The weird thing was, she looked so quintessentially New Yorker to me. She looked perfect; in equal turns brash, classy, willful and insane. She matched my stereotype perfectly. And there she was, talking about my country and my countrymen, yelling about her own prejudices and stereotypes. And there we both were, in a nasty little bar that had nothing to do with Ireland, and everything to do with what Americans think Ireland is.

Then, to add to the irony, the other day I read Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's HELLBLAZER: DAMNATION FLAME for the very first time. It's a story about an Englishman in New York; the London-based wideboy John Constantine. Within a few pages of arriving in the city, our hero visits a small Irish bar near Times Square, for a few pints of the black stuff. The bar he goes to is the Blarney Stone. The same Blarney Stone! The look, the location, and the layout were all just like the real Blarney Stone. It was modelled on the real thing. And here I was, back home in England, reading an Irishman's idea of what's English and what's American, set in the American model of an Irish bar, where I'd once heard an American shouting about the ways of the English. Full circle.

I think every country recognises a little truth and a lot of abstraction in the way it gets portrayed by outsiders. In comics, that portrayal becomes increasingly charicatured. The Irish, when not ably cast as drunks, get stuck with convenient shorthand roles, like Shamrock the 'lucky' superhero, or they have to express the kind of simplistic political rubbish that only an outsider could write. The English are either punks or snobs, either unshaven and scruffy or polished and posh. And then, of course, there are the Americans.

Comics are not an American artform. Like cinema, comics were born elsewhere, but came to reach maturity Stateside. They say the only truly American artform is jazz, a beautiful mode of expression that grew up out of poverty and slavery, making it something to be in equal parts proud and ashamed of. Comics are not American, but thanks to that country's cultural dominance in the last century, most of our prevailing ideas about comics come from America. That means the view of America shown in comics comes largely from Americans.

There are four Americas in comics. The first is the America of the patriots. The America of the second world war, where brightly coloured heroes like Superman and Captain America came from. It's the America that feeds the culture of the hero, that is equally visible in the actions of the Justice League, Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four. America as the righteous defender, morally upright and justified in its every intervention.

Then there is the second America, the flawed and fractured America of psychopaths and shell-shocked soldiers. This is where the Batman and the Punisher hail from. America betrayed by its own masters, but still in possession of a noble soul, for if it weren't basically noble, how could it be betrayed?

The third America is the land of the cynics, where American publishers and editors hire the English and Irish (and sometimes the Scottish) to tell it 'like it is'. The America of PREACHER, THE INVISIBLES and TRANSMETROPOLITAN. This is the inversion, where the foreigners try to undermine the reigning power, not so much with charicature as with commentary. Or maybe that's my own prejudice talking.

Then there's that other America. The one they're not trying to show us, but the one they're trying to appeal to. American comics sell around the world, but the rest of the world only accounts for a small percentage of the audience. The market is America, so the comics the rest of the world gets to see are the ones the publishers think America wants to read.

America, the comics tell us, is a place where big tits reign supreme. America is a place where, if comics are going to sell at all, they're going to sell with spandex. There is a sad and shallow obsession with plastic beauty, and a worrying emphasis on victory at any cost. Anyone with ambition comes from America. Anyone with strength is most likely American. One in every ten heroes might be foreign or female or black, but the great American icon of the white American male reigns supreme. Even Storm was born in New York City. The superhero is just the astronaut or the cowboy, distilled for a new medium.

The comics industry serves the American audience. The same audience that craves Britney and Buffy also lives for Red Monika. The people who supports the bad soaps will also feed the bad series. The American audience demands the patriotism of the first America, the embittered idealism of the second, and even a streak of the criticism of the third, because even criticism carries with it a kind of validation. In fact, the America that shines through from the comics industry is one that is desperate for endorsement and instant gratification. A shallow world of toothpaste smiles and car-sticker idealism. The American dream has become synonymous with the 'comic book' mentality.

One might be tempted to believe that everything that's wrong with comics is America's fault. Maybe that's true. Except, thanks to McDonalds and the bomb, the rest of the world is much like America too. Lara Croft was invented by the English, and both Baywatch and the Backstreet Boys were big in Britain before they hit the heights back home. It's not just America's fault. We're all Americans now.

So, if you're having trouble distinguishing between nationalities, here's a helpful reminder; the Irish are drunk, the English are arrogant, and the Americans are obnoxiously loud. Then again, as those whimsical little leprechauns might say, it's all a lot of blarney. Though they might as easily call it bollocks.

Andrew Wheeler, huddling his masses, London, March 2000.

Andrew Wheeler is an editorial consultant for PopImage.

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