By Zach Rabiroff — This wasn’t the first column I was hoping to write.

This is the beginning of an ongoing series about Marvel Comics: the issues, creators, and general zeitgeist that surround a comics company that’s been a part of my cultural scenery for as long as I can remember. It was going to be an opportunity for me to talk about the things I’ve always loved about this particular constellation of characters: the commitment bordering on obsession to the ongoing story of a shared universe; the mixture of soap opera melodrama and unapologetic heroics; the rare but transcendent moments when a writer and artist work together to create something that goes beyond superhero adventure and becomes genuine lasting art. That’s how I was going to start this piece. And then, as happens, the world intervenes.

For the third week now as I write this column, the United States and the world have been in the midst of huge and historic protests for Black lives and racial justice. It has been a period of enormous pain and betrayal, punctuated with glimpses, however fleeting and transitory, of growth and change. And it forces us, for better or worse, to view our comics through a set of new and powerful lenses: how are these stories engaging with Black characters and Black culture? How are they representing diverse creators? How are they grappling with the questions of policing, of government, of freedom and law and the future?

This is a little unfair to the creators, of course. No sooner had they started to emerge from the sandpile of the past two months of pandemic delays, then a brand new set of urgencies came along to change the stories we want and need to hear from them. But maybe it’s appropriate to start this Marvel column with a question that Marvel Comics has, by its own description, always built itself around: what do we see when we look at the world outside our window?

One answer comes from this week’s Miles Morales: Spider-Man #17, by Saladin Ahmed and Carmen Carnero. Miles has always had a special burden as a Marvel character: one of their handful of prominent characters of color (being both African American and Puerto Rican American), it’s not for nothing that he became the superhero costume of choice for protestors in New York and beyond these past weeks. And Ahmed, for his part, has been among the most outspoken creators in grappling with the topics posed by the Black Lives Matter movement, insisting especially that comics need to come to terms with the way they portray the police in their stories, and their protagonists’ interactions with them.

And that, indeed, is right at the forefront of this week’s unexpectedly prescient issue, which sees Miles navigating the fallout Kamala’s Law, a Marvel conceit in which the puckishly-named C.R.A.D.L.E. agency seeks to police the actions of under-18 heroes. Opening with a showdown against the new branch of law enforcement, Miles delivers a harangue to the black-clad, militarized crew that cuts to the quick: “Do you even see yourselves?! Y’all look like fascists!” Later, as police swarm over his school looking for potential criminals in all corners, he asks, “They’re here, too?! I just got done tusslin’ with C.R.A.D.L.E. agents on the way here. How come government can’t spend this much money on actual problems?

It’s an unexpectedly sharp angle for a book that had been struggling for a clear direction and identity since Ahmed took over as its writer, and it gives, for the first time, a clear sense of purpose to this new status quo beyond Marvel’s Civil War III: Civil War Babies. This Spider-Man isn’t just here to protect us from crooks and lawbreakers. He’s here to the protect us from the creeping and inevitable threat of the law itself.

We get a different angle on the streets from Chip Zdarsky and Marco Checchetto’s Daredevil #20, which finds the protagonist in medias res during an inferno engulfing Hell’s Kitchen. I wouldn’t be the first to observe that Zdarsky and Checchetto are the most effective writer-artist pairing on this book since (at least) Brubaker and Lark, with Checchetto’s rough lines and spattered inks giving a visceral sense of heat and smoke to a vision of hell on earth. Visually and tonally, it’s a deliberate and effective callback to Frank Miller’s Born Again storyline, with Matt Murdock here forced (once again) to face the darkest aspects of his character and try to build back up.

And yet. In its unapologetic evocations of the Millar era, and in its depiction of a neighborhood swarmed by supervillains and lawbreakers, the issue feels oddly and uncomfortably out of step with the immediate zeitgeist. This is a fantasy of New York straight out of the 1980’s, where crime runs rampant, and the greatest threat to life and property are the lawbreakers who thwart the system. Indeed, even (and I give fair warning of SPOILERS AHEAD) the issue’s dramatic climax, in which Daredevil turns himself over to the police for an accidental murder at the start of this run, fundamentally reaffirms the sanity and strength of law. Daredevil’s unregulated violence as a vigilante puts him in opposition to the police, rather than in alliance with them. In the face of a month of small and large-scale violence too often instigated by the police themselves, it’s a position that feels almost utopian in its optimism.

Excalibur #10 by Tini Howard and Marcus To opens to a scene of burning and violence of a different stripe. After a text page blaring a propaganda warning against mutants from the British government (“Protect and survive!...THE HUMAN RACE IS IN PERIL. DEFEND IT WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT.”), the team is forced to grapple with armed soldiers instructed to kill mutants — even, like Captain Britain Betsy Braddock, their own citizens -- on sight, and a raging effigy of mutant forms. The dialogue Howard puts in the mouths of her characters feels so keenly of-the-moment as to be pulled from interviews in the wake of this month’s trauma: “I don’t understand. This feels like a living nightmare,” Braddock says. “I feel like I’m bein’ trapped. And I don’t like that,” Gambit adds.

Of course, this is fantasy, and a narrative-bending twist late in the issue calls into question much of what we’ve read here and earlier in the series, in a way that suggests these heroes will, indeed, find a way home from the madness. No one in a superhero story is ever really trapped. The chaos is never as chaotic as it seems, the loneliness of those who stand against unjust authorities is never as lonely as it feels. And that’s the strength of the genre, really. It’s why we continue to turn to these stories even in times when they can’t hope to be as vital, or as terrifying, or as urgent as the real world outside our window. They let us hope that there is an end to this narrative beyond pain and injustice, and that the fights we wage now will be victories in time. That may not be the world outside our windows; not right now, anyway. But who is to say we might not look out and see it tomorrow.

Zach Rabiroff is a writer and editor who has written for Open Letters Monthly, Open Letters Review, and Xavierfiles.com in addition to this column. He has read every Marvel comic ever published, and regrets the life choice only mildly.