In the famous opening line of the great modernist author Franz Kafka’s 1915 short story The Metamorphosis, its protagonist, Gregor Samsa, awakens from sleep to find himself transformed into a cockroach. It sounds like a joke, but it is a horrifically absurdist piece of irony. Samsa’s transformed state becomes a metaphor for his psychological and emotional alienation from the rest of humanity and normality.
Reading the story in the past, I had always imagined the transformed Samsa looking exactly like a cockroach, albeit an enormously oversized one. Now writer/artist Peter Kuper, who has done previous adaptations of Kafka, has turned The Metamorphosis into a graphic novel (issued last year by Crown Publishers). In it Kuper anthropomorphizes the insect, giving him a cartoonish humanoid head and face. At first I thought this weakened the impact of the adaptation, but I soon saw that it was essential to a visualization of the story. In the story Kafka verbalizes Samsa’s thoughts, showing his anguish and despair; through giving the bug human-like expressions, Kuper can convey his emotions visually. The cartooniness also fits well into the overall style art Kuper uses for the story. Though born in Prague, Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis in German, and Kuper’s art style here evokes the distorted visuals of German expressionism. Indeed, Kuper’s adaptation demonstrates the similarity between cartooning and expressionism’s treatment of figurative drawing. In reading the story, Samsa seems to be the one unrealistic element in a naturalistically described world, but Kuper’s visual exaggerations and distortions turn Samsa’s world into the nightmare he feels it to be.
Reading through Kuper’s adaptation, seeing the story’s events visualized, brought home aspects of the tale I had not realized before. Samsa’s fate can in part be viewed as a metaphor for clinical depression: his world seemingly shifts into a nightmare state without cause, he has trouble even getting out of bed, he feels isolated from the world and unfit to be part of it, and the change in him seems inexplicable to others. Likewise the story serves as a metaphor for the gulf in understanding that can separate oneself from others. Samsa literally cannot make himself understood by his family, and they, seeing only the horrific outer symptoms, come to regard him as a monster, failing to see the tormented human within.
Most remarkable is Kuper’s visualization of Samsa’s physical decay, culminating in the shot of his death, as the sun rises out the widow, shining its brilliance into the darkened chamber of death. Has Samsa spirit escaped? Or is this part of the final irony of the story, along with the concluding vignette of Gregor’s family, happy now that he is gone. In a parody of sacrificial death and resurrection motifs, Gregor’s sister “blossoms” into womanhood, as if the end of Gregor’s existence somehow released fertility into the world.
Kuper’s The Metamorphosis, then, is an extraordinary adaptation, proof of the heights that comics can reach in interpreting literary works.
THE UNCANNY EGGS-MEN
This may surprise my regular readers, but the comics industry has tended to pigeonhole what I can do, thinking of me as merely a Marvel trivia expert, or, worse, as a part-time proofreader (as if this is the career for which my three Ivy League degrees qualify me), and recurringly as an X-Men x-pert. So perhaps it’s just as well that I have almost entirely steered clear of Marvel’s mutants for the first half year of this column. But here is an anniversary issue, New X-Men #150, written by Grant Morrison, and it seemed a good opportunity to check in with the series.
I admire much of what Grant Morrison has done with the X-Men. His most revolutionary stroke was the “outing” of Professor Xavier and his students as mutants. It’s a trend now in superhero comics to get rid of secret identities, as seen lately in Daredevil and Iron Man and ordinarily I think this is a mistake. The dual identity is not only part of the appeal of the superhero genre (the appealing idea that a Superman lurks within the Clark Kent-like everyman) but also the basis for one of its major psychological themes: the divided self, with different identities expressing different aspects of a character’s personality.
In the X-Men’s case, though, I think that Morrison may have hit upon the right way to remodel the series for the 21st century. The superhero genre in comics was created by the progeny of immigrants, and the secret identity motif may relate to the way that immigrants and their families sought to assimilate within American society and culture. Like someone who changes his name to make it seem less ethnic, so Superman conceals his Kryptonian descent by taking the Waspish name of Clark Kent and blending in with a community of people wearing business suits and working at 9-to-5 jobs.
Similarly, the original X-Men, when in costume, made no secret of being mutants, but, unmasked and in “civilian” clothing, would “pass” as “normal” humans when they hung out at night in a Greenwich village coffee house listening to Bernard the Poet recite verse. Over the decades, Marvel writers seemed to care less about the X-Men’s secret identities. When the Angel publicly revealed his true identity and founded the Champions, the most incompetent of newsmen should have been able to figure out that Xavier’s school was the cover for the X-Men. When the “new” X-men came along, some of them, like Storm and Phoenix, did not even bother with masks.
Still, the X-Men remained a secret community within “normal” human society. The insistence on concealment went too far in the original concept for the first X-Factor series, which had the original X-Men, in their everyday identities, posing publicly as mutant hunters. In actuality, the X-Factor team would then help teach the mutants they located in mastering their powers and in passing as “normal.” As readers, and eventually the original X-Men themselves realized, X-Factor’s public stance worsened the public bigotry against mutants by treating them as menaces, and by teaching mutants to pose as “normal,” implied that mutanthood was something to be ashamed of.
The criticism of the early X-Factor issues was a symptom of an evolving change in American culture: minority groups were increasingly asserting pride in their ethnic or gender identity rather than attempting to disguise it to blend in more fully with a homogenized mainstream society.
By exposing Xavier and his school, Morrison recognized this change in the culture. Now that the X-Men had gone public, they could openly serve to promote the cause of mutant rights. If Xavier’s dream of peaceful coexistence between mutants and “normal” humans were truly to be implemented, mutants could no longer hide from the society at large, but had to assert their place within it.
Much of the power of the X-Men concept lies in the fact that the mutants served as metaphors for any minority group that was excluded from the mainstream or the victim of prejudice; “mutanthood” could even stand for an individual who felt alienated from the larger community. I also liked it when Morrison raised the possibility that the growing numbers of mutants might indeed someday supplant “normal” humanity in the course of evolution. Thus, “mutants” could even serve as a metaphor for the younger generation, which inevitably will replace the older generation. The strange powers of the young mutants could stand for the new modes of thinking and behaving that sets every new generation apart from its elders, many of whom do not welcome the new ways they do not comprehend.
So, Morrison gave X-Men the conceptual push it needed to revitalize it for a new century. Yet while I admire Morrison’s concepts for X-Men, I can’t say that I have any affection for it. Another of X-Men‘s strength has been the success with which its best and most important writers – Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, and for most years since 1975, Chris Claremont – have created characterizations that readers could care about. The X-Men are a community of outsiders; the “outsiders” part is the basis of the series’ theme of minority rights, but the fact that they are a “community,” an extended surrogate family, is nearly as important. Morrison’s X-Men stories lack the emotional warmth that Lee’s, Thomas’s, and Claremont’s all have.
Morrison’s achievement: superheroes secret identities linked to theme of assimilation for immigrants of past generation – having to blend in and disguise their true selves – so mutants pass for human – worst in X-Factor – now, however, trend for pride in one’s ethnicity or gender – reflected in X-Men going public, becoming public force working for mutant rights. Morrison gave the series a needed kick into a new phase.
New X-Men #150 presents the conclusion of the Planet X story line, and I am hereby issuing a spoiler warning for those who do not want to know the ending.
Usually mysteries in superhero comics are easily penetrable. So I am impressed that Morrison’s character Xorn the mutant healer turned out to be the disguised Magneto: I had even mentioned Xorn as a prominent new character in my recent updated edition of DK’s Ultimate Guide to the X-Men.
I am less happy that what seemed another of Morrison’s changes, enabling Professor Xavier to walk, proved to be temporary. Chris Claremont had restored Xavier’s ability to walk years ago, but editor Bob Harras had Xavier crippled once more. I heard Harras explain that he did so to restore the “poetry” of the character. I see what he meant – the idea of the world’s most powerful mind in a physically crippled body – and I suppose that Xavier works better thematically this way: Xavier’s disability makes him an outsider in yet another way. Still, for those of us who have read X-Men for years, it seems a cheat to cure Xavier and then cripple him again not once but twice. I suppose, though, that since present day Marvel has so little sense of its own history, no one working on New X-Men may have even known they were recycling the past.
Though Mark Millar in Ultimate X-Men has done masterful work in portraying a genuinely sinister, even genocidal Magneto, Morrison’s version of the character is a letdown. Though Magneto in New X-Men #150 is powerful enough to endanger the Earth by tilting its axis, he is astonishingly ineffectual in combating individual X-Men. Towards the end Xavier berates Magneto for being an “old man” who is out of touch with the new generation of mutants. Oh, really? In the post-9/11 world we are all too aware of older, ideological fanatics followed by a younger generation of terrorists, whose sense of exclusion and humiliation drives them to murderous hatred. It seems to me that Magneto, as a symbol for such leaders, is very relevant indeed in the early 21st century.
At the end of the issue Magneto, uncharacteristically suicidal, demands to be given a martyr’s death, Wolverine lashes out, and we see Xorn’s helmet bounce along the floor. So was Magneto beheaded? That would sure be a hard death scene to undo, and yet it would be foolish to (truly) kill off a character who is such an important part of the series.
And, oh, yes, Jean Grey, who has regained command of the Phoenix Force, dies in front of Cyclops yet again. Considering how often we are informed that new comics readers don’t care about stories that are decades old, it is amazing how Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s “Dark Phoenix Saga” of 1980 continues to influence today’s comics. Of course, it has been available in reprints for years; current comics fans must be reading them. So here is Morrison rerunning Jean’s death scene, but with only a small fraction of the passion and tragic grandeur of Claremont and Byrne’s original. Byrne and Claremont did not want to kill Jean off; editor in chief Jim Shooter made them do it. After all, the romance of Jean and Scott is the emotional heart of the series, as their wedding (after her resurrection) in New X-Men #25 demonstrated. But the editors and writers working with Scott and Jean over the last several years seem to have found their relationship tiresome. If Marvel’s current powers that be really do intend to keep her dead, that’s a big mistake.
There would have been a time when I would have been outraged, saddened, or both by seeing Jean and Magneto killed off. But now I find it hard to care, in part because I’m depressed by the quality of the story, and in part because I am well aware that someone sooner or later will find a way to revive them both. One friend observed that for Jean death has become “a revolving door.” I suspect that one reason Jean was killed off (again) is because she was (apparently) killed off at the end of the X2 movie, in a clear setup for doing the “Dark Phoenix Saga” in X3. (Comic book executives keep imagining that hordes of people who saw superhero movies will start reading the comics and get confused if the comics don’t match the movie continuity. On the contrary, what I’ve been told is that such large crossover audiences usually don’t happen.) If so, then if Jean comes back in X3, she’ll be back in the comics. I haven’t yet read any X-Men issues after this one, so far all I know her resurrection may already be in the works. “All I ever did was die on you, Scott,” are Jean’s dying words in New X-Men #150: she’s become the X-Men’s equivalent of the ever-dying Kenny on South Park.
Oh, yes, on the final page, the “Phoenix Egg” is found on the moon. it must be the very egg that this story laid.
MONEY AND McDUCK
Thanks to Ken Plume, I’ve no finally gotten to see a copy of the first film appearance by Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge, the 1967 Disney featurette Scrooge McDuck and Money, directed by Disney animation veteran Hamilton Luske, and referenced in my Christmas column. As I expected, this is one of the short animated films that the Disney studio did in the 1960s that was educational in purpose, like Donald in Mathmagic Land and Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom. Like them, it is not dry and didactic but genuinely entertaining. What surprised me was that it is a musical, with songs (one sung by Scrooge himself) and even rhyming dialogue. The subject is the history of money; with its celebratory tone, I kept thinking that this is the kind of movie that Scrooge himself would produce.
The film gets Barks’s character exactly right. We first see him playing in the mounds of coins and paper currency in his vault, although it does not seem as colossal as Barks’s iconic money bin. The film turns Scrooge into a collector of examples of forms of currency from other times and civilizations; as far as I know, something Barks did not think of, but it is right for the character. The film’s serious educational intent does mean modifying one of Barks’s concepts. In the comics Scrooge is the ultimate hoarder of wealth, but in the film, Scrooge lectures Huey, Dewey and Louie on the importance of investing money rather than just sitting on it and letting it collect dust. (Scrooge amusingly refers to the vault full of money as merely “petty cash” he keeps on hand.)
A nice surprise came towards the end when Scrooge, having spent the film lecturing to Huey, Dewey and Louie about money and the importance of investing it wisely, charges them three cents as a consultant’s fee. The grandnephews hand over the pennies, and Scrooge takes on an evil, greedy look as he accepts the coins; yep, this seems right for the character, too.
The featurette is visually inventive: to explain how much a billion dollars is, Scrooge pictures a stack of bills reaching up into outer space. It also betrays the prejudices of the conventional wisdom of its time, portraying husbands as having careers and wives having none.
I’m not altogether happy with the voice work. Huey, Dewey and Louie speak in voices clearly done by women impersonating young boys, rather than Clarence Nash’s quacking voice; presumably this is to make the trio more comprehensible, but they sound wrong. More weirdly, the copy Ken sent me seems to be from the Wonderful World of Disney TV show, since it is introduced by the show’s recurring animated host, Professor Ludwig Von Drake, but whoever did his voice sounds nothing like the distinctive, humorous Viennese voice that voice actor Paul Frees created for the character. On the other hand, another voice acting legend, Bill Thompson, gives Scrooge a warmly appealing Scots accent, not very different at all than the voice that his successor on the character, Alan Young, would give Scrooge.
Here’s an example of Thinking Too Deeply about Things: So, Donald Duck has one uncle from Scotland, Scrooge McDuck, and another from Vienna, Ludwig Von Drake, so Donald must be of mixed Scots/Austrian descent. (Has anyone ever done a family tree that works this out? As far as I know, Carl Barks ignored Von Drake, so he never dealt with the matter.) Moreover, Donald has a cousin, Gladstone Gander, whose name indicates he is a goose, suggesting there is interspecies romance in Donald’s family tree.
THE AMERICANIZATION OF BALOO
I also recently caught up with Disney’s 2003 animated feature The Jungle Book 2, directed by Steve Trenbirth, on the Starz cable network. The previous animated Jungle Book was the last animated feature that Walt Disney oversaw before his death, and as has been repeatedly reported, Disney instructed people working on the film not to pay much attention to the books by Rudyard Kipling on which it was based.
Time and again I’ve read statements by filmmakers and movie critics to the effect that a movie is a separate creative entity from a book on which it is based and therefore need not be faithful to it. In fact, many reviewers of the Harry Potter movies seem aghast that they are faithful to J. K. Rowling’s books and seem to feel it is the filmmakers’ duty to diverge from her work, apparently simply for divergence’s sake. I have yet to read any review of the Potter movies that explains just how the films should differ from the books. I also notice that the movie reviewers I read praise The Lord of the Rings movies for their great fidelity to Tolkien’s novels. This suggests to me that the difference is that the film critics in question grew up reading Tolkien but are, of course, too old to have grown up reading Rowling. (I also observe that Rowling’s fictional universe is so intricately constructed that to alter elements of one book might upset the workings of a later one.)
To my mind, though, why adapt the work of a writer, especially one whose work has proved to be an enduring classic, if you are going to violate his or her characterizations and themes? This is also a phenomenon in the world of comics, where it sometimes seems as if in revamping classic characters and series, all that survives from the original version may be the names. (For example, there’s Marvel’s recent revamp of Jack Kirby’s Eternals, about which you will read more in a future column.)
The original Disney animated Jungle Book is a delightful entertainment, though in it one can see the seeds of the sharp decline in Disney animated features after Walt’s death: there are lots of showpieces for character animation, but the narrative is really a series of vignettes rather than a well-constructed overall story. But apart from the names of the characters and the basic idea of a boy being raised by animals in the jungles of India, it has nothing to do with Kipling.
This is odd for a number of reasons. The Disney studio had done previous adaptations of classic children’s literature – Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, and, of course, A, A, Milne’s original Winnie the Pooh stories – that did not wholly capture the moods and themes of the source material, but served as interesting blends of the original author’s works and the style of the Disney animation studio. Recently watching Alice again (on the big screen at a Museum of Modern Art showing), I reflected that, true, the vaudevillian slapstick did not reflect Lewis Carroll’s approach to humor, but much of Carroll came through quite clearly: the absurdities and even tyrannies of the adult world, the adults’ condescension towards children, and, especially, Alice’s intrepid, common sensical character.
In Kipling’s two Jungle Books, the jungle is a place that is exotic yet austere, filled with wonder but also with danger everywhere. The human orphan Mowgli is adopted by wolves over the opposition of the man-eating tiger Shere Khan. The animals not only have their own language, but they even have their own government: chaos is held at bay by the strict adherence to the Laws of the Jungle, which all species must obey. Mowgli’s growth to maturity within the jungle is Kipling’s primal metaphor for learning how to function within a harsh human society. One must obey the laws. One must form bonds within one’s community and cope with rivalries, as Mowgli dies within the wolf pack. One must seek guidance from mentors, as Mowgli does from the wise bear Baloo and his protector, the black panther Bagheera, and make peace with potential adversaries like the cobra Kaa. Mowgli ultimately proves his maturity by slaying his nemesis, Shere Khan, and leading the pack in their war against the wild dogs, the Dhole.
It’s easy to understand that Walt Disney might have been put off by the harshness of Kipling’s vision. In Disney’s Jungle Book movies, the jungle instead represents a nearly idyllic world of childhood without responsibility. Baloo is not a mentor but an older playmate. It has been reported that Walt Disney insisted on casting Phil Harris as the voice of Baloo over others’ understandable objections. Harris’s public persona, ranging from his stint on Jack Benny’s radio show in the 1930s into his guest appearances on Dean Martin’s TV show in the 1960s, was that of a likable rogue with a fondness for drink, a musician whose style of hipness was becoming dated in the ’60s. Walt Disney saw correctly that Harris’s persona could be domesticated into that of the cool dad, a father figure that a growing kid would enjoy hanging out with. So the animated Baloo is not a surrogate father as teacher, preparing Mowgli for adult responsibility, but an ursine Falstaff, entertaining Mowgli until the latter can no longer put off entering the adult world.
In keeping with the movie’s vision of the jungle as playground, Bagheera is less formidable than the butt of Baloo’s jests, the dangerously irrational monkeys become King Louie’s jazz ensemble, the regal elephant Hathi becomes a Colonel Blimp-like parody of British military officers, and the eerily powerful Kaa, though still a threat, is foolish and easily thwarted. The only real danger is presented by Shere Khan, who, in the original film, is simultaneously a witty caricature of the late actor George Sanders, who provided the voice, and, in the animation, a palpable, sinister threat.
In the first film, Shere Khan’s climactic attack on Mowgli is the sign that the boy’s life of hedonistic irresponsibility has ended. So has Baloo’s: he nearly loses his life in combating the tiger, leading to the archetypal Disney symbolic death and resurrection scene (see too Snow White, Pinocchio, Tinker Bell, Trusty in Lady and the Tramp, etc.). As in the end of Kipling’s book, Mowgli finally must leave to take his place in human society, In the Disney film, the impetus is Mowgli’s attraction to a young Indian girl: he grows up when he discovers girls.
I find it particularly strange that the Disney Jungle Book ignores Kipling so much since other Disney animated films come closer to the spirit of Kipling’s book. During Walt Disney’s lifetime there was Bambi, another tale of growing up in what proves to be a dangerous wilderness. In recent years there has been The Lion King, and especially the Disney Tarzan. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and Kipling’s Mowgli are basically variations on the same archetype: a man raised in the jungle by animals.
Watching the animated sequel, I was struck by how Disney so thoroughly Americanized Kipling’s India. Shere Khan and Hathi have British accents, and a quartet of moptopped vultures have Liverpudlian accents, as the early 1960s Disney studio’s uncomprehending nod to the Beatles. The other characters sound American, and Baloo/Harris’s hipster dialogue and King Louie’s singing thrust American culture right into the viewer’s face. It seems like a sort of unconscious American cultural imperialism: the whole world is presented as American. (This got worse in Disney animated films. Take Robin Hood, in which the royalty and nobility sound British, but the Sheriff of Nottingham and his aides have American Southern accents!) My favorite example of this sort of thing is the original Planet of the Apes. Why is Charlton Heston’s character so surprised that he’s on Earth when the apes have spoken English all through the film? I suppose because it does not automatically occur to naive Americans that members of alien cultures wouldn’t necessarily speak English.
The Jungle Book 2 corrects this problem somewhat: the girl from the end of the first movie plays a large part, as do her father and brother, all of whom are decidedly Indian. In this, Jungle Book 2 continues a welcome trend in the recent era of Disney animated films. In Walt Disney’s lifetime the films tended to draw on European fairy tales and presented Caucasian casts. With the renaissance of Disney animation that began with The Little Mermaid, the body of films has become multiethnic: there have been Arabs (Aladdin), Native Americans (Pocahontas, Brother Bear), Chinese (Mulan) and native Hawaiians (Lilo & Stitch), along with the African influences in The Lion King. (In the film, The Lion King‘s characters are animals, voiced by white and black actors, but in the stage version most of the cast is black, wearing costumes influenced by African culture.)
In the new movie, John Goodman takes over as the voice of Baloo. This is interesting since Goodman’s voice, though close, does not sound like Phil Harris. It’s more usual to cast voice actors who can mimic the originals. British actor Tony Jay does an astonishingly good job of recreating George Sanders’ voice for Shere Khan, and the animators likewise recapture the tiger’s sinister stalking movements from the original. Expectedly, Jim Cummings, who duplicates the late Sterling Holloway’s voice for Winnie the Pooh, does Holloway wonderfully here too as Kaa. Goodman may not sound exactly like Harris, but he conveys the same personality that Harris did as Baloo, and that proves entirely satisfactory.
The movie, though, is not. The story basically serves to duplicate bits from the original: so once again, Shere Khan nearly strangles Kaa, and Baloo reprises his song “The Bare Necessities” over and over. The issues of responsibility and of the necessity of choosing between the jungle and human society are dropped. The end of the film, with Mowgli and the girl sneaking off to join Baloo in the jungle, is ambiguous, probably unintentionally so. Are they just visiting him, or running away from home?
HONG KONG PHOOEY
I had hopes for the 2003 graphic novel Batman: Hong Kong, inasmuch as it was written by Doug Moench, the most prolific Marvel writer of the 1970s, responsible for years of remarkably fine stories in Master of Kung Fu, and with considerable experience writing Batman. This new graphic novel begins well, with a computer hacker witnessing a murder on a secret webcast. But Batman: Hong Kong was a disappointment, with lots of furious action to no real point. As I keep finding in various projects, characterizations are too slim to warrant my interest or caring about the people involved. At the center of this story is a family feud, but the participates win no empathy, and the villain is just a ranting, raging cardboard figure. The dust jacket pronounces artist Tony Wong to be “the Comic King of Hong Kong,” but his work here just seems to demonstrate that anime and manga-influenced storytelling cliches are now international in scope.
THE HALFWAY POINT
At last year’s San Diego Con Neil Gaiman said that in creating 1602 for Marvel he was trying to avoid writing about the post-9/11 era, and yet found himself writing about heroes invading another country that holds weapons of mass destruction. He was talking about issue six, in which heroes invade Latveria, the kingdom of Doctor Doom, here known as Otto von Doom. The Angel thinks, “We go to release prisoners. We go to reclaim a stolen weapon, “We go to fight a just war.” Like JLA: Liberty and Justice (as we shall see in a coming column), this is a book that reflects America’s position in the world in a new century of terrorist threats and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The series so far has portrayed the familiar Marvel heroes of the Silver Age transposed into Renaissance England in the year 1602. As promised, issue six begins to explain what has happened, courtesy of another creation by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Uatu the Watcher, the alien being who observes life on Earth but is sworn not to intervene.
Gaiman finds wonderful new notes to sound in his handling of the Watcher. In his hands, Uatu is so dedicated to nonintervention that he will not simply offer Dr. Strange an explanation of events; he instead insists that Dr. Strange ask him specific questions, thereby to enable him to make specific answers. There’s an air of myth and fairy tale about this, as if Strange must solve a riddle before this oracle can speak.
According to Uatu, the temporal anomaly that threatens to destroy the universe of 1602 is the result of a “something,” “almost certainly a human being,” having been sent to that year from four centuries in the future (our present) by an unusual means of time travel. Uatu calls this being “the Forerunner,” and says that its appearance triggered the creation of the Marvel heroes four centuries earlier than they were destined to appear.
Uatu speculates “that the universe fights to save itself” by prematurely creating the “heroes and Marvels” in response to the threat triggered by the Forerunner. So, it would seem, the universe is sentient. Is this a reference to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s character Eternity, the living embodiment of the cosmos? Can it even be a reference to God? You and I may disagree as to whether the real universe, in which we live, is an accident of fate or designed by a higher power. But 1602 indicates that the Marvel Universe is governed by a principle of order, perhaps by a controlling intelligence.
Who is this “Forerunner”? I will guess that it would be the first Marvel superhero, meaning either the original Human Torch or the Sub-Mariner, both of whom debuted in 1939. But what would they be doing experimenting with time travel? (And where is Iron Man, the most obvious Missing Person in the cast so far?)
Uatu says that the Watchers decided to intervene in this case since the Forerunner has brought about a threat to all of reality. So Uatu tells Strange about the menace, but then forbids him to act on the knowledge he gives him. So what was the point of telling him?
Gaiman isn’t being consistent in giving the dialogue in 1602 an Elizabethan flavor. Did people in Elizabethan England really use phrases like “draw your attention to the matter at hand” or discuss their “options”? Then again, I like the way that Gaiman transforms Ben Grimm’s familiar New Yorkese into period British slang. Reading Matthew’s dialogue makes me realize that though Gaiman has evoked Frank Miller’s handling of Daredevil, he is also drawing upon Stan Lee and Gene Colan’s Silver Age interpretation of the character: the verbal wit and the astonishing, daring acrobatics. I also like the handling of Reed’s dialogue: this is a genius who can’t stop thinking and talking about science, to whom new ideas are continually occurring. One of the best strokes is Jean’s maxim, “From those who have much to give, much is demanded,” a variant on Stan Lee’s familiar line, “With great power must come great responsibility,” if not quite as felicitously phrased.
I am very pleased to see that my most recent speculations about the identities of Donal and the Templars’ treasure proved to be correct. Gaiman did not make his great reputation in comics through action-adventure stories, yet he superbly stages the battle with Doom and the escapes of the heroes he held prisoner. When origins for characters in 1602 seemed incomplete, I wondered if Gaiman planned to finish them: it seems he does, for in this issue Doom’s face suffers its inevitable scarring. Doom’s trap for the Thing was clever and very credible, not requiring any super-science at all. I even like Iceman’s point that he cannot fully utilize his powers without there being more moisture in the air to freeze, a scientific fact usually ignored in the X-books.
1602 is the only comic book I have been reviewing in this column issue by issue, and that is because each issue is such a pleasure to read, and offers so much to discuss. 1602 does not have great thematic depth, but is essentially a well told superhero genre story. Gaiman makes crafting such a tale look so easy, and yet, if it were, then why are stories of this level of excellence so rare in contemporary comics?
-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson
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