amendment. That misses the point completely. People have not been calling for AMERICAN POWER to be banned (or at least, not in significant numbers). They have merely argued that it was a terrible idea.

A lot of people buy into the unfortunate fallacy that, in order to believe in freedom of speech, you must respect the opinions of others. This is completely wrong. In order to believe in freedom of speech, you must respect the right of others to voice their opinions. You can do this and still have complete, open contempt for the opinions themselves.

Personally, I am very pleased that AMERICAN POWER has been pulled, because the entire concept is crass, exploitative and offensive. But I would have strongly opposed any attempt to make CrossGen pull the book against their will. My ideal would have been for CrossGen to pull the book, not because everyone else told them it was a bad idea, but because CrossGen came round to that point of view as well.

God knows there are times when the right wing are correct about this sort of thing - I have little time for people who try to get academics fired for expressing politically incorrect views, for example. That genuinely is an attempt to suppress debate. This isn't. This is CrossGen saying something really stupid, and most of the rest of the world shouting, "You bunch of idiots" at them.

'This is not 1942, and jingoism is hollow for modern audiences.' It's important, as well, to be clear as to why exactly AMERICAN POWER is offensive. It doesn't cross the line into "What the hell are they thinking?" merely because it's right wing. Nor is it just because it's a story tying into the current US foreign policy.

Doubtless there are plenty of great stories you could do about the "war on terror". I'm sure we'll see plenty of them in years to come, since the terrorists have handily provided action stories and spy thrillers with something that's been missing since the end of the Cold War - an easily recognisable bad guy. If Iraq goes really badly wrong, it'll also probably result in a wave of those hand-wringing, "where did we go wrong" movies that Americans keep making about Vietnam. Anyhow, regardless of your political viewpoint, there are bound to be plenty of great stories to be told.

AMERICAN POWER goes off the rails in two ways. The first is in turning the "war on terror" into a ridiculously simplistic superhero story. Given the publicity material, and Chuck Dixon's track record, it's fairly obvious that there would have been no moral grey areas whatsoever in this book. We're looking at a throwback to the days of flag-waving propaganda from World War II.

Now, you may well say: hold on, what do you mean, moral grey areas? They're terrorists, for god's sake! There's no question of who's in the wrong here. This isn't a "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" situation. It's the bloke with the explosives and the mobile phone who wants to blow up Madrid. He's the baddie!

Well, yes, he is. Not many people are going to argue with that. But it doesn't follow that the USA is necessarily perfectly in the right merely because it happens to be fighting him; or that the USA is going about that fight in the most effective or justifiable manner. Even if you accept the war on terror as a fundamentally good idea, it still falls under the heading of, "How much evil must we do in order to do good?" Terrorist organisations can't function without some degree of public support, and are always inextricably linked to wider political issues.

And that's before we even get in to the practical aspects of the whole thing - you only have to look at Iraq to see that "hit it really hard and everything will miraculously get better" is not the way it works.

A morally black-and-white superhero book about the war on terror is a painfully oversimplified version of a complex issue that continues to kill people daily. This should be apparent to anyone of reasonable intelligence, no matter where they stand on the war itself. The war on terror is no place for flag-waving jubilation. Even from the most favourable perspective, it is a necessary evil. This is not 1942, and jingoism is hollow for modern audiences. They are too sophisticated for that

I'm not saying that every war story or action movie needs to contain a dissertation on Islamic politics. But there needs to be some acknowledgement of the wider moral dimension, otherwise the whole thing will fail for all but the crudest audiences.

CrossGen's solicitation copy and cover for AMERICAN POWER deliberately went for controversy in order to stir up attention. This is obvious just from looking at the thing - you'd have to be blind or stupid to think that cover wouldn't attract criticism. But in any event, there has been plenty of confirmation that this was CrossGen's intention. Take Ian Edginton's recent interview:

"I asked [Bill Rosemann] if in the light of recent events, it was in questionable taste publishing a book that could be read by the husbands, wives and more importantly the children... of the victims of 9/11 and the Atocha station bombing. He said CrossGen intended it to be controversial, hence the provocative cover and copy for the prequel."

This is where CrossGen's conduct crosses the line into reprehensible - and, again, where they badly misread the audience. Their fundamental marketing error was to create a cover and solicitation which were not merely controversial, but which are obviously intended to be controversial. It's one thing to be controversial in order to stimulate debate in areas that people don't talk about - but there is plenty of debate already on this subject, and it's not like AMERICAN POWER showed any signs of looking to start a political discussion.

The natural reading of those covers - the reading that many people jumped to and, if Edginton is to be believed, the correct reading - is that CrossGen were consciously setting out to cash in on the current political climate. That is, to all intents and purposes, morally indistinguishable from trying to cash in on the dead of 9/11, the dead in Iraq, and the dead in Madrid.

If CrossGen wants to stand on a mountain of corpses and try to drill it for money, they have every right to try. But it's a despicable way to behave, and they deserved all the contempt they got.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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