Anti-Immigrant Supervillainy in Marvel Comics

That’s the working title of an academic essay I’ve been drafting. Most of the material comes from comics featuring the KKK-inspired supervillians Hate-Monger or Sons of the Serpent, stories I’ve been exploring off-and-on here for the past few years. The 1990 comic I’m looking at right now instead features the one-off “Xenophobic Man,” who is less a supervillain and more a direct reference to real-world vigilante murderers working within the Border Patrol in the 1970s and 80s. I’ll start by recounting some of that disturbing history: In 1977, David Duke, national director of the Ku Klux Klan, announced his answer to the so-called “illegal alien problem”: a “Klan Border Watch” to prevent undocumented immigrants from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The Southern California Desert Sun reported “very few Klansmen were in sight the first night,” and the operation was largely dismissed as a means to spread anti-immigrant rhetoric through media reports. However, Louis Beam, a participant and…