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In putting a comic in context, it’s useful to know what the comic’s author himself has to say. So, in preparing to write this column on the final issue of Neil Gaiman’s 1602, I read Jason Pomerantz’s interview with Gaiman for the Comic World News website (forwarded to me by Mr. Gaiman himself). It was rewarding to find that, as I had concluded, Gaiman did indeed intend to try to recapture the spirit of the Marvel comics of the 1960s in 1602, and that he sees one of the series’ themes as “the good, precious things that make America and the American ideals so valuable,” as well as “the ways the American ideal can go wrong.”

Gaiman’s interview also held some major surprises for me, though they do not alter my analysis of the series’ themes. In fact, had I known that Jess Nevins, annotator of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has done some work on his website annotating 1602 as well, I would have learned the truth about 1602‘s mysterious heroine, Virginia Dare, months ago.

DARE TO BE DIFFERENT

The Roanoke colony was not located at the site of the present day city of Roanoke, which I have visited, but on an island off the Virginia coast. This helps my analogy between 1602‘s Roanoke and Prospero’s island kingdom in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Many readers thought that Gaiman had created the character of Virginia Dare. She does have the kind of name one might expect from a comic book, as if she were to grow up into an action heroine. There’s Modesty Blaise, Emma Peel, Lara Croft: Virginia Dare seems like the same sort of name. It even goes farther, by combining the idea of appealing sexual innocence (“Virginia”) with the notion of daring, perhaps even derring-do.

And yet Gaiman did not invent her, after all. As I suspected, she is a figure of both history and legend.

Virginia Dare was indeed the first person of English descent to be born in the New World. It was during her infancy that the Roanoke colony mysteriously disappeared. Here the legends take over. It is speculated that the surviving Roanoke colonists lived among the Indians, adopting their ways. The legend is that Virginia grew into a young woman, but that an Indian whom she rejected as a lover cast a spell on her, transforming her into a white deer. (“Dare” does sound much like “deer.”)

In Gaiman’s 1602 Rojahz ““ the time-traveling Captain America ““ saved the Roanoke colonists from death by starvation and became Virginia Dare’s protector. In Gaiman’s version, Virginia was able to shapeshift from her childhood, and not just into a white deer, but into many different animals.

According to his interview, Gaiman had assumed that Virginia Dare was widely known in America. As it turns out, the vast majority of 1602‘s readers had never heard of her. Perhaps this should be no surprise. I had heard of the mysterious disappearance of the Roanoke colony, but Americans prefer always to look on the bright side of life, and of their history. The unsolved disappearance, and probable death, of the first person born in England’s American colonies, when she was still a baby, is too sad a story. The popular story of early 1600s Virginia that every American knows is the more optimistic saga of Pocahontas saving the life of Captain John Smith. (It’s even now part of the canon of Disney animated features.) A little later, in the 1620s, is another famous tale, that of the Pilgrims celebrating the first Thanksgiving with the Indians.

In each case, this is a story of Native Americans saving colonists from death (by beheading or starvation), of the English colonists living in harmony with the Indians (thereby foreshadowing the American ideal of a peaceful multiracial society), and of an early American colony overcoming hardships and flourishing. Americans believe in success stories; they dislike tragedies like the death of Virginia Dare. (Gaiman’s own story, with Rojahz leading the Indians in helping the people of Roanoke survive, fits into the same pattern as the Pocahontas and Thanksgiving tales.)

The fact that Virginia Dare is a character in actual history and in American folk mythology contradicts nothing I’ve written in past columns about the role she plays in 1602. One source I found on the Internet declares that “The name Virginia Dare came to symbolize wholesomeness and purity”; in 1602 she does as well. She is innocence, unspoiled nature, a young girl representing the fertility of a new land, and liberty and America symbolized by a woman. She is also an analogue to Shakespeare’s Miranda, the heroine of The Tempest, who represents all of these things as well (possibly even America, since it is speculated that The Tempest was inspired by reports of voyages to the New World). As an apparent mutant, she is also the first American-born superheroine. And she also looks like Peter Parker’s first true love, Gwen Stacy, an icon of 1960s comics.

THE PURPLE PREZ

As for the dystopian future America from which the 1602 Cap was banished, Gaiman has denied that the “President for Life” pictured on the posters in issue 8 was intended as a caricature of George W. Bush. In fact, Gaiman does not see the resemblance between them. Well, many readers, including myself, do: the short hair, the beady eyes, the bland smile bordering on a smirk, all familiar from political cartoons. Gaiman may not have intended the President to be George W. Bush, but I wonder if artist Andy Kubert did.

The true identity of the President for Life should have been obvious from what seemed the rather odd, stylized coloring of the posters: this is Daredevil’s longtime adversary Zebediah Killgrave, the Purple Man, whose skin remains purple, but whose purple hair has turned white with age. The Purple Man has the power to make people obey his verbal commands. It was eventually explained that Killgrave’s power works through pheromones, chemicals that his body gives off, so his victims have to be in his physical proximity to fall under his control. It would seem that in 1602‘s alternate future, which Gaiman specifies in the interview as 2061, Killgrave has found a way to extend his power over the entire country.

I’m grateful that Gaiman was not engaging in the kind of superficial political thinking that labels Bush as a potential tyrant. I am nonetheless disappointed that the President turns out to be the Purple Man. For one thing, Killgrave is too small-time a villain. Frank Miller even once did a story that made him into a semi-comedic figure, who did not need to conquer the world because he could have anything he wanted just by asking for it. In the graphic novel Emperor Doom, Killgrave was merely the pawn in the world conquest scheme of Doctor Doom, a genuine major league Marvel villain.

But even if we follow a more malevolent interpretation of Killgrave’s character, he still seems inappropriate in this context. For Captain America and the other super heroes, America’s transformation into a despotism is a tragedy. It doesn’t seem so serious if the nation has simply been mesmerized by the Purple Man. Why would a revolution even be necessary? Just capture or kill Killgrave, and everyone would revert to good democratic Americans. Hitler is not as frightening as the fact that millions of Germans willingly followed him. It has been said more than once that it might make little difference is Osama bin Laden is captured or killed; the real threat is the many terrorists who have been inspired by him and would carry on in his absence. Cap’s sorrow over losing “his” America only carries the proper emotional weight if America willingly embraced tyranny. If the Purple Man is to blame, why is Rojhaz so obsessed with making sure that the America of 1602 turns out differently? All he would have to do is find a way back to the 20th/21st century to keep Killgrave from undergoing the accident that mutated him.

Art works in mysterious ways. It is always important and interesting to know what the creator of a work of art intended. Yet critics and scholars know that the creator is not necessarily the best interpreter of his or her own work. For one thing, the artwork may express subconscious intents of which the creator himself is unaware.

For another, the artwork is a creation that has an existence independent of its creator. If the critic or member of the audience finds a pattern in the artwork that functions well in the context of the overall work, then even if the creator did not intend it, that pattern nonetheless exist. Gaiman and Kubert may not have meant for the President for life to look like President Bush, yet if their readers think he is Bush, and that notion works in the context of the 1602 story, then it’s still a reasonable, valid interpretation.

Here’s another example. In his interview, Jason Pomerantz asks Neil Gaiman if the 1602 characters’ crises of conscience had anything to do with his decision to set his story in the seventeenth century, “a time when notions of individual conscience and political liberty first began to dominate the world stage.” Gaiman replies, “I don’t honestly think so.”

But the story is indeed set in the early 17th century, and, whatever the author’s intentions, I think it is reasonable to see links between the moral and intellectual issues of 1602 and those of the actual period.

Only several days ago as I write this, I happened to see the 1975 film of Bertold Brecht’s play Galileo, and was struck by the unintended parallels between it and 1602. Like Gaiman’s Sir Reed Richards, Galileo Galilei was a scientific genius living in the early 17th century. Like Gaiman’s Reed, Brecht’s Galileo believed that man should use his intellectual abilities to study and learn about the universe. As in 1602, the Church is presented as an institution that maintains its power by suppressing knowledge. Donal in 1602 fears that if the world knew that Thor existed, the Catholic Church, which asserts there is only one God, would fall. In Brecht’s play, Galileo’s insistence that the Earth revolves around the sun contradicts the Church’s literal interpretation of the Bible. Believing that Galileo’s work undercuts the Church’s authority, the Inquisition (which plays a sinister role in 1602) forces him to recant his views.

Was Gaiman subconsciously remembering Galileo’s real life history? Has he ever read Brecht’s play? It could be totally coincidental that Brecht and Gaiman address similar themes in works set in the same time period. But that doesn’t mean a critic like myself isn’t justified in pointing out the parallels between the two works.

And here’s the biggest coincidental resemblance between Galileo and 1602: Galileo’s daughter is named (believe it or not) Virginia.

GETHSEMENE

Let’s return to the final issue of 1602 where we left off last time, at the halfway point. Peter Parquagh, the 1602 counterpart to Peter Parker, has arrived on Roanoke Island, having been compelled by King James I to join his aide, David Banner, in an expedition to find and assassinate England’s former spymaster Sir Nicholas Fury.

Peter enters singing the traditional English song “Greensleeves,” including lines about being wrongly “cast… off” by his beloved and how he was “delighting in your company.” Peter had not been “cast off” by Virginia, but this song suggests how he feels about her and cues the reader to hope they will be reunited.

Peter, shocked, discovers the corpses of the other members of his party (except for Banner), and then finds Fury cleaning his blade: he has killed them all. This is justifiable, since they were out to kill him. (It could be argued, though, that Fury’s super-powered allies could have captured the assassins without killing them.)

Fury bids Peter, “Come over here, lad. I’ll not harm you.” Peter cautiously keeps his distance: he will not trust Fury. Nor will he tell Fury where Banner is: it is not that Peter is loyal to Banner and James, but more likely that Peter abhors killing anyone.

This scene turns on the question of whether Fury can be trusted. He says he will not harm Peter, but he also notes that Peter “crossed the Atlantic to kill me.” Fury seems to hold no grudge against him for this: “it’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Presumably Fury knows Peter well enough to realize that James must have pressured him into joining these assassins. In fact, Fury even appears to blame himself for what happened to Peter, saying it was “Too late the day I came and took you to London” from his uncle and aunt’s home.

Note too that Fury keeps his back to Peter in this scene. One might consider this a sign of trust. Peter is wielding a blade, but Fury believes Peter will not use it against him.

Then again, we soon see in another panel that in cleaning the blade Fury allows it to serve as a mirror, and he is indeed watching Peter. So is Fury simply being cautious or is he setting a trap?

One of 1602‘s themes is that of fathers and children, real or surrogate. Virginia has two fathers: her actual father Ananias, and her symbolic father protector Rojahz. Fury and Peter are figuratively father and son as well: Fury has been Peter’s mentor through the series.

As Peter realizes, Fury “heard me coming” and could easily have killed him, but didn’t. Now Peter asks why. Fury explains “I saw myself in you, I think” as looks into his blade, which reflects both Peter and the eyepatch covering his dead eye. This image links the two men together. It may further symbolize the idea that Fury is figuratively “dead,” in the sense that his life has reached a dead end, like his “dead” eye, while young, idealistic Peter represents life. (Fury even says “I’ll never forget the first day I clapped eyes on you, Peter,” which may suggest Fury still had sight in both eyes when they first met. If so, then perhaps this links Peter to happier times in Fury’s life.)

“I saw myself in you” means that Fury regards Peter as his other self, an alternate version of himself. Fury points out that they have similar backgrounds, both being orphans. Now, in Marvel continuity, the “real” Nick Fury was not an orphan: his father died when Nick was a child, but he was raised by his mother. Perhaps this is one reason why the 1602 Nicholas Fury seems a darker soul than his present day counterpart.

Of course, it’s no surprise that there is a similarity between Fury and Peter in that both of their present day counterparts were co-created by the same man, Stan Lee.

Fury found success through his skills as a soldier. He refers to fighting in “Open warfare, and secret wars.” That may refer to the present day Nick Fury’s two series, Sgt. Fury, set in World War II, and Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, which places him in the shadowy world of spies and subversive organizations. I suppose it could even be a reference to Marvel’s Secret Wars series, in which Fury did not actually take part.

Fury reminisces that he received “a fine house, and beautiful gardens” and was knighted by the Queen for his battlefield successes. He then notes simply, “James’ll have given my house to one of his favourites by now.” (You notice the British spellings throughout, a nice touch for this series that transposes modern American heroes to 17th century England.)

Here is a man who was rewarded by the previous regime, and given great status. And now, with a change of rulers, his wealth and position are both gone, and he is left with nothing. Surely anyone who prospered by loyally working for a company for years, only to be let go after a change in once the company fell into different hands can identify with Fury’s fate. Even the queen and the vision of government she represented are no more.

It is no wonder if, perhaps, the Fury of 1602 wonders if his life had any meaning or value at all.

Fury recalls that the Queen “laughed at me” because he had no interests beyond warfare. “What I did was what I was.” His life suffered from lack of balance; now that his career as a soldier and spymaster has ended, he has nothing to fall back on for work or for emotional sustenance. “And now. . .nothing I do matters. Everything I did. . .” and his voice trails off, as if it is too painful to continue voicing his despair.

Fury shifts to a related theme: “There’s blood on my hands, boy.”

Even his past achievements are morally tainted.

Fury then invokes the religious faith that he and Sir Richard Reed (counterpart to the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards) share: “Reed says that God made a thousand, thousand worlds, each like this one, only different.” Reed has intuited the principle of Marvel’s alternate realities, in which an individual can make a fateful decision that results in divergent timelines: in one timeline he chose a particular path, but in the other he made a different choice. Fury continues, ” I hope there’s only one if them in which I choose to walk another path. But I fear that in any universe my path will be marked with blood.”

This reminds me of the debate in The Dark Knight Strikes Again over determinism vs. free will. Fury despairs that violence is so ingrained in his personality that he could never have led a different path.

Notice that Fury’s situation parallels Cap’s: each served a government that has in effect been supplanted by another. Cap says he lost “his” America; Fury has lost “his” England. But while Cap battles on by protecting Virginia (the girl and the colony), Fury is giving up the fight.

Fury makes this clear: “Reed seeks to save the world. I no longer care if it lives or dies.”

Nor does he care about his own life: he tells Peter to “slit my throat” if he so wishes, and “Take my head back to James.” This is not simply death but surrender to his political enemy.

Now one might ask why Fury killed James’s assassins if he doesn’t care if he lives or dies. But perhaps the point is that he will not save his own life at the price of killing Peter, his figurative son and better self. Or perhaps it was not until Fury opened up his emotions in this long soliloquy that he was overcome by this suicidal despair. “I’ll not fight. I’m done,” Fury says, lowering his head as if for the executioner’s axe. Saying “I’m done” is like pronouncing himself dead.

And then Fury looks about and, surprised, finds that Peter is gone.

Fury smiles triumphantly.

Now, what does that mean? A cynical interpretation would be that Fury was just putting on an act, trying to trick Peter into giving up the idea of killing him. Fury, as we see elsewhere in this issue, is fully capable of lying and manipulating others.

But, of course, Fury could have killed Peter at any time during this scene: this studious young boy, even armed, is no match for this old soldier.

I prefer a more positive, optimistic interpretation. Fury regards Peter as another version of himself. But whereas Fury worried that “in any universe my path will be marked with blood,” Peter has just demonstrated that he can make a different choice. Peter, representing a new generation, need not walk the same bloody path that his “father”/mentor did. (To put it another way, Peter is to Fury as Luke is to Darth Vader.) In fact, if Peter, Fury’s other self, can turn away from violence, then perhaps Fury now feels that he himself is capable of better things.

In short, Fury is smiling, perhaps even laughing, with new hope. To continue the religious theme, this scene was Fury’s Garden of Gethsemene, during which he underwent both spiritual “death” and spiritual rebirth.

And now Fury has a reason to try to save the world: to save it for his “son” Peter, and the new generation he represents, some of whom, this series shows, will form the new nation of America. Fury will fight to save Peter just as Rojahz fights to protect his “daughter” Virginia, who symbolizes America.

Returning to The Tempest analogy, in that play Prospero administers a test to young Ferdinand to determine if he will be a proper husband for his daughter Miranda. Fury, intentionally or not, just posed a test to Peter, who passed with the proverbial flying colors.

This scene could even be a comment on kid sidekicks in superhero comics. Batman sees himself in Robin ““ both were orphaned by criminals ““ just as Fury sees himself in Peter. Like Batman with Robin, Fury has drawn Peter into his own line of work. But Batman presumably does not really want Robin to be as driven and unhappy as he is (a theme that Frank Miller makes clear in the Dark Knight books), just as Fury does not wish Peter to suffer through the same kind of life he led.

THE BETRAYAL

The scene shifts back to London, where King James gets his comeuppance at the hands of Matthew, 1602‘s counterpart to Daredevil.

Here, Matthew acts very much in the mode of Frank Miller’s version of Daredevil, though he retains a wittiness reminiscent of Stan Lee’s dialogue for the character. Matthew calls himself “a devil in the dark,” evoking the idea of Daredevil as a symbolic “devil” or shadow figure who nonetheless serves the cause of good. Being a “devil” makes Matthew an outcast from the religious establishment (which, in England, is headed by James), but he paradoxically is a genuinely moral man. (He is blind justice, in fact.)

Matthew makes it clear that he will kill James if he harms Fury. Those who may doubt Fury’s moral importance in this issue should take note: three different heroic characters act to save Fury’s life. Peter is the first of these, and Matthew is the second. The fact that they think so highly of Fury may signal his moral value to the readers.

Matthew’s warning to James to leave Ireland alone is a good bit, referring not only to England’s subsequent oppression of Ireland (which perhaps will not happen in the 1602 timeline) and Matthew/Daredevil’s own Irish background.

Now, by 1602‘s end Fury will have mysteriously disappeared. I wonder if Matthew will presume that James is responsible and return to take vengeance. (Mind you, Matthew has basically threatened to assassinate James, so here 1602 borders dangerously on what I recently dubbed the Authoritarian School of superhero stories, in which superheroes impose their will on society and government. And killing James might well plunge Britain into civil war, which his accession had prevented. Still, in this story’s context it’s satisfying to see James get a good, deserved scare after the horror he has perpetrated.)

In the next scene Carlos Javier (1602‘s version of the X-Men’s Charles Xavier) and Enrico, the former Grand Inquisitor (1602‘s Magneto) hold a meeting that involves mistrust and misapprehension. Enrico realizes that Javier could easily have killed him by having Iceman imprison his ship in solid ice. (Similarly, Fury and Peter each could have killed the other but chose not to.) But Enrico interprets Javier’s act of mercy as merely a tactical maneuver: “You’ve come back. . .to parley. You need something.” Javier does indeed need Enrico’s help. But Enrico seems unwilling to accept that Javier’s real reason for sparing Enrico’s life, as we saw earlier, is that Javier simply believes killing is wrong.

Javier asks Enrico if he wishes to remove his helmet. The mistrustful Enrico refuses, since the helmet protects his mind from being psychically manipulated by Xavier’s. Javier asks, “Do you believe I could do that?” and Enrico changes the subject, unwilling to debate a question whose answer he finds obvious. Is it? The 1602 Javier does not seem the sort of person to alter a former friend’s thoughts, but Xavier has twice tampered with Magneto’s mind in modern X-Men continuity.

One might say that in those cases Xavier committed an evil act in the service of good. Here, in 1602, Javier agrees to Enrico’s unstated terms to save the world. Xavier must make a moral compromise with evil, thereby incorporating shadow forces onto the heroes’ side, to defeat a greater evil. As Enrico states, Javier must do this “Because the alternative is worse.”

Henry, the counterpart to the X-Men’s Beast, calls Enrico a “monster,” but Javier retorts, “There are no monsters, Henry. Surely you have learned that by now.” Thus Javier gently reminds Henry that they and other mutants are also unjustly labeled as monsters. Henry is talking not about the fact that Enrico is a mutant but about Enrico’s morality: he is a murderer many times over. But Javier is taking the noble position that no person is wholly evil. Javier is extending more trust to Enrico than Enrico does towards him.

Next the scene shifts to Donal, the aged monk who has used an enchanted walking stick to transform himself into the Norse god Thor. But Donal believes that the Church forbids recognizing the existence of other gods. Though Reed needs Thor’s powers to save the cosmos, Donal refuses to change again. (Oddly, no one seems to consider the question whether somebody else could change into Thor by using the walking stick.)

“Though God Himself demanded it, I will not,” Donal thunders. In phrasing his refusal that way Donal sets his own will above that of God. By the precepts of Donal’s own religion, that is a sin.

Like Fury and Rojahz, Donal has also seen his world figuratively collapse. He dedicated his life to his religious faith, and yet by transforming into Thor, he has gained proof that his worldview was incorrect, and that there are other gods. His earlier drunken ramblings about the collapse of his worldview is a more comedic counterpart to Fury’s soliloquy of despair.

Another theme of 1602 is its stand against moral absolutism. The series criticizes people who adhere so vehemently to a rigid system of moral precepts that they cannot adapt their views to changing circumstances and new information. The absolutists thereby violate genuine morality by clinging to their outmoded, even destructive systems of thinking. Other absolutists in the series include Magneto, who Javier observed is like a man who only knows one tune to play on his lute; the Inquisition and James, who destroy those who disagree with them.

So here Donal refuses to commit what he considers to be a mortal sin, even though it is necessary to save the entire universe. By saying he would not transform into Thor even if “God Himself demanded it,” Donal even indicates that part of him may recognize that true morality requires him to change his views, and to change into Thor as well.

It soon becomes clear that what really bothers Donal is not what God’s attitude towards Thor may be. “The price is I spend every waking moment remembering what it was like to be him,” Donal says. He asks, “do you think if I were to become him again, that I would ever let myself change back into this?”

Here Gaiman is examining one of the basic conventions of the superhero genre, the secret identity. In his book The Great Comic Book Heroes, Jules Feiffer asks why Superman would want to lead an everyday life as the powerless, human Clark Kent, and postulates that by doing so Superman may be masochistically punishing himself. Donal, a frail, elderly man, is torn between the lure of sharing in Thor’s power, youth and vitality and his ascetic sense that it is sinful to embrace such physical pleasures. To transform back into Thor would be to change his identity in more ways than one.

It is Susan, the Invisible Woman, who finds the key to Donal’s conundrum. Her ghostly presence stands to the side of Reed; if he represents a male form of intellect, then she, perhaps, represents its feminine counterpart. Susan asks Donal if Thor is “wiser” than he. This is a nice touch. For one thing, it indicates that superhuman status may lie in intellect as well as in physical power. (Reed, Strange, and Javier are primarily cerebral heroes.) Donal rejects physical pleasures, but wisdom is a more spiritual quality.

“You were listening to me, weren’t you?” asks Donal, and Susan replies, “I told you I was,” as they join hands in agreement. Susan’s role reminds me of that of a good psychotherapist, who provides a sounding board for her patient and makes perceptive observations. Donal transforms back into Thor, who tells her, “You are wiser than all of them, Susan Storm.” The idea of female wisdom was raised earlier by Clea, but here the theme has returned in a more serious context. Susan humbly denies Thor’s praise, saying, “No, I just listened when he spoke,” thus reiterating her psychiatrist role. Fury was the mentor of Peter, and Javier the mentor of the X-Men’s counterparts; Susan is a different kind of mentor and spiritual guide.

Earlier in this issue Fury had forced the villagers to join together with the superheroes under his leadership. Now, however, we see the villagers and superheroes joined together at a strategy meeting headed by Reed. This seems to be much more of a genuine community, people working together towards a common goal.

Fury is among them. Whereas earlier, in his despair, he said he did not care if the world survived, now he is working to save it, and doing so as a subordinate to Reed.

The problem that Reed and his allies face is that all of reality is about to be obliterated by a disruption of the timestream. That disruption was created when Captain America was sent back in time from a dystopian America of the mid-21st century. In 1602 Captain America has adopted the identity of the Indian Rojahz. The only way to prevent the oncoming apocalypse is to send Cap/Rojahz back to his own time through the temporal rift.

It is Fury who notices who is missing from the gathering: Rojhaz himself. Fury seeks out Virginia to see if she knows where Rojhaz is. Though Fury addresses her rudely (“Hey! Girl! You!”), he ends up kneeling before her. In part this is because Virginia is so short. But I wonder if it also signifies that Virginia is the figurative successor to the person whom Fury served before, Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.

Fury tells Virginia that “Without him,” Rojahz, “your colony is dead. So is your father. And the world.” This is all true. Fury swears “in England’s name,” not to “hurt” him. “I give you my word, Virginia. The word of a gentleman.” And these will prove to be lies.

It is possible that Fury means what he says when he makes these promises to Virginia. But it is more likely that Fury is well aware that he will use violence if he deems it necessary.

Fury swears in England’s name. Yet Fury’s England, the England of Elizabeth I, no longer exists. Fury says “my word” is “the word of a gentleman.” But Fury was not born a gentleman, and James has apparently deprived him of the status that Elizabeth granted him. So Fury’s promises are not what they seem on the surface.

How does Fury’s “persuasion scene” with Virginia compare with his earlier “persuasion” scene with Peter? Was Fury playing the role of a trickster in both scenes? If Fury voiced his true feelings in the scene with Peter, is it possible that those sincere emotions lie beneath the surface deceits in this scene with Virginia?

Now Virginia serves as Fury’s guide, transforming into a white dog to track down Rojhaz. So, it seems, Virginia is not limited to transforming into animals native to America; otherwise, she would have become a wolf. Remember that in the early issues Fury refused to believe in Dr. Strange’s powers. Although this is not emphasized, Virginia’s transformation is yet more proof for Fury that the paranormal exists.

Fury finds Rojhaz, who, in another fine stroke, now wears warpaint that mimics the mask of Captain America. The fact that it is warpaint also signals that Cap is in a mood to confront, not to cooperate.

Cap refuses to return to the future, because he insists on remaining to protect the nascent America. “They need me,” he declares. “We don’t have to make the same mistakes again. we’re here at the birth of a nation. . .of a dream.” I suppose since Captain America does not seem to age, it is possible that Rojhaz could continue to watch over this new America for decades, perhaps even centuries to come.

Fury points out that “If you don’t return to your own time, there won’t be anything,” but Rojahz is not persuaded. This seems out of character for Captain America. After all, after coming out of suspended animation in Avengers #4, Cap has borne witness to the super-science of Marvel-Earth and joined with other heroes in saving the planet from cosmic perils. He should therefore recognize that the threat to the universe that Strange and Reed foresee is a genuine possibility. It’s true that Rojahz does not remember everything from the future, so perhaps he does not recall the cosmic threats he faced. Still, he knows that time travel is possible, so why can’t he believe that his journey through the timestream imperils the world?

Just as Fury was driven to despair by losing “his” version of England, so Cap is now obsessed having lost “his” version of America in his own time. So Cap/Rojahz is adamant about remaining in Roanoke to protect this new America. He has become yet another of 1602‘s moral absolutists, unwilling to adapt to a new reality.

It seems to me that Captain America would recognize the necessity of sacrificing himself to prevent his beloved America from being obliterated from existence throughout time. Indeed, one of the themes of the Captain America series from the Silver Age onward has been Cap’s steadfast loyalty to his American ideals while adapting to times very different from those of World War II America. Captain America does not become stuck in outmoded ways. I understand the role that Rojahz’s refusal to cooperate with Fury plays thematically in 1602; I am not persuaded that the character of Captain America would act this way.

There follows Fury’s third persuasion scene in this issue. Rojhaz has not agreed to go back. Fury asks him to come down and discuss the matter and says, “I won’t hurt you.” This is the same promise about Rojhaz that he made to Virginia, who is watching in dog form.

Fury asks Rojhaz if the Fury he knew in his own time “. . .would that other Nicholas Fury betray you? Would he lie to you?” Moved by the memory of his friendship with the other Fury, Captain America agrees to “come down,” presumably to talk; this is not a promise to go back.

Extending his hand, Fury calls Rojhaz “Good man,” as indeed Captain America is. Sir Nicholas Fury, though, has a somewhat different moral code. “You know,” he begins (with an anachronistic turn of phrase), “that other Nick Fury you knew,” and then Fury strikes Cap down with a rock: “I’m not him.”

Well, I’d commented in an earlier column that a Nicholas Fury who would condone the use of torture is not like the present-day Nick. The 1602 version grew up in a harsher time and place than Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal America.

But I think it altogether possible that, with the fate of the world at stake, “our” Nick Fury would also lie and betray a friend to save the planet. Fury could have tried to persuade Rojhaz, but Fury presumably thought he could not take the chance Rojhaz could not be convinced. And, unless he took him by surprise, Fury could not overpower Cap.

This scene, in which Fury strikes Captain America down, is the most ambiguous in the entire series. Did Fury kill Rojahz?

Or merely render him unconscious? (Since this is the Captain America of an alternate future, his fate dies not affect the Captain America of the present day.) Rojahz never revives in the course of this issue, so there is no proof one way or the other.

Would sending Captain America back to the future work in preventing the disaster if Cap was dead? If Cap is dead, does this mean that another living person must to be sent forward in time with him?

Significantly, Virginia, in the form of the white hound, watches as Fury overcomes Rojhaz, her protector and father figure. She does not try to stop Fury, and she follows him as he carries Rojhaz towards the temporal rift.

Perhaps Virginia’s reaction (or lack of it, as in Sherlock Holmes’s case of the dog that did not bark) indicates that Rojahz is not dead.

Whether he is dead or not, Virginia apparently approves of what Fury has done. She adapts to the fact that it is more important to prevent the approaching catastrophe than to allow Rojahz to remain in 1602, despite her personal connection with him. (Virginia overheard at least part of Reed’s earlier discussion about closing the temporal rift.) Perhaps, in a way, Fury has even taken over as Virginia Dare’s ““ and Roanoke’s ““ new protector.
THE SACRIFICE

As Fury carries his weighty burden (like a cross?) towards the rift, as a small, silhouetted dinosaur watches from a tree (like a vulture?), Banner sights Fury in his telescope (a new invention at that time) and aims his crossbow. “It’s our time,” Banner grimly declares, as if he and the repressive forces he represents are about to take control of the course of destiny.

Remember that in the Hulk’s origin story, Bruce Banner, through creating the gamma bomb, also dealt in meting out death from afar.

Suddenly Virginia attacks Banner, preventing him from slaying Fury. Keep in mind that Virginia did not similarly attack Fury to prevent him from overcoming (even killing?) Rojhaz. Thus Virginia becomes the third person in this issue to protect Fury, following Peter and Matthew. Her willingness to save Fury’s life signals her acceptance of Fury’s actions.

In turn Peter, who seems to recognize Virginia in canine form, disobeys Banner’s command to kill the dog so that he can still “get a clean shot at Fury.” Peter will not harm Virginia, and once again he has spared Fury’s life. Since Matthew, Peter and even Virginia, a symbol of America, all seek to protect Fury, perhaps this is Gaiman’s way of signaling us that Fury is indeed a hero of this story. To prevent a far greater evil, Javier had to make a deal with the “devil,” Enrico, Donal had to “sin” by turning back into Thor, and Fury had to deceive and harm (even kill?) a “good man” who trusted him.

In the course of this last scene the colors grow pale and give way to shades of gray, as if 1602 had changed from a color movie into a black and white film. Banner observes that “The light is so strange. . .I think a storm is coming.” Or, if you prefer, a tempest. It is also the approaching end of the world.

As Fury carries Rojahz to the site of the rift, the other heroes wait behind a barrier of rocks, which suggests the protective trench for the gamma bomb test in the Hulk’s origin. Fury calls to them to “Make it ““ happen”: sending Rojahz back through time and sealing the rift.

Javier says “it would mean Fury’s death” were he to remain when Rojhaz is sent back through the “gate” in time. But Clea angrily retorts, “Were you not listening? This is what he wants.” It is she who gives the order to proceed. Is this another sign of women’s wisdom, or rather of the otherdimensional Clea’s disdain for human lives?

Does Fury know that the temporal rift might kill him? If it doesn’t, then it will send him to an alien future. Perhaps even though Fury again cares about saving the world, he no longer cares about his own life. Just like Strange, he is sacrificing himself for others; remember, the series began with the two of them in conversation. Perhaps Fury is even attempting to expiate his life of bloodshed through sacrificing himself.

The 1602 Fury fits the archetype of the flawed hero who ensures his people will achieve the Promised Land but cannot go there himself. Think of Moses, of course, or Sydney Carton in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. A fine, specifically American example is Ethan Edwards, the character whom John Wayne plays in John Ford’s epic Western,. The Searchers, a violent loner who aids a peaceful community of which he can never truly be a part. (In the famous concluding shot of The Searchers, Wayne stands in a portal whose door swings shut, and, by coincidence, the 1602 Fury is also last seen in a portal that opens and then closes. Chris Claremont cites The Searchers as an influence on his characterization of Wolverine in an interview I did with him for Back Issue #4.)

Fury carries Cap into the great glowing loop that signifies the temporal rift. The loop is part of the symbol of infinity, and hence a sign of the universe. It’s even as if Fury and Captain America are somehow achieving transcendence, entering into a higher realm. Fury holds Rojahz’s body up, as if offering him ““ and himself ““ as a sacrifice to the forces governing the universe.

But we are also to think of the glowing rift as an atomic explosion. Banner pushes Peter down to save his life from the unleashed energies, thereby reenacting the critical moment in the Hulk’s origin story, in which Bruce Banner pushes Rick Jones into the safety of the trench, only to be exposed himself to the radiation of the gamma bomb.

In the Hulk’s origin, Bruce Banner had aligned himself with the military to creating a weapon of mass destruction; he showed no moral qualms whatsoever about this. This is comparable to the 1602 Banner, who is the willing aide to the malevolent King James and has no qualms about assassinating Fury. What finally awakens Bruce Banner’s conscience is seeing the unwary Rick Jones on the gamma bomb test site; Banner then risks his life to save Jones, only to fall victim to his own evil creation, the gamma bomb’s radiation. Similarly, 1602‘s Banner suddenly turns hero to save Peter. (And hence Peter Parquagh is the 1602 counterpart to both Spider-Man and Rick Jones.)

There is “the sound of a universe screaming in pain, the sound of a world dying. And after that, silence” and a black panel: a universe has died. The “pain” and blinding flash of light echo Cap’s memories of his own transition to 1602, but now on a scale that the “noise” “fills the world.”

THE RESURRECTION

But the 1602 timeline died so that the “true” time-space continuum would be “reborn” and restored. The Watcher states that “I feel time reconfigure itself.” This is the Campbellian point of death and resurrection extended to cover an entire universe, indeed, all of creation.

He also singles out the fate of the Roanoke colonists. In the “true” timeline, without Rojhaz to aid them, most of them died of starvation.

The Watcher tells us that the ultimate fate of Virginia Dare is the same as in the legend: she was killed in the form of a white deer. And so the people of the Roanoke colony died that “everything else may exist.”

The Watcher too feels he has engaged in moral compromise to do what is right. “Everything I did, I did for good reason. And yet. . .If this is right, why do I feel so. . .empty?” Uatu and his fellow Watchers found they could not be absolutists, either. Had they failed to make an exception to their rule of noninterference, all of reality would have been obliterated.

Not until recently, reading the America’s Best Comics paperback’s Little Nemo parody with Promethea visiting worlds in the solar system, did I realize that the Watcher is Lee and Kirby’s version of the Man in the Moon! (This only took me decades to figure out.)

Uatu wonders if he had not interfered if the heroes could have mended time themselves, just as readers may wonder if Fury could have persuaded Cap to go back willingly.

A Watcher from his race’s High Tribunal appears as a godlike figure, looming over Uatu just as Uatu towers over human beings. Their High Tribunal’s Watcher says that Uatu feels “shame” for violating their race’s vow of nonintervention, and that the Tribunal feel both “shamed by you” and “proud of you.”

This suggests to me that to violate one moral law to serve a higher purpose does not entirely excuse the violation. It was necessary for Uatu to intervene to prevent reality’s destruction, but that does not mean that he does not regret violating his sacred oath. The High Tribunal Watcher instructs Uatu to feel both “shame” and “triumph.” So, similarly, we learn in a few pages that Donal is “screaming” within Thor. And Fury’s betrayal of Rojahz was still wrong, even if it was necessary to save the cosmos. These are all cases of necessary, but regrettable evils, undertaken to prevent greater evils.

Note that the Watcher from the High Tribunal addresses Uatu as “Ikor’s child.” So the theme of father and child turns up again. We might postulate that the High Tribunal Watcher is a member of Ikor’s generation, and so he is symbolically conveying the approval of the father’s generation to the son.

This is a version of what Joseph Campbell calls the scene of the recognition of the hero, wherein Uatu’s contribution to saving the cosmos is recognized and rewarded. Uatu is presented with a “gift.” The watcher from the High Tribunal tells him, “We have crafted it from the fringes of Alternity.” This reminds me of the late Mark Gruenwald’s fanzine “Omniverse” (on which I was a writer and assistant editor), which dealt primarily with alternate realities and timelines as they are depicted in comics. Mark published “Omniverse” through his own company, Alternity Enterprises. (Were “Omniverse” still being published, it would surely devote an article to 1602.)

Uatu’s gift turns out to be the 1602 cosmos, now in the form of a “pocket universe.” And so the 1602 universe, and its analogues to present day Marvel characters, has likewise undergone death and resurrection. In a sense, those characters and their world are thus also being recognized as heroes of this story. And they have gained a new, protective father figure: Uatu himself, who, in contrast with his usual emotionless demeanor, says he will carry this universe “in my heart.”

As Uatu watches his gift, we move from an all-black panel to one showing Earth, then the coast of Virginia, and finally focuses in on Banner and Peter, as if the 1602 world had returned to life from oblivion before our eyes.

The caption over the panel of Banner and Peter, “Nothing has changed. . . .” seemingly spoken by Banner, is ironic, for both of them will soon indeed change. I wonder if, by saving Peter’s life, Banner has become his new father figure.

Reed wonders aloud how they would ever know if their universe had ended and a new universe had taken its place, and Clea says philosophers may debate this till the end of time. It’s true. We are aware of existing in our own timeline. Is it possible that an event at some point in the future, or past, could somehow obliterate the entire time-space continuum, past, present, and future, including the moment we are now experiencing? How could that be possible. (“Omniverse” existed to unravel such conundrums. Now if only someone would make it possible for us to revive it.)

Clea reiterates about Strange, “He died that worlds might live,” and I once again think of Christ imagery, even if Strange was beheaded rather than crucified.

There is a wonderful bit with Clea going “home” through a portal into a recognizably Ditkoesque surreal universe. It’s enough to make me wonder if the mystical dimensions in Steve Ditko’s Marvel work helped inspire Gaiman’s creation of the Dreaming.

Before leaving, Thor again salutes Susan Storm’s wisdom, so this seems to be a point that Gaiman wants emphasized.

Perhaps because they worked together in saving the universe, Enrico’s attitude towards Javier has changed for the better. Enrico’s terms for cooperating with Javier prove to be as “reasonable” as he promised. More significantly, Enrico doffs his protective helmet, demonstrating his trust that Javier will not tamper with his thoughts. Indeed, Enrico goes farther and entrusts Javier with teaching his children, Wanda and Petros. Once again, the Neo-Silver theme of fathers and children thus reemerges. As in the 1960s, Wanda and Pietro/Petrus are unaware that Magneto is their father. Actually, neither Magneto nor anyone else knew this in the Silver Age; their relationship was first hinted at in 1979.

Next we are shown Reed and the (still invisible) Susan standing together, his hand on her shoulder, in an image of their love.

Reed worries, “But I fear the creation that has been restored is not the same as the one that would have been.” Susan says, “We gave Rojhaz back to the Future. . . .” and Reed responds, “We also gave them Fury.”

Now, what might this exchange imply? For one thing, it suggests that Rojhaz/Captain America is still alive. Moreover, despite Javier’s contention that Fury would die in the rift, Reed seems to believe that Fury survived and traveled to the future, as well.

But how would they know? They saw Rojahz’s unmoving body: was he alive or dead? They cannot see into the future to know if Fury survived, although since Captain America survived the original time trip, one may presume that the passage through the rift is not lethal. Perhaps Reed and Susan’s conversation is Gaiman’s means of signaling the reader that he intends that Cap and Fury are still alive.

One might wonder if the balance in the time-space continuum has truly been restored. One person, Captain America, was sent to 1602, but two people were sent forward in time. This is probably not worth worrying about: we ourselves have seen that the Marvel Universe has been restored, and the Watchers, who should know whether or not the balance is restored, seem satisfied there is no further danger.

Is Reed’s worrying meant to sound an ominous note? Perhaps it depends on how the reader regards Fury. Considering his capacity for treachery and violence, does he present a danger to the future? I regard his actions in this issue as ultimately heroic, though if he had killed Cap, they would earn shame as well as triumph, to use the Watchers’ terms. Or is Reed merely being the careful scientist, simply observing that things will be different now that Fury has been displaced from their time into another, without making a moral judgment. In fact, Reed might even be regretting the loss of a friend and ally: his own life will be different because Fury is gone.

Since the 1602 universe still exists at the series’ end, there could be more 1602 stories someday. It’s too bad that Strange, Jean and Doom were all killed off. Or were they? By the laws of story Gaiman has invoked, Doctor Doom’s many “deaths” never prove to be permanent. When we last saw Doom in 1602, he was in bad shape, but he was still alive and talking; for him, this is an easy “death” to survive. As we know, Strange can exist in astral form on the Earthly plane. (Perhaps Gaiman has read Steve Englehart’s never-finished Dr. Strange story arc about The Mystical History of America. And if Strange is a Christ figure, then his resurrection is assured.) Jean Grey’s body was incinerated, but the appearance of the Phoenix force suggested she had risen into a higher form. As we shall soon see, 1602‘s analogue to Prospero’s island has its own Caliban; wouldn’t Jean, as Phoenix, make an appropriate Ariel? 1602 also now lacks its own Cap and Fury, but Peter is Fury’s student and figurative “son,” and could carry on in his place, while Virginia, as Rojahz’s “daughter,” can take over as the embodiment of the American spirit. Maybe there could even finally be a place for the missing analogue of Tony Stark. (As a weapons maker whom James dispatches to the Roanoke colony with a party of soldiers?) Who else might have been mutated by the radiation from the temporal rift? What if there’s a resident of Roanoke named Henry Pym, who becomes the colony’s equivalent of Paul Bunyan? (And the Wasp, Janet Van Dyne, sounds like she could be the daughter of a Dutch tradesman to me.)

Gaiman says in the Comic World News interview that he may do more 1602 stories in the future. (I wonder if his contract with Marvel ensures that only he can write 1602, or whether, as so often happens, lesser writers will take it upon themselves to write sequels to someone else’s successful series.) But at last year’s San Diego Con Gaiman referred to “the mysterious second project I agreed to do” for Marvel, and mentioned that he had agreed with editor in chief Joe Quesada that “it could come right out of 1602.” (See Comics in Context #8.)

So my guess is that the real sequel to 1602 will concern the exploits of Rojahz/Captain America and the 1602 Fury in the alternate future with President Killgrave. Seeing Captain America leading a new American Revolution has a lot of potential. How would he get along with the 1602 Fury after Fury betrayed him in this issue? Would the more idealistic Cap and the more Machiavellian Fury disagree over the revolution’s methods? Would the 1602 Fury, who served a monarch and shows no interest in democracy, even side with the revolutionaries? And what about the modern-day Nick Fury, who, thanks to the Infinity Formula, ages slowly if at all? Is he still alive in this dystopian future, and, if so, has he fallen under Killgrave’s control? It may even be necessary to go on another time trip, to prevent this dystopian future from coming about in the first place.

THE BIRTH OF A NATION

On the final page of this current 1602 series, we see the Hulk, colored gray as he was in his first story, marauding through the forest. Here we have the laws of story that Reed invoked in issue 7 in action. The handsome Otto von Doom, in his final scene, ended up with a scarred face like his modern day counterpart. And now 1602‘s Banner, exposed to the cosmic energies of the temporal rift, has finally fallen victim to his inevitable destiny, and been transformed into the Hulk. (And hey, Banner’s purple robes turn out to be the counterpart to the traditional purple pants worn by the Hulk.) Since Gaiman has established that the American wilderness is 1602‘s Savage Land, complete with dinosaurs, this makes a good environment for the Hulk: he can roam about and fight monsters. Reviewers of the Hulk movie compared him to King Kong: now he has an island realm like Kong’s Skull Island. And the Hulk is the Caliban of 1602‘s analogue to Prospero’s isle.

The counterpart to Prospero himself may be Reed, who, though he is a scientist, is a “magician” as well, according to the late Dr. Strange.

Reed tells Javier, “My own suggestion would be to declare the colony independent of England.” Now, Fury had already suggested this to Ananias Dare. But for Fury, this was a tactical maneuver for protecting the colony, as well as a means of seizing power by asserting himself as the colony’s unelected ruler.

When Reed speaks of “My own suggestion,” Gaiman puts “own” in italics for emphasis, perhaps to distinguish Reed’s suggestion from Fury’s.

In contrast with Fury, Reed seems motivated by a more democratic vision of political society. Javier asks Reed if he will be the new colony’s king, but Reed, like George Washington, refuses to be a monarch: “I do not believe that there will be any more call for Kings or for Queens.” Elizabeth’s time has passed; James is irrelevant to the colony’s future.

Reed continues, “I shall propose to Master Dare that we make the colony a place where people-people of all shapes and talents ““ can prosper.” Note that Reed says he will “propose” this to Dare, the colony’s official leader; this sharply contrasts with Fury, who pressured and manipulated Dare into ceding authority to him. But it is clear that Reed is the visionary who will become the colony’s real leader once it becomes an independent nation.

Reed’s phrase, “people of all shapes” may literally refer to the fact that some of the superhumans in this new community do not look like “normal” human beings. But this may be Gaiman’s metaphor for people of all backgrounds. Reed’s new nation represents America as “melting pot,” a multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural society, a place where, ideally, people of different backgrounds live together in harmony and cooperation. No wonder that Reed is talking to, and even carrying Javier in this scene: Reed’s vision of America is the same as the modern day Charles Xavier’s “dream” of racial integration and tolerance.

When Reed says that this new nation will be a place where “people of all shapes and talents ““ can prosper,” he is describing the American dream, America as a place where people of any class or ethnicity can achieve success through their own efforts.

In 1602 as in the present, the Marvel heroes are founded on timeless mythic archetypes, but they are also exemplars of American ideals. The 1602 heroes, like we Americans’ forebears, are emigrants from the Old World to the New, seeking freedom and a fresh start. In this they should remind us that the creators of the American superhero genre were themselves the children of immigrants. The superheroes are outcasts from established society, different than other people, so they become part of a new community, as the emigrants to the New World did, which becomes America.

Sir Richard Reed has thus created a vision of an ideal America. In this alternate timeline, the United States of America begins in 1602, and Reed, Javier and their cohorts are its Founding Fathers. Rojahz worried that he had to stay with the Roanoke colonists to ensure that “his” America would come about. But the colony, with its new superheroic members, does not need him for this, after all. As far as 1602 America is concerned, Rojahz, like Fury, resembles the Moses and Ethan Edwards figures who cannot enter the Promised Land. Rojahz was necessary to save the people of Roanoke from death by starvation. But the colony, inspired by Reed and the rest, will evolve into America without Rojahz’s help.

In the final scene Peter and Virginia are reunited. Peter, and perhaps Virginia too, have awakened, as if from a dream. (Sandman fans take note.) Neither recalls anything about the opening of the temporal rift except seeing “the strange light,” as if they were recalling a near-death experience. (So they too have figuratively “died” and been “reborn.”)

This is the scene that Campbell would call “the sacred marriage.” There is no wedding, proposal, or even an explicit declaration of love. But the two young people have been united: Virginia asks Peter to stay with her and her father, and Peter places his hand on her shoulder, visually echoing Reed’s gesture towards Susan on the previous page. Peter and Virginia represent the new generation, the hope for the future, for whom members of the older generation ““ their “fathers” Fury and Rojahz, and Strange as well ““ made sacrifices. Peter also represents the immigrants from the Old World to the New, just as Virginia represents those Americans who will be born in this new nation. They remind me of Ferdinand and Miranda, the young couple united in love in The Tempest. Like Virginia, Miranda grew up in her new country. Ferdinand sailed to Miranda’s isle with Prospero’s enemies, just as Peter came to Roanoke with Fury’s foes, and both young men ended up switching sides. Peter and Virginia are the Adam and Eve of this new land, and there is as yet no serpent in sight.

For those of us waiting for the other shoe to drop, in the next to last panel a spider bites Peter on the hand. The yellow glow around the spider is no accident: it has presumably been irradiated by the energies of the temporal rift. And so the laws of story decree that Peter’s destiny be fulfilled: he will no doubt gain the powers of Spider-Man. (And notice that the spider bite happens after Peter is united with Virginia, as if his being endowed with super-powers indicates sexual potency.)

Hand in hand, this first couple of their New World walk towards what is either a romantic sunset or an optimistic sunrise (either one will do). And even Virginia’s final words have symbolic meaning.

“Well, it’s not the end of the world,” she says. No, it isn’t: the world ended and was recreated. This is a new beginning for their world.

“I’ll put a poultice on it.” It makes sense that Virginia, who is figuratively a nature goddess, can heal the wounded.

“Come on, Peter. Let’s go home.” Home is their newborn nation, America.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

In the Sunday, April 18, 2004 issue of The New York Times, film critic A.O. Scott, whose name should be familiar to longtime readers of this column, tries yet again to clarify his argument against genre movies that won’t stick to what he thinks are their proper place; quoting the late cinema critic Pauline Kael, Scott labels that place “trash” as opposed to what he terms “genuine art.” Invoking another predecessor, Scott refers to critic Manny Farber’s distinction between “white elephant” art, “which stifled its innate energies in pursuit of prestige,” and “termite” art, which, in Farber’s words, “goes forward eating its own boundaries.” (That actually sounds to me like art that, in the contemporary phrase, pushes the envelope.) Scott is dismayed that what were once considered “B” pictures, the popular genre movies, now dominate the industry, and claims that “some of the pulpy, subcultural allure of these forms has been polished away.” (“Subcultural,” eh? This reminds me of the shot of the fictional America’s Best Comics building in Alan Moore’s trade paperback of the same name, inscribed with the slogan “I can’t believe it’s not culture.”)

“Among the sins of white elephant art, according to Farber,” Scott states, “are the tendencies to ‘install every event, character and situation in a frieze of continuities’ and to ‘treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.'” Among what Scott condemns as the “current white elephant B pictures” are “bloated comic-book term papers.”

So, I take it that if Scott ever stumbles across my extensive lit-crit analyses of works like Neil Gaiman’s 1602 and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, he would not appreciate them. As for those of you who might sympathize with Scott’s position, let me assure you that 1602 and DK2 and other works that I treat in such detail are superb entertainments. If they didn’t work as examples of their genre, in these two cases the superhero adventure, I wouldn’t be motivated to spend so many hours poring through them. You can have a satisfactorily good time reading these books on the surface level of escapist fun.

To my mind, however, still more pleasure is to be derived from careful, detailed readings of works like these. Themes, complexities of characterization, and insights will emerge that will increase the reader’s understanding of the material and hence his or her appreciation of it. Comics creators on the level of Miller and Gaiman not only impart greater literary depth to the genres with which they work, but masterfully dramatize their themes in ways that make their stories even more entertaining.

The title of Scott’s tirade is When It Was Bad It Was Better, subtitled, “Why Did Good, Clean Trash Have to Get Sleek and Pretentious?”

He seems to want certain genres, including those he associates with comic books, to remain mindless guilty pleasures. I couldn’t disagree more: to my mind, works like 1602 or DK2, to which I have devoted so many recent installments of this column, are exemplars of what genre comics should be: simultaneously filled with both dramatic vitality and keen intelligence, confidently asserting their right to be taken as seriously as any other forms of storytelling.

And so let’s turn to the final issue of 1602, #8, which is longer than its predecessors and hence will be the subject of two installments of this column. Those of you who are unacquainted with this series should look up my reviews of past issues in the Comics in Context archive. To set the scene for issue #8, I will say simply that we have learned that Captain America has been transported back in time by a means that has had a catastrophic effect on time and space. All of reality is in danger of obliteration. In an apparent attempt to save itself, the forces controlling the universe have caused counterparts to many familiar Marvel heroes and villains (all associated with Stan Lee’s 1960s comics) to come into existence during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Now Elizabeth has been succeeded by James I, and most of these heroes and villains have left England for the New World.

Let’s start with issue 8’s striking cover by Scott McKowen, showing a map of American colonies in the early 17th century, upon which stand the figures of Rojhaz (Captain America, transported back in time, and garbed as an American Indian), the 15-year-old Virginia Dare (the first girl to be born in one of England’s American colonies), and Sir Nicholas Fury, the spymaster who is the counterpart to the present day Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.. These three, then, are to be the central figures of this last issue.

Virginia Dare has mystified readers with her ability to transform into various animals. I had thought she only turned into animals native to America, but in this issue she becomes a dog; surely if she were restricted to wild American animal forms, she would have become a wolf instead. Readers hoping for an explicit explanation of her powers in 1602 will be disappointed. So perhaps we must look for a thematic explanation instead. Virginia has a super-power, so perhaps Gaiman thereby means to link her to the super heroes who join her American colony in the course of this issue. Perhaps, like the X-Men, she too is a mutant.

Another possibility is that Virginia’s ability to take the forms of animals is meant to link her to the natural world. Hence, Virginia, the first American-born colonist, who shares the same name as the colony (and now state) of Virginia, represents the as yet unspoiled (virginal) natural world of America.

On the cover Virginia and Rojahz both stand in the light. Virginia opens her arms in a welcoming gesture. Rojhaz keeps his arms folded, in a gesture that evokes traditional images of Native Americans. But it also may suggest a lack of openness to other people and other points of view, an unwillingness to change his ways, as we shall see as the story progresses.

Fury, who turns warily towards us, stands in shadow. He is thus significantly excluded from Virginia and Rojahz’s brightly lit newborn America. Perhaps he is also a shadow figure in the Jungian sense. Does this make him the villain of the piece? Or does he instead represent “dark” qualities that the heroic forces must incorporate in order to succeed?

Let us briefly acknowledge the inside front covers to 1602, which evoke the look and typeface of actual literary works printed in 1602.

In the first panel on the first page we see a ship, the “Virginia Maid,” bearing Rojahz, Clea and Virginia Dare herself, sailing to the Roanoke colony in America.

I suppose it is possible that Gaiman has based Virginia Dare on a historical or legendary figure of whom I am unaware. I do know about her colony, Roanoke, the namesake of a present day city in Virginia which I have visited. The original Roanoke colony was a real settlement which came to an abrupt and mysterious end. Hence it is an apt site for the unusual events that Gaiman sets there.

The ship’s name, “Virginia Maid,” reinforces the image of Virginia Dare as a fifteen-year-old virgin (or “maid,” short for “maiden”), and perhaps therefore her symbolizing the “virgin” territory of America as well. It may also be a pun: as the first-born of the Roanoke colony, Virginia Dare was “made” in the future state of Virginia.

The various ships transporting the major characters from Europe to the New World make Joseph Campbell’s celebrated phrase “the hero’s journey” literally true. Campbell contended that the hero always leaves the normal world for the enchanted realm of adventure and then returns home to the normal world. I think he is wrong that this is always the case: Luke Skywalker does not go back to farming on Tatooine after he blows up the Death Star. In various cases the hero ends up in a new, more suitable home at the end of his adventure, a home more in keeping with his newly realized potential as an individual. In 1602, as we shall see, Virginia returns home, which is a good thing. So does Captain America at the end, thereby saving the universe, although Cap himself will not be happy in the world he returns to.

But many other heroes of 1602 have left their homes in Europe and do not return. One could even argue that those previous “homes” no longer exist. In Fury’s case, this is literally true: branded as an outlaw by King James, Fury presumes that his home has been given over to one of James’s favorites. James’ new regime has displaced the late Queen Elizabeth I’s in England, and so in effect the England that many of these heroes called home is gone.

And so these heroes, in the course of this last issue, instead find a new home in America, joining the Roanoke colony. This evokes the immigration of Europeans (and, of course, later people from other continents) to America. Keep in mind that immigration is a theme that in superhero comics goes back to the origin of Superman himself. He is an “immigrant” from Krypton who became assimilated into American culture. For that matter, many of superhero comics’ founding fathers were from families who had emigrated from Europe in recent generations. (And immigrants play a role in today’s comics, as well, even in unexpected cases: Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Neil Gaiman himself were all born in England and at different points in their lives moved to the United States.)

Thus 1602 evokes the traditional concept of America as a place of refuge for the displaced, a place to which people can escape from religious or political oppression (and 1602‘s heroes suffer from both), a place where one can start his life anew, and hence a place of rebirth. America is portrayed as a land of freedom, in contrast to the more oppressive old regimes of Europe, represented in 1602 by the despotic James I, the Spanish Inquisition, and even by Doctor Doom. Doom’s armor, medieval castle, and role as absolute monarch clearly make him seem anachronistic in the 21st century, but he is also a throwback in the Renaissance Europe of 1602. However advanced his science, Doom in both periods represents the heavy, tyrannical hand of an old, outdated political order attempting to dominate the new. (Come to think of it, Doom is not unlike contemporary Islamic terrorists who employ modern technology but subscribe to a medieval ideology.)

Gaiman is drawing on the Marvel concept of the superhero as outsider and even (in the cases of Spider-Man and the X-Men) outlaw. It is appropriate that I’ve recently been reviewing The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Miller also portrays the superhero as an outlaw, and both he and Gaiman also depict the superhero as a symbol of individual freedom and the heroic potential within each human being. (One of the rewards of writing this column is not only discovering thematic patterns within individual works in comics, but finding similarities and connections between different works.)

In the Marvel canon, a superhero may be an outcast from society, but Marvel also pioneered the concept that these outcasts could band together to form a new community. This is clearly evident in The X-Men.

In 1602 Gaiman melds together the Marvel concept of the community of outcasts with the traditional concept of America as a community of outsiders from the Old World. In 1602 the first American colony includes a community of superheroes. In fact, the Roanoke colony in 1602 becomes the embodiment of Charles Xavier’s “dream”: “normal” humans co-existing in peace and harmony with superhumans.

I was pleased to see that Gaiman’s recap of Captain America’s origin hews to tradition. Marvel claims that its recent Captain America series, Truth is part of official continuity, despite its violations of so many past stories. As I understand it, Truth indicates that Steve Rogers did not become Captain America until after America entered World War II and even suggests that “Steve Rogers” is not his real name. Gaiman sticks to tradition: Rojahz recalls being transformed by the “super-soldier” serum before the war started (“There’s a war coming, we called it World War II”), and Professor Reinstein once again looks like Albert Einstein, rather than the Truth version of the character. Good.

Continuing to recount his history, Rojahz says, “Then, end of the war, I lost a couple of decades.” This is probably Gaiman being intentionally vague. In real time, Cap was revived in the comics in 1964, and hence was in suspended animation for just short of two decades. Thanks to the way “Marvel-Time” works, whereby characters age very slowly, and it’s always only been seven to ten years since the events of Fantastic Four #1, Cap would now have been in suspended animation for a half century. Through Rojahz’s phrasing, Gaiman allows the reader to pick whichever interpretation he or she prefers.

As for Rojahz’s remark, “they thawed me out,” well, that’s a slight distortion of the facts in order to describe the events simply and quickly. The ice in which Cap had been entombed was actually melted by warm ocean currents by the time the Avengers found and rescued him.

I applaud the nice shot of Captain America in costume on page 1, which artist Andy Kubert has made into an evocation of and tribute to Cap’s original artist in both the 1940s and the 1960s, Jack Kirby.

Now comes a surprise. I had assumed that Captain America had been sent to 1602 from the present day. But instead it seems that he has come from one of Marvel-Earth’s possible futures (each of which exists as an alternate reality).

“The dark times came slowly,” Rojahz reports. The superheroes grew old, and were hunted down and killed. We are shown a picture of the captive Spider-Man and Daredevil, each in what seems late middle age, and they don’t seem to be in good physical condition, either. Not only are they manacled, but they have been unmasked, and hence figuratively reduced from superheroes to impotent human status.

So this is only a few decades into the future. In fact, we are shown posters featuring the visage of the “President for Life,” who looks like a caricature of a white-haired George W. Bush!

Now, this is a new example of a recurring motif in superhero comics following the Silver Age of the 1960s: the American government devolving into a repressive regime, under which superheroes (symbols of individual liberty and of justice) are outlawed, imprisoned, or killed. In the Marvel canon the key work of this sort is John Byrne and Chris Claremont’s landmark “Days of Future Past” in Uncanny X-Men #141-142. This is also the premise of Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight series. (Again, I’m pleased at the happy synchronicity that finds me reviewing 1602 #8 right after DK2)

At least Byrne and Claremont came up with a reasonable scenario for why and how the U.S. government turned into a police state: there was a clampdown on mutants after mutant terrorists assassinated a United States senator, the feds unleashed the mutant-hunting Sentinel robots, and, as usual, the Sentinels took over from their supposed masters.

Gaiman, though, like Miller, offers no convincing explanation as to how the government went wrong. It’s as if the stories assume that the readers would automatically accept the idea that the U.S. government is on the brink of turning into a tyranny. (I am reminded of Moveon.org’s recent “Bush in 30” contest for political ads against the George W. Bush administration, and a few notorious submissions comparing Bush to Hitler.) Sorry, I don’t buy it. I understand that there isn’t enough space in this last issue for an extended backstory about this alternate future, and I suspect that this may be a tale that Gaiman intends to tell at length in a future project. Still, I find this vision of America as a police state hard to swallow.

Still, Gaiman is working here within a strong tradition in the Captain America mythos. In each decade following the Silver Age of the 1960s there has been a major story arc in which Captain America, who represents pure, traditional American ideals, finds himself at odds with the United States government, which has departed from them in some way.

As a result, Cap finds himself operating outside the authority of the government. Steve Englehart did a story of this sort in the 1970s, reflecting the disillusionment over Watergate; Mark Gruenwald wrote his version in the 1980s, and Mark Waid did another variation in the 1990s. This is an archetypal story line for Cap, and it can involve his taking on a new identity: Nomad in the 1970s and “the Captain” in the ’80s. Now, in 1602, he is Rojhaz.

In each variation of this story line, Captain America is a truer representation of America as a platonic ideal than the American government is. So it is that in 1602, Rojahz says of the America of this possible future, “That America wasn’t my America any more.”

Gaiman takes this further than the previous writers did. Though in Steve Englehart’s Secret Empire arc (serving as a metaphor for Watergate), the government nearly fell to a coup d’etat from within, the U. S. government never actually turns into an oppressive state in any of these previous stories. But, as we have seen, Gaiman’s alternate future America does turn authoritarian, and Captain America becomes part of an “underground” revolutionary movement “to restore the country that I had sworn to protect.” Again, here is a parallel to Miller’s DK2, in which Batman is a revolutionary leading a rebellion.

The “For Life” and “Because Life Matters” slogans on the President’s posters cleverly evoke the pro-Life movement, so presumably Gaiman sees this future American regime as dominated by the Right, perhaps specifically the religious Right. That would serve as a parallel to the power of the Church and the Inquisition in 1602. (It should be pointed out, though, that the American Right includes libertarians, strict supporters of the Constitution, and many who believe the federal government is already too big and powerful; none of these would tolerate the “Big Brother”-type of police state that Gaiman envisions.)

The President’s posters evoke George Orwell’s 1984 not only through their promotion of a personality cult around the leader, but also through the way they twist the uses of language. We can observe in real life what Orwell spotted: how governments use benevolent, idealistic phrases to justify their actions. And so this poster asks people to support the “President-for-Life” “because he cares,” attempting to present an authoritarian figure as a kindly, paternal one.

When Rojhaz says that the America of this alternate future is no longer “his” America, I wonder if we should consider the possible “meta” aspect of Neo-Silver comics, which I view as attempting to recapture and reinterpret the positive spirit of 1960s superhero comics for the present day. As noted, 1602 only deals with the Marvel characters that Stan Lee wrote in the 1960s; Captain America was created in the 1940s but Lee and Kirby revived him in the “Silver Age.” It is possible to interpret Cap’s statements about the “dark times” in America as a comment on the state of comics following the Silver Age. Perhaps Cap is saying through parable that amid the pervasive grimness and grittiness. the irony and the destructive revisionism, the Silver Age spirit has vanished. Cap and his “underground” represent the creators trying to turn the tide.

Continuing to recount his past, Rojahz says, “I was betrayed.”

By whom? This may be a further indication that Gaiman has worked out a great deal of backstory that is later to be told in greater detail.

Cap’s captors did not kill him, because even if they incinerated his body, his ashes could serve as a “memorial, to inspire others.” So instead they sent him back in time to the wilderness of the late 16th century.

Now, one must accept many impossibilities in the superhero genre, including time travel, but human behavior must still be believable. Why would these tyrants go to all this trouble and, presumably, expense to get rid of Cap? If they had killed him and burned the body, they could have just scattered the ashes over the ocean? (And if they’re so worried about relics that could serve as a memorial, why didn’t they send Cap’s indestructible shield back in time, too?)

Rojahz says that just before he was sent through time, he was shot in the head. How could he survive that? Perhaps he wasn’t actually shot with a bullet. In any event, this shooting is Cap’s symbolic “death” preceding his “rebirth,” naked, his memory mostly gone, in the sunny 16th century American wilderness. It’s as if he is cross between a newborn infant in adult form and Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Now, if the bad guys had a time machine and sent Cap through time, disrupting the timestream, couldn’t they do it again? Wouldn’t they have experimented with sending objects through time before sending Cap? Wouldn’t they try to get rid of other enemies of the state the same way, thereby continuing to endanger reality?

Or is Gaiman suggesting that it is displacing this particular person, Captain America, through time by this specific method that caused the danger to the fabric of reality? Captain America has traveled through time in various past stories, so it must be this specific method of time travel, described as unique in a previous issue, that endangered the cosmos. Moreover, Gaiman has established that Cap is the “forerunner” of the Silver Age Marvel heroes, and when he was sent back to Elizabethan times, his presence there triggered the creation of other Marvel heroes and villains. A different time traveler would not have done so; perhaps his displacement through time would not have convulsed the cosmos this way, either.

In his new time period Captain America was taken in by Indians and became known as “Rojhaz,” a variant on his last name, Rogers. Obviously most of his memories returned over succeeding years.

On finding Virginia, the first settler of English descent born in America, Rojhaz says, “I knew what she was. What she represented. What she meant, My America….”

Virginia is thus an example of the tradition of envisioning a country as a woman. Perhaps she also falls into the artistic tradition of picturing liberty as a woman (as in the Statue of Liberty, or Delacroix’s Louvre painting Liberty Leading the People, which is one of my screen savers) as a woman.

By protecting Virginia from the time she was a baby, Rojhaz/Captain America becomes a father figure to her. This fits his image as the protector of America. Indeed, as Virginia’s protector, Rojhaz becomes a “father” to America, the “father” of his country.

Note that the state of Rojahz’s mid-21st century America parallels that of the other 1602 characters’ England: in each case a good political system and society to which characters felt loyal has turned bad, dark and repressive under a change in leadership, and the heroes have been made into outcasts. In watching over Virginia and the Roanoke colony, Rojahz is trying to recreate “his” America in 1602. Similarly, as we shall see, other 1602 heroes arriving from Europe will try to recreate a better England through the community they join in Roanoke. The end result is the same: Captain America and the other Marvel heroes are the co-creators of America as mythic land of liberty. Gaiman thus links not just Captain America but all the Marvel heroes to the spirit of America.

1602 deals with both politics and religion: America is likewise traditionally a land of religious freedom. In the next scene Gaiman cleverly explains why the Church kept secret the existence of the wooden staff that can transform a worthy wielder into the Norse god Thor. The aged monk Donal explains that the Church feared what would happen if it became public knowledge that there were gods other than the God of Christianity.
 Sir Richard Reed (counterpart to the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards) looks grimly at Donal in this scene. The Church establishment of this time maintains its power and authority by concealing knowledge (the existence of the Asgardians). As we shall see, Reed has a very different view of God and his attitude towards human knowledge.

In the original concept in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Thor series, Don Blake was a normal human who found the staff and was transformed into Thor. Lee and Kirby eventually reversed this concept, establishing instead that Odin transformed Thor into the human Don Blake, and that therefore Blake had no existence independent of Thor. (Still later, Roy Thomas established that there had been a “real” Don Blake who had been displaced by Blake/Thor.).

In 1602 Gaiman returns to the original Thor concept, examining how a human might react to merging with a god. Indeed, here he is examining the general idea of the superhero with a human alter ego. Why would Superman pose as the all-too-human Clark Kent?

Donal confesses to Reed that he “gloried” in cohabiting the body and mind of Thor. But Donal feels guilty over this, and even considers himself to be damned. The Church is not only forbidding certain kinds of knowledge, it is also condemning forms of pleasure, which Donal describes in physical terms. Moreover, the Church is restricting the human spirit’s capacity for growth. Recall that superheroes, in 1602 as in DK2, represent the heroic potential within the individual human being. Donal can become Thor; he can exceed his metaphorical “mortal” limits. But the Church forbids him to do so. The fact that Donal is a frail, elderly man, and Thor is youthful and superhumanly strong, strengthens the metaphor. The Church will not allow Donal to be “reborn” and regain spiritual and physical vitality. Donal thinks that turning into Thor has damned him, but perhaps it is the Church that has truly “damned” him by condemning him to decline and death. The Church insists that Donal stay within prescribed limits and never move beyond them.

Having arrived in Roanoke, Fury meets with the head of the colony, Virginia’s real father, Ananias Dare. “Ananias” is an interesting name. According to the dictionary, it is a synonym for “liar”; in the New testament Ananias was a man who suffered death for lying about the Church. In 1602, however, Ananias Dare is a positive figure, who welcomes the Marvel heroes into his community. Perhaps his name serves an ironic purpose, marking him as a good man who is nonetheless an outcast from established society, in other words, James’s England, just as the superheroes are.

Fury tells Ananias that those who look monstrous on outside are on the inside “no more monstrous than the rest of us,” and “perhaps the reverse is also true.” This states a classic Marvel theme, and may be relevant to Ananias as well: don’t judge him by his unfortunate name. This may also serve as a warning about Fury’s true nature, as we shall see.

Not wishing James to retaliate against the Roanoke colonists for their kindness to Fury and his allies, Fury suggests they claim that he and the superhumans seized control of the colony. This is a lie, an evil that will be done in a good cause, like others that are to follow in this issue.

Fury cunningly goes further, and declares “the village of Roanoke and this continent independent of the British Crown,” and declares himself Governor. So here is America declaring its independence nearly two centuries early. But this is hardly a great moment for American idealism. This is a Machiavellian maneuver by Fury (appropriate for the Renaissance), who in one stroke both spares the people of Roanoke from James’s wrath and seizes power for himself, supplanting Ananias’s authority. Ananias protests, but Fury argues him into acceding to his demands.

In an amusing scene, Ananias proclaims the cover story to the citizenry: “our poor colony has been captured by monsters and rebels.” So he has indeed become a liar, like the Biblical Ananias, though he makes his good intentions clear in bidding his people to “treat them with respect, and with goodwill…”

Carlos Javier (1602‘s counterpart to Charles Xavier) tells Fury about the three approaching ships bringing much of the rest of the cast to the New World. Well, things often do come in threes, though I wonder if the three ships are to evoke the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria.

One of the ships carries Enrico, the Grand Inquisitor (1602‘s version of the X-Men’s archnemesis Magneto), so Fury suggests destroying the ship before it can reach land. This is a reasonable suggestion, but Javier overrules him: “If we murder them, we would be no better than they are.” And that is another indication of the moral difference between Fury and many of the other 1602 heroes that readers should keep in mind.

Javier communicates telepathically with Enrico, who informs him that it is merely a coincidence that they have both ended up in this area of the New World. “And you expect me to believe that?” asks Javier. Well, if Javier is telepathically communicating within Enrico’s mind, he should know whether or not he’s lying!

Enrico asks Javier if the normal people, whom he calls “mondani” (the mundane? the muggles?) still hate him and the other “witchbreed” (mutants). Javier comes up with an amusing image of Enrico as a lute player who only knows one tune and plays it over and over. This is funny, but moral absolutism is a serious themes in 1602. Enrico’s enemies, the Inquisition, will destroy anyone who disagrees with them. Will Enrico/Magneto prove more willing to compromise with his adversaries?

Gaiman has reassembled the original Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in 1602 except for Mastermind. Perhaps this is due to lack of space. Certainly Mastermind’s ability to create illusions would have helped the Brotherhood more easily escape the Inquisition.

There follows another of this series’ splendid, magical visual images: Enrico’s ship entrapped within an iceberg created by the X-Men’s Iceman (who was shown earlier exhaling towards it, as if he were the god of the frigid North Wind). Unlike virtually all other writers who have dealt with Iceman, Gaiman, in an earlier issue, pointed out that Iceman’s ability to create ice is limited by the amount of moisture around him; the sea here provides enough to perform this colossal feat.

Gaiman’s final issue of Sandman was named after Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and I wonder if there are analogues between this final issue of 1602 and The Tempest. In Shakespeare’s play Prospero, who commands magic powers, has settled on an island that may be in the New World; when his enemies sail close by, he summons a tempest that wrecks their ship, putting them in his power. Here Javier’s enemies are sailing to the New World, and Javier succeeds in capturing them.

Here is reassurance that I’m on the right track when I try to interpret even the names of characters in this series: Reed refers to a “Borssian phenomenon.” Reed later explains that he has named different areas of knowledge after the Knights of the Round Table. In this specific case it enables Gaiman to link the name of Sir Bors to Niels Bohr, the 20th century atomic physicist. I also like Reed’s implication that the search for greater knowledge is like a knight’s “quest,” and the subliminal association of Reed and the other superheroes with their Campbellian forebears, the Arthurian knights.

Next comes another round in Gaiman’s variation on the Cyclops-Marvel Girl-Angel triangle in 1960s X-Men stories. Jean had been masquerading as a boy, and 1602‘s version of Cyclops says that the Angel “allowed her disguise to fool him,” suggesting it was a conscious decision: he wanted to believe her to be a boy. The Angel disagrees, saying, “I was truly deceived. . . .But I do believe I was in love with that young man.”

I am still confused by this. Was Angel attracted to Jean because he subconsciously realized she was a girl? Or is he gay? If Gaiman means to indicate that the present-day Angel is gay, several female characters, including the late Candy Sothern, would sharply disagree. Maybe the point is that, believing Jean was a boy, the 1602 Angel accepted the idea that he had homosexual feelings for “him.” Having portrayed Catholics, Jews, political dissidents, and, yes, mutants, as outsiders in the society of 1602, perhaps Gaiman wanted to include gays as well.

The warmth of the reunion of Virginia and her father is a reminder that the relationships between fathers and their children, real and figurative, is another theme of this series, as it was in DK2.

Arriving in Roanoke, Clea says she will “try to help unknot the mess you men have made of things,” suggesting that women have a kind of wisdom that men lack. She has transported Dr. Strange’s severed head, through which his spirit can communicate, in a barrel of brandy. This leads to a bit of macabre humor, in which we learn that a sailor drank some of the brandy and went mad. Perhaps it’s not just funny: metaphorically the sailor could not cope with his “taste” of Strange’s awareness of the dark side of reality. I suppose that even if this is brandy, Strange’s wisdom falls under the motto “in vino veritas.”

Speaking of “in vino veritas,” now Donal is rambling drunkenly about the power of Thor, as the unseen Invisible Girl listens, as if she were a ghost, or his conscience, or his anima. He regards himself as damned: he is now another outcast. There is pathos in Donal’s complaints over the pain he feels due to his old age, and his envy of the immortal Thor’s freedom from such pain.

A boy accuses Virginia: “Think you’re queen of the world.” Later, talking about a timeline in which Virginia dies, Uatu says she is “never now to become queen of anything.”

Keep in mind that Virginia is named after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, as the latter pointed out in issue 2. Though Reed says there will be no actual Queens in America, Virginia is symbolically the successor to Elizabeth. The glories of her realm, now that James has taken over, will pass to the future of America.

The “virginity” imagery may be another link to The Tempest, whose ingenue heroine, Miranda, may be Virginia’s counterpart. And Shakespeare, through Prospero, emphasizes the importance of Miranda’s virginity.

Strange’s head tells Reed, “I have died, that others may have their chance at life.” Is this Christ imagery?

Fury, looking on, says quietly (to judge from the small size of the lettering), “Get on with it.” This is a subtle indication of how taken aback he is by this encounter. When Strange was alive, the 1602 Fury refused to believe in his magic. It is not emphasized, but obviously this, as well as other things that Fury has witnessed (like Thor), must be convincing him that the supernatural is indeed real. That, in turn, would persuade him that Strange’s story about the impending end of the universe is likewise true.

Reed outlines the danger to the universe in scientific terms. Observe that when Reed states that it will be “Extremely difficult” to return whatever came from the future back to its time, Gaiman and Kubert show us not Reed but Fury, standing deeply, ominously in shadow, his expression unreadable.

Impressed by his analysis, Strange comments, “Reed, you are the magician, not I. . .” Gaiman is pointing to the fact that Reed/Mr. Fantastic, though he deals in science, fits the archetype of the wise and powerful wizard. (Gaiman is also very good at capturing Stan’s dialogue style for Reed and the personality it creates.)

Reed discovers the “rip” in time-space takes the form of what we would call the infinity sign. This is an appropriate symbol for the entire universe, indeed, for all of reality. (There is actually a Marvel “abstract being” named Infinity, who is a personification of the universe ““ and is the female aspect of the better known Lee-Ditko creation, Eternity.)

Explaining how he names the different “disciplines” of science (the study of animals, the study of electricity, and so on), Reed contends that the separation of knowledge into distinct categories is an artificial device: “there is but one table, which is God’s creation.” As Javier realizes, “each discipline, like each knight, is a way of reaching” the symbolic “Grail,” which Reed defines as “perfect knowledge.” Reed emphasizes that “all disciplines are equal.” (So perhaps even writing comics ““ or writing comics criticism ““ is a means towards attaining perfect knowledge.)

It seems surprising to see Reed, the master scientist, speaking fervently of his religious faith. It could be argued that agnosticism and atheism were rare back in 1602. Still, it seems significant that the 1602 Reed, who can foresee the theory of relativity, is a religious believer. Even the 1602 Fury voices faith in God, and appears to be sincere about it.

1602 has pointed to the misuse and distortion of religion, notably through the Inquisition. But it also offers a positive vision of what religion can and should be, and, surprisingly, it is Reed the scientist who voices that vision.

Earlier in this issue we saw through Donal’s scenes that the established Church of this time, maintains power by restricting knowledge. We know that the Inquisition destroys those who disagree with it; King James follows the same policy with dissidents like Strange.

But here Reed is asked, “And do you not fear that there are things God did not intend man to know?” and he replies, “Frankly, no.”

The Beast thereupon jokes that if Reed had been in the Garden of Eden and had been forbidden to eat fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (the cause of man’s fall), “by the time the Lord returned I swear you would be advising him on the finest preserv’d fruit recipes.”

Does the Beast mean that Reed would have defied the Lord’s commandment and eaten the fruit? Or, more likely, that Reed does not need to eat the fruit, and would have gained knowledge through his own efforts?

Whichever was the case, the real point is that knowledge is not a vice but a virtue; it should not be the cause of mankind’s fall, but of humanity’s rise to fulfill its potential. Knowledge is the Holy Grail. Religion should not keep people in submission, but encourage them to strive forward, to empower themselves. (And perhaps the wise critic encourages creators to push past the alleged limits of a genre, rather than contenting themselves with producing pleasurable “trash.”)

“As I once told Fury,” Reed states, “God gave us eyes to see, and hands to grasp, and minds to understand his creation. And perhaps ““ with God’s grace ““ to save it.” And Gaiman and Kubert show the infinity symbol floating in front of Reed’s forehead, illuminating it with its glow, perhaps signifying the infinite potential of the human mind. (Even if one does not literally believe in God, this passage works as a celebration of the human spirit.)

And who was it that Reed told that perhaps we can save the world with God’s grace? It was Sir Nicholas Fury, the realist, the Machiavel, the man who condones murder and torture. And it is he who becomes the central character in the second half of this final issue, as I will show next time.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

Through the end of March the cable channel TV Land was showing reruns of the 1960s Batman show at midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. This series’ notorious mockery of Batman in particular and the superhero genre in general damaged on the image of comics for decades; even as American comic books grew more sophisticated, media critics and the general public alike continued to regard the medium as the juvenilia that the Batman show satirized. Nowadays, though, since the first two Batman movies and the recent animated series have established a more serious alternative image of Batman in the public mind, it should be easier for comics enthusiasts to appreciate the TV series on its own terms. (I even think that DC Comics would be well advised to do something to mark the show’s forthcoming fortieth anniversary.)

Watching the TV Land reruns, I was struck by how sharply the show declined in its second season, in part, I think, because it was busily casting guest stars as new, second-rate villains rather than primarily drawing upon the well-conceived, time-tested villains from the actual comics. The last two-parter that TV Land telecast was a brilliant exception from the second season, and it featured one of the comics’ prime villains: in the show’s tradition of rhyming titles, this was “Hizzoner the Penguin/Dizzoner the Penguin,” in which the Penguin runs for mayor of Gotham City.

That’s right: this is the source from which the second Warners Batman movie, Batman Returns, must have drawn its own Penguin mayoralty campaign. Since my impression is that Twentieth Century Fox owns the characters and story lines created specifically for its Batman TV show (which must be why, say, the TV villain King Tut has never turned up in the comics), I don’t know how Warners managed to reuse this plot, but there it is.

The premise of “Hizzoner the Penguin” is actually a variation on that of a first season two-parter, “The Penguin Goes Straight/Not Yet He Ain’t,” in which the Penguin not only pretends to reform but even becomes Batman’s rival as Gotham’s preferred costumed crimefighter. In this earlier story, the Penguin captures crooks in order to change his public image, lending the premise some measure of credibility. The second season story takes the going straight idea further while throwing out any believability: not only has the Penguin somehow served his sentence (which one would think would by this point be several lifetimes long) within less than a year, but as soon as he announces his candidacy for mayor, polls declare him the favorite to win the election! The Penguin’s rather extensive criminal record, including his repeated murder attempts on Gotham’s favorite heroes Batman and Robin, do not appear to matter to the electorate at all.

I know I’ve seen the “Hizzoner” two-parter years ago, but watching it in 2004 I was surprised and delighted not only by how much fun it is, but how witty and perceptive it is as a political satire. Determined to prevent the Penguin from taking over the city, Batman figuratively throws his cowl into the ring and campaigns against him. Batman thereupon becomes the model of the earnest but deadly dull candidate, at one point droning a campaign speech to a virtually empty room, as if looking back to Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s and somehow foreseeing Al Gore in 2000. This perfectly fits Adam West’s deadpan delivery and portrayal of Batman as a mild-mannered idealistic square who happens to wear a bat costume.

In contrast the Penguin is a pioneer of political campaigning as show biz, staging a rally that is one huge party with entertainment provided by belly dancer Little Egypt (gyrating in a way not to be seen at a Republican convention) and mid-1960s rock group Paul Revere and the Raiders (!). Indeed, one can only rationalize the public support for Penguin’s candidacy by theorizing that he’s popular because he is a celebrity. (Why, the current Governor of California was once Mr. Freeze!) He creates photo ops in which he fights and captures criminals (secretly hired by himself).

The Penguin proves to be a master of what is now called “spin,” pointing out to the news media that he is usually photographed with policemen whereas Batman is usually found with criminals. Batman can’t truthfully deny this But the Penguin has “deniability,” leaving it to his henchmen to stick Batman in the inevitable death trap. And when the Penguin finds himself losing the election, he decides to ensure his victory by intervening in the counting of the votes. (Does any recent parallel come to mind?)

At the center of all of this is Burgess Meredith’s reliably, wonderfully funny yet convincingly crafty and malevolent portrayal of the Penguin, as if Charles Dickens had turned his skill at vivid caricature to superhero comics. I have thought in the past that it’s a shame that Meredith, who had a long, prestigious career in theater and film, is mostly known to the Boomers and subsequent generations for his work on Batman and Twilight Zone. But watching this two-parter, seeing him throw himself so enthusiastically into the part, it’s hard to believe that Meredith didn’t love performing this role. The 1960s TV Batman may not be “our” Batman, but to my mind Meredith’s Penguin is the real thing. (And I wish that DC Direct could make copies of those Penguin campaign buttons in the show.)

And as the Penguin’s popularity soared in the polls, I found myself thinking: the American electorate in this episode is just as stupid as they are in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again.

This is the last in my trilogy of essays on Miller’s recent Batman series, which is, like “Hizzoner the Penguin,” a satire on American politics, albeit a more serious one. Batman, Superman, and other superheroes and villains are engaged in a battle that will determine the fate of the United States government. And Miller’s Batman is no soft-spoken middle-of-the-road candidate for office, but a revolutionary and self-proclaimed terrorist. (Those who have not read the end of DK2 and wish to be surprised should heed this spoiler alert.)

The third issue begins entertainingly and puzzlingly, with a family of green aliens who seem to belong more to the world of cartoonist Vaughn Bode than to the superhero genre. It turns out that one of them is Hal Jordan, the Silver Age Green Lantern, now living in retirement with an alien wife and child.

So here is more evidence of the Neo-Silver movement in comics. In every artform one generation rebels against the preceding one in order to assert its own identity and achievements; the work of an older generation may fall from favor for a time, only to be reevaluated and appreciated anew years later. However consciously intended by their creators, much of the work at DC Comics from Crisis on Infinite Earths onward represented a rebellion against the Silver Age. That Age had ended around 1970, and it was true that efforts to continue in its path over the following fifteen years had in many cases lost their way and run low on creative energy.

The generational revolt, when it came, struck hard at some of the Silver Age’s signature characters: Crisis killed off Supergirl and the Silver Age Flash, who had started the great superhero revival of the later 1950s and early 1960s. At least they were allowed to die heroically. In sharp contrast, later, Hal Jordan was turned into an insane mass murderer and ended up dead. This may not have been consciously intended as a slap in the face of those who had worked on Jordan’s stories or their readers, but that was the effect. (“Post-Crisis” DC even removed many classic Silver Age stories from the canon of continuity, as if in an Orwellian rewriting of its history.) This phase of rebellion and rebooting at DC is itself now over fifteen years old, and so the emergence of the Neo-Silver movement at this time makes sense. It does not dominate comics by any means, but it is interesting to observe how many important creators are now doing work that falls into its scope.

Miller, in devising his own continuity, simply ignores the fates that DC meted out to Barry and Hal: they’re not dead, they have simply been away. In Hal’s case, he has retired from the role of superhero, at least on Earth, to devote himself to his new family. In short, he has settled down. Perhaps because so many of its writers are middle-aged, the Neo-Silver movement emphasizes the virtues of marriage and family life.

But though Miller portrays the appeal of Hal’s contented life away from the rat race of the neverending battle, he also, through Batman, criticizes it as a retreat from responsibility. Showing him the chaos ensuing on Earth, Batman accuses Hal: “This is the world you turned your back on, pal. These are the people you abandoned.” Hal’s new alien form is not just a clever Bode homage: it is also a visual metaphor for Hal cutting himself off from the human race and his responsibility to it. (By extension, Miller could be arguing that people in real life have the responsibility to work for political change, and perhaps even that comics creators must seek to remain active in mainstream comics.)

Alan Moore’s Watchmen is said to have been a major influence on the final issue of the original The Dark Knight Returns, and its presence can be felt here as well. In the first issue of Watchmen, Rorschach, a character inspired by the Question, seeks out his former colleagues who have retired from activity as superheroes, to issue a Campbellian “call to adventure.” In the previous issue of The Dark Knight Returns, the Question enacted a similar scene with the Martian Manhunter. Now, in the final issue, it is Batman himself who issues the call and the challenge to Green Lantern.

Like Rorschach, Batman serves as the voice of conscience to his fellow heroes: Batman points an accusing figure at Green Lantern for allowing Earth to fall victim to tyranny. (This may be DC, but Spider-Man’s mantra that “With great power must come great responsibility” lurks behind this.) In this series Batman is clearly the teacher of the kids, Catgirl and the Batboys, but notice how Miller also puts Batman in the position of Green Lantern’s mentor as well. “Watch. Learn.” Batman commands Hal, “And make your choice.”

In this sequence in which Batman shows Jordan what is happening on earth, Miller grossly caricatures many members of the public, none of whom have anything enlightening to say. (“They blowed up Captain Marbles,” burbles one.) This technique continues to disturb me: it dehumanizes the very people the heroes claim to be trying to protect.

With a lovely lighting effect by colorist Lynn Varley, Jordan reverts from his alien guise to that of the human Green Lantern.

Here one can see Miller’s skill with language: he subtly shifts into a sort of poetry, with short, simple but evocative phrasing that creates a verbal rhythm: “He used to need a ring. He used to need a lantern. Now he is one. He is pure will. Sheer power. Hal Jordan. Green Lantern.”

That poetic style continues into the next three captions, which set the scene: “Earth. Metropolis. The city of dreams.” This image of Metropolis as “the city of dreams,” appears several times in this issue. Miller’s Metropolis, I suspect, is not simply “the city of dreams” because it is the idealized big city in which a fantasy hero, Superman, dwells. I believe that Miller is also pointing to Metropolis as a fictional analogue to New York City, which for so long has been the United States’ business and cultural center, the place in the popular imagination where people go to turn their dreams into reality. Just why Miller should be preoccupied with the symbolic nature of New York City in this final issue shall become clear later.

First, though, Miller addresses the theme of the death of a dream. In superheroes’ cataclysmic battle against Brainiac, continuing from the previous issue, Captain Marvel sacrifices not simply his life but his existence.

Miller has the Captain contend that the boy Billy Batson did not transform into him, but that they simply exchanged places when he said the magic word Shazam. This isn’t true in actual Captain Marvel continuity, but it does resemble the situations of Miracleman and Marvel’s Captain Mar-Vell, both of whom were inspired by the original Captain.

Perhaps Miller’s real point, though, is to emphasize that as a creative concept, Captain Marvel represents a young boy’s image of himself as a superhero. Hence Captain Marvel is Billy’s “wish” or “dream” become reality.

Now that leads to the question of how Miller’s Captain Marvel could still exist if, as he says, Billy Batson died eight years before. (Then again, characters like Captain Marvel, Superman and Batman himself have continued long after the deaths of their creators.)

Wonder Woman asks Captain Marvel what will happen to him if he says “shazam” now. “Where’s a wish go?” the Captain asks rhetorically. “Where’s a dream go when you wake up and you can’t remember it? Nowhere.”

This, perhaps, is the point in the series that is the most despairing. Like Neil Gaiman in 1602 #7, Miller here is conjuring up the image of mortality that is definitely the end, with no hope of resurrection or afterlife. Moreover, the death of the “dream” that is Captain Marvel would symbolize the death of all he symbolizes: a positive world view that good will inevitably triumph over evil, that uncorrupted heroism is possible, that innocent virtue can exist.

Now, The Dark Knight Strikes Again is far from a work of despair: instead, it vehemently contends that moral heroism is possible and can triumph. But I theorize that Miller kills off Captain Marvel because to him the Captain represents an outdated sort of hero. The two Dark Knight series are in part about redefining the superhero to fit a more adult and morally complex worldview. Miller’s Batman even berates himself for having wasted time chasing bank robbers in the past instead of addressing greater problems in the political system. Miller’s Batman has redefined his mission against evil, and he teaches other heroes, both young and old, to follow his lead. Batman’s redefinition occurred in the first Dark Knight series; in this second series, it is Superman whom Miller seeks to redefine to fit today’s world.

Wonder Woman urges Captain Marvel to meet his end as a “warrior,” to “go out with a lion’s roar,” and he does (reminding me of Jack Kirby’s “The Glory Boat” in The New Gods). Even if Miller does not have Captain Marvel adapt to this new, grim and grittier world, he still salutes him by granting him a hero’s demise.

Meanwhile, Gotham City (another New York analogue) is “rocked” by “cries for freedom.” “We’re talking tights power,” asserts one grotesque media talking head, as Miller reiterates his metaphor of the superhero as freedom fighter. But for another perspective, look at what the next talking head says: “If this is treason, then treason rocks.” Are the superheroes and the political protesters in this series opposed to the usurpers of authority, Luthor and Brainiac, or are they, as the word “treason” suggests, opposed to the American system of government?

As for Gotham being “rocked” by “cries of freedom,” now the rock group called the Superchix reemerge in the series. The Superchix represent a younger generation’s attraction to the superhero myth, and their growing awareness of its political subtext of individual liberty. Appropriately, it is the Superchix who models herself after Batman who has the most insight into what this movement means. “Batchick” avows that “We’re looking at a seismic cultural shift here, with profound political consequences. That’s why everybody’s wearing the tights all of a sudden. It’s in the zeitgeist.” Perhaps Miller here is commenting on the resurgence of the superhero concept in real-life contemporary media, through, for example, all the recent superhero movies, and speculating as to why the audience responds so strongly to this imagery.

Batman addresses the young audience at the “Superchix” concert: “We aren’t here to rule. We aren’t here to bring chaos or anarchy. We’re here to end the reign of criminals.” Well, Batman (and Miller) is surely sincere in saying this. It is echoed by the Martian Manhunter in Paul Dini and Alex Ross’s JLA: Liberty and Justice, but there the Justice League appears to be acknowledging they serve at the will of the United Nations and the people of the world.

The majority of the American people do not back Batman’s American revolution; Miller even points out that the majority opposes it. At this point in the story Batman is gaining support from the younger generation, at least a segment of them, but this series gives me the impression that Batman would be out to topple Luthor’s rule whether Batman had any popular support or not. Batman may not intend to “rule,” but he and his allies are seeking to impose their will on the American government, which Luthor and Brainiac control. Batman says he does not intend to bring “chaos or anarchy,” but if one lops off the heads of the government, what happens next? Batman and company do not want to try to govern the country after they get rid of Luthor, so who will take charge?

So Batman and his allies take it upon themselves to intervene in the workings of a government, claim they have not come to “rule,” have no real plans for preventing chaos after they depose its leaders, and assert that they merely intend to “end the reign of criminals.”

Batman continues, “Luthor, Brainiac. This is only the beginning, tyrants. Your days are numbered. You can’t fight us ““ and you can’t find us. We strike like lightning ““ and we melt into the night like ghosts.” Batman is casting himself and his revolutionary movement as guerrilla warriors. Then again, one could describe terrorists the same way, and throughout this series Miller’s Batman characterizes himself as a terrorist. Yet next the story evokes the work of real life terrorists.

Miller shifts to a full page shot of silhouetted twisted steel girders amid rubble, and he repeats the phrase that Metropolis is “the city of dreams.” Miller has stated in interviews that he was working on this series when the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks occurred, and this image inevitably evokes the remains of the World Trade Center at Ground Zero. The corresponding site in this story appears to be that of the Daily Planet building, likewise obliterated. Miller shifts back into his poetic mode of brief but vivid phrases for a description that could suit both scenes of devastation: “There are countless dead. But few corpses. Countless dead. Atomized.”

It’s odd: the World Trade Center attack was the work of malevolent terrorists striking out at the American government. The Dark Knight Strikes Again turns this upside down. Here the devastation is wreaked by the (secret) heads of the United States government, and the “terrorists” are the good guys, rebelling against it. If real life terrorists read American comic books, would this be how they saw themselves: as superheroic figures attacking a tyrannical, monolithic political establishment? Perhaps DK2 is not just seeking to revive the spirit of 1960s superheroes, but also the sprit of 1960s political radicalism.

Now there is a sequence of Superman and his daughter, Lara, the new Supergirl, amidst the ruins at Metropolis’s Ground Zero. The Dark Knight Strikes Again page that was in the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art show I reviewed last year is part of this segment. It evokes the difference between the father, who feels he has failed in his lifelong career and his daughter, just starting out on her own. In one large panel Superman stands surrounded by the rubble, and seems in a sense to be a part of it: Miller draws him as if his face and hands are smeared with grime, while Varley colors his normally bright costume in dark, somber tones. In contrast, Lara, here and throughout this sequence, floats above the rubble. Superman feels implicated in the disaster because he did not dare to fight back against Luthor and Brainiac; Lara has not yet been corrupted by the world and can hover above it, untouched by the catastrophe.

There’s more to the metaphor. Presumably inspired by those who lost family and friends in the 9/11 attacks, Miller establishes that the core supporting cast of Superman’s series ““ Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, and even Lois Lane ““ perished in the annihilation of the Daily Planet building. It is not just his own moral compromises that link Superman to the disaster, but also his humanity, his personal connection to “normal” people. In this large panel Superman is looking at a locket he found amid the rubble: it is Lois’s, and holds joined pictures of herself and of Superman in his Clark Kent guise. The series has already established Wonder Woman as Superman’s lover and the mother of his daughter. There is no backstory given for the Superman-Lois-Wonder Woman triangle, so one can only speculate. One may presume that Superman’s feelings for Lois was his principal link to humanity. Indeed, though characters keep calling Superman “Clark” in this series, the only time that Superman is pictured in his traditional Clark Kent guise in DK2 is in this photo, significantly paired with Lois’s. Perhaps when Lois died, the death of Lois, Superman’s life as part of the world of humanity has died as well. Looking at the locket, Superman sees not only the image of the dead Lois but that of the “dead” Clark Kent, as if looking down at himself in a coffin.

And Lara floats above this, too. From one aspect this is a sign of her moral innocence. But in another, more disturbing aspect, this signifies Lara’s separation from the human race. As far as we know, the only people that Lara knows are her mother, Wonder Woman, and now her father. And as we shall soon learn, not only does she have no ties to humans, she has contempt for them.

In comics the deaths of loved ones can serve to motivate the hero to pursue his crimefighting career: Batman’s origin is perhaps the prime example of this. Put it another, more disturbing way: the deaths of loved ones frees the hero to embark on his new mission. The demises of Lois and “Clark” similarly function as the conditions out of which Miller’s redefinition of Superman will emerge.

Look at how Miller finds visual imagery to represent Superman’s strong, shifting emotions during this sequence. Enraged by the massacre, Superman is pictured as a living silhouette, his head totally black even though his costume remains in full color, with his eyes glowing a fiery red. Here is Superman overwhelmed by his own “shadow” side, his presumably long-gestating anger. (One might also interpret this as Superman “blackened” by his own guilt over not preventing this disaster.) There’s a similar image of a vengeful, enshadowed Superman, eyes ablaze, confronting Luthor in the recent Superman: Birthright #9; perhaps it was influenced by the power of Miller’s image.

In contrast there is the huge close-up of an anguished superman when Lara asks him about Kandor (the city of potential victims he has so far failed, but who remain alive). The raging Superman’s face was a black void; the face of the mournful Superman, looking at the locket, seemed obscured by grime; the anguished Superman’s face is entirely visible, as if his concern for others brings him out of the darker, withdrawn side of his own emotions.

Superman thinks, “Lara is everything. She’s everything.” This may signify not only that he hopes that Lara will succeed as Earth’s protector where he believes he has failed, but also that, with his Daily Planet colleagues dead, she is all he has left. The “human” side of his life is over, and he is left with his half-Kryptonian, half-Amazon daughter.

There follows another of Miller’s remarkable double-page spreads, this one depicting Superman and Lara flying against a cityscape, reminiscent of the lower Manhattan skyline, complete with a gigantic cloud of soot, that looks much like the one I could see out my own window on September 11, 2001.

One of the themes of DK2 is the relationship between fathers and real or surrogate daughters: Batman and Carrie, Superman and Lara. So it’s no wonder that Superman is startled when Lara abruptly asks Dad “So how about sex?” But no, there’s no incest theme here; Lara is merely asking about the facts of life vis-a-vis super-powered Kryptonians, though perhaps this links her with the open attitudes towards sexuality taken by other members of this series’ younger generation, notably the Superchix.

Apparently having read Larry Niven’s “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex,” Superman replies, “Never with Terrans. They’re fragile.” This may be the explanation of why Superman turned from Lois to Wonder Woman.

Perhaps wrongly assuming her father shares her opinion, Lara elaborates on Superman’s phrase “Fragile, puny, stupid. These humans ““ They don’t know their place.” Shocked, Superman tells her, “You’re very young. You don’t know the poison those words contain.” Indeed, Lara is voicing the bigotry of a female ubermensch towards her supposed racial inferiors. It should be remembered that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman, like Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America, were transformations of the Nietzchean concept of the superman, which Nazism would turn to its own purposes, into a democratic hero who would combat fascism and its master race ideology.

In DK2 Batman teaches his “daughter” Carrie, and now Superman, having long neglected his paternal responsibility to mentor Lara, seeks to become her teacher, to turn her away from her dangerous attitude towards humanity. “We don’t command the world, Lara,” he tells her, “We share it. At our best, we serve it.” This is exactly the position that J’onn J’onzz takes in Dini and Ross’s JLA: Liberty and Justice when he addresses the United Nations.

Lara not only disagrees but seems not even to comprehend why her father takes his position. “Why?” she asks in bewilderment. “The humans just make a mess of things. Look at them. When they aren’t killing their planet, they’re killing each other. For their own sake – why don’t we just take over and run things?”

Now there is an issue that a number of major works in the superhero genre have addressed over the last decade and a half: Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman’s Miracleman, Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme, Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come, Warren Ellis’s The Authority. If the superhero is the superior man or woman, shouldn’t he or she be running society? Each of these works finds a different answer to the question. For example, the Squadron limited series forcibly argued that even the benevolent dictatorship of its superheroes was impermissible, for even they violated individual rights. Notice that in both Squadron and Kingdom Come it is Superman (or, in Squadron‘s case, his counterpart, Hyperion), who leads the superheroes who dominate the nation. Further, in both series it is Batman, or his Squadron analogue Nighthawk, who leads the forces of revolution against those superheroes in power. Batman is continually seen as a rebel, a revolutionary; Superman, the establishment figure, is seen as a potential ally of an oppressive political order, as indeed he was in the original Dark Knight series.

Here, in DK2 Batman is again a revolutionary, though he is acting without widespread public support from a populace that is mostly complacent or aligned with the established order, and Superman is being tempted by his daughter towards what he regards as tyranny.

Superman is appalled by Lara’s suggestion: “And do what?,” he exclaims, “Make them all slaves? That’s what the bad guys do,” he adds, slipping into simplistic language, perhaps suggesting Miller’s estimation of the depth of Superman’s philosophy.

Now one might think from his earlier speech that he is not out to “rule” that Batman would take Superman’s side in this argument. But now Batman appears as a voice on Superman’s head, and he instead castigates him for his shallow thought processes. As if he were his teacher in logic, Batman scolds Superman for “Working backward from a dumbass conclusion. Repeating whatever Ma and Pa told you without giving it a damn thought.”

Having physically beat up on Superman at the end of issue one, Batman has not yet finished mentally beating up on him as well. Thanks to a device he had the Atom plant inside Superman’s ear, Batman can now speak to Superman from far away, and transmit his image to him as well.

Batman has literally become a voice in Superman’s head, as if he really were Superman’s conscience. Batman has become like Superman’s guardian angel, albeit one who deals in tough love, trying to batter down his psychological defenses in order to set him on what he believes is the right path. Perhaps we can even view Batman and Lara, shown in one large panel on opposite sides of Superman, as, symbolically, his good and bad angels, one encouraging him to aid humanity and the other trying to persuade him to rule them.

Perhaps this image of Batman as a voice in Superman’s mind might even lead us to regard Batman and Superman as being like two sides of the same personality. Batman has become Superman’s Jungian shadow, representing a side of himself he has so far suppressed.

There is an interchange between the two sides. Studying the passive Superman, Batman finally figures out what has stayed Superman’s hand from attacking their enemies: the fact that Luthor and Brainiac hold the people of Kandor, the miniaturized last surviving city of Krypton, as hostage. As though continuing the concept of Batman and Superman as two sides of the same mind, Batman comes to realize Kandor’s fate without actually being told about it. And Batman now takes on some of Superman’s sympathy and concern for the stolen city.

But Batman does not let this stop him from waging his war against Luthor and Brainiac. The “Batman side” of the personality now asserts its dominance over the “Superman side”: Batman decrees, “From here on out, we don’t debate a damn thing… you work for me.”

Then the “shadow” figure of Batman tries to impose control over Superman’s dark anima, Lara, as well: “The same goes for you, young lady. You work for me.” But she angrily rebels, refusing to cede her independence to what she considers a human who doesn’t know his subservient place.

But this is Superman’s turning point: he sides with Batman, the shadow figure he had previously rejected: “The bastard. He’s our only hope.”

At this critical point Luthor triggers a long-range power surge that causes Batman’s image and voice to vanish. Lara believes that Batman is “dying.” But Superman for the first time in this series, smiling, denies it and tells her, “You don’t know Bruce.”

Well, Superman knows that Batman has already “died” and returned to life in the first Dark Knight, so it would not be a surprise if he were resurrected again. But why “kill” Batman off at this point in the story? Simple: by accepting Batman’s influence, Superman has incorporated the “shadow: element that Batman represented into himself. Batman the teacher has died only to be resurrected in the form of his student Superman’s new determination to fight back against Luthor. Lara may not “know Bruce” but now Superman truly does: Batman and Superman are now in agreement on what to do.

The story shifts to a full page shot of Batman hanging upside down, in something of a fetal position, attached to the figurative umbilical cords: the wires he was presumably using to transmit his image and voice to Superman. Is this a nod to the imagery of The Matrix, another saga of rebirth and revolution?

On this page, the supposedly dead Batman wills himself back to life: “Not just yet, old man… One more job to finish.” Batman’s sheer will and spirit will triumph over his physical limitations, even it seems, over death.

Elsewhere Batchick continues her slow but steady process of enlightenment, recognizing that they are “in the midst of a political crisis of global proportions” and that hence “It’s incumbent upon us to put our sudden notoriety to better purpose than shaking our butts.” The first Dark Knight series was in part about turning rebellious children ““ the male street gangs ““ to better goals; DK2 continues the theme through raising the consciousness of these apolitical, hedonistic girls.

The news media refers to Batman’s forces as “terrorists” as they storm an orphanage being used by the government for genetic experimentation on children. As noted, Miller’s Batman revels in the idea of being a terrorist, but by this point it’s clear that this is the label that DK2s” American government uses for anyone who opposes it by force. Again, the idea of the terrorist as hero seems particularly strange at this point in our history.

As for the genetic experimentation, this not only reflects the fact that genetic engineering, for good or bad, is becoming a reality, but also ties in with the series’ continuing theme about parents and children. Here is the government, an older generation, horribly mistreating the country’s own children. It also reminds me of Marvel’s recent Captain America series, Truth, which draws on actual reports of American medical experiments on unknowing test subjects and compares this with Nazi human experimentation; I note further that Miller is mentioned in the Truth paperback’s appendix as having provided advice on the subject.

On his way back to Earth, Green Lantern provides another variation on the theme that Batman is the “shadow” figure whose views the other superheroes had to assimilate in order to defeat the greater “shadow” of Luthor and Brainiac’s tyranny. Calling Batman “The mean one. The cruel one. The one with the darkest soul,” Green Lantern thinks wonderingly, “How strange that you, of all of us, would prove to be the most hopeful.” While other superheroes engaged in moral compromise (Superman) or retreated from the fray (Green Lantern), Batman’s idealistic fervor proved as powerful as his rage.

Next the third issue brings back a major subplot from issue two, the mysterious new Joker who murders superheroes, and one of the previous issue’s major themes, the question of determinism versus free will. Carrie meets a precognitive girl who has adopted the name and costume of Saturn Girl of the 30th century Legion of Super-Heroes. (This is a clever bit: the fact that she knows about a woman who lives a thousand years hence is proof of this girl’s ability to see into the future.)

The new Saturn Girl foresees that Carrie will be attacked by the new Joker. Can Carrie change the course of events, or is it predestined? In a flashback Carrie recalls her previous encounter with Joker II, in which he was garbed as Mr. Mxyzptlk. That’s appropriate: the Joker and Mxyzptlk are both evil trickster figures. Carrie thought she had killed the new Joker, but Saturn Girl warns that he cannot die. Is that because symbolically, he is Death? Miller draws his head as a skull behind a mask.

Next we learn that Marine gunships are heading towards Gotham to suppress Batman’s rebellion. Superman unleashes his powers against the oncoming military. Even though earlier Batman and Lara had seemingly taken opposite sides on the question of whether Superman should participate in the rebellion, Superman has now adopted and synthesized both their points of views. He has joined Batman’s rebellion to free humanity, but he also apparently accepts Lara’s belief that they should take charge of human affairs. “Lara, you are right,” he thinks; “This time is ours. The power is ours.”

Meanwhile, Lara tells Brainiac that she will submit to him “body and soul” to save Kandor. The subtext of sexual surrender is pretty explicit: though one might think that Brainiac, a computer intelligence, is asexual, he leers that she is “lovely” and talks about inserting his “nanobots” into her. Brainiac hooks her up to wires to keep her complacent, in perhaps another borrowing from The Matrix. More importantly, Brainiac’s description of how the nanobots will work on her “pleasure centers” to induce a state of “bliss” should remind readers of how issue one contended that prosperity had soothed the public into political complacency.

A media talking head states that polls show “a groundswell of public support for the President’s military assault on domestic terrorism.” Several pages later we are told that Congress has unanimously voted to authorize the President to use military force “to confine domestic unrest.” The President’s press secretary, who looks much like George W. Bush’s former press secretary Ari Fleischer, notes how high the President’s popularity is. So Miller is emphasizing that most of the American public disapproves of Batman’s revolution; he is leading a minority in trying to topple the current regime. One of the Superchix asks, “Are we just spreading our legs to executive power?” continuing the imagery linking rape to political domination in the scene between Lara and Brainiac.

Superman, demolishing a military aircraft exults, “This is getting good to me.” This is a sign of how much Superman is absorbing the attitude of the missing Batman, who earlier demonstrated his joy in battling government forces.

A hero’s main villain represents his dark side, so it should be no surprise that the story now cuts to Luthor, who is also enjoying himself inflicting violence. His target is Batman, who we last saw on the brink of death: he doesn’t seem that much better off now, having been captured by Luthor, who, looking and behaving like a seedy version of Miller’s Kingpin, keeps punching him in the face.

Luthor repeats the line about “Metropolis. The City of Dreams” in the course of babbling about how he is going to destroy the city within ten minutes, and he and Batman discuss Luthor’s evident plans to trigger earthquakes that would kill millions of people. (Is that last part a reference to Luthor’s scheme in the first Superman movie?) Some pages later, Luthor indicates that he and Brainiac intend to kill off all but one billion of the Earth’s population to make it more “manageable,” though that makes little sense.

Luthor just seems to want to perpetuate the murder of millions out of sheer bloodthirstiness. This has nothing to do with any previous characterization of Luthor that I know. He is a cerebral character; so what sense does all of this destruction make? It is a commonplace that no one thinks of himself as evil, but always finds rationales for his actions; hence, in real life tyrants and terrorists have ideologies. If Luthor is just killing millions of people Because He Can, how can we take this character at all seriously? And if we cannot take the Luthor of DK2 seriously, then how, even in a work with a strong satiric streak like this, can the character be used to make a serious critique of government?

Now Superman makes an important speech, in which he redefines himself and his role on Earth: “Ma. Pa. You were wrong. . . . I am not one of them. I am not human.” He rejects his traditional mentors, the two foster parents who taught him traditional American values, and chooses instead two different teachers: “It took my own daughter and my darkest rival ““ my despised opponent ““ to teach me ““ I am not human.” Batman himself has learned from the young: it was Carrie who formulated the political strategy at the end of issue two. Wonder Woman criticized Superman for not acting as Lara’s mentor, but instead Lara has become Superman’s mentor, in a reversal of the normal order. Superman continues, “And I am no man’s servant. I am no man’s slave. I will not be ruled by the laws of men.” This is the complete opposite of the conclusion of JLA: Liberty and Justice, in which the superheroes acknowledge the authority of human society. Is Superman arguing that to serve man is, in effect, to serve Luthor or the mindset he represents? Superman is saying that to obey “the laws if men” is to be a slave, to possess a slave mentality. He is sounding very much like the Nietzchean superman, indeed.

The American superhero has a dual nature: he is both human and superhuman, and it is the human side that ties him to the rest of mankind, and that restrains him from perceiving himself as superior to them.

The destruction of the human side of Superman’s dual life is complete with his rejection of his parents’ teachings. The restraints are now gone.

Superman’s head again turns to a silhouette, hiding his human features, as he angrily fires heat beams from his eyes. He declares, “I am no man. I am Superman.”

As a moment of comic relief, there is a vignette with Steve Ditko’s characters, the original Hawk and Dove, “just off Christopher Street,” a famous gay neighborhood in Manhattan. So, does Miller mean that the Hawk and Dove are a gay couple? (But they were brothers!)

Much better is the next sequence, with the size-changing Atom appearing as a giant in the shrunken city of Kandor. Putting the Atom in Kandor is such a good idea I am surprised that no one (as far as I know) had done it decades ago, when the Kryptonian bottle city was still part of official DC continuity.

It turns out that Batman allowed himself to be captured (and punched repeatedly) by Luthor to distract him. This seems rather masochistic on Batman’s part, but, in fact once he had converted Superman, his active role in the revolution was over. Batman had set all the players in motion, so no wonder Miller could let him “die” and vanish from the scene for awhile. Once Green Lantern arrives and strikes (in a Lynn Varley light show of green color), Batman can relax. He repeats his mantra from issue one, “Striking terror. Best part of the job.” It would seem that according to DK2, “terror” is a good thing if it is perpetrated by the right people. (Though somehow I suspect that, say, Osama bin Laden is as confident of his own rightness as Batman is in this story. Real life villains aren’t like Miller’s Luthor, who considers himself evil and is happy about it.)

Just as the Atom appeared in Kandor as a “colossus” who brought “salvation,” so now Green Lantern looms in outer space as a colossus who closes his fist around the Earth, in a gesture that mirrors Batman’s clenched fist signifying revolution on the cover of issue 1 and the last page of issue 2. Green Lantern’s gigantic size and power suggests that DK2 presents him, like Superman, as a being superior to ordinary men.

Also like Superman, Green Lantern now embraces the “shadow” side of superherodom that Batman represents. Green Lantern says that Batman was right: “Of course we’re criminals. We’ve always been criminals. On this planet we have to be criminals.” In other words, the superheroes cannot cooperate with human government; they must stand in opposition to it.

Even in the original Dark Knight, Miller’s Batman drew the line at killing. Not any more, although, significantly, Batman leaves it to a member of younger generation, the son of Hawkman, to kill Luthor. Batman exclaims, “Way to go, kid! That was great!” The Flash objects, but Batman counters, “Get used to it, Barry, These youngsters play it rough. It’s a whole new ballgame.” This is the second time we’ve read that line in DK2. Like Superman, Batman is learning from members of a younger generation who seem more ruthless than their elders were. And yet was it necessary to kill Luthor once Green Lantern had wrecked his plans? (And have we all forgotten that Batman could have captured Luthor when they met early in issue 2, thereby preventing many of the deaths that followed?)

Brainiac’s holding the Kandorians prisoners in their bottle parallels Luthor’s domination of Earth. Just as Batman and his allies liberate Earth, so now Lara liberates Kandor by smashing the bottle open. Joining their heat vision powers together, Lara and the Kandorians incinerate Brainiac. “And the monster screams” says a Kandorian: in destroying Brainiac, Lara and the Kandorians are enacting the mythic role of the dragon slayer.

As Lara rests after the battle, the Kandorian says, “Our savior sleeps,” perhaps making Lara a Christ figure; Christ symbolically slew the “dragon” Satan. But Lara is a wrathful demigod. Brainiac is destroyed by “fire,” and Miller three times gives us the line: “And hell comes to Earth.”

That is an ominous phrase. Is this a Last Judgement, in which Brainiac is consigned to the flames of hell? Does this make Lara, the one who sent him there, an analogue to Christ the Judge or to Satan, ruler of hell?

With Luthor and Brainiac destroyed, this leaves the Joker II subplot that seems borrowed from the “cape killer” mystery in Watchmen. Amusingly, Miller shifts to the subplot over two pages divided into many tiny panels, as if in acknowledgement that he hasn’t got much space left to wind this all up.

The second Joker murderously attacks Carrie, and so the prophecy has come true, although the new Saturn Girl left the matter of whether Carrie would die unresolved. Joker II pronounces Carrie to be “the daughter” that Batman “never had,” thereby making the father-daughter subtext explicit. There is a clever nod to various actresses from the 1960s Batman TV show (so, you see. my opening review in this column was not so far afield from the main topic).

And the new Joker turns out to be Dick Grayson, the original Robin, who in Miller’s alternate continuity, apparently never graduated to become Nightwing of the Teen Titans. Now perhaps his masquerades in Legion of Super Heroes costumes makes sense: in the Silver Age the Legionnaires, like Robin, were teenage superheroes. Maybe Miller is trying to lump all these “kid” heroes together. And while Miller certainly loves his own creation, Carrie Kelly, the female Robin, he definitely does not like the original version.

Whether by accident or not, this plot twist parallels the one in Warners Animation’s Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, in which a new Joker likewise is revealed to be a former Robin.

Batman tells Grayson he “fired” him for “incompetence” and “cowardice,” which are not traits associated with the Dick Grayson we know from the comics. Grayson’s hatred of Carrie is a lethal form of sibling rivalry, resentment of the “daughter” who displaced him as Batman’s sidekick, heir and surrogate child. “Damn you! I loved you!” the DK2 Grayson tells Batman. This is the cry of a rejected adopted son, or perhaps even, in a nod to the late Dr. Fredric Wertham, that of an embittered sufferer of unrequited love of a different sort. But could the Grayson of past continuity ever conceivably become a serial killer?

The Robin subplot is clearly important to Miller; the extreme close-up of Batman’s grim eye as he wields an axe against Robin is even used for the cover of the DK2 trade paperback. But why? What purpose does it serve in the series? What is the point?

Perhaps it is no more than what Batman tells Grayson: “You were always pathetic. You’re still pathetic.” Maybe Miller just really dislikes the kid sidekick characters of past decades, and created Carrie as an improved version.

What I find to be the most startling part of DK2 is Batman’s utter hatred towards Grayson. Batman must have cared for him once, and Grayson has clearly gone insane. But Batman shows not the least iota of sympathy for him or regret that Grayson turned out this way. Instead he ruthlessly tries to destroy him. Whether you think of Batman and Robin as father and son, big brother and little brother, teacher and student, or even as lovers, this is shocking.

First he tries to drop Grayson into the lava of an active volcano beneath the Batcave. (A what? Gotham City is a fictionalized New York, and New York State is not known for volcanic activity.) Grayson saves himself, so Batman beheads him with an axe, commenting that “I’m no Thanagarian, but it’s a good, clean cut.” (So it seems that Batman is following the example of Hawkman’s son and is now willing to kill.) Thanks to genetic alterations he underwent, this doesn’t kill Robin, who merely sticks his head back on. (What, is there Velcro attached?) So instead Batman throws himself at Robin, hurling them both towards the lava. “Let’s die,” Batman says, though he knows full well that Superman will rescue him. Having become more like Batman, Superman doesn’t bother with saving Robin, who is incinerated in the lava, as if he were Tolkien’s Ring at Mount Doom. The scapegoat, Robin, perishes, while Batman undergoes a symbolic death and resurrection.

The result of Batman’s revolution seems all too simple. He did not actually overthrow the government, but his forces removed the two “criminals” in charge, Luthor and Brainiac. The threat supposedly gone, Miller (through the Flash) pokes fun at two leading government officials, who are clearly caricatures of real-life Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft. So I suppose Batman’s goal was not so much revolution as assassination.

But wait: if “President Rickard” was a CGI fake, and Luthor and Brainiac the secret powers behind the throne, surely they must have had accomplices to execute their orders through the government and military. The top administration officials must have been working hand in glove with them. If in the world of DK2 Rumsfeld and Ashcroft were working for Luthor and supporting his policies (like mass murder), has Batman really saved America by leaving them in power?

The presence of Rumsfeld and Ashcroft further suggests that Miller means for Luthor’s government to symbolize the real-life federal government, and the current Bush administration in particular. But one cannot seriously accuse the actual Bush administration of literally committing the kind of atrocities that Luthor’s regime perpetrates.

So what is Miller’s actual beef against the U. S. government? What are his actual criticisms of it? How does he think that things could be run better? Towards the end Miller presents another Crossfire-style debate between Green Arrow, representing the left, and the Question, representing the right, that goes nowhere. There are no answers offered.

Does Miller just not like big government and the prosperous public that supports it? Is he just writing out of the sort of gut feeling he has against Dick Grayson?

Inspired by Batman’s victory, Batchick enthuses, “We could be witness to a profound change in human history here! This is totally millennial! These heroes offer us a fresh start ““ toward a better world! A brighter tomorrow!” The Superchix’s Wonder Girl sneers, “God, that is so Silver Age!”

Actually, that should be Neo-Silver Age. Miller does seem genuinely to see Batman and the other superheroes as symbols of individual freedom as providers of hope for a better world, as forces for positive change. In this way Miller’s versions of these DC superheroes really does recapture the spirit of the Silver Age, rejecting the cynicism, irony and pessimism of other recent comics.

But then there’s DK2‘s last look at Superman and Lara, hovering above the planet Earth. (Just previously, Miller shows us that there is now a church that worships Superman as a god.) Superman, ceding the role of mentor to his daughter, asks her, “What exactly shall we do with our planet, Lara?” Lara watches silently, with an eerie look in her eyes. She reminds me of the Starchild at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the man evolved into a godlike being, contemplating the Earth. What will he ““ or Lara and Superman – do next?

Is it in keeping with the spirit of Silver Age comics to have a Superman who renounces his humanity and intends, effectively, to control the world? Is a Batman who murders Robin have anything to do with the Silver Age philosophy? Or heroes who so disdain democratic processes? No, no and no.

In “Dizzoner the Penguin,” Robin, Commissioner Gordon, and virtually everyone else thinks the Penguin will win the election easily. Only Batman trusts in the ultimate wisdom of the people, and by the episode’s end he is proved right. As a good West Wing watching liberal, whose sensibilities have been shaped by the politics and the comics of the’60s, I prefer this show’s attitude toward democracy to that of DK2. Batman has changed since the ’60s in more ways than one.

Perhaps I can postulate the existence of another school of contemporary comics writing, one that flirts with the dangerous dark side of the superhero myth, with the concept of superheroes who put their own moral codes above those of society, and who believe it is their duty, not just to save people from harm, but to impose their “higher” morality upon them. In honor of Warren Ellis’s The Authority, I could dub this the Authoritarian School.

The Dark Knight Strikes Again sets out on two different routes simultaneously, one towards recapturing a heroic, idealistic past, and another towards a particularly grim and gritty ideology. Which path are the comics of this first decade of the 21st century more likely to take?

It is quite possible that, as Miller had the Question say in the first issue, he is not out to propound answers, but merely to ask the “question.”

Having set up this dichotomy between popular ideals and elitist ideology in DK2, perhaps he intends to explore the subject further. I, for one, would like to see what Superman and Lara do next, and if they do decide to take control of the world, how Batman would respond to that. In other words, I hope we do not have to wait another fifteen years for DK3.

Speaking of hope, thankfully, The Dark Knight Strikes Again ends on a positive note as Batman, so ruthless towards the first Robin, expresses his genuine warmth and love towards his “daughter” Carrie. He seems humanized at last.

Carrie is surprised that Batman has blown up the Batcave, including the familiar relics of the past, like the giant penny. “But it’s your history. Your whole history,” she protests. Now maybe this is the real reason DK2 kills off Dick Grayson. Miller makes a point of reviving the Silver Age heroes in DK2, even ones that DC officially killed off, but he recasts them in contemporary terms, discarding what he feels no longer works. Perhaps the Dick Grayson version of Robin fits into that category.

On this final page of the series, having endured Luthor’s beatings and the rest, Batman looks battered and grotesque. He may be physically old, but through his actions he remains spiritually young; through redefining himself he has been reborn. He no longer needs the “souvenirs” of an outdated past because he has regained his vitality in the present. His last words in DK2 are “I was sentimental back when I was old.”

For still more about the Batman mythos, I direct readers’ attention to editor Michael Eury’s new Back Issue #3, now on sale from TwoMorrows publishing. This new issue’s cover feature is an article by yours truly about the history of the Joker, containing interviews with six writers and artists who did landmark work on the character: Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams, Steve Englehart, Marshall Rogers, Jim Starlin, and Brian Bolland, who contributed the stunning and macabre cover.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

As I hope readers know by now, the weekly schedule of this column is interrupted when IGN/FilmForce assigns me to report on some cartoon art-related event, most recently Cartoon Network’s “upfront” presentation on its Adult Swim programming. Now I can return to some works in progress for this column. But even before completing my trilogy on Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, I should deal with my comments and annotations on the penultimate issue of Neil Gaiman’s 1602 before the series’ conclusion finally arrives.

Initially I found the cover to 1602 #7 puzzling. There was Dr. Strange’s head, symbolically hovering over the ship in which other heroes cross the ocean through the unexplored darkness. So what is that red ribbon that comes out of his mouth and swirls above his head? It is like an enormous tongue. (No, smart alecks, I don’t believe this is an allusion to Marvel’s KISS books. More seriously, as we see later in the issue, Magneto’s minion the Toad also has a long tongue, but I don’t think there is a meaningful parallel there, either.) Perhaps it symbolizes speech: the message that Strange has to offer, following the information he gained from the Watcher in the previous issue.

It also alludes to a standard magician’s trick: producing ribbons and cloths from unexpected places, including one’s mouth.

Reading the issue reveals that Strange is not entranced on the cover, his eyes closed, or dreaming: he is beheaded in the course of the story. As we shall see, this supports the “speech” interpretation, since Strange’s spirit will have much to say after his physical demise. But now the red ribbon also represents a river of blood, with the lines on it denoting flowing water. The bright blood, denoting life escaping the body, contrasts with the nearly black waters below, which may be lifeless death.

A ribbon representing blood is also a traditional, stylized theatrical device: director Julie Taymor uses it in her work. This may serve to remind us that 1602 is a story, an artificial construct, and the concept of story becomes important by the issue’s end.

There is also the old image of the soul emerging from a person’s mouth at death with his last breath. (For modern uses of this artistic device, see Terry Gilliam’s film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and even the new Hellboy movie.) If the ribbon represents Strange’s soul, that would explain why it rises upward, in contrast with the ominous comet, which plunges through it towards the mortals on Earth.

The comet on the cover is a traditional signifier of major events that will radically alter the status quo. The Star of Bethlehem could have been a comet, for example. William Shakespeare, alive in 1602, repeatedly used strange disruptions of the usual natural order in his plays to symbolize social and political upheavals on Earth. The unusual phenomena in the skies in 1602 not only indicate on a literal level the forces that imperil all of reality in the story, but also fulfill this symbolic function. With Elizabeth I murdered, a malevolent James I having ascended the throne of England, Magneto openly defying established authority, and repression and religious persecution rampant, the world of 1602 would be in turmoil even without this cosmic sword of Damocles hanging over the cosmos.

Not until I started taking notes for this column did I notice that the constellations in the background represent characters from the story. Magneto especially looks here like the kind of figure from Greco-Roman mythology whom Westerners picture as a constellation. In Peter Parker’s case, the constellation takes the form of his symbol, his animal avatar, the spider. The deer, perhaps, is the still mysterious shapeshifter Virginia. (But who is the nude woman to the right?) This is a wonderfully ingenious new way of making the point that superheroes (and villains) represent a modern mythology, contemporary counterparts to the gods and heroes of classical myth.

Strange’s opening narration (or, if we pursue parallels to English Renaissance literature, his soliloquy), is another of Gaiman’s inventive ways of recapping complex continuity in this series.

It is odd that Strange can be held captive in a cell. (At times it has been claimed in his own series that Strange’s magic cannot affect physical things. Well, excuse me, but then what is the point of magic?) It is possible that Strange is not as powerful in this time, though surely he is still more powerful than Clea, who indicates later that she could easily rescue him if he had not forbidden it. But it becomes clear as the issue progresses that Strange has willingly allowed himself to be imprisoned and eventually executed. To save humanity and more, he had to give himself up to his enemies and sacrifice his life. (There’s a Christ motif here.)

Though Strange claims that the alien Watcher gave him a “vision of everything,” it does not extend to the identity of the Forerunner, the being whose arrival in this period triggered the approaching apocalypse (Hey! Another religious image!). But that makes sense: the Watcher could not reveal what he himself did not know.

The Forerunner arrived fifteen years ago, and Strange thinks it may be the girl Virginia. Of course! A teenage girl! I wondered why I had missed something so obvious, until I realized why I had unconsciously dismissed this red herring. It is because we were told she is the first “born” in the New World, so she is not a time traveler from the future.

Strange refers to the threat of the coming “darkness” that will spread “across everything there ever was, or is, or will be, rendering it down to pure nothingness. No heavens or hells, no worlds between.” Gaiman could have simply stated that the threat to the universe, if unstopped, will destroy it in 1602, but he goes further. He has conjured a particularly chilling vision of mortality, in that he specifies that there will be no hereafter, either: death will definitely mean oblivion, nonexistence. (This “darkness” is thus the opposite of the heavenly “light” that the dying are said to see and move towards.) Indeed, the “darkness” will obliterate time itself, it seems, so that all of creation never existed: it will be an eternity of nonexistence. Why does Gaiman go to such lengths in describing this peril? He could simply be trying to make his apocalyptic threat seem greater than the many others in past comics stories. Perhaps, since it has been established that the Marvel Universe has been established to extend to alternate realities and timelines, and that humans have spirits that survive after physical death, that Gaiman means to indicate that there is no means of escape from this impending catastrophe. Strange’s astral form will not survive it, nor will there be a divergent timeline in which the universe escaped the disaster. (I suspect that theologians would challenge the idea that a physical threat could actually have any effect on spiritual realms, but this is irrelevant as far as this story is concerned.)

In any case, religious themes have thus been introduced, and they will crop up repeatedly in this issue.

The Watcher imparted his “vision of everything” to Strange on the condition that for the rest of Strange’s life, he never tell anyone what he has learned. “While I live, my lips are sealed.” In 1602 the Watcher is like an oracle, a source of knowledge, who deals in riddles. This is one of them, and Strange must solve it.

The story shifts to Spain, where representatives of the Church are about to burn the captive Grand Inquisitor, who we know as Magneto, and his allies, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, at the stake. In the dialogue between Magneto and the lead clergyman, I am struck by its simple, conversational tone. Gaiman deals with understated villainy, the villain who speaks quietly rather than in the sort of bluster and threats that one traditionally expects from Marvel villains. Perhaps this is the only way to make the dialogue of these larger-than-life characters believable in today’s comics. The mode of speech that Stan Lee gave so many of his villains, which so many of his followers adopted, can seem corny and over the top. Yet it took a long time for comics writers to start to abandon this style. (For example, writer Peter Gillis, in his 1980s Eternals limited series, endowed his creation Ghaur, the high priest of the Deviant race, with a quiet, subtle yet menacing style of speaking. Every writer who subsequently used Ghaur ignored this, seemingly unable to comprehend a comics villain who did not speak in pompous bombast.)

Nonetheless, I suspect that something has been lost here. Stan Lee was aiming high with the disparate styles of dialogue he gave his characters. He may have consciously been inspired by Shakespeare, who could have noble characters speak in high poetry and low comic characters talk in prose and Elizabethan slang. In Stan Lee’s case, think of the comparable difference in the dialogue he gives the Silver Surfer and the Lee aimed at creating a heightened, stylized form of language for his grander characters, both heroes and villains, contrasting it with the colloquial, more realistic style he gave his everyman characters like Spider-Man. The language mirrored Lee’s fusion of the mythic and the everyday in his stories.

As the drawings make clear, Magneto is bound to a stake between the stakes to which his accomplices have been tied. Is this an ironic parallel to Christ crucified between the two thieves? This won’t seem so far-fetched in another few pages.

We learn that in the 1602 reality, Magneto’s first name is “Enrique,” a play on “Erik,” his alleged first name in mainstream Marvel continuity. (There was a story some years back that established that Magneto’s name “Erik Lehnsherr,” was merely an alias, but it’s as if I was the only one who read that story, inasmuch as it has been ignored by subsequent writers.)

The lead clergyman reveals that in this reality Magneto was “born a Jew, in the ghetto of Venice,” and in this speech, the clergyman makes the virulent anti-Semitism of that time quite clear.

It is by now a commonplace that the antagonism towards mutants in X-Men is a metaphor for racism. It has been pointed out that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the X-Men in the early 1960s, when the African-American civil rights movement was prominent in the news. It might be more relevant that Lee and Kirby were both Jewish-Americans; consciously or unconsciously, perhaps they were really aiming at anti-Semitism. Decades later, it was Chris Claremont who established that Magneto, as a child, had been imprisoned at Auschwitz. Although another X-Men issue that people seem ignorant of established that Magneto was a gypsy (like Doctor Doom!), the comics and X-Men movies now treat Magneto as Jewish.

Gaiman not only picks up on this, but uses it to point to the similarities between Magneto and a far more famous literary character, who was created not long before the year 1602. By establishing that the 1602 Magneto was born in Venice, Gaiman is surely referring to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and its dominant character, Shylock, another victim of anti-Semitism who, understandably pursues a bloody vengeance.

The clergyman burns off Enrique’s beard. Gaiman dies this in part for practical reasons: Enrique will soon don his familiar helmet, and Gaiman wants him to be recognizable as Magneto. Ridding Magneto of the beard throws off his “disguise” from the readers and also makes him look younger, in part one of his “rebirth” over the next pages.

And here is another aspect that may not have been intended by Gaiman. The burning off of Magneto’s beard echoes the way that the Human Torch burned off the amnesiac Sub-Mariner’s beard in Fantastic Four #4: in both cases the beardless man then reclaims his true identity and launches an assault on the human race.

Like the malevolent “vice” characters of Renaissance drama, Magneto is a trickster, and here he saves himself through a stunt out of the playbook of a later trickster, Br’er Rabbit. Magneto asks that his most precious belongings, including his helmet, be spared from the fire; naturally, as Magneto expected, the cruel clergyman instead places the helmet on the pyre.

(The helmet, by the way, is no anachronism: Jack Kirby seems to have based Magneto’s helmet on ancient Greek battle helmets.)

The churchman says that the helmet will burn as Enrique burns, thereby linking the two. The helmet is representative of Magneto’s true self. Through the burning of the helmet, which is unaffected by the flames, Magneto undergoes a symbolic death and resurrection.

Magneto then magnetically levitates the helmet, the sign of his power and identity onto his head, and breaks free of his bonds. It does not make literal sense that the helmet increased Magneto’s power enough that he could escape. Perhaps he could have broken free at any time and was merely putting on a show to cow his oppressors. But it makes sense metaphorically. Symbolically, Enrique has to be reborn into his Magneto identity to escape.

As Magneto frees himself, he extends his arms, taking on the familiar pose associated with the Crucifixion. As noted, this is an ironic parallel: Magneto is certainly no Christ figure, though he may think of himself as mutantdom’s savior. In freeing himself while mimicking the Crucifixion, Magneto creates the image of simultaneous death and resurrection.

Magneto continues the theme of rebirth through comparing himself with a “butterfly” emerging from its “chrysalis”: he has ascended to a more powerful state of being.

Now the story shifts to the Eagle’s Shadow, the ship carrying many of 1602‘s heroes to the New World. Perhaps there is an allusion to Shakespeare’s The Tempest here, inasmuch as Prospero’s island is thought to have been inspired by newly discovered islands across the Atlantic. Or perhaps this journey is meant to evoke the emigration of Englishmen, many of whom felt themselves to be outcasts in Britain, to new homes in America. Even if Gaiman has recast these well-known Marvel heroes as Europeans in 1602, these characters are American creations, after all. (Perhaps this even reflects Gaiman’s own transition from his life in England to his eventual settling in the United States.)

It’s a nice touch that the 1602 version of Bobby Drake, the X-Men’s Iceman, turns out to be a relative of the Elizabethan explorer Sir Francis Drake.

Here it becomes clear that the 1602 Fantastic Four don’t have their modern-day uniforms made of “unstable molecules” that adapt to their powers: Reed’s clothes do not stretch along with him. The series seems to suggest that Sue, the Invisible Woman, wears nothing when invisible because she cannot turn clothing invisible. (In fact, according to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, this is irrelevant since Sue achieves invisibility by bending light around herself.)

In 1602 America is a wilderness, so it makes sense that Gaiman has turned it into the 1602 version of Marvel’s own primeval realm, Ka-Zar’s Savage Land, populated by prehistoric beasts. The Thing refers to its “hairy oliphaunts,” meaning woolly mammoths. Can this also be a subtle allusion to the “oliphaunts” in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings?

PBS recently telecast the series In Search of Shakespeare, which pointed out that Elizabethan England was, in host Michael Wood’s words, a “police state” and mentioned Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Sir Thomas Walsingham. Presumably Nicholas Fury, in 1602 holds the role that Walsingham filled in actual history, and the PBS series showed me the context in which to place Gaiman’s depiction of spies, intelligence gathering, the search for traitors, and the state’s use of torture in 1602. (The series also emphasized that Catholicism was outlawed in Elizabethan England, another example of the religious persecution that is one of 1602‘s subjects.)

Here Fury makes a speech that demonstrates the fate of those who fall from power in such a state: he is branded a traitor, his possessions have been confiscated, and his allies will be executed. (Actually, Fury has suffered a severe form of the fate that many members of established orders face when a new regime from outside takes over.) Fury makes the point that he chose personal loyalty ““ to the Queen and to Reed ““ over allegiance to James’s new order. As I observed about a previous issue, Gaiman seems to be emphasizing that the classic Marvel heroes can become outcasts because they stand for a moral code that may put them at odds with the established order.

Now religion raises its head once more: Fury speaks of the time when he will “meet my maker,” and Reed chimes in, “As we all shall.” One would not ordinarily think of Reed Richards, the man of science, and Nick Fury, the political realist, as being among the Marvel heroes most likely to be men of religious faith, but in 1602 they are. The previous issue established Carlos Javier (the X-Men’s Charles Xavier) to be deeply religious as well. These three men’s spirituality is presented much more positively than that of the institutional churches, the Catholic Church in Spain and the Church of England in Britain, both of which deal in religious persecution and bigotry. The 1602 Reed and Fury believe in a moral God and a life after death.

We have previously been told that King James’s aide is named “Banner,” so he must be the 1602 counterpart to Bruce Banner, the Hulk. With only one issue to go, it seems unlikely that this Banner will undergo a monstrous transformation. Perhaps this Banner’s role in 1602, as the underling of a malevolent ruler, is meant as a comment on Dr. Bruce Banner’s original role as a nuclear scientist who, without questioning its morality, develops a weapon of mass destruction for the U. S. government.

In this issue we learn that King James’s Banner is named “David”: I will assume that “Bruce” was not used as a first name back then, so Gaiman has chosen to nod to the “David Banner” of the Hulk TV show instead.

In explaining to Virginia why they cannot openly use supernatural means to rescue Strange, Clea speaks of James’s antagonism towards magicians; this is another example of the pervasive prejudices depicted in this series.

The Angel, it turns out, is the only character aboard the eagle’s shadow who did not realize that “Master Grey” was really a girl, whom we know as Jean Grey. This certainly makes Angel look stupid; if no one else aboard was fooled, one might wonder what the point of her disguise was. (Later, Angel refers to Jean as “the boy I so wanted to believe in.” Is Gaiman possibly implying that the 1602 Angel is gay, then?)

Gaiman is surely alluding to the Shakespearean device of girls masquerading as boys here: in Shakespeare’s plays this trick enables young women ““ Viola, Rosalind, Portia ““ to exercise a freedom of action that is not permitted to women of their time. Perhaps Gaiman’s point is that a girl could not be a part of a team of adventurers in this time unless she disguised herself as a boy. (This prejudice does not stop 1602‘s Susan Storm from being an adventurer; then again, she’s invisible, so no one literally sees her defying social customs.) Maybe it’s even Gaiman’s joke on the fact that though this team of mutants has virtually always included at least one woman, Marvel has always called it the X-Men.

From excessive exertion of her powers in the previous issue, Jean now dies, in a sequence superior or more affecting than the recent “death scene” Jean had in contemporary continuity in New X-Men #150. (Since Jean has “died” and returned before, it’s hard to think that her “death” in New X-Men #150 will prove to be permanent.)

Imprisoned in the Tower of London, Peter Parquagh ““ the 1602 counterpart of Peter Parker ““ again watches an animal symbol of his modern day self, a spider. Banner tells Peter a story about the Scots rebel, “the Bruce” (This is appropriate from Banner’s mouth!), who saw the spider as a symbol of heroic perseverance and survival; whether this story is Gaiman’s invention or not, I do not know, but it presumably tells us how Gaiman regards Spider-Man’s celebrated devotion to his responsibility.

Strange’s execution comes as a surprise, in part because of Gaiman’s subtle handling: the beheading happens off panel, and when Clea is reunited with Strange on the next page, it may take a bit of time to realize that Strange’s head is no longer connected to his body. One never expects one of the heroes to die, though presumably the finale of 1602 will somehow undo Strange’s death, and perhaps this series’ entire version of the events of 1602 in the Marvel Universe.

The lights in the sky, this time described as being like “a hundred comets,” not only signal the coming end of the world, but in this case, specifically show the cosmos reacting in Shakespearean manner to the unjust death of a great man, Strange.

One of the guards mockingly pretends to tell another, “Harry, I am thy father’s ghost, come to see thee repent of thy whoremongering ways. . . .” I expect that the first guard has seen Hamlet and Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, and, perhaps not having the best of memories for the popular entertainment of his time, has conflated father and son relationships from both into his little joke.

Strange’s head can still telepathically project his thoughts until “darkness takes me”: though Strange spoke of heavens before, he is not here picturing a meeting with his maker, as Fury and Reed did. (Possibly Strange is simply referring to the coming “darkness” that will destroy all of time and space.) Clea kisses Strange’s severed head, but I don’t think that a reference to either Oscar Wilde’s or Richard Strauss’s Salome is intended (not unless Clea is the naked woman on the cover, which seems unlikely). Sandman aficionados will surely recall the living, severed head of Orpheus, however.

Clea notes that “the dead speak only in riddles,” raising the riddle theme once more. Here we learn how Strange solved the Watcher’s riddle: since Strange could not speak of what he learned from the Watcher while he lived, then Strange had to allow himself to be killed. Physically dead, Strange can now convey the information to Clea. I suppose that Strange is also not technically “speaking” the information, since he is communicating telepathically. (But couldn’t he have done that while he was still alive?) But why did the Watcher place such a cruel condition on Strange? Did he want Strange to die, and if so, why?

Actually, though Clea claims the dead Strange is speaking in riddles, he does not do so intentionally: neither of them know who “the Forerunner” is who must be sent back to its own time. In the manner of Sandman’s Lady Johanna Constantine, Clea rescues this sentient severed head from captivity amid a political reign of terror and carries it off.

Clea’s references to being a “queen,” whom Strange freed, “far beyond the veils of this world,” is a reference to the classic Stan Lee and Steve Ditko Dr. Strange storyline in which Clea is the princess of the Dark Dimension, tyrannically ruled by the Dread Dormammu. Dormammu already existed in the year 1602, so he did not need to be displaced through time: he simply met Strange several centuries earlier. (Exactly how old Clea is chronologically is a question that has never been addressed.)

As part of her funeral ceremony, the Human Torch sets Jean’s body afire in mid-air, and the Angel says he “imagined” ““ and we actually see ““ the gigantic image of a fiery bird: “Something huge. Something strange. Something beautiful.” This is the manifestation of the Phoenix force, which Gaiman describes in terms of the 19th century concept of the sublime: the beauty of the fearsome. Possibly the Phoenix image represents Jean’s released spirit, although since the Angel says he imagined it, we cannot be certain it is there; perhaps he is somehow drawing on the memories of his “real,” contemporary self.

As I have observed in previous columns, in 1602 Gaiman confines himself to the characters of Marvel’s Silver Age of the 1960s, those that Stan Lee wrote., and the characterizations he gave them. But Gaiman makes two exceptions to this rule by tipping his hat to the work of two of the most important writers to follow Lee on his creations. Though Gaiman primarily follows Lee’s lead in portraying Daredevil as a witty “daredevil” swashbuckler in the mode of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn, he also invests him, especially in the first issue, with the mysterious, noir-based “devil” aspect of Frank Miller’s Daredevil. And with the apparition of the Phoenix, even more so than with his discourse on Magneto’s background, Gaiman salutes Chris Claremont, who turned Jean Grey into the human embodiment of the Phoenix force.

Now comes what I consider to be the heart of the seventh issue. Reed theorizes that the “fundamental particles” or, perhaps more precisely, the “fundamental principles” of the universe are “Stories. And they give me hope.”

As with Reed’s evocation of God, this is not something one might ordinarily expect the modern day version of Reed Richards to say. The 1602 Reed is speaking of a philosophical concept as if it were a scientific theory. He is contending that in the Marvel Universe, it is fact that progressions of events tend to fall into the form of stories. In other words, existence is not a series of accidents; the course of events is directed and planned. “Yet I posit we are in a universe which favours stories. A universe in which no story can ever truly end; in which there can be only continuances.”

So who or what is formulating these stories?

On one level, the 1602 Reed is a character who, through his genius, has deduced that he exists within a fictional universe, an artificial construct. Reed is a character in the Marvel Universe, an enormous body of interconnected stories. Neil Gaiman is the presiding intelligence governing the events of the current story, 1602, but the character of Reed will go in to appear in other stories, planned out by other writers, probably for many decades to come.

Then, perhaps, the Marvel Universe is a better universe than the real one in which we dwell. In real life, we have no guarantees as to how our lives will progress, and our individual life stories inevitably end in death. Reed senses, however, that his universe will not end because stories do not end: one story leads into another. Though Reed does not say so, this means that an individual’s story may never end, either. A character is likely to survive any present dangers in order to go on to the next story. (Even many comics characters who die, like Jean Grey, eventually return to life.)

The Human Torch, more cynical than Reed, sees these implications of his argument. “You’re talking rot, Reed. Poor Jean Grey’s story is over. Von Doom’s story is done. All tales end. And our world will end likewise.” In other words, everything will end in death. (This seems to echo what Gaiman has told us in Sandman about Death of the Endless, that she will be the last surviving being in the universe, although she is intentionally vague on the matter of what, if anything, lies beyond death.)

Now,. even in terms of what we have already seen in 1602, the Torch may be wrong. Doom was still alive, if barely, when we last saw him. And, as noted, perhaps Jean’s spirit continues to exist as the Phoenix Force. Again, recall that Reed and Fury have both spoken of an afterlife: they believe that in their universe, the hereafter is a reality. They also both referred to “their maker,” God, who would be the Writer of the stories of their lives and their universe.

Now, does Reed’s theory apply to the universe in which we readers exist as well? It depends on your point of view on religious matters.

Here again there are connections to be made with Gaiman’s previous comics work. For one thing, Morpheus, the Sandman, is the patron of storytellers and stories. And then there is Morpheus’s brother Destiny and his book. All of the past, present and future are written in Destiny’s book: though we do not know who does the writing, this implies that it is written and preordained. So the DC Universe also follows a “story.” And if Destiny’s book is meant as a metaphor for the workings of fate within our real universe, it too functions according to plan, not according to accident.

Ben asks Reed if he could transform him back from monster into normal human form. Reed replies that “the laws of story would suggest that no cure can last for very long,” since Ben is “much more interesting and satisfying” as the Thing.

This, of course, has proved true for the Thing throughout the history of his stories: his cures never last for long. So here Reed once again speaks of his universe as if it were a fictional construct. Still, a believer in an ordered universe might likewise believe that Ben’s cures could not last if it was necessary for him to remain the Thing in order to fulfill his destiny in a “satisfying” manner.

Just as the Angel “imagined” seeing the Phoenix, now Peter has a dream in which he swings from tree to tree. “I am more free and more alive than any man has ever been,” Peter thinks. He is, of course, imagining (remembering?) himself as Spider-Man. In part Gaiman is pointing out the difference between the introverted, brooding Peter, weighed down by his personal problems, and his other self, the extroverted, high-spirited Spider-Man. Gaiman’s reference to Spider-Man as “more free. . .than any man has ever been” reminds me of Frank Miller’s use of superheroes in The Dark Knight Strikes Again as symbols of individual freedom. Like Miller’s work, 1602 also has a political context. Miller states that his superheroes have to be “criminals” under a repressive government, and in 1602 King James treats all the heroes as traitors and outlaws.

In his dream Peter imagines himself swinging from trees because he cannot envision the skyscrapers of a later century. But I wonder if Gaiman is also linking the web-swinging Spider-Man to the vine-swinging Tarzan, himself an Englishman who has escaped the confinements of conventional society. The 1602 Captain America is likewise linked to Tarzan: a white man who grew up in the wilderness and mastered it. (The fact that the 1602 Cap’s wilderness is the Savage Land, realm of Ka-Zar, who is clearly a Tarzan analogue, makes the connection even clearer.)

Perhaps 1602 is pointing to Tarzan as a forebear of the superhero concept.

Fury’s, Reed’s and Javier’s positive view of God contrasts sharply with the one that King James now presents to Peter: James sees God as his excuse for persecuting whomever the king hates, just as Magneto’s adversary earlier in the issue used religion as his rationale for attacking Jews and “witchbreed” (mutants). This churchman accused Magneto of rejecting God’s mercy; James sees himself as embodying “God’s will.” Through James 1602‘s theme of bigotry and repression reaches its peak.

He obsessively sees traitors everywhere: “It’s all plots and plans and treacheries, laddie.” By this point, mutants, Catholics, Jews, “witches,” loyalists to the previous ruler, and, yes, superheroes, have been lumped together as traitors either to Church, state, or both. (I am reminded of Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier, which, building on a previous Justice Society of America story by Paul Levitz, shows the political witchhunts of the McCarthy era putting an end to the Golden Age of superheroes.) In having James justify himself by stating that “A king is God’s anointed,” Gaiman thereby political oppression with religious oppression, and alleged heretics with alleged traitors.

In an earlier issue Fury considered using torture on a captive, but decided against it. This issue 1602 clearly links torture with evil and oppression, not just through the attempt to burn Magneto at the stake and Strange’s beheading, but most dreadfully through James’s sadistic fantasizing about having Fury drawn and quartered

James threatens Peter that his Uncle and Aunt’s hearts would break (literally) if Peter were to die “a traitor’s death.” Faced with this prospect, Peter accedes to James’s will. But readers should recall the earlier speech about the spider’s persistence; I expect that in issue eight Peter will make his characteristic decision about the requirements of “great responsibility.”

It is fun to see how artist Andy Kubert now dresses Magneto in believable period garments that nonetheless evokes the present-day Magneto’s costume. It is even more amusing that Gaiman has Magneto name his new alliance “The Brotherhood of. . .” and then hesitates.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had called Magneto’s team “the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants,” but the word “mutant” did not exist in 1602; besides, Gaiman may be subtly acknowledging the improbability that the self-righteous Magneto would actually call his group “evil.”

On the final page, Clea accuses Rojhaz, the Caucasian who acts as an American Indian, of being the Forerunner who came from the future. With that Rojhaz drops his stereotypical broken English and speaks in what is clearly the English of our own time, right down to addressing Clea as “Ms. Strange.” (And what a relief that we were not to take Rojhaz’s politically incorrect, proto-Tonto brand of English seriously!) It is not a surprise that Rojhaz is Captain America; the surprise is that, unlike the other transplanted Marvel heroes, he remembers his 21st century self.

Cap/Rojhaz is supposed to have been in the past for fifteen years, yet he does not seem to have aged a bit: it must be the Super-Soldier serum at work.

As for Cap’s being the Forerunner of the Marvel heroes, well, the Sub-Mariner and the original Human Torch both predated Cap in comics’ “Golden Age.” But the original Torch, apart from a one-shot appearance in Fantastic Four Annual #4, was not part of Silver Age Marvel as well, and Namor, with his one-man terrorist attacks on the surface world, was hardly a conventional superhero. Though a Golden Age creation, Cap also embodies the spirit of the Silver Age Marvel heroes, so I can see Gaiman’s thematic point in making him the Forerunner. (And I wonder how many other readers had dismissed Cap as a suspect and were busy trying to find Namor instead.)

Will any other familiar Marvel characters, as yet unseen in 1602, appear in the final issue? I observe that Gaiman has avoided unsubtle allusions to his past work: the 1602 Strange did not encounter or even mention Nightmare, Silver Age Marvel’s own dream lord. I do not expect that when the Eagle’s Shadow lands that part of the beach will turn into the Stan Lee-Steve Ditko Sandman character, either.

Of the major Silver Age Marvel heroes, the most obvious one missing is Iron Man. I have been informed by one reader that Neil Gaiman stated in an interview that he couldn’t come up with a role for Iron Man’s alter ego, Anthony Stark, other than the obvious one of a man in a suit of armor.

Well, maybe I can come up with one. In the 1960s Tony Stark worked with Nick Fury at SHIELD, designing that organization’s weaponry and high tech equipment. Perhaps in 1602 Stark could have been Fury’s weaponer, as well as Peter’s mentor in science. Or, the Stark of the 1960s was also a munitions maker: like Bruce Banner, he was a servant of the American military-industrial complex, and, also like Banner, was nearly killed as a result: Stark stepped on the booby trap that injured his heart while he was on a mission in Asia observing his combat equipment in action. Could Stark have been another of King James’s aides, like Banner? Or could he have been working in the service of Doom, perhaps unwillingly, designing his weapons of mass destruction or even his armor? Perhaps Doom would have forced a wounded Stark to serve him, in an echo of Iron Man’s origin, in which Stark’s captors forced the dying man to create weaponry for them?

I somehow thought that 1602 would be a longer series, but here we are at issue seven with only one more remaining. Even considering the extra length of the final installment, can Gaiman really wrap up such a complicated tale in a single issue? It would seem that there is still so much to be done that it does not feel as if we are near the end. Well, we shall soon see.

In theorizing that the universe is comprised of “Stories. And they give me hope,” Reed gives a further indication that 1602 is part of what I have called the “Neo-Silver” movement in contemporary comics.

Perhaps this is a good point to explain further what I mean by this term. I do not mean the works of comics writers who are simply recycling variations on old Stan Lee stories as if the superhero genre and American comics had not evolved since the 1960s. This is the kind of work, which we have seen starting in the 1970s, that ended up reading like third, fourth, or fifth generation dupes of a videotape, and provoked such a strong reaction against Silver Age-style material from the mid-1980s on. Nor do I mean the attempted “reboots” of Silver Age series, in which the “rebooters” claim to be honoring the original stories, but make severe alterations in characterization and continuity that violate not just the letter but the spirit of the original tales.

In contrast, the writers and artists of “Neo-Silver” works have recognized and assimilated the more sophisticated developments in the medium since the 1960s and reinterpret the Silver Age characters and stories from that standpoint. They respect the achievements and intentions of the great writers and artists of the past, and attempting to recapture the spirit of their works for a new generation.

I propose that the first true “Neo-Silver” work emerged at the very time that the legacy of the Silver Age was under severe attack in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths: it was Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” his 1986 hail and farewell to the Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz Superman continuity, as I shall show in a future column.

So, too, 1602 neither debunks nor condescends towards the classic 1960s Marvel heroes; it does not distort their morality nor set the characters in a cynical or nihilistic world. One of its themes, as Reed states, is “hope”; others, enunciated elsewhere in issue seven, are loyalty, love, moral responsibility, heroic sacrifice, and the persistence “to keep on fighting forever” if need be. Just as Gaiman has transposed the classic Marvel heroes of the 1960s back into the 1600s, so too he has found a way to faithfully reinterpret their moral agenda for a contemporary readership. Created in the 1960s, the classic Marvel heroes are shown in 1602 to be timeless, able to fit into the early 17th century as well as into the early 21st.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

ONE AMONG FIVE

Here’s my favorite personal anecdote about the late, great comics editor Julius Schwartz. Once I was at the DC offices when I heard familiar voices coming from Julie’s office and wandered inside. There was ye editor himself, along with John Byrne, Frank Miller and DC staffer Robyn McBryde. With a big smile, Julie declared (and I can’t recall the exact wording) “Here we are: the five most important people in comics!”

And this was not entirely true. As you shall see, even Alan Moore refuses to challenge a Schwartz pronouncement, but I must summon up the courage to do so (much as I enjoy the fantasy of the five of us as absolute monarchs ruling benevolently over the entire artform; now there’s an Elseworlds premise for you). I am certainly not one of the most important figures in comics: I am and have been a peripheral figure, as befits my role as a historian, standing on the sidelines, observing creative people at work (yes, the parallel to Uatu the Watcher has occurred to me). Robyn, who subsequently vanished from the ken of comicdom into a career in women’s health clubs, certainly wasn’t that important either. (However, she is a beautiful blonde woman, a motif that will recur in this week’s column, and which surely accounts for why Julie included her.) John and Frank had a much greater claim to the title, as the men who had revamped Superman and Batman, respectively, for a new generation of readers. But are they definitely among the top five?

On the other hand, Julius Schwartz himself unquestionably was. In fact, I would suggest, seriously, another set of five: the five people without whom today’s American comics industry would not exist. Though some aficionados of alternative comics may not like to admit it, superhero comics dominate the market, keep the direct sales shops open, and thereby allow comic books in other genres to survive and even flourish. So these five people are the ones who are most responsible for the continuing existence of the superhero genre. Obviously, the first two are Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, the character that started it all. There are also Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the two principal fathers of the Marvel revolution, which opened the genre’s potential for greater literary sophistication and older audiences. And there was Julius Schwartz, who, among his considerable number of other achievements, rescued the superhero genre from near-extinction in the 1950s by pioneering the great revival period now known as the Silver Age.

THE BACKSTORY

How much can the world change in the course of one person’s life? Julius Schwartz was born in 1915, during World War I, before nanotechnology and genetic engineering, before DVDs and the Internet, before personal computers or television or transatlantic air travel, even before motion pictures with synchronized sound; all of this would have seemed the stuff of science fiction at the time that this major figure in early science fiction was born. Byrne and Miller may have reconceived Superman and Batman for a new generation in the 1980s, but when Schwartz was growing up there was no Superman or Batman. (Considering how established these characters have since become in the public consciousness, this may seem almost like saying there had been no stories about Robin Hood or King Arthur!). In fact, the American newspaper comic strip was still a young artform, having begun in 1894, only twenty-one years before Schwartz’s birth, and the first successful newsstand comic book would not appear until his adulthood, in 1934. Despite the high profile successes of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in the 19th century, science fiction was still a small, obscure, struggling genre in the 1920s. Did anyone imagine that a half-century later it would become one of the dominant genres of popular culture, the stuff of blockbuster movies? The first magazine entirely devoted to science fiction was Amazing Stories, which debuted in 1926: Julius Schwartz was eleven, and he was one of the magazine’s devoted fans.

Then there is another question: how much can one person change the world within his lifetime? As a teenager Julius Schwartz co-created the first nationally distributed science fiction fanzine, The Time Traveler, and thereby effectively co-created organized science fiction fandom; he was also one of the organizers of the first World Science Fiction Convention, in 1939. Schwartz became the very first literary agent to specialize in science fiction. Both as a fan and as agent he established connections with science fiction and fantasy authors of a generation older than his own: in their eulogies for him Alan Moore and Harlan Ellison seem especially impressed that one of his clients was H. P. Lovecraft. Schwartz also represented brand new talents, including two who became titans of the genre: Alfred Bester and Ray Bradbury. Play a game of Six Degrees of Separation concerning Julius Schwartz in his agenting days, and you will begin to see his connections spread wide through popular culture. One of his clients he championed was Robert Bloch, who would later write the novel on which Alfred Hitchcock based Psycho; another was Leigh Brackett, who would go on to write films for Howard Hawks and at the end of her career, co-write The Empire Strikes Back.

So all of this would be more than enough for Schwartz to make his mark in the history of American popular culture, but this was only Act I of his career (and in a culture in which there are supposedly no second acts). With the decline of the science fiction magazine market during World War II, Schwartz landed a job as an editor at what is now DC Comics. He knew nothing about comic books, and yet would become one of the major creative forces in the field.

During the rest of the “Golden Age” of the 1940s Schwartz edited series like the Justice Society of America in All-Star and the original Green Lantern. But by 1951 superheroes had virtually all vanished from publication, save for the Big Three of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.. Comics moved into other genres, and Schwartz edited the anthology titles Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space, two of the only successful, long-running science fiction comics ever. Within these titles ran several continuing series, most notably Adam Strange, an Earthman who led a secret life as champion of a distant planet.

Had superhero comics merely been a transient fad, or were they a genuine new genre, that would endure and flourish as long as it could be reinvented for each new generation of readers? That was what Julius Schwartz did when he relaunched The Flash in Showcase #4 in 1956. The artwork was handsomer and more dynamic than the relative crudity of so much Golden Age art. In the new Flash, as well as his superhero series that followed, Schwartz drew on elements from the science fiction genre: the writing thereby gained new vitality, imagination, and sophistication. The stories seemed more contemporary, reflecting the young generation’s own growing interest in science, and they were even intellectually challenging: Schwartz’s comics were clearly not for kids incapable of reading “real books,” but for smart ones.

Thus arose many of the greatest DC Comics of the Silver Age of 1950 through 1970, all revivals and revamps: The Flash (starring police scientist Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, in adventures that mixed spectacular stunts and witty comedy), Green Lantern (test pilot Hal Jordan, now a member of an intergalactic police force), the size-changing Atom (who took one DC hero’s name but was actually more like a reworking of the size-changing Doll Man), Hawkman (a blend of science fiction with the trappings of ancient civilizations, and pioneering the idea of a superhero and superheroine as equals), Justice League of America (DC’s greatest heroes united, in an updated analogue to the Justice Society), and later, ranging outside science fiction, The Spectre (an avenging ghost whose exploits now took on an epic, cosmic scale). On these books Schwartz worked closely with a cadre of great collaborators, most importantly writers John Broome and Gardner Fox, and artists Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, Murphy Anderson and Mike Sekowsky. Alex Ross has argued that in this period these superhero concepts reached their finest form, not surpassed by either previous or later incarnations of the characters. And he’s right.

So this would be enough to make Schwartz’s mark in the history of comics. Yet there’s still more to come. By the early 1960s Batman had strayed so far from his roots, battling aliens and dealing with the likes of Bat-Mite and Bat-Hound, that his books were on the verge of cancellation. Schwartz was assigned to take over Batman and Detective, and, though reluctant to take the assignment, he and collaborators like Broome, Fox and Infantino, made them the equals of his other titles. The artwork went from dated cartooniness to a sleeker, more realistic look; instead of science fiction, Schwartz and his writers drew on their love of mysteries to recast Batman as the “World’s Greatest Detective” (As a backup series for Detective, Schwartz spun off a character from The Flash, the Elongated Man, in mystery stories that fused the stretching stunts and humor of Plastic Man with the romantic comedy and repartee of The Thin Man.) Not only did Schwartz save Batman from cancellation, but his Bat-books attracted the attention of television producer William Dozier. True, Dozier ignored the seriousness and intelligence of Schwartz’s Batman stories, but it was the television show of the mid-1960s that made Batman a seemingly permanent fixture in American popular culture.

So Schwartz’s work had inadvertently set into motion another set of dominoes, with unexpected but important results. Here’s an even more important example: it has long been known that in 1961 Stan Lee was assigned to create a superhero team book to compete with Schwartz’s Justice League. The result was The Fantastic Four, the pioneering work of “The Marvel Age of Comics,” which led to The Incredible Hulk, The Amazing Spider-Man, X-Men and all the rest. (And speaking of the X-Men, the first comics hero to be identified as a mutant was Schwartz’s Captain Comet.)

For the benefit of newer readers, I should point out that before the Internet took over the world, readers commented on comics via snail mail sent to that now nearly-extinct phenomenon, the comic book letter column. Julie Schwartz’s letter columns were the best in the business: whereas other editors then and since would choose to print inoffensive puff pieces, Schwartz sought and published letters with wit, style and intelligence, that demonstrated genuine, if still budding, critical faculties. Doubtless remembering how important lettercols in science fiction magazines were to him as a fan, Schwartz treated his comics lettercols as a means of thought-provoking entertainment, just like the stories themselves. So many letter columns in other books ran non-answers by anonymous staffers; Schwartz, in contrast, always made clear he treated his readers’ opinions with respect. By printing names and addresses of his letter writers, he fostered communication among readers in a time before comics shops or conventions. Thus, just as he had pioneered organized science fiction fandom, Julie Schwartz was a prime mover behind organized comics fandom as well. Moreover, in encouraging his more creative correspondents, Schwartz set a number of them on the path to becoming comics professionals themselves. Quite a number of comics pros made their first appearances in print in 1960s Schwartz lettercols; he thereby helped inspire and create the next generation of comics creators.

All right, so surely that is enough for one man’s remarkable career. The success of the Batman TV show swelled the sales of comics, but when the TV show fad ended, sales plummeted. For various reasons, Broome and Fox left DC, and the Silver Age was coming to an end, as a new generation of comics creators began entering the business. Surely this is the end.

But no. In some of Schwartz’s mid-1960s comics there are awkward attempts to imitate Marvel, like nicknames in the credits. But Schwartz ultimately responded to the Marvel revolution by moving in new, original directions, mentoring members of the new generation of pros, and taking advantage of the new opportunities to push the artistic envelope. Hence, Schwartz presided over Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ landmark Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories, which dealt in political and social themes in a manner unprecedented in the genre, as well as delving deeply into characterization.

Having revamped and saved Batman once, Schwartz now did it a second time, through his work with O’Neil, Adams, and such other talents as Frank Robbins, Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers. The result was “the Batman” as we know him today in comics, animation, and film: the driven avenger from his earliest stories, presented in contemporary terms.

With the retirement of his longtime colleague Mort Weisinger, Schwartz took over as editor of the principal Superman titles, which, despite their brilliance in the early 1960s, had run out of creative steam and no longer satisfied an older readership raised on Marvel’s innovations.

Again, Schwartz modernized the look and upgraded the writing of the books, and if his Superman books did not represent the cutting edge of superhero genre, they were still imaginative, intelligent and entertaining enough to hold their own for over a decade.

In none of the pieces I’ve read or heard about Julie Schwartz since his death has there been mention of his 1970s revival of the original Captain Marvel. Perhaps that’s because it wasn’t commercially successful; then again, none of DC’s subsequent efforts to revive the character have worked for long. But I don’t care if Schwartz’s version was ultimately a sales disappointment: it was the only DC version that captured the whimsy and enchantment of the Captain’s Golden Age stories, and if a modern readership can’t appreciate that, that’s their tough luck.

So finally, with the DC Universe having come to the point of Crisis (on Infinite Earths, that is), in the mid-1980s, Julie Schwartz’s editorship on the main Superman books was coming to an end; John Byrne (one of the aforementioned Five) would be “rebooting” the series, starting its continuity over from scratch. Julie’s retirement as a DC editor was only a few years off. And yes, the last few years of Schwartz’s Superman had been disappointing. But then, for his farewell to the series, Julie again reached out to a new generation of talent and enlisted Alan Moore to write his final issues of Action and Superman.

Moore’s two-part story, “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” was such an astonishingly brilliant utilization of the Weisinger/Schwartz Superman continuity as to make one wonder why anyone thought it needed to be rebooted in the first place. Julie Schwartz left his last important series with one of the great classics of his entire career: not with a whimper but with a bang.

MEMORIAL DAY

So, yes, it seems as if Julius Schwartz was everywhere in the history of American science fiction and comic books, but what kind of a person was he? For that I turn to the speeches made in his honor at the public memorial that DC Comics held for him on Thursday, March 18 in New York City.

Obviously, I had to go. My friend Laurie Sutton, a former DC editor, warned me: you know Julie’ll be looking down and watching, seeing who shows up. She turned out not to be the only person thinking along these lines.

But early on, it was a miserable day. After one of the coldest and snowiest winters on record in New York City, we had finally broken through to springlike temperatures, only to be plunged abruptly back into Arctic weather. It had snowed the whole day before, and this morning was dark, overcast and chilly. It was funeral weather.

There is actually something of a tradition of memorial services in the New York comics community: there were a disturbing number of them in the mid-1990s, in ominous juxtaposition with the convulsions shaking the industry, and shaking various people out of it. Not only were there memorials for Founding Fathers of the business, such as Jerry Siegel, but for people who died far too early: notably Marvel direct sales head Carol Kalish and editors Archie Goodwin and Mark Gruenwald. Those three memorials were attended by enormous numbers of comics professionals.

At the Gruenwald memorial, watching old videotapes of the stunts and hijinks staged by Mark that were a regular part of life at Marvel in the less corporate environment of the 1980s, people commented that an era had passed; Mike Carlin noted that he knew even while they were happening that those would be the “good old days.”

It was less obvious at that memorial that it would be the last great gathering of the mainstream New York City comics community. With harder times and fewer social occasions, much of it dispersed.

Unlike past memorials I attended, which were in the afternoon or evening, the Schwartz memorial was held in the morning, and in a different sort of locale: a movie theater. That accounts for the early time: there are no screenings in the morning, but we would have to be out by noon. The memorial was scheduled to begin at 9:30 AM, actually started at 9:40, and ended at 11:30, leaving a half hour for the inevitable milling about, conversing and networking, before everyone had to leave.

The site was a Clearview Cinema (showing The Fog of War, the Oscar-winning documentary about Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara) on 62nd St. and Broadway. This would be over halfway along a direct route from DC’s offices (which are in the big black building you see across from the Ed Sullivan Theatre on the Letterman show) to Lincoln Center. Paul Levitz himself, DC’s president and publisher, was in the lobby welcoming people as they arrived. On a nearby table were copies of Julie’s autobiography, Man of Two Worlds: My Life in Science Fiction and Comics (2000, HarperCollins), as well as the program booklet for the memorial. On the front of the latter was a photograph of Julie, inside was Harlan Ellison’s obituary for him, and on the back was a familiar illustration from DC’s 1970s in-house fanzine, Amazing World of DC Comics: drawn by Joe Kubert, it shows tiny figures of DC’s leading super heroes looking up at a colossal bust of their editor’s face.

It had been widely reported that this was a memorial open to the public, and I wondered beforehand if there would be a crush of comics fans trying to get in, but there wasn’t. It was certainly well attended: the theatre was nearly full. But that’s “nearly,” not “entirely,” since there were plenty of empty seats. True, there had been snow the night before, and the early starting time was not good for out-of-town freelancers. Still, it seemed to me there had been more attendees at the Goodwin memorial, and unquestionably at the Gruenwald public memorial. Perhaps in part this is due to the comics pro diaspora: people at the memorial would meet and greet each other with the kind of delight and surprise that comes with not having seen each other in a very long time. Part of the reason could also be that Schwartz had been retired from editing for about a decade and a half. I saw very few people younger than Boomers at the ceremony. Yet Julie had been a prominent presence at conventions over those years. And one might hope more of the newer pros would have had more of a sense of history. Ah well. In his blog Peter David estimated the audience as being 100 to 150 strong. I think it was more; as I said, it was nearly a full house. And it was clear that for all of the people there, it was important for them to be there.

A memorial like this one is a form of theater. That is not to imply it is less than serious in intent. Theater began as a firm of ritual; a memorial is a ritual of remembrance. There are speakers and there is an audience. But the speakers are not the “stars”: there is a lead character, the deceased, and it is the story of his life that they tell. The speakers are, in a sense, performers, and the best speakers deservedly receive applause.

The art of public speaking is in a sorry state in contemporary America. Just think of the current presidential election campaign, or every other one of them over the last forty years. How often is anything memorable said? I even saw a column in the New York Times that argued that people nowadays would reject eloquent, well-written speeches as false and artificial. Even at the Cartoon Network advertisers’ presentation I attended last month, I found myself enduring lame and dismal efforts at humor, as if the speaker’s craft of capturing an audience’s interest were irrevocably lost.

Politicians and comedy executives may not be good at public speaking, but comics writers and editors are. The great comics industry memorials are themselves memorable for the eloquence and writing skill of their best speakers, and the Schwartz memorial bore this out.

At 9:40, Paul Levitz started the proceedings by informing us that in his “usual organized fashion,” Mr. Schwartz had edited today’s memorial. He had requested that selections of his favorite form of music, jazz, be played. And so they were, over the sound system, suggesting to my mind a touch of a New Orleans funeral. The tone set was quietly contemplative, though. One passage seemed particularly appropriate: Louis Armstrong singing (if I made out the words correctly): “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust/It’s too bad ol’ Gabe couldn’t have stayed on and lived with us.”

When these opening selections ended, the audience applauded. Paul Levitz said, “As far as I know, Julie has not arranged for anything else to happen here,” but warned us that he could not be certain of that. (So perhaps Laurie was right.)

Then Levitz spoke of the tradition of these memorials in the comics industry: “Over the years days like this have been very special experiences within our field.” As for the man being honored today, he said Julius Schwartz was “unique among the unique” and “our self-proclaimed Living Legend.” (This was one of the continuing motifs of the morning: Schwartz’s description of himself as a “Living Legend,” which, as Henry Kissinger said about another subject, “has the added advantage of being true.”)

The memorials are a tradition, and their format is traditionally laissez-faire. “We have no system; we have no organization; we have an open mike,” Levitz noted, so anyone who wished to speak could do so. He pointed out that we “have to be out of here by noon,” observing that “Julie would not approve of our missing any deadlines.” As for the length of the speeches, Levitz said he would “suggest a minute or two for every decade you’ve known Julie” ““ the audience chuckled ““ and added that he realized this would make some speeches long indeed.

The first of the speakers was Brian M. Thomsen, Schwartz’s collaborator on his autobiography, Man of Two Worlds. (The title, should you need it explained, refers both to one of Schwartz’s landmark stories, Flash of Two Worlds, in which the Golden Age and Silver Age Flashes first met, and to Schwartz’s careers in science fiction and comics.)

Thomsen was primarily standing in for the man who was supposed to have been the lead speaker, Schwartz’s longtime friend and the great writer of imaginative fiction, Harlan Ellison, who had been prevented from attending by the double whammy of health problems and last night’s snow causing the cancellation of his flight from the West Coast.

However, Ellison’s eulogy was printed in the program leaflet, and now Thomsen read it aloud. It was just right for the occasion, combining historical perspective and personal anecdotes, and touching in its conclusion. Much of the audience followed along silently in their programs as Thomsen read the piece aloud. When Thomsen moved from one page to the next, there was a loud rustling noise, as so many audience members simultaneously folded over the program, as if they were turning the page of a prayer book in church.

I would love to quote bits of the eulogy, but I’m not going to. It is well worth reading, and touching. But Ellison is understandably and rightly upset by the mindset in the Internet culture that asserts a right to illegally download copyrighted material without paying for it ““ such as music or Ellison’s own writing ““ just because it’s so easy to do so, and he takes a very hard line against copying. Rather than debate him on the subject of “fair use” of excerpted quotes in reporting on public events, I’ll simply send you all to read the eulogy where Ellison has posted it himself. (Remember: look but don’t touch!) It will also be printed in the Schwartz tribute comics that DC will be publishing this summer, so you can buy copies of it then.

But maybe I can describe (without quoting) some of the topics of his eulogy. Much of it was a chronological recounting of Schwartz’s extraordinary list of career achievements; I’ve taken my own approach to doing this sort of thing earlier in this column. As if composing an overture to the ceremony, Ellison touched on many subjects that recurred throughout the day’s speeches, like leitmotifs in a musical composition: the Living Legend nickname, Schwartz’s trademark pleasures (jazz, the Yankees, pea soup), the regularity of his habits, his proper businesslike manner of dress (in contrast to younger, more casually garbed slobs ““ I mean, comics pros), the contradiction between his gruff facade and his kindly inner self, and the fact that he saved American comics from going the route of the dodo. And there was another theme that other speakers also voiced: the fact that through editing (and so often co-plotting) these stories of heroism that readers discovered in their childhood, Schwartz was a positive influence on the moral sensibilities of generations. (Julie Schwartz had a stronger creative personality than most mainstream comics editors of recent times; to borrow a term from film criticism, he was clearly the auteur of his Silver Age comics.)

I will risk one quote ““ because Ellison was himself quoting someone else. He pointed out that in Spaceballs, Mel Brooks’ parody of Star Wars, characters great each other with “May the Schwartz Be with You.” Now I always assumed that Brooks just used “Schwartz” as a funny sound-alike for “force.” But is Ellison right? Is Brooks comically aware enough to have been doing a homage to our industry’s Schwartz?

On finishing Ellison’s piece, Thomsen then began his own reminiscences of Schwartz: in keeping with the regularity of Julie’s habits, Brian had a weekly lunch and phone call ““ always at 9 PM ““ with him. Thomsen recalled how Schwartz “loved the Yankees,” but would continually grouse, “The Yankees…they’re not a very good team” ““ even when they won the pennant. In part, Thomsen acknowledged, this is because Schwartz was old enough to remember the days of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. But it was also because he was “a man who expected perfection from everyone else because he expected it from himself.”

Speaking of “The Golden Age of Schwartz,” Thomsen said that Julie provided an “example of why retirement means you don’t have to stop working.” After officially retiring from editing, Schwartz continued to appear at conventions as DC’s goodwill ambassador; he also retained an office at DC and went in once a week. Thomsen said that Schwartz would insist that he “had to get into the DC offices because DC needed him.”

But, Thomsen said, “there was a time he felt he wasn’t needed anymore”: Schwartz “was getting depressed, discouraged, and needed something to do.” Thomsen credited Paul Levitz with solving the problem by arranging for Julie to write his memoir. This meant that “Julie had a focus again,” and work to do, and he had a “sense of accomplishment” when the autobiography finally came out. And when it did, Schwartz asked Thomsen, “We’re starting on the revision now, aren’t we?”

(This was not the first time that the idea of a book about Schwartz’s life had arisen. I seem to recall that Elliot Maggin was working on such a book at one time; in fact that’s what scuttled the plans of Mark Gruenwald, who idolized Julie, to write his own book about him ““ and Mark wanted me to help on it, but with his own busy schedule, Mark never got around to doing it. So I am pleased that Thomsen succeeded where others had not.)

Thomsen underlined the fact that beneath a certain ironic bravado, Schwartz was actually quite modest. “Despite calling himself a Living Legend,” Thomsen stated, “Julie didn’t really think his story was that important.” Instead of getting him to talk about himself, Thomsen found himself getting Schwartz to talk about the many talented individuals he had worked with: “Julie told his story through other people’s stories.”

Thomsen concluded by proposing a revision of the old maxim that one can judge a person by the company he keeps. Instead, “You can tell a man’s character by the people who wish to be in his company,” and Thomsen proceeded to go down a remarkable list of luminaries in the worlds of science fiction and comics who counted Julie as friends, and included “many many beautiful blonde women.” (Now actually, I was under the impression that Julie didn’t discriminate according to hair color.)

Following Thomsen’s remarks, Paul Levitz declined credit for the memoir project, and said he was merely the one who connected Julie, whom he called “an unlikely Scheherezade,” with Thomsen as his collaborator. Levitz said that the project started instead with Harlan Ellison, Comic Buyer’s Guide editor Maggie Thompson and others, who “came up with the basic idea,” and said that Julie was “a national treasure” that they must “keep polished.”

BEYOND THE SHIRT

Next up was Denny O’Neil, who worked with Schwartz on Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Batman, Superman and Shazam, and who represents the gold standard for speakers at comics memorials: I still recall his eulogy for Mark Gruenwald, praising him for making his “life” into his foremost work of “art.” O’Neil was Gruenwald’s mentor at Marvel; now O’Neil would be eulogizing his own mentor in the artform.

O’Neil began by reflecting that superhero comics deal with “double identities”: the person who looked ordinary on the surface, but “underneath, ubermensch!” He continued that about three days ago, it occurred to him that Schwartz himself was a “double identity character.”

O’Neil then gave us a flashback to his first meeting with Schwartz, in 1966 or 1967. “He did not look like the god of editors”: in white shirt and tie, he “looked like he could’ve been a Midwestern businessman.” Moreover, O’Neil said, Schwartz proved to be “a man of egregiously regular habits”: making a phone call to his wife at same time at the same time each day, and so forth. O’Neil noted that the philosopher Immanuel Kant was said to be so regular in taking his afternoon walk at the same time every day that his neighbors could set their watches by it. Compared to Julie, O’Neil declared, “Kant was Courtney Love.”

In contrast, O’Neil described himself as looking like “an aging hippie” in tie-dye shirt, jeans, and long hair (“I know it’s hard to believe; I have photographs.”). Yet despite the disparities, within only months they had established “mutual trust” which eventually evolved into “friendship.”

O’Neil commended Schwartz’s style of editorship, stating that he “set boundaries for the playing field,” but allowed him a “great deal of freedom within” those boundaries. Moreover, with Schwartz “ego never entered into it.” O’Neil quoted one of Schwartz’s own proteges in science fiction, Alfred Bester, as having said, “Among professionals the job is boss,” and that was true of Schwartz.

“Along with Stan Lee he reinvented a genre,” O’Neil declared, adding that Schwartz “didn’t think it was so important”: he saw himself as just doing his job. And yet, O’Neil said, returning to his “double identity” theme, “beyond the white shirt” lay “Super-Editor.”

Calling Schwartz a “warm, cranky, lovable, extremely creative guy,” O’Neil summed up, “Working with Julie was one of the better things that happened in my life. Being able to call him friend was one of the absolute best.”

AN INTERRUPTED TOUR

Next came Michael Uslan, who started out in comics writing letters to Schwartz’s books; if his name is familiar to you it’s because you see it in the credits of the Batman movies as executive producer.

Introducing himself as “another student of the Living Legend,” Uslan revealed that he first met Schwartz forty years ago that very week on a tour of the DC offices. (Calm down, readers, I don’t believe these tours are held any longer, and certainly not for adults.)

Another of the recurring themes of the memorial was how young many of us were when we first encountered Schwartz’s work. When he was only eight, Uslan said, he thought Schwartz’s name was “Editor” because that’s how the letters in the lettercol were addressed: “Dear Editor.” With greater age, sophistication, and powers of observation, the young Uslan discovered the mystery man’s name in the indicia: “Julius Schwartz, Editor.” “I remember thinking that ‘Schwartz’ was a funny middle name,” Uslan recalled.

Their first meeting was a fan’s dream come true. At age thirteen Uslan was taking the DC office tour, and Schwartz went by and saw him carrying a copy of The Flash. Schwartz pulled Uslan out of the tour, introduced him to legendary Flash writer John Broome, and even took him into the DC Library (the treasure vault!!) and showed him a copy of Flash #1. And from then on, Schwartz answered every letter Uslan wrote. (Hey, wait a minute! He didn’t do that with my letters! Note to self: another reason I shouldn’t have grown up in the Boston area.)

When Uslan was in college, Schwartz even let him write Batman, in retrospect, a foreshadowing of Things to Come. Here Uslan introduced another of the morning’s running motifs: Julie’s nickname (known even to us readers at the time) as “B.O. Schwartz.” This was not a reference to scents but to sensibility: it stood for “Be Original,” Schwartz’s maxim for his writers.

ACHIEVING THE HEIGHTS

Our next speaker was senior among them: Irwin Hasen, whose artwork on the comic strip Dondi I saw in my childhood, but who worked with Schwartz in the “Golden Age” of the 1940s.

“Julie Schwartz was a legend of the Golden Age,” Hasen began, and “an innovator of the Silver Age, but Julie was ageless.” Here’s yet another running theme, and one that reminds me of something writer Steve Englehart said when I interviewed him some months ago for TwoMorrows’ Back Issue #3: “…some people, and Julie is certainly one of them, are sort of eternally youthful. Julie is always enthusiastic about cool stuff. … There’s no reason to get stuck in any particular era, and Julie was always of whatever era he was in.”

There was no melancholy in Hasen’s speech: instead it was a rapid-fire string of funny anecdotes about his decades-long friendship with Schwartz, delivered like an old-time stand-up comedian. A man who might be described as vertically challenged, Hasen declared, “At a low point in my life he advised me to go to Height Watchers.” A few seconds passed as the joke sank in, and then the audience burst into laughter.

STANDING ROOM ONLY

Then came Jack C. Harris, a former writer and editor at DC, who now (like some other comics veterans, including myself) has turned to teaching about the comics medium. He posted his speech at the Ellison website on March 20, and you can find it here

Harris was the first of the speakers to acclaim Schwartz’s letter columns. As “a price to pay” for what he gave us, Harris said, “Julie demanded original, thought-provoking letters, missives that posed intriguing questions and offered informative critique.”

“I never saw anyone who didn’t like Julie Schwartz,” stated Harris, who quoted comics writer Len Wein’s description of him as “everyone’s favorite uncle.” Harris imagined that Julie was now the permanent guest of honor in a comics/science fiction convention held in the hereafter.

The high point of Harris’s speech came after he recalled standing alongside Schwartz at a comics convention, looking out at the enormous crowd of pros, fans and more. Harris told him, ‘You know, this is all your fault.” and Schwartz smiled and replied, “Yeah, I know.”

So now Harris conducted an “experiment”: he asked the members of the audience if any of them were in the comics industry today because of Julie Schwartz, “either indirectly or directly,” to stand up. By Harris’s estimation, about two thirds of the hundreds who were gathered there stood. “See, Julie?” said Harris; “It’s still your fault.”

(Afterwards I spoke with Jack, and we agreed that considering that the comics industry might not even exist today if not for Schwartz, everybody should have stood up.)

IN THE SOUP

Harris was followed by Ricia Mainhart, who observed that as a science fiction literary agent, she was following a career that Julie Schwartz had created. She was another of Schwartz’s regular lunchtime companions, and the centerpiece of her speech was an amusing tale of how “catastrophe” struck when the restaurant near DC’s old offices where he had his beloved navy bean soup closed: unable to find another restaurant with the good sense to put it on their menu, she ended up learning to make it herself, with him editing her efforts all along the way.

DC editor Bob Greenberger read a message sent by longtime comics writer Len Wein. In their first meeting, Wein recalled that an angry Schwartz saw him and seized him by the shirt collar, telling him. “You’re writing The Flash. I don’t know who you are but you couldn’t do a worse job than the expletive deleted I just fired!” (Playing Schwartz’s part, Greenberger affected a comically gruff voice that didn’t really sound like him but got the requisite laughs. Perhaps Julie should have played J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man movie, or maybe Bob.)

A year later, Wein found himself at the DC offices just watching Schwartz intently working at his desk, as if studying how editing is done. Schwartz looked up and (in Greenberger’s performance) barked, “What the hell do you want?” In his reminiscences Wein admitted he could not explain why he said what he did (was he demonically possessed?), but he replied that he “just thought I’d stand here for a while watching you go senile.” (!) Schwartz stared, then started laughing, so convulsively he actually fell out of his chair. “Now that was funny,” Julie told him; “Why aren’t you that funny in your scripts?” (And the audience laughs in surprise and delight.) And that is how Wein and Schwartz became friends.

Yet more comedy came from the next speaker, Mike Carlin, one of Schwartz’s successors as Superman editor. I had thought that Mike had begun his comics career at Marvel, but he informed us that thirty years ago around this time of year he was a high school intern at DC. Carlin said he didn’t meet Schwartz back then, but he saw him, at work, drinking his lunchtime soup. “Soup is a very big theme here,” Mike observed, as if engaging in literary analysis. “Julie was Soup-erman.”

The audience groaned in agony, like a massive wail of pain from the pits of hell. But Schwartz loved puns, including bad puns, and Mike was simply honoring the Schwartz tradition here.

Though they became friends later, once Mike became an editor at DC, Carlin said he understood why Schwartz never talked to him when he was an intern: he didn’t have to, “I wasn’t part of his day.” But “He actually taught me a lot. I don’t talk to interns now,” Carlin told an amused audience.

OLD TIMES ON OLYMPUS

Now Neil Gaiman stepped onto the stage, but he told us, he was there to deliver not his own speech but one sent by Alan Moore! For 1602 readers, this state of affairs causes me to imagine if there had been a memorial held by English playwrights in the early 17th century. Ben Jonson gets up to speak, and the audience stirs expectantly: it’s Jonson, the best writer here, this is going to be good, o rare Ben Jonson and all that. And instead Jonson says he’s there to read something his friend Will sent down from his retirement home in Stratford, and the audience’s collective jaw drops!

Moore’s speech was utterly extraordinary, and you can find it in the March 18 post on Gaiman’s blog (a website that people of taste should visit from time to time, anyway).

As a writer, rereading Moore’s tribute, I am astounded at how much vivid imagery, insightful characterization, sharp observation and sense of time and place (even a throwaway bit like a reference to “the migraine-yellow dot-toned hallways” of the old DC offices; it’s true!) he packed into such a short piece, while still allowing the piece to flow smoothly, whether it is read silently or aloud. Gaiman reveals in his blog that he was asked to read Moore’s message when he arrived at the memorial; hence he had no time to rehearse. Gaiman says he tried “to pace and pitch it as Alan would have done.” Neil’s reading struck me not as an imitation of Moore, but as a performance by a skilled actor of his own writings, turning the same talent to an interpretation of a fellow author’s work.

You should all go read it for yourselves. In the time-honored tradition of reporters and reviewers I will merely mention a few of the best bits. Like some other speakers, Moore drew our attention to how young most of us were when we first encountered Schwartz’s work: he was “our childhood’s god, the intergalactic cabby who wouldn’t shut up, the curator of the Space Museum” (clever references to two of Schwartz’s comics science fiction series). Moore and Gaiman drew their second biggest laugh with Moore’s reminiscences of Schwartz showing him his scrapbook filled with photos of the great writers he had known: Moore wrote that he “could not have possibly been more impressed if he’d said, ‘See that old guy in the toga, standing by Ed Hamilton? That’s Zeus.”

But the biggest laugh came unexpectedly, after Moore and Gaiman abruptly seemed to shift the tone away from amusing anecdotes. “And now we hear that Julie has been discontinued. Cancelled.” Gaiman paused significantly, and then continued, “But they said the same about Green Lantern and the Flash ““” And there was a massive detonation of appreciative laughter, the loudest and most fervent of the entire morning.

Towards the end Moore noted that Schwartz had “ruined my reputation as a gentle pacifist” through his anecdote (found in his memoir and elsewhere) that Moore had (playfully, I trust) seized him by the throat to persuade him to let him write his final Superman story. Asking how he could possibly contradict Julie, Moore confessed that it was true.

Or was it? I recall filmmaker John Ford’s classic line at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to the effect that when the legend is superior to the truth, “print the legend.” Did the mock-strangulation actually take place? Well, it’s a good story. If it didn’t happen, it should have. And since the two participants claim that it did, it effectively has. (In W. S. Gilbert’s The Mikado, Ko-Ko reasons that if the Mikado sentences someone to death, that person is as good as dead, and to all intents and purposes is already dead, so why bother with the trouble of physically carrying out the execution?)

SEEING SPARKS

And now, finally and appropriately, a blonde woman steps up to speak about Julie: Karen Berger, head of DC’s Vertigo line. She began by remarking that the comics industry, “particularly DC,” has a “sense of family.” (Well, perhaps this is still true of DC.) Pursuing the metaphor, she characterized Schwartz as the “cranky but lovable uncle or grandfather.” She also observed that he kept his personal life separate from his off, and that he thus had “two families”: it would appear that his funeral, held weeks earlier, was her and other DC editors’ first real encounter with his “other” family.

Unlike so many of the other speakers, Berger was not a comics fan when she was growing up, and hence did not read Schwartz’s comics as a child. But she said her memories of when she started working at DC, nearly twenty-five years ago, and sat in a cubicle outside Schwartz’s office (I remember that cubicle: it’s where she sat the day I first met her), were something “pure” which she likened to “childhood memories.” She recalled seeing his leading artists “coming and going,” and also his conferences with writers, where they “sat nervously as Julie plotted with them.” She said “You could see the spark in his eye” as he worked with them, and that he would “get them to take bigger chances, to be more original.”

So there, intentionally or not, was another reference to Schwartz’s “Be Original” nickname. This also made me realize that Karen was learning how to be an editor by observing Schwartz from her privileged vantage point: so, inadvertently, Julie Schwartz also had a major influence on the Vertigo line as well.

Referring to Schwartz as the “ubereditor,” Berger reiterated one of the day’s leitmotifs: “Comics today really wouldn’t exist as it does if not for him.”

Next, DC veteran Anthony Tollin recalled attending “PulpCon” with Schwartz, where he saw Schwartz’s “fan” side emerge: the pulp magazines of the ’20s and ’30s were what he loved growing up. Tollin pointed out that the “important thing” about Schwartz as an editor was that “he remembered what it was like to be a fan,” and “identified with fans,” and knew what sort of things they would want to see.

Tollin was followed by Nick Barucci, of Dynamic Forces, dealer of comics-related collectibles, who, alluding to the hereafter, said that Schwartz was “now truly a man of two worlds, looking down” upon us.

THE WORLD OUTSIDE

Then came Maggie Thompson, editor of the Comic Buyer’s Guide and one of the leading figures of comics’ “first fandom.” Conveying Harlan Ellison’s apologies for his inability to be there, she proceeded to illuminate the origins of Schwartz’s Man of Two Worlds autobiography. It was, she said, a “conspiracy” devised by Ellison, who was concerned about Schwartz’s health, as a means “to keep him focused.” Ellison got in touch with Maggie, who then told Paul Levitz.

Maggie Thompson sounded a now familiar but essential theme about Schwartz once more and extended it: “The comic book industry would not be here without him,” and, further, science fiction would be different without him. And here she came to a major point indeed: “The world outside will never comprehend how important he was to us.”

That’s certainly true about the present day; one might hope for more enlightenment in years to come, if comics continues to gain respect as an artform. For example, The New York Times‘ obituary was respectful and accurate, but did not truly convey Schwartz’s enormous influence. It’s not just the direct influence on writers and artists who worked with him, or even the indirect, unintended effects I’ve pointed to his having on Marvel and Vertigo. How many writers of science fiction, fantasy, and heroic adventure in comics, prose, television and film grew up reading books he edited, or the works of writers (like Bradbury, et al) he promoted? Just how far does Schwartz’s influence extend through popular culture? Indeed, to return to one of Ellison’s points, how many millions of people over several generations had their sense of morality and social responsibility in part shaped by Schwartz’s stories? Are there even kids who were inspired by Schwartz’s science-oriented Silver Age comics and ended up pursuing careers in science as adults? Will the World Outside or any of us ever really know?

UNDER LOC AND KEY

Then came another message from an absent mourner, a surprising voice from the past. In the 1960s there was a small, prolific cadre of writers who regularly turned up in Julie Schwartz’s letter columns, the fan critics with the most incisive and stylishly written LOCs (Letters of Comment). The foremost of these writers, the dean of LOC correspondents, was the erudite and aristocratically named Guy H. Lillian III. I’ve never met him, and he was not there, but he had sent in a LOC, by e-mail, in keeping this new century, and it was read aloud at the memorial: a poem from a novel by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick,. including the lines, “I must be gone/There is a grave.”

Following this was another longtime fan, Ken Gale, who for eleven years has run a radio show about comics. Gale reinforced what Brian Thomsen had earlier remarked about Schwartz’s underlying modesty about his achievements. Gale said that it was impossible to get Schwartz to set a date to talk about himself on the radio, but he would eagerly go on to talk about people he had worked with.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

In his closing speech, Paul Levitz invoked the work of science fiction pioneer E. E. “Doc” Smith, whose Lensmen series was a major influence on Schwartz’s Silver Age Green Lantern. In that series, Levitz said, was a character like Schwartz, who was described as “one of the good aliens,” trying to make sure the humans got the help they needed, without taking credit.

His voice breaking twice in these closing comments, Levitz focused on Julius Schwartz as mentor. “Thank you, Julie,” he began, saying that he “began teaching me when I was six,” reading his first Schwartz-edited comic, The Atom #6. Though Paul “didn’t know your name,” he was “learning about heroism. . .modesty. . .courage,” through morals “soft-spoken in the back of stories,” not realizing he was being taught. Years later, when he was a DC staffer, Levitz “watched” as Schwartz “taught organizational skills,” “gravitas,” and more, “by example,” acting as the “model of what an editor should be.”

The very last speaker of the morning was Julie’s adult granddaughter, Andrea Hopkins, who told us it was “so overwhelmingly beautiful” to see how many people loved her grandfather. If we didn’t know about her and the rest of Julie’s family, it seems that they hadn’t known much about us until now, either. As she said, “he was very private.”

TAKING A STAND

The audience applauded Ms. Hopkins, the jazz recordings resumed, and the memorial had come to an end. It was 11:30, and for another half hour there was much communal milling about, both within the dark theater auditorium and in a well-lit room outside. People who hadn’t seen each other in a long time were talking, and perhaps the attendees did not really want the gathering to end so abruptly.

This was far from the last tribute to Julius Schwartz. There will surely be panels in his honor at comics conventions in the coming months. Moreover, in July and August, DC will publish eight tribute comics. Each one will have a cover, recreated by a present day artist, based on a Silver Age cover from a book that Schwartz edited. The cover images would often be devised first and then he and his writers constructed stories around those images. So, too, each of these tribute books will contain two eleven-page stories by leading comics writers and artists, based on Schwartz’s original cover imagery. The original cover will also be reprinted inside each book. (But shouldn’t each issue also contain a reprint of Schwartz’s original story, too, so that readers who don’t have collections of forty-year-old comics can witness the work of the master and see what all the fuss is about? Well, I can help remedy this: I have a future column in the works that critiques a number of classic Schwartz-edited stories. And probably I will review the tribute books later this year, as well.)

When it finally came time to leave the Clearview Cinema, we emerged into a greatly changed day: the clouds had appropriately lifted, it was brightly, beautifully sunny, the snow had all melted, and it was reasonably warm, as if spring had finally succeeded the long winter.

I was part of a group that decamped to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and ended up sitting across from, and meeting for the first time, Irene Vartanoff, another of the leading lights of the Silver Age Schwartz lettercols. As a fan, I greatly admired Irene’s work as I did Lillian’s and others, and was thrilled when Julie began printing my letters regularly, too, elevating me into this honorable circle: this was my first published work. Now, at the restaurant, I found myself contemplating the unexpected twists and turns that life takes: it is at once strange and very appropriate that I should finally meet Irene, finally put a face and voice to the name, at the memorial for the man we both wrote letters to decades ago. This is one of those incidents that seems to be evidence against the idea that life is merely a random series of accidents; is it being plotted?.

Irene made the point that Julie was our editor, too: that we knew we had to meet his high standards, to do our best work writing these reviews of his books, in order that he would print them in his letter columns. She’s right, and those letters were not just my first published work, but my first works of comics criticism. I went on to do more such work, in those oxymoronic entities, professional fanzines, which led in large part to my many years of work chronicling continuity for the Big Two, Marvel and DC, a satisfying way to make a living until recent years.

But the silver lining is that now I have returned to my Real Work: as a critic and historian of American comics and cartoon art, in this column, in my (unsigned) reviews for Publishers Weekly, in the course on comics as literature that I’ll be teaching at New York University this fall, and my work in books and documentaries (and I hope I do more of both). The “Comics in Context” column, my Abrams Marvel Universe book, and all of the rest of it are direct descendents of the letters I used to write to Julius Schwartz’s letters pages. As far as I’m concerned, among his many other contributions to comics and science fiction, he is also one of the fathers of comics criticism. This column exists because of Julius Schwartz. I write about comics as an artform because of him. When that moment came in Jack C. Harris’s speech, I stood up.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson