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As I told you last week, now I’m getting copies of comics sent to me to review, and along with 1602 #1, I received photocopies of the first issue of Supreme Power, Marvel’s new series about the Squadron Supreme, written by Babylon 5 creator and sometime Spider-Man scribe J. Michael Straczynski, and drawn by Gary Frank.

Sitting down to review Supreme Power reminds me of the time I wrote a preview of the previous Squadron Supreme limited series.

Back in the 1980s Fantagraphics was somewhat more tolerant of mainstream comics, enough so that they published Amazing Heroes, an admirable magazine that covered superhero comics as well as the early alternative books. (This, of course, gave the magazine’s sister publication, The Comics Journal an excuse not to cover mainstream titles and concentrate on what it did best: detesting them.) I conducted many interviews for Amazing Heroes in the course of its long run, and once I arranged to interview my friend and colleague Mark Gruenwald about his forthcoming Squadron Supreme maxi-series. Mark agreed on one condition: we could not bring up the very obvious fact, never mentioned in the comics, that the Squadron was based on DC’s Justice League of America. It seemed that Marvel thought it best not to publicly rub DC’s figurative face in the fact. This condition didn’t bother me or the editor, Kim Thompson, and the interview proved to be among my better ones for Amazing Heroes.

And then the magazine got letters from outraged fans: how DARE you not point out that the Squadron is a rip-off of the Justice League!?!

The Squadron wasn’t a rip-off. Nobody is really going to confuse Hyperion with Superman or Power Princess with Wonder Woman. If the Squadron characters had really been that close to the Justice Leaguers, DC would indeed have sued. The Squadron were like characters from a roman a clef, a novel whose readers know that the cast is based on real people, and want to learn what the author has to say about them.

And if these infuriated Amazing Heroes readers had had a sense of humor or, for that matter, history, they would have known something else: the Squadron Supreme started out as a joke.

Before the Squadron Supreme ever appeared in comics, there was the Squadron Sinister, who startled readers with their surprise debut on the final page of Avengers #69, written by Roy Thomas. This was part of the story line which introduced the Grandmaster, a virtually omnipotent alien being who obsessively played games. His opponent on this occasion was the Avengers’ archfoe Kang the Conqueror, who compelled the Avengers to serve as his champions in combat against the Grandmaster’s pawns. Cleverly, and somewhat daringly, Thomas devised the Squadron Sinister as a team serving the Grandmaster: a quartet of evildoers who were clearly based on four of the most prominent members of the Justice League of America. Hyperion was based on Superman, Nighthawk on Batman, Doctor Spectrum on Green Lantern, and the Whizzer on the Flash. (Then as now a passionate fan of the comics of the 1940s, Roy named the Whizzer after Marvel’s own Golden Age super-speedster hero, and subsequently revived the original Whizzer in Giant-size Avengers #1.) A further dimension to the joke was that the Avengers themselves were surely created as Marvel’s answer to the Justice League: both teams were designed to be organizations of superheroes who starred in their own series as well.

The Squadron Sinister would return from time to time over subsequent decades, either operating as individuals or together, and one member, Nighthawk, reformed and became a mainstay of a longrunning superhero team, the Defenders.

In Avengers #85, Thomas took the Squadron notion further. A group of Avengers journeyed to an alternate Earth, in which they met that planet’s leading superhero team, the Squadron Supreme. Some of its roster, like Hyperion, were parallel world counterparts of members of the Squadron Sinister. Other characters were brand new, except, of course, for the fact that they too were inspired by Justice League members. Thus American Eagle (later to be known as the Blue Eagle) was a variation on Hawkman, Lady Lark evoked Black Canary, and the dwarf Tom Thumb, a genius inventor and scientist, was a twist on DC’s Atom, a physicist who could shrink to miniscule size. (It just struck me that Thomas may also have been thinking of Dr. Miguelito Loveless, the memorable archvillain of the TV series The Wild Wild West, who was also a dwarf and scientific genius. Roy, are you reading this? Is this true?) There was also the Squadron’s own Hawkeye, who shared a name with the Avengers’ Hawkeye, perhaps as an acknowledgement that Marvel’s Hawkeye was influenced by past archer heroes, including DC’s Green Arrow. After the usual contention when Marvel heroes meet, the two teams joined forces against a villain named Brain-Child, whose enormous head, containing an equally enormous brain, was reminiscent of various sci-fi characters from DC stories of the 1950s and 1960s.

Once again Thomas was poking affectionate fun at the Justice League by creating these counterparts, but now it was clear he was also paying homage. Indeed, this cross-dimensional teaming of the Avengers and Squadron Supreme evokes the annual team-ups between the Justice League, the heroes of DC’s Silver Age, who were based on “Earth-1,” and their predecessors, the Justice Society of America, the greatest heroes of DC’s Golden Age of the 1940s, who had been established as inhabiting “Earth-2,” a parallel version of Earth in an alternate dimension.

The Squadron Supreme returned in the 1970s in Avengers #141 thanks to one of the best and most innovative superhero writers of that decade, Steve Englehart. To set Englehart’s work with the Squadron in context, I want to digress into another topic I’ve been thinking about over the last few months.

Recently, the Independent Film Channel telecast a documentary, A Decade under the Influence, about the generation of filmmakers who transformed Hollywood in the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s. The great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age had died, retired, and lost touch with what the marketplace wanted. Much of Hollywood’s older audience was staying home and watching television instead of going out to the movies. A new, young generation was becoming the dominant audience for movies, and they had different tastes, and different attitudes towards politics and sexuality than their parents. The studios, clueless about how to deal with this generational shift, were turning out elephantine epics and musicals that fell flat. Some of the new, rising generation of filmmakers were greatly influenced by classic Hollywood films of the past, and still more of them had their sensibilities shaped by newer forms of cinema: the foreign art films of the 1950s and 1960s, and the earliest American independents. When some of the movies made by these new American filmmakers began making large amounts of money by tapping into the sensibilities of the new generation, the studios gave many of these directors a surprisingly free hand. The studios didn’t know how to appeal to the new audience, but realized that these newcomers might. The new generation of moviemakers, even when working in the old familiar genres, put the stamp of their artistic personalities on them, and were willing to address the political, social and moral issues of their time.

It strikes me that there was a similar movement going on simultaneously in comics. DC was the equivalent of the big Hollywood studios: after the brilliance of DC’s reinvention of the superhero genre in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it had run into a creative drought by the decade’s end. There was a new audience for comics, now, and it wasn’t just the little kids that traditionally had read the books. The Marvel of the 1960s was in its own way the counterpart of the French New Wave and the foreign innovators in film: Marvel was pioneering new methods of comics storytelling and characterization, addressing more serious themes, and in the process keeping and attracting readers in their teens and beyond. Moreover, among this new generation of readers were people who wanted to write or draw comics themselves, within the new style that Marvel had pioneered, and push the creative envelope still further.

Their stories would simultaneously be true to the new Marvel tradition (or, if published at DC or Charlton, recognizably influenced by it) while also clearly serving to express the individual writers’ ideas and sensibility. Roy Thomas was the first of comics’ New Wave, and was instrumental in bringing in many of the others. Thomas was to comics as Peter Bogdanovich was to movies at that time: the critic and scholar turned creator, who was primarily influenced by the classics of the past, but took them more seriously as art than their creators had. And there were others: Archie Goodwin, Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams, Gerry Conway, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, Doug Moench, Don McGregor, Walter Simonson, Howard Chaykin, and more; Chris Claremont was probably the last major figure to come in as part of this movement, and he would inaugurate another period in comics through his early work on the X-Men. All of them, to a greater or lesser extent, turned their work into a vehicle for personal expression, as indeed Stan Lee had starting in 1961. Some of them, like O’Neil and Gerber, revolutionized comics by using familiar genres, like superhero adventure and horror, to express their views on the political and social issues of that time.

Another writer who did this was Steve Englehart, who devised a story arc for Captain America involving the subversive organization, the Secret Empire, that served as an incisive commentary on the contemporary Watergate scandal in government. On discovering that the conspiracy reached into the Oval Office, Captain America was so shocked and demoralized as to abandon his costumed identity, thereby reflecting many of his readers; disillusionment with the status quo in government. In Cap Englehart introduced Hugh Jones, CEO of the Roxxon Oil corporation, which for years thereafter would be Marvel writers’ favorite symbol of corporate greed and wrongdoing.

Englehart used his Squadron Supreme arc in Avengers, drawn by George Perez, to criticize the misuse of power by elements of corporate America and their allies in government. Roxxon’s Hugh Jones was now the possessor of the Serpent Crown, an ancient object of mystical power that Roy Thomas had introduced in Sub-Mariner. There was also a Serpent Crown on the alternate Earth of the Squadron Supreme, and there it was worn by Nelson Rockefeller, one of the wealthiest men in America, who had become President of the United States of that world. (In the real world Nelson Rockefeller was indeed a real person, and a member of one of America’s richest and most powerful families, who had been governor of New York State and run unsuccessfully for the presidency; he became vice president under Gerald Ford, and is now deceased.) Since Rockefeller was head of state, the Squadron followed his orders without questioning, blind to the possibility that his motives and goals were not in the best interests of their country.

And so the Avengers found themselves in battle against the Squadron once more, and Englehart added a counterpart to Aquaman, Amphibion (yes, that is spelled correctly). Continuing the tradition of making jokes at the JLA’s expense, he renamed the Squadron’s Hawkeye the “Golden Archer,” presumably an allusion to McDonald’s “Golden Arches.” That was appropriate, since Englehart’s Squadron had become pawns of corrupt politicians and corporate executives.

This, I take it, was Englehart’s comment not just on the dangers of unquestioning trust in whatever the government says, but also on the traditional DC concept of superheroes. Englehart loved the Justice League, too, and, all too briefly, wrote one of the greatest runs of JLA stories in their history. But the Justice League of the Silver Age (1950s-1960s) never took issue with the government or delved into social issues; not until O’Neil and Adams broke the ice with Green Lantern/Green Arrow would DC heroes begin to investigate social and political evils.

Meanwhile, from the early 1960s onward, Stan Lee and Marvel writers had shown their heroes in conflict with the law, big corporations, the mass media, the armed forces, and sometimes the federal government. In pitting the Squadron against the Avengers in this arc, Englehart was depicting a clash between two generations of superheroes: one that never disputed authority, and another (including the Captain America who had gone through that Watergate story) who had learned to question it. (Steve, are you out there? Am I right?)

In the end the Avengers persuaded the Squadron of the perfidy of Rockefeller and his corporate allies, and they brought him to justice, setting up the next phase of their history.

One of the few comics stories I have written was a “Saga of the Serpent Crown” two-parter that is actually an addendum to Englehart’s Squadron Supreme story. I showed what the members of the Squadron whom Englehart didn’t use were doing while the Avengers story was taking place. (In some cases, like Arcanna, that was because the character had not been created at the time Englehart write the story, but according to continuity, the character would indeed have been around at the time.) I also gave Hugh Jones an otherdimensional cabal of allies in the form of Squadron-Earth counterparts of various corporate villains from past Marvel stories, like Lee and Kirby’s Gregory Gideon. Englehart’s wariness of corporate power was not unprecedented in the Marvel canon.) Nighthawk and the others thwart the Serpent Cartel, as I dubbed the cabal, thereby freeing the Squadron members who were in Englehart’s story from the Cartel’s mental influence.

A Decade under the Influence concludes by showing how the innovative filmmakers of the 1970s only had their creative freedom for a relatively brief time. Two more members of that generation, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, turned their efforts to revitalizing film genres that had long been in low repute, like the space opera and monster movie. The new filmgoing generation of Baby Boomers, though, loved fantasy and science fiction, and Jaws and Star Wars stunned Hollywood by making extraordinarily huge amounts of money. The studios now saw the way to big bucks was through big budget sequels to hit adventure movies and imitations thereof. The kind of personal films that the other 1970s directors made could not compete commercially with the blockbusters and faded from the scene, not to be reincarnated until the rise of the contemporary independent film movement. Ironically, Lucas’s and Spielberg’s action-adventure films are personal works of art expressing their own distinct sensibilities, but you and I have seen plenty of imitations that do not begin to live up to their examples.

Again, I see numerous parallels between the movies of the 1970s and the comics of the 1970s. DC, in dire straits, took chances with members of comics’ New Wave, resulting in classics like Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ Green Lantern/Green Arrow series and Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing (the latter being the ancestor of today’s Vertigo books). Still, at DC the experiments were few and far between at first, though O’Neil and Adams were then allowed to wreak a lasting transformation on the artistically moribund Batman series. The New Wave had a freer hand at Marvel. Stan Lee was no longer writing comics and eventually passed the editorial torch to Roy Thomas, and Thomas, in turn, to others. Marvel writers at this time had extraordinary creative freedom; as long as the books sold, they could do pretty much what they wanted within the bounds of the newly revised Comics Code (and in the black and white magazines, that didn’t apply), and no one expected the books to bring in big bucks. And so we had Roy Thomas’s Conan books, Marv Wolfman’s Tomb of Dracula, Steve Englehart’s Avengers, Captain America, and Doctor Strange, Steve Gerber’s Man-Thing and Howard the Duck, Don McGregor’s Black Panther and Killraven, Doug Moench’s Master of Kung Fu and Werewolf by Night, and many more.

Then the comics business changed much like the movie business did. Instead of reaching into new genres, Marvel started cloning its successes: Amazing Spider-Man spawned Marvel Team-Up, then Spectacular Spider-Man, and then Web of Spider-Man, and more. Uncanny X-Men became so, shall we say, extraordinarily successful that it gave rise to an entire family of books; Chris Claremont and former X-Men editor Louise Simonson could write the initial spin-offs, maintaining their personal feel, but there were soon far too many for them to write or control. Secret Wars launched the era of the epic crossover blockbuster series. Simultaneously, and for good reasons, Marvel, under editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, replaced its previous laissez-faire editorial system with an editorial hierarchy that exerted tighter control. DC and Marvel found ways to take editorial control back from the many writer-editors who supervised their own books. And the reign of the New Wave was over.

The next writer to revive the Squadron was J. M. DeMatteis in the pages of The Defenders. Nighthawk, in his civilian identity of multimillionaire Kyle Richmond (paralleling Bruce Wayne) had become President of Squadron-Earth’s United States, thereby succeeding the discredited Rockefeller. DeMatteis introduced yet more Squadron members: Arcanna (a variation on Zatanna), Nuke (inspired by new DC hero Firestorm), and Power Princess (the Squadron’s long-overdue counterpart to Wonder Woman).

DeMatteis’s story, though, was neither joke nor homage, nor was it particularly good. Now President Richmond and the Squadron members, except for Hyperion, had fallen under the mental domination of a malevolent alien called the Over-Mind, who was working in concert with a demonic entity known as Null the Living Darkness. The Over-Mind likewise took control of the minds of every important political, military and corporate leader in the United States. President Richmond then declared war against any nation on Earth that did not accept United States supremacy. Since the Over-Mind had also been busy taking over the minds of foreign leaders, every nation quickly surrendered. Hyperion had escaped to the Avengers’ Earth and brought the Defenders back as allies. The Defenders freed the Squadron from the Over-Mind’s control, and together the two teams defeated the Over-Mind and Null, freeing Earth.

I suppose that this story arc, too, may have political connotations, conjuring up the image of what might happen if the United States became Earth’s sole super-power nation (as indeed it has!) and turned aggressor. But this idea is not treated as more than plot mechanics: this arc was just a rather uninspired twist on the old world conquest story line.

Moreover, it set a bad precedent. Keep turning the Squadron into the pawns of bad guys, and they start to look like fools. A few years back, when Kurt Busiek and George Perez had the Squadron fall under mental domination yet again, Busiek explicitly treated it as a joke, having characters ask on panel why the Squadron doesn’t take protective measures against mind control after it has happened to them time and again.

GRUENWALD SQUADRON

Mark Gruenwald’s twelve-issue Squadron Supreme limited series was his masterpiece in his long career as a comics writer. Mark was as strongly influenced by the Silver Age DC superhero comics edited by Julius Schwartz as he was by Stan Lee’s Marvel stories of the 1960s. Gardner Fox, the author of the classic first years of Justice League of America, one of Schwartz’s series, was one of Mark’s heroes. (Indeed, the President of the United States in the Squadron limited series, President Gardner, is drawn with Fox’s likeness.) Though it was common to claim that the classic DC heroes had only one-dimensional personalities, Gruenwald disagreed. You can see this in how he explores the characterizations of their counterparts, like the Whizzer, a conservative Midwesterner, and Dr. Spectrum, presented as a “Right Stuff”-style astronaut.

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Ironically, in that period DC was not doing the classic Justice League, the team of its greatest superheroes. This was the period of the Justice League as “superhero sitcom” in the hands of editor Andy Helfer, writer J. Marc de Matteis, and co-plotter/penciler Keith Giffen, with the likes of goofballs Booster Gold, Blue Beetle and Guy Gardner as members. This was entertaining in its own way (and the DeMatteis/Giffen version is now being revived in its own series), but it wasn’t what people traditionally think of as the Justice League. As is often the case when a series strays too far from its conceptual roots, in time the pendulum swung back, and the Justice League, in both the comics and the Cartoon Network animated series, is once again recognizable as Schwartz and Fox’s creation.

Gruenwald did not treat the Squadron as a joke or as pawns in someone else’s conspiracy. Although his Squadron series was clearly a homage to Fox’s Justice League, he was not just doing disguised versions of DC’s characters. Gruenwald’s Squadron depicted what would happen if characters reminiscent of DC’s great Silver Age heroes had evolved in the Marvel Universe. This meant that their personalities became more complicated and more nuanced: in Gruenwald’s hands the members of the Squadron finally became identifiably real, three-dimensional people. This also meant that the world in which they existed was more complex, and that there was no longer an absolute division between good and evil or right and wrong.

In the limited series Gruenwald continued exploring political themes as Englehart had with the Squadron. But Gruenwald went further, and the Squadron Supreme limited series is a superhero adventure story that is simultaneously an investigation of ethics. It is an illustration of the maxim that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Gruenwald picks up where DeMatteis had left off: following the devastation wreaked by Null and the Over-Mind, the United States is in a state of collapse and crisis, beset by crime and famine and numerous other ills. The Squadron resolves not only to restore the nation to working order and stability, but to go further, and to solve the country’s greatest problems once and for all. They intend to turn the United States into a utopia, a paradise on Earth. (I don’t know if Mark had this in mind, but this makes me think of the Silver Age classic Superman Red and Superman Blue.) But to do so, they must temporarily take absolute control of the nation’s government. Demonstrating a total faith in their heroes, so characteristic of the people in Silver Age DC books, President Gardner and the federal government happily turn sovereignty over to the Squadron Supreme. The lone important dissenter is the former President, Kyle Richmond, who was once the superhero Nighthawk.

So it is that the Squadron, confident in the rightness of their “Utopia Program,” begin to transform the United States. They provide food to the starving. They confiscate all firearms from the entire population. They alter the minds of captured criminals to turn them into productive members of society (just as the famed proto-superhero of the pulps, Doc Savage, used to do).

And from this you should see that the Squadron, acting from the best intentions, quickly become a threat to the nation’s liberty., They are a benevolent dictatorship, but a dictatorship nonetheless. Eventually Kyle Richmond returns to his identity of Nighthawk to organize a band of rebels – a fallen hero, young new heroes, and outlaws – to overthrow the Squadron and restore freedom to their country. Hyperion’s Squadron and Nighthawk’s Redeemers inevitably meet in final combat, just as Superman’s and Batman’s rival teams will in the later Kingdom Come, and Superman and Batman themselves clashed in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. The climactic battle in the final issue of Squadron was a new Revolutionary War, and also a Civil War: friend fought friend, and friends died.

This is the principal story running through the Squadron Supreme limited series. But there was so much more. For one thing, Gruenwald made the series an examination of love and the forms it can take. There was the love of family, exemplified by Arcanna and her brood of children. There was romantic love, touchingly depicted in the marriage of Power Princess and her husband, a counterpart to Wonder Woman’s Steve Trevor, who had grown elderly while his still devoted wife remained eternally young. And then there was the dark side of love, displayed as the Golden Archer secretly uses the mind-control machine on Lady Lark rather than lose her love.

Perhaps the best individual issue focused on Tom Thumb and his desperate race against – and, thanks to a time machine, through – time to find a cure for cancer, not only for the benefit of humanity but to save himself. His quest was doomed, and this issue is one of the rare examples of genuine tragedy in the entire superhero genre.

Gruenwald did a subsequent graphic novel about the Squadron and moved them to mainstream Marvel-Earth to guest star in another series he wrote, Quasar, to keep them around. He had plans to write a new Squadron limited series, which would explore religious themes, but, unfortunately, never got to do it. After his unexpected and sudden death, the story of Tom Thumb’s demise in Squadron appears even more haunting.

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Following Mark’s wishes, after his death, his ashes were mixed with the printing inks for the trade paperback edition of the Squadron Supreme limited series; now that is putting one’s heart, body and soul into one’s work, literally as well as figuratively. Alex Ross, who had not read Squadron before doing his own Kingdom Come, acknowledged that in Squadron Mark had anticipated much of the later series (including Batman leading villains in rebellion against Superman’s world order). In tribute Ross contributed a splendid painted cover for the book. Following in Mark’s path, Len Kaminski wrote the one-shot Squadron Supreme: New World Order, published in 1998.

This brings us to the present and to J. Michael Straczynski’s take on the Squadron. Most of Supreme Power #1 concerns the childhood of Hyperion, the Squadron member inspired by Superman.

The saga of Superman’s childhood entails tragedy on a scale that is impossible to fully comprehend: not just the death of the hero’s parents but the obliteration of the entire population of his native world. (Has anyone ever interpreted the destruction of Krypton, first depicted by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1938, as an anticipation of the Holocaust?) And yet the various versions of the tale of Superman’s childhood are also idyllic: he is found by the most loving of foster parents, a saintly couple who believe in, practice and teach traditional American ideals, and he grows to adulthood in an idealized small town America. (The fact that super-villains keep turning up in some versions does not take away from the fact that Smallville is still a Norman Rockwell fantasy once young Clark puts the bad guys in their place.) Even Superman’s deceased parents are idealized, loving, self-sacrificing figures, or, in John Byrne’s version, his father is, anyway. (Superman’s mother Lara in Byrne’s Man of Steel revamp is as emotionally repressed as all other Byrne-style Kryptonians of that time, save his father, Jor-El.)

Straczynski gives a series of dark twists to this familiar saga. When we first see the unnamed country couple who are counterparts to Jonathan and Martha Kent, they do not look at each other; the art emphasizes the distance between them. This somehow does not seem like a happy pair. When they find the crashed spacecraft, we do not see a happy baby lying within, as if in a cradle. The spaceship is utterly wrecked, and the infant’s face is encased in inhuman machinery. The woman who finds him looks at the scene in horror, and the baby looks frightened by his new surroundings. The woman, like Martha Kent, wants to adopt the baby, but significantly sees him as a means for healing the rift in her marriage. The husband is stone-faced, looking aside even when the baby reaches towards him, and will not commit to keeping the infant longer than overnight.

No sooner have the couple driven off with the infant than a silhouetted helicopter – a black helicopter such as UFO lore claims the government uses for covert operations? – flies over the spot where the spaceship crashed. Soon armed men, looking inhuman in their battle grab, arrive at the country couple’s home to take the alien arrival from them.

So the baby ends up not in a home out of Norman Rockwell but in a government lab, where his superhuman powers have been discovered, and he is suspected of being the first of a potential series of invaders. The story of Hyperion’s childhood is set in the past, and the President of that time is Jimmy Carter, who wants to make sure that the baby grows up to be “on our side.”

Carter is also responsible, it seems, for understanding that it is important for the child’s psychological and emotional health that he be given a semblance of a normal childhood. He is indeed to be raised by a pair of foster parents in a home in the country. But the house is on Army property, under continual guard, cut off from contact with the outside world. The rooms within the house are under continual government surveillance. Moreover, not only are the child’s “father” and “mother” not his real parents, they are apparently not husband and wife. They are employees of the government, who did not even know each other when they were assigned to act as the alien baby’s “caretakers” (a word that could just as appropriately be applied to janitors). They are even forbidden to become “involved” with each other. Perhaps this is to evoke a child’s Oedipal unwillingness to think of his parents as having sex, but turned into a creepily strange reality. At the end of the initial scene with the foster “parents,” the woman touches the man’s hand, thereby demonstrating more affection than the actual married couple who found the baby did for each other. But it is all an outward show without substance. Later, one of the government operatives aptly compares the duo to the robotic Stepford Wives of the book and movie of the same name.

A government official says he wants the baby to live in an environment resembling that of the 1950s sitcom Father Knows Best, and, in a subsequent scene, Hyperion’s “mother, in a miniskirt when we first see her,” even seems to be wearing a 1950s dress, with its billowing skirt and low hemline, once she is in her role as perfect mom.

In short, Hyperion’s “Norman Rockwell” childhood is a facade, a fake.

Looking back to the first page, I see the significance of the song playing on the country couple’s radio: “Got to be cruel to be kind.” The upbringing the government has provided for this alien intruder is both at once. Perhaps Straczynski is also suggesting that the American idealized image of the family is a fraud in real life, as well.

This pair of government-issued “caretakers” are an intriguing enigma. Just who are these people? Why would they sign on to spend “fifteen to twenty years in a confined environment with a potentially dangerous individual” where celibacy is mandatory? What is wrong with these two?

Perhaps Straczynski’s nastiest twist is to give baby Hyperion a pet dog, evoking in many readers the memory of Superboy’s dog Krypto. The puppy barks at the frightened one-year-old, who obliterates him with a blast of heat vision. So, this is not quite in the same category as those pranks pulled by Superbaby in stories from forty years ago, is it? I have long wondered how the Kents could possibly have disciplined a baby with super-powers; this story makes me wonder just how Hyperion’s “caretakers” managed to survive his childhood without suffering lasting injury or death in the course of a toddler temper tantrum. Just lucky, I guess.

A nice touch is that realizing the danger that the baby poses actually shakes the “parents” out of their weird complacency and into humanity. They actually break the rules and become lovers (though hardly in the most romantic fashion), and, significantly, it is at this point that the story gives them names: Mason and Elizabeth.

As Hyperion, or Mark, grows older, the efforts of his “parents” and teachers to inculcate his mind with government propaganda are paralleled by the televised news reports he watches, all about murders, government crises, and other horrors. The world outside seems a terrible place. (It’s odd that the government lets the boy watch TV, including the news, since that would expose him to other views than the propaganda he receives. And doesn’t he see shows other than the news, shows with a more positive outlook that might make him want to see the outside world?)

Having subverted our fantasies about Superman’s boyhood, Straczynski then pulls the rug out from under the idealized version of his homeworld as well. A scientist shows the first President Bush that the infant Hyperion was sent to Earth in an “escape pod” from a large spacecraft in the midst of a battle in space. Bush wonders whether the child’s biological parents were on the side of the victims or that of the aggressors. Were Hyperion’s version of Jor-El and Lara warmongers?

The first issue climaxes with the teenage Hyperion, who now realizes he is really the government’s captive and resents it, coming to a decision. And the irony is that the basis for his decision, his belief that his “parents” love him and love each other, may be founded in a lie.

This is very strong stuff, admirably well told. It is a highly effective retelling of one of the primary myths of the superhero genre in a new, darkly ironic mode. Oddly enough, this actually makes Hyperion more closely like Superman than he had been before. It struck me that the Hyperion story in this first issue could just have easily been an Elseworlds tale about Superman. However it diverges from Superman’s canonical history, it is nevertheless founded in that history for its points of departure. Hyperion’s hair has even turned dark rather than remaining red, as in past Squadron tales.

Straczynski seems to have recognized that Englehart and Gruenwald used the Squadron for political commentary, and he is following along similar lines. As in Englehart’s story, here too is a government that is attempting to put its superhumans under its control.

Now, personally, I tend to react badly to what is now the cliché of the Big Bad U.S. Government. When Englehart was criticizing government power, this was new in comics. But he was also careful not to make blanket indictments. Number One of the Secret Empire in Captain America and the alternate Nelson Rockefeller in Avengers were depicted as criminal anomalies; get rid of them, and the government is still healthy. The X-Files went farther, conjuring up vast conspiracies within the federal government. But it was careful to state that it was rogue elements in the government who were responsible for the alliance with the aliens and other such nefarious matters. The Cigarette-Smoking Man, head of so many of the series’ malevolent operations, states in one episode that he takes pains to ensure that the Presidents do not even know he exists. The X-Files is really about two honest government operatives – Mulder and Scully of the F.B.I. – trying to expose the hidden, criminal conspiracies within the government. Thus, government contains both good and bad elements.

In Supreme Power #1 I was at first exasperated by seeing the government depicted as once again automatically doing Bad Things: taking a baby away from people who love him, raising the child in captivity, indoctrinating him with propaganda, and intending to make him, effectively, their slave.

But Straczynski is careful to make the government’s actions reasonable at every step. Yes, young Hyperion has reason to be angry at his captivity. But, confronted by the situation of an immensely powerful child, what else would the government do? Actually, they could have killed the child outright; one official says that the infant’s skin resists “nearly” everything they tried, so he wasn’t utterly indestructible, at least at that point. I suppose they could have raised the child in a laboratory or a kind of prison, but the government people are careful to give him something resembling a normal upbringing, with surrogate parents in a real house, in the hopes that he will grow up psychologically well-adjusted. There is the standard issue Insensitive Government Guy (the one who comments on the dog’s death), and the first President Bush, when he shows up, does verge somewhat into Dana Carveyesque caricature, and even beyond: the visualization of an alleged Bush sexual fantasy is a cheap shot. But, on the whole, Presidents Carter and Bush, in their appearances, come off as serious people seriously concerned with the potential dangers the alien baby may pose, and Carter even seems concerned with the child’s well-being.

On a first reading it also bothered me that the story was so unrelentingly grim. I know this is hardly the only superhero series being published, and the first issue is admirably well written. But I do find unrelenting angst to be an empty cliché. Years ago, I attended a meeting of Marvel writers that was addressed by Stan Lee, the man who inspired us all. Stan’s basic point was that he believed that the grim and gritty school of comics writing was heading down the wrong path. No matter how tough and depressing Spider-Man’s life got, there was humor, and there were his victories over his adversaries. In short, there was balance.

In lesser hands than Straczynski, this dark tone would bother me more. But his recounting of Hyperion’s childhood is so imaginatively done than it rises above the clichés of the grim and gritty. Besides, I know the series has only just begun, and it remains to be seen whether the all-encompassing gloom will be broken. The superhero concept embodies the potential to rise above the harsh realities that afflict ordinary existence; no wonder so many of them can fly.

My only real point of contention with Supreme Power #1 did not hit me fully until its final pages. It surprised me that Hyperion turned out to be an alien. I know that Mark Gruenwald intended Hyperion to be an Eternal of the Squadron’s Earth. That made sense, since Jack Kirby’s Eternals were superhumanly strong, virtually indestructible, could shoot energy beams from their eyes, and could fly, and so is Hyperion. Of course, this also helped make Hyperion different from Superman. But I don’t believe that Mark made that clear in his Squadron series, and Tom Brevoort is the only person left on staff at Marvel who might recall that Mark intended Hyperion to be an Eternal.

So this didn’t bother me that much. If Mark hadn’t clearly established Hyperion’s origin, then Straczynski is perfectly entitled to write his own version. We’d never seen a story about Hyperion’s origin, so there was a gap to be filled.

But the final pages of the issue made it clear that this Squadron was not Mark’s, or Thomas’s or Englehart’s. Their Whizzer was a white Midwesterner, just like Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash. Straczynski’s Whizzer is African-American.

So, this is a new version of the Squadron. Okay, the first Squadron originated on an alternate Earth, so maybe these will be their counterparts on mainstream Marvel-Earth, the home of Spider-Man and the other Marvel heroes. I suppose this could even be a Squadron originating on another parallel Earth we’ve never seen before.

But my fear is that the current Marvel administration has decreed that Supreme Power‘s version of the Squadron Supreme is hereby supplanting the Thomas-Englehart-Gruenwald Squadron in the official continuity. This is not the first time Marvel has done something like this, whether it was Alan Davis’s recent revision of Killraven, or X-Men: Children of the Atom, which transplanted Professor X’s original students into a high school (Why, to imitate Buffy?), or even Frank Miller’s well-written but continuity-busting Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, which considerably revised Stan Lee and Bill Everett’s origin story. (That series continues to cause problems, since some subsequent Daredevil writers, like Dan Chichester, refer to the Miller origin, while others, like Jeph Loeb, use Stan’s version.) Since virtually all Marvel series are interconnected, this Squadron reboot, of course, screws up the continuity of Avengers, Defenders, Captain America and other series. I would hate to see Marvel’s continuity, one of its most important assets, reduced to the kind of patchwork mess that DC continuity has become since Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986, as it rebooted one series after another, without regard for the damaging consequences to its overall continuity.

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The consistency of Marvel continuity over forty-some years is not just a means of keeping nostalgic Baby Boomers with long memories happy. Properly seen, the Marvel canon, from Fantastic Four #1 in 1961 onward, is a grand epic saga, spreading through thousands of interconnected stories. Former Marvel writer Peter Gillis once said that it was the largest collection of interrelated stories since the mythos of King Arthur. This is an achievement with its own aesthetic grandeur and beauty.

Moreover, throughout the decades, each writer has built upon the work of his predecessors. Just think over what I have told you about the evolution of the Squadron Supreme from Thomas to Englehart to Gruenwald, from a one-dimensional joke to three-dimensional personalities embroiled in serious philosophical issues. Over time, and through development by the better writers, characters grow in psychological depth, they become more distinct as individual personalities, and their personal histories grow rich in significant events that can spark ideas in writers for new directions in which to take these characters. A fictional world whose characters remain the same quickly turns stagnant; a world in which they are allowed to change and develop is a fictional world that retains its vitality, evolves with the times, and stimulates creativity.

Keeping the stories of the important Marvel writers and artists of the past in the official canon demonstrates respect for their works. Oh, yes, I’ve seen the argument that editors give to readers who protest when their favorite stories are yanked out of official continuity: you still have copies of those stories that you can read over and over again. This is like having your employer tell you you’ve done a fine job at the company but we’re laying you off anyway, ta-ta! No, this doesn’t seem respectful at all.

We have heard time and again over the years that new readers shouldn’t be expected to know decades of past continuity in order to understand current stories. No, they shouldn’t, but that is no reason to junk it. Most stories shouldn’t require that much knowledge of the past. Say there’s a new story in which Spider-Man battles the Vulture. Fine: probably all you need to know from the past is that the Vulture is a bad guy who can fly and that he’s fought Spider-Man before, facts which can easily be stated in the first page.

Other stories may necessitate drawing on a greater number of plot elements from past stories. However, competent comics writers know how to recap any information that the reader may need in a concise and entertaining fashion.

Think of the many television shows with continuing story lines and continuity that continues to evolve throughout the course of the series: Hill Street Blues, Dallas, The West Wing, Alias, and more, not to mention daytime soaps. How many viewers actually started watching those shows with the first episode? And yet they had or have millions of viewers. As long as in each episode the writers gave newcomers enough information to get their bearings, to understand the basics of the present situation, the new viewers could understand and enjoy that episode. The same principle applies in comics.

One could even argue that longrunning comics series bear a certain resemblance to legends conveyed down through the years by oral tradition, spread from one generation of storytellers to the next. So, yes, every so often there should be a flashback sequence retelling Spider-Man’s origin for the benefit of new readers, and reaffirming its importance to the canon.

It is also growing less and less true that newer readers have no way of reading the older stories should they want to. In recent years, with the growth of the market for trade paperback and hardcover collections of comics, there are more reprints of classic Marvel and DC stories available than some of us ever dreamed there would be. So much of Stan Lee’s work with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others, is available for new readers, along with Frank Miller’s Daredevil, extensive amounts of Chris Claremont’s X-Men, and so much more. In the best case scenario, the best Marvel stories of each of the last four decades would be in print. Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme trade paperback should remain in print. If all Squadron stories were part of the same continuity, then if a new Squadron series proves popular, Marvel could reprint the old ones in a new collection. (You see, Marvel, maintaining continuity also keeps the old stories commercially viable.) Comics collections in trade paperbacks could become what DVDs are to film, preserving the best works of each year for future audiences, keeping them alive.

Besides, at today’s Marvel, there is absolutely no reason to alter traditional continuity in order to do a rebooted version of an old series.

If you’re going to reboot the Squadron Supreme, set the reboot in the Ultimates universe! That’s what it’s for, isn’t it? That’s where the current Marvel administration started Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Avengers (as The Ultimates), and so many other characters’ continuities over from scratch. Why mess with the Squadron’s past continuity in the “original” Marvel Universe? Just don’t use that Squadron any more. Set the new Squadron in the Ultimates cosmos, and then you can do whatever you want: there’s nothing to contradict the revamp.

(What Marvel’s current administration has really done is to create its own versions of DC’s Earth-1 and Earth-2. The Ultimate universe continuity, meant to be accessible to new readers, of course grows more complicated with each year. Someday, some future Marvel administration will realize that it publishes two different sets of continuity, the traditional one and the Ultimate version, for the same characters. And that administration will decide this is too confusing and wonder what possessed Marvel’s Powers That Be circa 2001-2003 to create such a situation.)

So, yes, I am looking forward to the rest of Straczynski’s Supreme Power series, and I think it may even prove to be an important work in the evolution of the superhero genre. I just wish he could have found a way to make it fit into the great tradition of Marvel continuity. When I mentioned to a friend that I was doing a column on the new Squadron reboot, he commented that it was ironic that this should happen to a series so associated with Mark Gruenwald, a leading spokesman on behalf of the integrity of Marvel continuity. It is ironic, indeed.

Here, by the way, is an odd coincidence I offer for your consideration. In Supreme Power #1, not only does the first President Bush appear, but we also learn why Hyperion was given the civilian name “Mark Milton,” after “Mill-town” or “Middle-town.” I was born in Milton, Massachusetts, and so was the first President Bush. I used to live off Adams Street, and in one direction was Milton Hill, the rich people’s neighborhood, where the Bush family lived. In the other direction, in the town of Quincy, is the house where John Adams lived, and, of course, he and George H. W. Bush are the only two Presidents who were also the fathers of Presidents. Strange, isn’t it?

MAKE MINE BUSIEK

At the opposite side of the ongoing debate over the importance of maintaining continuity is JLA/Avengers #1 by Kurt Busiek and George Perez. Kurt believes in the traditions, recognizes the riches in past stories upon which he can draw, and knows how to reintroduce established concepts into new stories in a way that will delight old and new readers alike. One can palpably sense the enthusiasm and joy Busiek and Perez must have felt in working in so many pieces of DC’s and Marvel’s past. The Avengers contending against Starro the Conqueror, the menace from the very first Justice League story! The Justice League battling Kirby-designed monsters from the Marvel comics that were published during the original Justice League of America‘s early years, including the celebrated Fin Fang Foom himself! (And if you’ve never heard of Starro or FFF, it doesn’t matter, since Busiek and Perez tell you what little you need to know about them, and they’re great enough concepts that new readers should be dazzled by them anyway. As Green Lantern comments, “Those are some great-looking monsters. . . .”) Aficionados of classic DC and Marvel should relish the lists of power objects that the heroes must hunt down, all from landmark DC and Marvel stories. (And again, if you don’t know where, say, the Bell, the Wheel, and the Jar come from, as I do, it doesn’t matter: they work in the story simply as colorful treasures the heroes have to locate.)

My favorite bit of business is something that happens on panel: we are told that Batman, on witnessing the Punisher trying to kill criminals, took twenty minutes out of his schedule to beat him up! Yes, exactly what Batman, with his code of ethics, would and should do!

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That, by the way, should show you that Busiek and Perez often have a particular reason for the ways in which they mix and match DC and Marvel concepts. The forerunner of this meeting of the Avengers and Justice League is, of course, Roy Thomas’s Avengers stories with the Squadrons Sinister and Supreme, so it’s a good joke when Hawkeye finally accuses the JLA of being “Squadron Supreme wanna-bees.” It was the Grandmaster who pitted the Avengers against the Squadron Sinister, so it is appropriate that it is he who sets the events of this Avengers-JLA crossover into motion. Readers should also take note that the Avengers and Justice League finally meet atop a building with the name “Fox Storage.” Like Mark Gruenwald’s President Gardner, this is a homage to the Justice League’s original writer, the late, great Gardner Fox. Since JLA/Avengers is a tale of superhero teams from different dimensions meeting, Busiek and Perez are also surely aware that its forebears are the Justice League/Justice Society crossovers that Fox started forty years ago.

Those of you who remember the first DC/Marvel crossovers, the earliest of which are reprinted in the Crossover Classics trade paperback) know that they betrayed a very different attitude towards continuity. The first Superman/Spider-Man book and the DC/Marvel books that followed in the 1970s and 1980s took the position that the DC and Marvel characters inhabited the same fictional universe. Now, I can understand the impulse to set disparate sets of fictional characters in the same fictional reality: this is a motivating factor behind Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in which Captain Nemo can team up with Dr. Jekyll. But it cannot work with the Marvel and DC universes. Why doesn’t Superman come running every time Galactus invades Earth? What does DC’s Atlantis, ruled by Aquaman, have to do with Sub-Mariner’s Atlantis? How can Hercules and Circe be villains in Wonder Woman and heroes (the latter under the spelling “Sersi”) in Avengers? Combining the universes creates too many contradictions and problems.

But none of this bothered the editors and writers of the time, who argued that it was unnecessarily confusing to readers to set the DC and Marvel characters in separate realities. This reminds me of a videotape I recently saw of a Museum of Television & Radio seminar on writing science fiction for television, on which Supreme Power‘s J. Michael Straczynski appeared, as well as the inimitable Harlan Ellison. Ellison said that network executives are forever complaining that particular science fiction concepts are too confusing for the audience to understand. The audience, Ellison contended, is smart enough to understand these ideas, and it is the executives who don’t get it. Something similar was going on in the DC/Marvel crossovers. Alternate Earths is not a hard or unfamiliar concept. (How many of you have seen “Mirror, Mirror” on Star Trek? Or “The Wish” on Buffy?) But at the time of these early crossovers, I’d be told, well, these stories happen on “Earth-Big Bucks.”

More recent DC-Marvel crossovers, the DC Versus Marvel series and the Amalgam books, acknowledged that the DC Universe and Marvel Universes had to be separate realities. The Amalgam books even made a joke out of the fact, by creating temporarily merged realities in which Spider-Man and Superboy fused into Spider-Boy, and the X-Men and the eerily similar Doom Patrol became the uncanny X-Patrol.

The first several DC-Marvel crossovers had the aura of being special events, fans’ long-held dreams come true. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the years of the dreaded speculator boom, there were so many DC-Marvel crossovers that they did not seem extraordinary at all. The end of the boom and the convulsive changes at Marvel brought in new executives who were too cheap to want to do crossover titles and share the profits with DC. Perhaps it was just as well: now, with JLA/Avengers, the first DC-Marvel crossover of the 21st century, the concept seems unusual and exciting again.

This is particularly so for JLA/Avengers since many years ago there had been a previous version in the works, also drawn by George Perez but written by Gerry Conway, that never saw print. I’ve seen a lot of the quite handsome artwork on display at an auction to raise money for the International Museum of Cartoon Art; the auction failed to raise sufficient funds, the Museum closed, and I have no idea where the original Perez artwork ended up. But for decades, the first Avengers-Justice League team-up remained a legend in comics circles. This new version is entirely different, but it still represents the original idea come to fruition at long last.

Strangely, the first issue of the new JLA/Avengers series reads as if none of the previous DC/Marvel crossovers ever took place. No one in the Avengers recognizes any of the DC characters, and none of the Justice Leaguers seem familiar with anyone on Marvel-Earth. That is a surprise, considering Busiek’s devotion to continuity. On the other hand, there are hints that someone is tampering with the minds of Superman and Captain America, who each seem unusually hot-tempered. Perhaps whoever is to blame for this has also temporarily altered the memories of the Avengers and Justice Leaguers. Hawkeye keeps thinking the Justice Leaguers look familiar and then, as noted, realizes they remind him of the Squadron Supreme. But maybe Hawkeye is actually dimly recalling seeing DC characters before.

I expect that Busiek and Perez will indeed explain these memory lapses. There is surely a purpose for them as well, since it enables Busiek and Perez to present the clash between the Avengers and Justice League as if it really is their first meeting since, as far as the heroes now know, it is.

My only quarrel with this first issue lies with its opening pages. Here are Arkon the Imperion and his world of Polemachus, which have been featured in many fine stories in Avengers and other series, including an X-Men Annual drawn by George Perez himself! And then the Mysterious Menace wipes out Arkon, his planet, and his entire dimension.

But wait, there’s more: here is the super-powered Crime Syndicate, the villains from Gardner Fox’s second classic Justice League-Justice society team-up, battling the Weaponers of Qward from the equally great John Broom’s early Green Lantern sagas! And the Mysterious Menace obliterates all of them, too.

I’m having flashbacks to Crisis on Infinite Earths: this is just what George Perez and Marv Wolfman did over and over in that series, too. And I am not filled with nostalgia for it.

Here I enunciate one of my principles for writing long-running “shared universes.” Killing off long-established characters who have been featured in classic stories should never be done lightly and should rarely be done, period. Just because the editors and writers of the present regard certain classic characters as cannon fodder does not mean that there may not be other editors and writers who would love to do stories about those very same characters. There could even be writers in the future who will come up with brand new ways of using these characters that the present writers and editors cannot imagine. And while, in the world of comics, anyone can be brought back from the dead, let’s not make it too hard for future writers to do so, eh?

The renegade Guardian of the Universe named Krona, from possibly the greatest Silver Age Green Lantern story, plays a major role in the new JLA/Avengers story, as does the Grandmaster. What if some previous writers had killed these characters off, and in such a way that made it difficult or impossible to revive them? (For example, DC policy has been that no character killed off in Crisis on Infinite Earths could ever be resurrected.) What would Busiek and Perez think? I believe that Kurt is one of a number of comics writers who is unhappy that the Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, was (1) turned insane and evil, and (2) killed off. Busiek and Perez give Hal a cameo in JLA/Avengers in his new role as the Spectre. (And if you’re an old-time DC fan and didn’t know about that, I expect you will be taking a few seconds to react in shock.) But I’d bet that Busiek would be happier writing a Hal Jordan who was still Green Lantern.

So, a writer should be wary of killing off classic characters, since there are always other writers willing to kill off other classic characters whom the first writer cares about. (And I am still mad at Wolfman and Perez for offhandedly killing off my favorite Flash villain, the original Mirror Master, in Crisis on Infinite Earths, thereby forcing me to endure Grant Morrison’s replacement version with the annoying Scots dialect. Aargh.)

On the other hand, the thing I most like about the first issue of JLA/Avengers is that not only do Busiek and Perez acknowledge that the DC and Marvel characters live in separate realities, but they use that fact to make a thematic point. It is clever that when the Flash vibrates into the DC Universe, he immediately loses his powers, since he derives them from the “Speed Force,” a concept that does not exist in the Marvel Universe. But then the Flash sees a Marvel-Earth mob chasing a mutant, and when he tries to defend the poor victim, the mob beats the Flash up.

The Justice Leaguers are appalled by the darkness of the Marvel Universe, ranging from the Punisher’s lethal vigilantism to genocide directed against mutants. For their part, the Avengers, accustomed to the way Marvel heroes, even themselves, are regarded with suspicion, are astounded to discover how honored and loved the leading DC heroes are on their world.

The Marvel revolution in superhero comics was so powerful that it reshaped DC as well from the 1970s onward. New writers at DC brought Stan Lee’s innovations to both new and classic DC series, writing character-driven stories that supplanted the traditional style of DC storytelling that people like John Broome and Gardner Fox, emphasizing fantasy concepts rather than personalities, did so brilliantly.

Yet here Kurt Busiek and George Perez emphasize that there is still a conceptual difference between the DC Universe and its traditional characters on one hand and the Marvel Universe and its classic heroes on the other. One side is more optimistic and the other more pessimistic. It reminds me of the difference between Superman, who draws his powers from the sun, and Batman, the creature of the night. (I suppose that makes Batman the major Justice Leaguer who is closest to being like a Marvel character.) At first I thought JLA/Avengers read like a big fun fest of a story without any depth, but by the first issue’s end Busiek and Perez have indeed given us food for thought.

And I’ve been saying for years that Thor’s hammer, because it is magical, would work against Superman. Finally, Busiek and Perez confirm my theory! Thanks, guys!

-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson

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