One of the benefits of writing a column of reviews is that I have started to be sent review copies of various things, so far including a graphic novel, a paperback collection of comics, a prose book about the comics business, and even DVDs. There are also photocopies of the first issues of two new Marvel limited series, and one of these is my topic for today: 1602, written by Neil Gaiman, in his first Marvel series, and illustrated by Andy Kubert.
It is somewhat strange to review the opening issue or issues of a comics miniseries. Nowadays it can be like reviewing a novel on the basis of its first chapter, or a movie based on the first reel.
This isn’t always the case. Each issue of the new mini-series of Kurt Busiek’s Astro City has a self-contained story. Going further back, Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns were each long stories running through the entire series, yet each individual issue brought a particular movement within the overall story to a climax. Watchmen‘s first issue follows Rorschach as he tries to persuade his former partners to join him in investigating the murder of their ex-colleague, the Comedian; he fails, but he comes to terms with his new mission. The first issue of The Dark Knight Returns not only returns the retired Batman to action, but covers the entire subplot involving Two-Face.
More often these days, an issue of a miniseries ends not with any sort of temporary resolution but with a pause in the ongoing storyline, perhaps accompanied by a surprising revelation, for us to mull over for the next month. This is the case here with 1602, whose first and second issues I have now read. But it does not matter that little has been resolved so far, and no major dramatic climaxes have been reached; each issue instead draws me deeper into the world of the series and its many mysteries.
In reading these first issues of 1602 I have the pleasure of exploring a new and fascinating world, combining a historical recreation of the distant past with imaginative reworkings of familiar fictional characters from the present. And so I find I have a great deal to say about these initial issues, just to set down for myself the details I have observed and the theorized I have formed so far about what the rest of this world and this story may be about.
As Gaiman described 1602 at the San Diego Comic-Con, the premise of the series is that, for as yet unexplained reasons, familiar Marvel comics characters are emerging in Elizabethan England, apparently as natives of that era, centuries before they are supposed to arise in the late 20th century.
This is not an unprecedented kind of concept. I described 1602 to a friend, who then reminded me about Kurt Busiek and George Perez’s first story arc for The Avengers, in which Morgan le Fey casts a spell that transforms the world, casting civilization back to a medieval state, and turns the Avengers into what they would have been at that time. I countered by recalling one of Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men stories of the 1980s, in which Kulan Gath, a sorcerer from Conan the Barbarian, transformed Manhattan into a city from Conan’s Hyborian Age. Various Marvel characters, not only X-Men cast members but also Captain America and Spider-Man, were magically converted into Hyborian Age versions of themselves. In both stories, the spell kept many of the heroes from realizing that they had come from modern times, and that reality had been altered.
For that matter, DC’s Elseworlds books delve entirely outside standard continuity and transpose a familiar character into an entirely different time and setting, so that Batman is presented as a medieval knight, or a pirate of centuries past, or a vigilante in America’s Old West.
This is not the “real” Batman undergoing time travel; instead one can see the elseworlds as alternate fictional realities, in which Batman was born into different times and circumstances.
By transposing a familiar character into a different time and setting, the writer can show us more clearly aspects of the essence of that character. If you remove Peter Parker/Spider-Man from 20th-21st century New York City, and imagine instead that he was born in Elizabethan England, a time before there were experiments with radiation or genetics that gave him his powers, what would he be like? What would still make him the Peter Parker that we know?
Gaiman has assured us that 1602 is not a What If or an Elseworlds, and that there will be an explanation as to how the miniseries fits into Marvel Universe continuity. I am pleased whenever I observe that some of the medium’s greatest writers, like Alan Moore (on Swamp Thing) and Neil Gaiman (in Sandman and again in 1602) both value the continuity of the Marvel and DC fictional universes and do their best to work within it. Would that other writers, editors, and executives were as perceptive on this topic as they are.
Reading this series is like solving a puzzle. How often is it that a superhero series actually functions like a mystery novel? There are many conundrums, such as the nature of the contents of a mysterious box that is being transported to England. Most of the riddles involve the identities of the cast. Some are obvious; others are not.
In this essay I am not only going to discuss how the 1602 versions of Marvel characters resemble and differ from their modern selves, but I am also going to venture educated guesses about various mysteries posed in the initial two issues. Let the reader beware. I have no inside knowledge of what will be revealed in future issues, but if you think that my hypotheses, if true, will ruin 1602‘s surprises for you, perhaps you’d best read this column at a later date.
The first two Marvel characters to appear in 1602 are Sir Nicholas Fury, the Queen’s “intelligencer,” and the Queen’s court physician, Dr. Stephen Strange, who also practices sorcery. Perhaps the fact that Gaiman pairs them up in the initial scenes is his allusion to the fact that Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD and Doctor Strange shared the same comic book in the 1960s, Strange Tales.
Dr. Strange, not unexpectedly, is unchanged from his present-day self: he is something of a timeless character, practicing ancient magicks in a contemporary world. That Strange lives in England’s village of Greenwich (as the modern day version lives in New York’s Greenwich Village) is one of Gaiman’s numerous pleasant throwaway jokes in the series.
I am pleased to see Gaiman feature Clea in the Doctor Strange sequences in issue one. In Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Doctor Strange stories, Clea was more of a stock character, the beautiful alien princess, unattainable by the hero, lacking even a name.
But several writers who followed Stan on the series made Clea (finally named by Denny O’Neil) into a more fully-realized character with an important role in Strange’s life. Roy Thomas brought Clea to Earth, casting Strange and Clea as an appealing adult couple in love, filling an important niche at Marvel between the Richardses in Fantastic Four, who came off as something of an old married couple, and the unconsummated, troubled romances of virtually everyone else. Strange and Clea were also pioneers for the sexual revolution, inasmuch as they were the first Marvel couple living together out of wedlock, as the Comics Code failed to notice; Steve Englehart devised a wonderful metaphor for the ties of love in the Silver Dagger arc, in which Clea and Strange’s spirits briefly inhabited the same body: lovers who had become “one flesh.” In his greatly underrated run on Doctor Strange, Peter Gillis even pronounced Strange and Clea to be husband and wife, by the laws of her otherdimensional realm. Gaiman could have done the boring thing and used Strange’s servant Wong as his confidant instead; I prefer seeing the subtle signs of intimacy in 1602‘s Strange-Clea scenes instead.
Would the wise “Old Man” who is bringing the mysterious box to Strange be the Ancient One? But I will say more about the box later.
In contrast, Sir Nicholas Fury has changed. The first thing I noticed was that he speaks in such a refined manner. The present day Fury, of course, never attended any elocution schools. His speech patterns are unchanged from his days growing up on the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the Great Depression, and his manners not that much different. What would be the equivalent in Elizabethan England, I wondered. But then I realized that it surely would have been impossible for a man of the lower classes to attain such a high position in the rigid class system of 1602. Still, with this well-spoken Fury, something important seems lost.
For decades now, many comics writers (outside Fury’s own series) have tended to portray Fury as a Machiavellian spymaster, willing to employ morally questionable means to achieve his greater ends. It’s been fashionable for a long time now for writers to accuse covert government agencies of nefarious doings (see The X-Files, for example), and sometimes some of the taint rubs off on Nick Fury. So far, the Fury of 1602 seems honest enough, but Gaiman’s characterization of him as knowing virtually everything about everybody he needs to deal with, thanks to his “spies and cutthroats,” makes me a bit uneasy.
When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD in the mid-1960s, the James Bond novels and movies were in their first great surge of popularity, and the market was flooded with imitations. Lee and Kirby came up with a brilliant twist: instead of a character like the gentlemanly, cosmopolitan, British Bond, they built their super-spy series around the plain-talking, rough-hewn, lower class, and decidedly inelegant American Nick Fury. They transplanted this Depression-era Everyman from his World War II adventures in Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos into a world he which he had to cope with the highest levels of government, futuristic technology, and what was then likewise futuristic terrorism. (Lee and Kirby were making the point that in SHIELD Fury was still fighting his old war in a new guise: the subversive organization Hydra was a costumed, high tech equivalent of Nazism. Jim Steranko made the point explicit by revealing Fury’s World War II archfoe, the Nazi war criminal Baron Strucker, to be Hydra’s leader. Today, looking back at Hydra, this army of terrorists driven by cult-like ideology, owing allegiance to no one nation, it is as if Lee and Kirby had foreseen al Queda.)
Lee and Kirby’s Nick Fury was not an establishment figure; he was the outsider who found himself put in charge of this vast multinational security force. He was the man of common sense and plain speaking, who cut through diplomatic niceties and bureaucratic tangles to get the job done. When he wanted something done, he didn’t send a memo or hold a conference: he ranted at his subordinates like the army sergeant he was chewing out the troops, and got his way. Moreover, he was the uncorrupted Everyman, averse to moral compromise, imposing order on the shadowy world of spies. In the third SHIELD storyline the aristocratic Count Bornag Royale leads an effort to have Fury dismissed from SHIELD for wrongdoing and general unfitness for the position: in fact, Royale is in the employ of another subversive organization, AIM, and it is Fury who wins this modern-day class struggle. Really, Nick Fury is like a rougher, tougher version of Lieutenant Columbo, another transplanted lower class New Yorker who smokes cigars and moves in the world of the wealthy and powerful to detect and expose evil.
So, a circa-1602 Nick Fury who speaks elegantly? It seems wrong. But it’s clever to see this Fury is already smoking primitive cigars, thanks to the recent discovery of tobacco. And there are more of Gaiman’s nice allusions, as the 1602 Fury says, “We are the Queen’s shield,” or speaks of a many-headed hydra.
Another character who, by necessity, is missing aspects of his persona is Daredevil. It is an important paradox that Matt Murdock is a lawyer by day and a vigilante, as Daredevil, by night: two contradictory are united in the same man. Stan Lee would make the point that Daredevil would capture a criminal and then Matt Murdock would defend him in court. Frank Miller tried to get rid of Matt’s role as lawyer, either thinking it was hypocritical or perhaps just out of a disdain for yuppies, and in “Born Again” gave him a job flipping hamburgers in Hell’s Kitchen. (When Joss Whedon and Marti Noxon gave Buffy the Vampire Slayer a similar job at the DoubleMeat Palace, this was intended to be a bad thing; Miller thought Matt’s new job was a good thing. But, as with other changes to longrunning characters that diverge too far from the original concept, Matt inevitably went back to lawyering.)
In 1602 Matthew Murdock is not a lawyer but a blind minstrel. But of course back then, centuries before Braille, it would have been impossible for a man blind since boyhood to be a lawyer. I rather like the idea of an artist – a ballad singer – as a secret super hero, and I am reminded of Steve Englehart’s Night Man, a costumed hero who was also a San Francisco jazz musician. I also like the 1602 Matthew’s interplay with Natasha, Fury’s widowed Russian operative – the Black Widow, in other words, and another tribute to one of Marvel’s early romantic pairings. Seeing Matt’s friend Foggy Nelson appear as a sea captain is also a nice touch.
Daredevil’s 1602 origin is greatly simplified, and it’s disappointing that he just stupidly tastes a glowing green liquid (which is apparently radioactive). Couldn’t he have saved someone from falling onto it, and gotten splashed by the liquid himself? (Matthew calls his acquisition of his super-senses an “act of God”; perhaps this is Gaiman alluding to Frank Miller’s Catholic themes in Daredevil.) More importantly, the present day Daredevil was motivated to turn crimefighter by the murder of his father. The 1602 Daredevil seems to have more mercenary motives, but it is still early, and perhaps still more to learn about him.
Speaking of motives, we also have Peter Parquagh, whose last name is surely pronounced “Parker,” a youth with a fascination with spiders. In issue 2 Peter talks about his idea for creating lenses that would allow one to see things more clearly; at once Gaiman is acknowledging Peter’s scientific ability and nodding to the fact that in the early issues of Spider-Man he wore glasses.
But the 1602 Peter, looking like a teenager, and, though intelligent, not particularly forceful or prepossessing, seems an odd sort of assistant for the master spy Fury. It is also clear that Peter’s uncle and aunt are still alive. I wonder if the Peter of issues 1 and 2 is meant to correspond to Peter Parker before he became Spider-Man, and if events yet to come in 1602 will motivate his change into a more heroic personality.
So far we have seen two out of a team of three assassins. I had no idea who the first, in issue 1, was supposed to be, but the second, in issue 2, is very obviously the Vulture. So if this assassin was one of Spider-Man’s foes, maybe the first one was, too. He has a grotesque face and is dressed in green: is he supposed to be the Green Goblin? He should have worn something resembling the Goblin’s cap, or thrown a bomb instead of wielding a blade.
There is another familiar character, who seems remarkably unchanged. In 1602 Doctor Victor von Doom has become Count Otto von Doom, but he is dressed exactly the same, having always affected a medieval look in his modern day stories. Count Otto, we are told, is known as “The Handsome,” and we have yet to see if this is simply Gaiman’s ironic joke or whether this Doom actually has an unscarred face. Doom’s dialogue gets a different lettering style than the other characters’. Walt Kelly employed this kind of gimmick in the comic strip Pogo, but he used lettering styles that clearly suggested a specific style of speaking. Hence, political campaign manager P. T. Bridgeport spoke in circus posters, for his showman’s bombast, and Deacon Mushrat spoke in Gothic type, denoting his preacher’s pious pomposity. Doom’s lettering in 1602 looks neat, but what is it supposed to mean he sounds like? The biggest surprise in the Doom scene in the second issue is that Gaiman’s Doom dialogue is no different from the usual melodramatic tirades writers give the character. (Since Doom doesn’t deal in understatement, maybe the secret to good Doom dialogue is to use as colorful a vocabulary for his boasts and threats as possible. In the first comic I ever read with Doctor Doom in it, Fantastic Four #58, he called the Thing “a blot on the escutcheon of humanity.” Wow. Doom at his best is a poet of verbal abuse.)
The most effective transposition of Marvel characters in 1602 is the X-Men’s. The powerful theme underlying the X-Men concept is bigotry and persecution. So, of course, though nobody ever does, we should have expected the Spanish Inquisition to turn up in 1602. In this series the X-Men are known as “Witchbreed,” believed by the common people and the Inquisition alike to owe their powers to black magic. Charles Xavier is now a Spaniard – his name easily converts to Carlos Javier – and he secretly trains his “witchbreed” students, counterparts of the original X-Men. In issue one the students rescue the counterpart of the Angel, here named not Warren but Werner (after 1960s X-Men artist Werner Roth?), from being burned at the stake by the Inquisition. Gaiman thus links the metaphor of anti-mutant persecution in X-Men not just to the Inquisition’s religious persecution of heretics, but explicitly to witch trials. Further, the sequence introducing the Witchbreed begins with Werner’s description of the Inquisition’s execution of a Jewish victim, reminding us (as did Chris Claremont’s backstory about Magneto in Auschwitz) that anti-mutant bigotry can also serve as a metaphor for anti-Semitism.
Another clever bit is the 1602 appearance of the X-Men’s Jean Grey as “Apprentice John Grey,” a lovely homage to Shakespearean heroines who masquerade as boys for their own protection and greater freedom of action in pre-feminist times. I would likewise assume that the storms raging at the outset of 1602 are meant to evoke the storms that erupt as signifiers of moral and political chaos in Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Pietros and Sister Wanda, who serve the Grand Inquisitor, are obviously Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. (I feel a spoiler warning coming on: some of you may want to skip to the next paragraph.) That suggests that the Grand Inquisitor, who employs mutants to oppose “Javier,” is actually Magneto, who in 1602 has grown physically old and bald. If so, this is an uncharacteristic role for Magneto to play. Sebastian Shaw of the Hellfire Club is a secret mutant who has aided the federal government against the X-Men and other mutants. On the other hand, traditionally Magneto operates openly as a mutant and aligns himself with no human institutions of authority. He is a terrorist leader, combating human governments in the name of mutant rights. If the Grand Inquisitor is Magneto, then if he is to be in character, he must eventually come out into the open, waging war on Javier’s witchbreed and humanity alike.
Issue one introduces us to a young girl named Virginia Dare, who is sailing to England from the Roanoke colony in Virginia, where she was born, along with her unusual bodyguard. At first I thought that her bodyguard, an unusually tall, muscular, and (strangely) blond Native American, was supposed to be Thor, though that seemed odd, since Thor would have been active in his familiar persona of Norse god at that time. But the Indian calls himself “Rojhaz,” which, pronounced aloud, sounds like Rogers: so this is Steve Rogers, Captain America. He even hurls a shield in issue 2. I was temporarily confused by my insistence on thinking of Captain America not as being tall, but of normal height, in a period when comics artists insist on making every brawny superhero look over seven feet tall or more.
So what does this say about Captain America? Cap has long seemed the human symbol, defender, and embodiment of American ideals, which is to say, the democratic ideals of the people and government of the United States. Notice I say “ideals,” rather than how the people and government may behave in practice; memorable story arcs of the past have pitted Captain America’s steadfast devotion to these ideals against repressive or even subversive actions by government officials.
So, one might think it hard to conceive of a Captain America before the American Revolution. Some of you may recall that in Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles in 1976, Jack Kirby even created an ancestor of Steve Rogers who fought in costume as a Captain America during the Revolutionary War. The implication was that it was then that the spirit embodied by Captain America began.
Though the contemporary United States is multiracial, the thirteen original colonies were almost wholly made up of British émigrés and their descendants. The American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, were all the work of these colonists and their leaders, drawing inspiration from the philosophies of other Europeans, like John Locke.
So, how could Captain America be a Native American over a century before 1776?
I suspect that first of all, Gaiman is indicating that to him Captain America represents the nobility and altruism of the spirit of the American people, and defines America as the land, not the present nation-state. Since the America of 1602 was principally populated by American Indians, then the Captain America of 1602 would have been an Indian, too. Perhaps this even suggests that America was destined to become a democracy.
Moreover, “Rojhaz” is only partly an Indian, as his blond hair demonstrates. In issue 2 it is conjectured that Rojhaz is descended from an early Welsh explorer of the New World who fathered a child with one of the native women. This links Rojhaz with the British, whose American colonists will one day found the United States government. (Note that Rojhaz is protecting the Roanoke colony, founded by the British, and not, say, a French or Spanish settlement. He is aligning himself with the colonies that will evolve into the United States.)
This also makes Rojhaz multiracial himself. He is both British and Native American. Hence, he becomes an apt and surprising representative of what America is destined to become: the melting pot in which all peoples are said to be equal. I notice that Virginia Dare explicitly states that Rojhaz is her friend, not her servant (or, though she does not say this, slave): he is treated as her equal, anticipating an age of racial equality.
In some ways, I think, Captain America also transcends being specifically American. His perennial conflicts with his nemesis, the Red Skull, have continued and remained viable as story material over a half century since their original clashes during World War II. The Red Skull’s roots are in Nazism, but he has come to represent totalitarianism regardless of specific national ideology. Similarly, Captain America represents the spirit and philosophy of liberty. In opposing Nazism during World War II he was fighting on behalf of all the Allies, not just the United States. When contemporary comics pit Captain America against would-be world conquerors from Earth or from other worlds, he is the guardian of freedom for all the people of Earth. What makes him Captain America, then, is that he believes that the ideals of American democracy best serve and express the rights of mankind.
In this sense, the Captain America figure could represent a spirit of freedom that existed long before the founding of the United States as an independent nation.
We first see Rojhaz on panel as the protector of Virginia Dare, the first child to have been born in Britain’s Roanoke colony: she, after all, is the first “native” American of a new sort, the first person of British descent to be born in America.
Rojhaz also fits the archetype of the noble savage, although that may be seen nowadays as a demeaning stereotype instead, just like Rojhaz’s Tonto-like broken English.
When she first appeared in issue one, Virginia Dare was a puzzlement to me. Every other major cast member seems to be an incarnation of a familiar Marvel character. Who can this be? In issue 2 her hair is colored yellow, not white, and she is paired with “Peter Parquagh.” All right, so maybe she is the counterpart to Gwen Stacy, Peter’s girlfriend from the days when Stan Lee himself wrote Spider-Man comic books. Gaiman would have changed her name because “Gwendolyn” and “Stacy” weren’t used back in 1602.
And then at the issue’s end (yes, yes, this is a spoiler warning: avert your eyes to the next paragraph if you wish), Virginia apparently turns into a bird. I thought and thought about this: what can it mean? And finally I got it: she’s an eagle, another symbol of the American spirit.
She is named “Virginia,” after Queen Elizabeth I, the “Virgin Queen,” and England’s Roanoke colony is located in what will become the colony of Virginia. Moreover, the girl travels on a ship called the Virginia Maid. I expect that there is a theme of death and rebirth coming: Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, will die, and Virginia Dare, the Virgin Maid, will symbolically succeed her, foreshadowing how the British Empire gave way to the United States as dominant world super-power (although that is a few centuries away).
I am getting the impression from this treatment of Captain America and eagle imagery, that, though primarily set in England so far, 1602 may be in part Gaiman’s homage to America, as a British subject who has moved and settled in this country. But only in part. I also wonder if one of the inspirations for 1602 is Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which detects the roots of the superhero, thought to be an American concept, in the popular fiction of 19th century Britain. And so Moore brings together his own team of proto-superheroes within the setting of the Britain of a past century. Gaiman actually resets the familiar Marvel heroes in 17th century Britain, as if claiming them for the United Kingdom on behalf of all the British kids like himself who read them while growing up.
What other familiar Marvel characters may show up in the course of this series? We have already seen references to the doomed sea voyage of the “Fantastick” and its presumed leader, “Sir Reed.” This, of course, is the analogue to the space flight in the Fantastic Four’s origin story. Dr. Strange envisions “the heart of a mountain, far from here, built to hold Earth and Air, Water and Fire.” The mountain is the counterpart to the Baxter Building, the Fantastic Four’s skyscraper headquarters. The reference to “Earth and Air, Fire and Water” is to the Fantastic Four themselves. Gaiman is not the first to link the FF to the four traditional elements. The Thing, with his rocklike hide and great strength (and earthy personality) is Earth. The Invisible Woman, who can disappear, is Air. The hot-tempered Human Torch is Fire. And, despite his stuffy personality, which might seem to link him to a different element, Mister Fantastic is Water, whose body “flows” by stretching and changing shape, and whose imagination likewise “flows” without bounds. I suspect that Lee and Kirby had no idea of these connections when they created the FF. That is what it is like to create modern day myths: one taps into mythic archetypes from the collective unconscious and gives them new forms.
I would be surprised if Iron Man does not show up as a wealthy armored knight. Thor, presumably, will turn up unchanged, though as the Vikings’ patron, may be decidedly hostile to England. (Then again, the Vikings visited America long before the British, so maybe he has an interest in the New World, too.) The journeys by sea might provide an excuse for the Sub-Mariner to show up, perhaps as some sort of merman. If Gaiman is intent on using all the major heroes from Marvel’s Silver Age, then that includes the Silver Surfer, but how could he could be worked in? (As a being thought to be a real angel? That would confound the Inquisition.)
What is the mysterious object in that box that the Templars guarded, thought to be a “treasure” or a “weapon”? (And here is another spoiler warning: skip this paragraph if you want to avoid my guesses.) My first guess was the Cosmic Cube; the box is far bigger than the Cube, but that is no proof the Cube is not inside? Here’s an idea: could it be the Hulk, carted about as an unmoving Golem, waiting to be brought to life? The “treasure” is said to be from the Holy Land, and a Golem is a creature of Jewish legend. (That might even be a nod to Michael Chabon’s Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, with its Golem in a box, or maybe even to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.)
As for 1602‘s covers, I confess that to my mind a comics cover should serve as a teaser for the story within, not only providing a suspenseful hook, but also giving the potential buyer a good sense of what the interior story is about. Time was that this was the standard belief among comics professionals, but things have changed over the last decade and a half. If you are not the kind of comics fan who reads professional fanzines like Wizard or comics news websites, then you are not going to know what 1602 is about before you see it appear in the comics shops. The covers aren’t going to tell you what it’s about, either. The first issue’s cover shows a man in Renaissance costume, from the back, standing before a castle, which turns out to be Hampton Court. This is Sir Nicholas Fury, but the cover does not say so, nor does it tell you that Spider-Man, Daredevil, and, oh yes, those obscure characters the X-Men, also appear within. The second cover shows various characters of the story, none recognizable to the casual observer, trapped within a garden maze of that time. Imagine if movie posters conveyed as little information about the movie as these covers, and befuddled filmgoers outside the multiplex trying to make head or tail of them, if they bothered to notice such undramatic images at all.
It is as if Marvel is assuming that everybody who might be interested in 1602 already knows about it from fandom’s news sources, so the covers can deal in images with obscure meanings. Gaiman’s name is at the top of the covers, but how many people browsing comics racks study the credits on each cover. Isn’t it the image on the cover that’s supposed to catch your eye and seize your attention? And people wonder why comics readership goes down. Yes, I know that 1602 will have big sales (by today’s standards for comics), but wouldn’t the sales be bigger if the covers were, shall we say, more inviting to the casual comics reader?
Ah, well. This is what I thought about the covers to Sandman initially, too, and the avant-garde imagery of Dave McKean’s art didn’t keep Sandman from being a success: I suspect it actually served to signify to readers that this was a very different kind of comic, and one that invited readers who wanted to be challenged artistically. (I also suspect that what really made Sandman a commercial success was word of mouth, which takes time to build. But I bet that the newcomer to graphic novels, who has heard nothing of Gaiman or Sandman, upon seeing one of the collections in a bookstore, might still be bewildered by its cover imagery and pass it by.)
And the covers of the first two 1602 issues do work in different ways than as advertisements for the books. The cover of issue one is, in effect, its first panel, with the unidentified Fury, clearly in a past century, advancing towards the castle beneath a storm; it sets the mood for the series’ opening. The second cover, with its garden maze, not only evokes the period in which the series is set, but also represents the archetypal labyrinth, signifying the confused state of the world in which the characters find themselves as they struggle to create order out of the potential chaos.
On the whole I am quite pleased with 1602, look forward to the following issues, and expect that I will be writing about this series again in this column, perhaps more than once.
1602 appears to be Neil Gaiman’s homage to Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and the other Marvel artists of the 1960s. After all, so far, no Marvel character who was created after the 1960s has appeared. (Gaiman has, however, incorporated into his treatment of some Silver Age Marvel characters some elements of their history following the 1960s: 1602‘s Matthew Murdock (Daredevil) resembles Frank Miller’s version more than Stan Lee’s, and Daredevil did not become involved with the Black Widow until Gerry Conway had taken over the former’s series.)
Perhaps 1602‘s foremost tribute to Stan Lee and his collaborators is the simple fact that these classic Marvel characters fit so well into what is so identifiably a Neil Gaiman series in its language, handling of characterization, and storytelling style. They are identifiably Stan Lee’s characters, acting in character, and yet they have become Neil Gaiman’s characters as well. Surely there are many Gaiman readers, and many superhero fans as well, who would not have thought that this synthesis could be possible, or so well achieved. Gaiman’s sophisticated, intellectually challenging work in comics, whether in fantasy or in semi-autobiography, seem to many to be the antithesis of the crowd-pleasing genre entertainments of the mainstream superhero titles. Yet Gaiman too read Marvel comics when he was growing up, and 1602 may demonstrate that the roots of Gaiman’s oeuvre may lie in part in the adventure fantasies that Stan Lee and his collaborators crafted in the 1960s. 1602 likewise serves as another indication of the scope of Stan Lee and his collaborators’ achievement in creating the Marvel styles of characterization, storytelling, and mythmaking. Stan Lee’s 1960s work is unmistakably stamped with his own personality, and yet so many other writers who have followed him in comics, at Marvel and other companies, have been able to work within that style and use it to express their own personalities as well. Even Gaiman’s work in 1602, so distinctly his own, so much more elegantly and subtly crafted than the Marvel stories of the 1960s, is nonetheless following the creative path that Stan and Jack and the others started out upon four decades ago.
As noted earlier, 1602 alludes to another, more famous author’s work as well, to whom Gaiman has paid homage in his most celebrated comics series. I will be disappointed if Gaiman’s 1602 doesn’t contain a cameo by that year’s leading playwright, William Shakespeare, making reference to his patron and benefactor, the Lord of Dreams.
CLARK GOES DARK
With October 1 came the season debuts of the WB Network’s two superhero series, Smallville, which revises and retells the story of the teenage Clark Kent, and Angel, which mixes the superhero, film noir, and horror genres in depicting the exploits of its vampire hero.
If I recall an article in the New York Times from a few years back correctly, Smallville co-creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar stated they were not comics aficionados (actually, I think they said “nerds,” alas) before starting work on the series. If so, perhaps it demonstrates the degree to which the classic Marvel concept of heroes has penetrated popular culture that they have reconceived the Clark Kent of Superboy as an angst-ridden young teen as troubled by his superhuman identity as Spider-Man or the X-Men.
I haven’t often watched Smallville over its run, but I admire the concept as an intelligent way of making Superboy work for an older, more sophisticated audience.
How, in the old comics, Superboy could operate openly in costume as a small town superhero and nobody could prove he was Clark Kent, bothered me even as a kid. The answer is not to have him adopt a costumed identity or reveal his powers.
The focus on young Clark’s emotional turmoil in coming to terms with his powers and alien identity also is a good move. Originally, though, Smallville put me off by emphasizing Clark’s angst too much: I would have thought they’d be a side of him that would enjoy discovering he could hover in mid-air. (Compare Clark’s initial reaction to this in Smallville to a similar scene in John Byrne’s Man of Steel to see the difference.)
I also admire a number of the intelligent changes Smallville has made from past recountings of Superman’s boyhood. They’ve managed to make the idea of Clark Kent and Lex Luthor as buddies in their youth work and not just seem a silly coincidence. For years Red Kryptonite was in disfavor in Superman comics, but the Smallville writers have figured out how to use it well, triggering a psychological change in Clark rather than giving him a giant ant’s head or wreaking some equally odd change as it would have in the 1960s. Last season’s Smallville finale, with Clark reacting to calamities at home by running off to the big city echoed Buffy‘s Season 2 finale, which may have been inspired in turn by Marvel stories like Stan Lee’s “Spider-Man No More,” in which the protagonist abandons his heroic identity. Smallville used the device of Red Kryptonite to take it further: this time the hero “runs away” to the dark side of his personality, adding a variation of Jekyll and Hyde to the mix.
Making Pete Ross black is a neat move, though I’m afraid I find Smallville‘s version of Lana Lang as romantic ideal less interesting than either the feisty snoop of 1960s Superboy comics, the high-spirited knockout of the 1980s “Superboy” TV series, or Clark’s sisterly confidant from John Byrne’s revamp of Superman.
This first episode even made the cliché of being marooned on a deserted island work, though I figured out the secret of the other castaway perhaps sooner than the writers intended. (I didn’t see Fight Club, but I read about it.)
Like 1602‘s initial issues, this season premiere of Smallville has action scenes, but they are not the focus of the story. Both 1602 and this episode are superhero stories that work through character interactions and mysteries and surprise revelations, rather than primarily through action. This is both unusual and impressive, showing how the characteristic elements of the superhero genre work to create and heighten dramatic storytelling even apart from the violence usually associated with it.
There are also a bunch of minor points in the Smallville season opener that strike me as strange, in most cases because I have been following comics history for so many years.
In the comics, before the mid-1980s revamp of the Superman mythos, Morgan Edge was the ruthless head of Galaxy Communications, which owned the Daily Planet, and who seemed inspired in part by a CBS executive at the time, James Aubrey, who was known as the “Smiling Cobra.” Edge, or rather a clone who took his place, was also the head of Intergang, a criminal organization that worked in league with Jack Kirby’s Darkseid. (I believe that originally Edge was supposed to be both the executive and the crimelord, but the clone idea enabled DC to keep Edge around as a supporting character for years.) Edge the network executive was the more memorable and interesting character, and I’m a little disappointed to see Smallville (like the post-Man of Steel Superman comics) use the name for a standard issue organized criminal leader (however distinguished the actor playing him, Rutger Hauer, may be). It just seems another example of how when comics series get revamped or adapted, sometimes all that remains of a character is his name.
This episode suggests we reconsider the distance between Metropolis and Smallville. It was the first Superman movie that put Smallville in Kansas, while the Metropolis exteriors were all clearly shot in New York City; John Byrne’s revamp of the Superman mythos followed the movies’ lead by putting Smallville in Kansas. But in this Smallville episode, Metropolis is obviously the big city closest to Smallville, since Lana and Chloe seem to travel between them quickly and without needing to go to an airport. This suggests that Smallville might be as close to Metropolis as, say, the farmlands of upstate New York are to Manhattan.
But is the Smallville series’ version of Metropolis more or less New York City? The Metropolis exteriors in this episode sure looked like Los Angeles to me. (Were those mountains I saw in the background of one shot? And, of course, Gotham City is based on New York City, too. Superman’s and Batman’s creators must not have expected that their two series would eventually be linked together, and the emerging DC Universe would have two disguised versions of New York City in addition to the real thing. Stan Lee was so wise to set all his heroes in the same, real New York.)
Two years ago I watched Smallville Episode 1, and I wondered then, and I wonder now: if Clark Kent and Lex Luthor were friends when Clark was a teenager, and Clark didn’t wear the glasses and affect the mild-mannered persona back then, won’t the adult Lex Luthor know who Superman is? Come to think of it, won’t everyone in Smallville recognize Superman as Clark? (The latter point is even a problem with John Byrne’s Man of Steel revamp of Superman.)
I’m used to a Ma and Pa Kent who look elderly, not just in present day Superman comics and the Lois and Clark TV show, but also in the Superboy comics of the 1960s. It’s odd that parental figures in Superboy and Spider-Man – Aunt May and Uncle Ben – were depicted as so old that they looked like Clark and Peter’s grandparents; it’s as if the writers and artists, now adults, were thinking of how old their own parents were.
So, yes, Ma and Pa Kent should look middle-aged when Clark is in his teens, not like senior citizens. Still, it still takes me aback that Smallville gives us a Jonathan and Martha Kent who are not only middle-aged, but youthful and attractive. (This is the WB, after all, where no one is allowed to look old.)
The casting is also one of the series’ nods to the Superman movies (which, by showing a teenage Clark who didn’t wear either glasses or a Superboy costume, must have helped inspire Smallville). Martha is played by Annette O’Toole, who played Lana Lang in Superman III, just as Clark’s father Jor-El in the season premiere was voiced by Terence Stamp, who played General Zod in Superman II; a true tribute was casting Christopher Reeve as a wise mentor to Clark in a memorable episode last season. But I still find it, well, strange, that Ma Kent – a character whom I regarded as an idealized maternal figure when I was growing up – is now being played by an actress whom I saw doing nude scenes in movies. There are many startling signs of the passage of time as we grow older. Adjusting to seeing Annette O’Toole going from the swimming pool scene in the remake of Cat People to playing Clark Kent’s (still sexy, to be sure) mom is yet another of these.
And am I the only one who thinks that Chloe is not only more interesting than this show’s version of Lana Lang, but also more attractive? And doesn’t Lana Lang without red hair seem as wrong as Jean Grey or Mary Jane Watson would? Some people are meant to be redheads.
ANGEL GOES CORPORATE
One has come to expect that episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel that are written and directed by the two shows’ presiding genius, Joss Whedon, are going to be high points of both series: think of the mostly silent “Hush”, “The Body”, and the musical “Once More with Feeling,” all on Buffy. On the other hand, he also wrote and directed this season’s first episode of Angel, titled “Convictions,” which was neither groundbreaking in technique or storytelling nor even better than average for the series.
But the point of “Convictions” was not to push the envelope in television storytelling but for Whedon to more fully establish the revamp for Angel that was introduced in last season’s finale. Up till now, Angel and his compatriots – Wesley, Gunn, Fred, Lorne, and the now MIA Cordelia – were a small and dedicated band “helping the helpless” by combating supernatural evils from their unlikely base in an old Los Angeles hotel. (Why did they need such a large building with so many rooms, that would require so much expense? I suppose now we’ll never know.) Their perennial nemesis was the powerful law firm of Wolfram & Hart, whose stock in trade were dark supernatural forces. Whedon and company appeared to have written Wolfram & Hart out of the series last season by having a demonic Beast massacre the entire staff of its Los Angeles office, and even killing off Lilah, its most prominent member.
But Angel came very close to cancellation last season, and Whedon and his cohorts had to rework the show to persuade the WB to give it another chance. So Whedon and his staff brought back Wolfram & Hart with a twist. In gratitude for Angel’s success in defeating a mutual foe, the mysterious Senior Partners of this dimension-spanning law firm offered him and his associates control of their Los Angeles branch, allegedly to utilize as they pleased. Seeing the opportunities that Wolfram & Hart’s resources would give them in battling supernatural evils, and, at least in some cases, allured by the financial rewards of working there, Angel and his friends all accepted the offer. So now Angel and company would be based in a bright, glamorous corporate headquarters instead of a dark, musty old hotel, and the WB would feel the series had a more positive, inviting look.
It is made clear in “Convictions” that Angel and his companions do not have an entirely free hand to remold Wolfram & Hart to serve the cause of Angel’s mission, “helping the helpless.” The mysterious, unseen Senior Partners ultimately remain in charge, the Los Angeles division of the firm is staffed by people who are, at the very least, amorally opportunistic, and the Los Angeles division must satisfy the demands of its clients, many of whom are sinister sorts, if it is to make a profit and thus continue to exist.
In other words, Angel and his friends cannot prevent all of the evil that Wolfram & Hart, or even its Los Angeles branch, commit. They must tolerate a considerable number of lesser evils in order to concentrate on wage war on major evils; they must allow the firm to engage in wrongdoing so that they can also divert some of its energies towards achieving good. In short, by agreeing to run Wolfram & Hart’s Los Angeles office, Angel and his friends have consented to moral compromise. No matter how much evil they prevent through Wolfram & Hart’s resources, they are implicated in the other evil that they allow to take place. As head of the Los Angeles office, Angel would be both morally and legally responsible for its criminal actions. One cannot even finally view Angel as trying to control the evils of Wolfram & Hart from above as its leader.
Since the L. A. office is only one division of the firm, and the Senior Partners are in charge of the entire organization, Angel and company are really cogs in the machine. They have more power to effect change than most Wolfram & Hart employees, but in the end they are employees themselves.
Whedon and his colleagues have long contended that Angel is a more “adult” series than Buffy, although Buffy, in practice, has delved into much darker emotional and psychological territory. The premise for Angel‘s fifth season makes it very clear the show is about the “adult” world: the workaday world, not the idealistic world of students. Angel Investigations was a small outfit, all of whose members had personal ties with and loyalties to each other, and who were all dedicated to the same idealistic philosophy. It was a surrogate family. Now its members are part of a larger organization, driven not by altruism or idealism but by profit-making, whose leadership is clearly dedicated to a philosophy that is in sharp opposition to Angel’s own.
Probably Whedon in part conceives of Angel’s situation at Wolfram & Hart as a metaphor for creative people working in Hollywood: making compromises, overcoming opposition, and contending with the corporate mindset in the struggle to realize one’s creative vision on the screen. But, more broadly, Angel’s situation at Wolfram & Hart can serve as a metaphor for the situation of any person committed to certain ideals who seeks to function within a commercial, corporate framework. This is not to say that corporations are necessarily evil, but to note how often they pursue the bottom line at the cost of inflicting damage on the interests and lives of individuals both within and without the company. In “Convictions,” a paramilitary squad that disagrees with the directives of their nominal boss, Angel, tries to him. Here is an extreme metaphor for office politics, or, for that matter, downsizing. (For that matter, I think that the Mob in The Sopranos functions as a metaphor for the business world. Through the world of gangsters, the show dramatizes an American paradox: a man can engage in ruthlessness in his job, even killing co-workers, in order to provide a comfortable life for himself and the family members he genuinely cares for.)
Season 5 of Angel is yet another variation on Faust, and one that takes a particularly contemporary form. How long can one deal with the devil, even for noble reasons, before one is committing more evil than good?
I still find myself puzzled by a scene from last season’s finale. In that last episode, Gunn, Angel’s African-American colleague, had a mystical encounter with a black panther, which seemed to change him in some manner that was not clearly defined. Knowing Whedon’s interest in classic Marvel comics, I figured that this sequence was an allusion to Marvel’s African hero, the Black Panther, who derives his powers from the “panther god.” So I expected that Gunn might have become physically stronger, like Marvel’s Black Panther, perhaps even superhuman. Instead, it appears that the result of Gunn’s vision was his decision to be transformed, through some odd kind of mystical brain surgery, into a brilliant lawyer, thereby skipping over the otherwise requisite years of law school. So I still don’t comprehend why the show introduced the black panther imagery, and I wonder, if other characters visit the “white room,” would they see the panther too, or would this being appear in a different form, specific to the person viewing it? Well, I will assume that we will learn more as the season progresses.
This first episode concludes with the return of another vampire with a soul. Spike, who was last seen being incinerated as he heroically sacrificed his life in the finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It has been reported that the WB renewed Angel for its fifth season specifically on condition that Spike became a regular, and to judge from the emphasis the WB puts on Spike in its promotion of Angel‘s new season, I wonder if they wish he were the show’s lead character instead.
I think that the interplay between Angel and Spike should be interesting. Both are “reformed” vampires, making them alike, yet they are polar opposites as well; Spike is the perennial rebel and outsider, whereas Angel has become the conformist, joining the establishment in an attempt to change things from within. Hence, personality clashes between Angel and Spike should tie right into the this season’s theme of trying to maintain one’s integrity within a corrupt organization. Spike may turn out to be the voice of conscience, harassing Angel when he comes too close to selling out. At what point does moral compromise go too far? At what point should one walk away from the corrupted organization, or is it one’s moral duty to stay inside the organization and keep fighting to change it, even incrementally? These are the sorts of issues I hope the series addresses as the 2003-2004 season proceeds.
-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
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