FRED Entertainment

Lest you forget, this column not only puts comics in context, but also movies and television shows that relate in some way to comics and cartoon art. I can’t really analyze the meaning and structure of a work without dealing with the ending, which not only resolves the plot but completes the ideas the creators were trying to convey. So here is the spoiler warning for those who wish it.

EXTREME MAKEOVER

We begin with the latest animated blockbuster, Shrek 2, which opened last week (as I write) both nationwide and at the Cannes Film Festival, of all places, perhaps in acknowledgement of the excellence and wide popularity of the original film. I should mention in passing that the first Shrek also spawned a witty and cleverly imagined comics series written for Dark Horse by the reliable Mark Evanier. I wondered when I read it why Evanier picked up the Shrek saga with Shrek and his new bride, Princess Fiona, on their way to their honeymoon but not quite getting there. Shrek 2 makes it clear: it opens with the honeymoon!

I got the impression that many movie reviewers liked the original Shrek because they regarded it as an attack on Disney, both the company itself and its canon of animated fairy tales. I agree with the first half of the equation: Shrek‘s villain, Lord Farqaard, was widely recognized as an unacknowledged caricature of Disney boss Michael Eisner. But as for the second half, no. I observe that many people seem to have a knee-jerk reaction against core Disney creations like the animated features and the theme parks. That the Shrek movies kid fairy tale characters is not particularly original: Disney itself tweaks its own versions of them in the TV series House of Mouse, and Jay Ward’s “Fractured Fairy Tales,” from forty-year-old Bullwinkle shows, were far more subversive towards the genre. The real point that Shrek makes is that Farqaard has driven the fairy tale characters out of his realm, leaving his castle (which, yes, resembles Disney’s Magic Kingdom parks) empty and sterile. (So Shrek was a foreshadowing of the current rebellion by so many Disney stockholders against Eisner, whom many accuse of mismanaging the classic Disney legacy.) The Shrek movies are actually pro-fairy tale, kidding them affectionately. In fact, Shrek is at heart a contemporary fairy tale itself.

The original Shrek was a revisionist version of the Beauty and the Beast story. In its usual form, as followed by the Disney animated version, Beauty and the Beast fall in love with each other, and the Beast is rewarded by being transformed into a handsome human being, a form that supposedly represents his true self. If indeed one of the themes of Beauty and the Beast is that outer appearances do not truly matter, then the traditional ending seems somewhat hypocritical. In both Jean Cocteau’s classic live action film version and the Disney animated version, the Beauty has a handsome human suitor who proves to be the real monster, spiritually. It is also said that, after watching the end of Cocteau’s film, in which the Beast turns into a human, Greta Garbo said, “Give me back my beast.” When Disney did a video sequel to its Beauty and the Beast, it was a flashback to a time before the Beast became human again. Similarly, when Disney’s Beast shows up in Disney World or on the House of Mouse animated series, he is back in bestial form.

In Neil Gaiman’s 1602, its counterpart to Reed Richards points out that by “the laws of story,” the Thing can never be permanently returned to human form, because he is so much more interesting as a monster. That principle seems to apply with these two Beauty and the Beast films as well.

In the first Shrek film the outwardly bad-tempered but inwardly sensitive ogre Shrek falls in love with the beautiful human Princess Fiona. She has a secret: she is under a spell that transforms her into an ogre at night. Comics fans may recall that originally Bruce Banner transformed into the Hulk at night (another bad-tempered green “monster” like Shrek!). Night, the time of sleep and dreams, is the time when the subconscious emerges, and perhaps Fiona’s ogre self represented the side of her psyche that she concealed from “daylight.” Is it the “shadow” side of her personality, Hyde to her daytime Jekyll?

In the end Fiona was magically transformed into ogre form permanently. This, it seemed, was her true self, and Shrek was indeed her true love. The “shadow” self turns out to be positive, representing her capacity for love.

So, obviously, Shrek is a contemporary fable about accepting one’s true self, not trying to hide it. It’s a parable about the pressure to conform: it states that one does not have to look like everyone else, it conform to standards that prevent one from fulfilling his or her potential.

And it also seems to be a very American fable, one suited to a multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural society. The ogres are a minority in Shrek‘s world, and they even have differently colored skin ““ green ““ than the human majority, who are white. It’s like the way that X-Men, with its theme of racial tolerance, is particularly American. (So, am I the first person to find similarities between Shrek and Marvel heroes?)

This is not the digression it will at first seem, trust me: when Sex and the City had its final episode a short while back, there was talk that there might be a theatrical movie version. I wrote to a friend that the problem with a movie would be that, in order to create dramatic situations, it would have to tamper with the carefully designed happy endings that the TV series had given each of its four lead characters.

This is part of the problem with Shrek 2, which I enjoyed and found pleasant, but didn’t impress me as being the equal of the first film. (Then again, I didn’t get why so many people liked the first Shrek so much until the second time I saw it, so perhaps my opinion of Shrek 2 will also change on a second viewing.) Though the opening honeymoon montage is a funny and joyful celebration of Shrek and Fiona’s “happily-ever-after” style love, the film ends up having to create discord between them. The excuse is that Shrek and Fiona visit her royal parents in the land of “Far Far Away,” where everyone, including the king and queen, are appalled that she has not only married an ogre but become one herself. It doesn’t seem to me all that convincing that Shrek and Fiona would come anywhere close to breaking up over this. Perhaps it didn’t to the writers either; they don’t even seem satisfied with the King’s deep dislike of Shrek. Instead, they bring in a new villain, a Fairy Godmother, to manipulate matters so as to separate the two newlyweds.I find her something of a disappointment. There was an edge to Farqaard, since people detected his resemblance to Eisner. Perhaps the Fairy Godmother seems too bland a villain to me because she does not seem based on anything more than reversing the motivations of a familiar archetype from kiddie stories. She deals in blackmail and manipulation, but what if the Fairy Godmother had been more Godfather-like, running a criminal “family” of fairy tale bad guys? Or what if she had been, say, more like a caricature of a Martha Stewart type, a control freak who insists on beautifying castles, princesses, and ogres whether they want it or not?

Similarly, the “Far Far Away” setting lacks the bite that Farqaard’s kingdom, based on Disneyland, had. “Far Far Away” is a parody of Hollywood, but there’s no more to it than palm trees, a variation on the “Hollywood” sign, and puns on the names of various high profile companies. But Hollywood is the center for a culture that abhors ugliness, where people are not satisfied with the way they naturally look, where they alter their appearance with plastic surgery, Botox, liposuction, and the rest. You might think that this would be the perfect target for a Shrek movie. But no. The movie doesn’t go any deeper than having Joan Rivers turn up to cover red carpet arrivals of celebrity fairy tale characters.

Still, I’m surprised and pleased that the makers of Shrek 2 chose to build its story around the same thematic concerns as the earlier movie. Shrek 2 is also about the contrast between appearances and the inner self, societal pressures to conform, self-esteem versus insecurity, and prejudices shown towards people who look different from the majority. New York Times critic A. O. Scott compared the scene in which Shrek and Fiona have dinner with his new human in-laws to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the landmark 1960s film about interracial marriage. Shrek 2‘s version is funny, but thematically the comparison is apt.

In the course of the story, Shrek steals the Fairy Godmother’s “Happily Ever After” potion, which transforms both him and Fiona into human form, and as a bonus, Shrek’s companion Donkey into a handsome stallion. Here I should mention a paradox. I admire the beauty and realistic look of the movie except for the human characters. As in the first film, the human figures and their skin just aren’t persuasive. Perhaps if the entire film had a more artificial look, that wouldn’t matter as much, but the awkward-looking humans stick out badly amid the convincing realism of so much else. When Shrek gets turned into human, I don’t know whether he’s supposed to be handsome or funny-looking.

But I should also mention that I’m very impressed by the skill with which characters’ emotions are delineated through their facial expressions. I thought the King looked wooden until he began grimacing in anger: then he came to life. Shrek and Fiona’s expressions are particularly good, and I’m surprised at how pretty the animators make her in ogre form, with soft, appealing features.

So Shrek has changed his appearance in order to conform to what he thinks Fiona (and society) want.

In the end, Shrek and Fiona have to decide whether to make the spell that turned them into human form permanent. Shrek is willing to remain in human form for Fiona’s sake, but Fiona says she wants Shrek to look like the ogre she fell in love with. (This is a nice sentiment, and no one points out that Shrek fell in love with Fiona in her human form.) Thus they allow the spell to lapse, and Shrek and Fiona return to being ogres, the form in which the audience presumably likes them better. Would we really be interested in seeing a Shrek 3 in which Mr. and Mrs. Shrek were both humans?

But I still wonder of Fiona’s choice really makes psychological sense. Perhaps in part it depends on how one interprets the “ogre” metaphor. There is some suggestion in Shrek 2 that ogres are a persecuted minority. During the blissful honeymoon sequence, Shrek is abruptly attacked by villagers, who automatically hate him because he is an ogre. The movie doesn’t do enough with this. There are references to other ogres (Puss in Boots is said to specialize in fighting them), but Shrek and Fiona (who is not an ogre by birth) are the only ones we see.

If being an ogre is a metaphor for being a member of a minority group, especially an ethnic or racial one, then Fiona made the only correct choice. Could you imagine a movie in which two black people were given the choice of magically becoming white and accepted it? That would be horrifying. In choosing to remain ogres, Fiona and Shrek are accepting their true identities.

But what if one interprets being an ogre as a metaphor for being physically deformed? If one were offered the opportunity to have the deformity cured, wouldn’t he or she take it? We the readers know that Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four will never be permanently cured of being the Thing. But we also know that he will always long to be in human form.

Even if being an ogre is just interpreted as a metaphor for being physically unattractive, is there anything really wrong with looking better? Most people don’t disagree with the goal of looking more attractive: otherwise people wouldn’t try to dress well, or stay in shape, or use makeup or good grooming. What many people object to is going to what they consider extreme measures in the pursuit of beauty, like surgery. But Fiona and Shrek are offered the chance of staying beautiful (if indeed that’s what the human Shrek is supposed to be!) without suffering pain or adverse side effects. How many people would really turn down an offer like that?

Put it another way. If characters in a movie were offered a million dollars, with no strings attached, would we believe it if they said, no thanks, we’re happy being poor?

Perhaps the real question, then, is whether or not Shrek and Fiona regard themselves as ugly or deformed. In the first movie Fiona was certainly ashamed of her nightly transformations into an ogress. But then Shrek seems to find her just as attractive, perhaps more so, in ogre form, and that suggests that he doesn’t see anything ugly about ogres. He simply has a different standard of beauty than most humans do. Perhaps if we were ogres, we’d think ogres were handsome.

Still, I find myself more easily sympathizing with Donkey’s joy at being transformed into a stallion, and his disappointment when he returns to his donkey self. If Garbo was voicing the real feelings of the audience about Cocteau’s Beast, which his movie did not acknowledge, perhaps Donkey is Shrek 2‘s devil’s advocate.

The trouble with serious analytical discussions of art is that one may end up neglecting its sheer entertainment value. So, let me make it clear: whatever my quandaries about the philosophical implications of this movie, it was indeed enjoyable, if inconsistently so. Less gruff than he was in the first movie, Shrek himself was not as funny this time round. But I intend to recommend the new Puss in Boots character to all my fellow cat lovers: voiced by Antonio Banderas, he is at once a wonderful burlesque of Banderas’s role Zorro, a funnier parody of Banderas himself than the one Chris Kattan used to do on Saturday Night Live, and a winningly affectionate portrayal of a real cat, from its hairballs to its big, sad eyes. (Actually, most cats I know deal in severe glares, contemptuous of humans, so I guess Puss in Boots’s over-the-top but endearing expressions reflect more what I’d like more cats to be like!)
A particularly subversive gag involving Pinocchio’s lying rightly brought down the house at the showing I attended. And a celebratory musical number and dance, uniting the community, is the classic way of ending a comedy: Shrek 2 raises the roof with the concluding and utterly anachronistic performance of “Livin’ la Vida Loca” by Puss and Donkey.

THE PROPER DIRECTORIAL ATTITUDE

In his introduction to Dark Horse’s Hellboy: The Conqueror Worm paperback, Guillermo del Toro, director of the Hellboy movie, says about the character’s creator, “Yes, Mike Mignola is a genius.” He continues, “this introduction. . .will merely point the reader to a few more reasons for groveling at the feet of a comic-book god like Mr. Mignola, here.”

Well. This is so different from the movie professional who makes fun of the comics creator on whose work his film is based, or the movie professional who acts oblivious of the comic creator’s existence. (I haven’t seen any reference to Gerry Conway, co-creator of the Punisher, in any ad or article about the new Punisher movie that I’ve read. Then again, considering the critical reaction to the movie, perhaps Mr. Conway is grateful for this.)

But Mike Mignola as a “genius” and as “a comic-book god”? Mike does indeed do good, valuable work, but if he’s a genius, then what words can we use to describe the likes of Jack Kirby and Will Eisner, before whom surely Mignola himself would bow?

Here again I am reminded of the strange paths that life can take. I can recall back in the 1980s when Mike Mignola was part of the Friday night comics pros groups in New York City that would head out to dinner and/or a movie. (I specifically remember his being there when we saw the dreadful Supergirl movie.) So I used to watch movies with him; now I get to see his name in big letters up on the screen!

But never mind del Toro’s hyperbole. The real point is that he so clearly respects the original comics on which he based his movie. He says in his introduction, “I tried to honor and expand upon the universe created by Mike in his series and in his masterful short stories.” In fact, Mignola was present during the filmmaking. In his interview about his Hellboy movie for FilmForce, del Toro reports, “And Mike was there, just to keep his blessing on everything. I mean, we argued, we argued a lot, and I said to him, ‘Your duty is not to agree. You convince me or I convince you.’ And we won both ways.” And that’s my ideal of how it should be done: a genuine collaboration. Of course, Mignola owns the Hellboy series, so he had more clout than the various Marvel and DC writers who did their stories on a work-for-hire basis and see neither money nor credit when a studio does a movie based on their work. But surely this also reflects well on del Toro, since it’s rare for a director to consult with screenwriters on the set, much less the author of the original material on which the screenplay was based.

It’s an interesting coincidence that the Hellboy movie and Shrek 2 should come out so close together. In the FilmForce interview, del Toro points out that it too is a variation on Beauty and the Beast.

He says, “You have a message that is anti-programming, almost, where they’re telling you to be yourself. It’s a beauty and the beast story where, number one, the beauty kisses the beast at the end, but instead of the beast turning into a prince, she turns into a beast.” He is referring to the final shot in which the fireproof Hellboy and the pyrokinetic Liz Sherman kiss, as both are engulfed in her flames, which here take on sexual symbolism. “The final shot, for me, is beautiful, because it works at the level where you’re telling people it’s okay to be a monster. Just accept it and make it part of yourself. . . To me, the theme of the movie is, what makes you a human is not anything to do with your birth, the place of your birth or what you’re supposed to do, but what you choose to do.”

So, in this respect, Hellboy treats the same theme in the superhero adventure genre that the Shrek movies do as satiric fairy tales. Indeed, in his FilmForce interview del Toro refers to Hellboy as both a “fairy tale” and a “fable.”

In preparation for my review of the Hellboy film, FilmForce arranged to have Dark Horse Comics supply me with review copies of some past trade paperbacks of Mignola’s Hellboy comics. I received Book 3, The Chained Coffin and Others, a collection of short stories, and Book 5, the graphic novel The Conqueror Worm. Alas, once again I find the same problem I encounter over and over in today’s comics: a failure to introduce the main characters and their situation to new readers. It’s as if Dark Horse can’t believe that anyone would read Books 3 and 5 unless they had read Books 1, 2 and 4. But they didn’t send Book 1 or 2; they sent 3 and 5! Is Hellboy a demon? How did he get here? Who are these people he is working for? Well, luckily the movie explains all of this: he is a demon, who was brought to Earth as a baby in a mystical ritual in the 1940s, was raised by a kindly scientist, and grew up to became an operative for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, which combats supernatural menaces.

Although in the comics Hellboy may bare his teeth in an annoyed grimace, and will at times vent his rage, he and the other characters more often have a stoic look: facial expressions are minimal, distancing the readers from them. In contrast, in the movie Hellboy and other characters more visibly emote. The Hellboy in these two volumes seemed, despite his demonic appearance, to have the personality of an American everyman with super-powers, with no really distinctive traits. In reading an interview with Mignola published some years back in The Comics Journal #189, I see that in many stories, this is intentional: Mignola’s principal interest in such stories lies in adapting material from folk tales, fairy tales and mythology from various cultures. “I think of Hellboy as not having a lot of baggage, So I tend to just drop him into the material and let the material work around him.” In the two paperbacks, while Hellboy remains at the center of the action, Mignola seems to take more interest in exploring the personalities of various supporting characters, notably the haunting figure of Roger, the artificially created “homunculus.”

In contrast, the movie concentrates on Hellboy as a character, drawing on his origin tale and presumably other stories not included in the collections that I was sent.

Reviewing the movie, New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell said that actor Ron Perlman, who plays Hellboy, had a “mastery of bad-tempered volubility [that] makes ‘Hellboy’ a kind of screwball-comedy version of the Thing from the ‘Fantastic Four’ comics.” I believe Mitchell may be confused here. It’s not as if, say, the old Stan Lee-Jack Kirby scenes of the Thing being the victim of the Yancy Street Gang’s pranks were the sort of elegant farce that Noel Coward might have written. The Thing, with his irreverent wisecracks and his tussles with the Human Torch, is a far more comedic character than the Hellboy of the movie or of these two volumes, as well as a much more tragic figure. (In none of these three sources does Hellboy wish he were an ordinary human, as the Thing so often does, and at the movie’s end, Hellboy gets the girl, whereas the Thing traditionally has worried that his beloved Alicia would reject him if she could see him.) I would not be surprised if the Hellboy of the comics were inspired in part by the Thing, but, at least in the material I’m reviewing here, he’s not as dramatically vivid or colorful a character as his predecessor.

(I may quarrel with this phrase of Elvis Mitchell’s, but otherwise he did a perceptive review of the movie, demonstrating his knowledge and appreciation of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics; he even makes a point of acknowledging John Byrne as scripter of the first Hellboy series. I quite like Mitchell’s insightful description of Mignola’s “expressionist woodcut cartoonishness.” Mitchell recently resigned from the Times, allegedly in protest after fellow critic A. O. Scott was promoted above him. Mitchell was one of the few writers at the Times, the nation’s leading newspaper, who took the comics artform seriously, and of those, he was the most talented, insightful, and knowledgeable about comics. That by itself is a major reason to regret his departure.)

In the movie, in large part thanks to Ron Perlman’s performance, Hellboy’s personality comes across much more vividly. As a demon, he ages far more slowly than humans. Hence, though he arrived on Earth as an infant in the 1940s, we are told in the movie that he is now psychologically and physically the equivalent of a human at age 30. Perlman, on the other hand, is middle-aged, and even under all the demonic makeup, comes off as a gruff, tough veteran fighter with a heart, puffing on his Kirbyesque cigars: in short, much closer to the Thing. The movie concentrates more on Hellboy’s personal dramas: his longing for Liz, the fellow agent he loves; his mixed feelings towards his adoptive father, Dr. Broom, and his simmering resentment towards the Agency head who effectively holds him captive to do his bidding but does not treat him as human.

The movie sets up a familiar nature and nurture opposition and tries to make us think that Hellboy will turn away from his upbringing by humans towards his demonic heritage, and serve the forces of evil: he even grows long horns on his head. But this is a character who keeps kittens as pets, watches TV, is in love with a co-worker, is clearly devoted to his work of helping others (even if he resents his employers) and seems so utterly human in personality. Does anyone in the audience actually believe he would switch sides?

Both the comics stories and the movie strike me as enjoyable entertainments, but lacking in the kind of thematic depth I prefer. They’re triumphs of visual and storytelling style over literary substance. In the comics I am impressed by the creation of a somber, ominous mood through the variations of darkness ““ the grays, blues and browns in the coloring; the black shadows and silhouettes ““ and in contrast, the occasional bursts of bright light. The stories take on an epic, sometimes cosmic scale through enormous creatures, settings like castles and Alpine mountains, and even panoramas of the starlit sky. Mitchell rightly notes the Lovecraftian influence in the Hellboy comics, and it’s in the film’s grotesque monsters, too. But the movie takes a more direct, action-oriented approach to such menaces. Certainly, the comics have Kirbyesque fight scenes in which Hellboy punches monsters, but they also have what del Toro terms “the moments of quiet, almost elegiac horror,” which OI think that the action-oriented movie lacks. The comics can create a genuine sense of eerieness. Often this is visual: the gigantic werewolf in “The Wolves of St. Aygust,” whose resemblance to an actual wolf is disturbingly exact, or the immense boar in “The Corpse.” Or the various ghostly presences who haunt these tales, like the ghost of a young woman in the same story whose head abruptly becomes that of a wolf. Other times the eerieness is conceptual, like the spirit of “The Conqueror Worm” in the story by that name, taking possession of the body of Hellboy’s homonculos ally. In Mignola’s best writing, the eerieness can even exist within a character’s personality: in “almost Colossus:” Roger the homonculus encounters his sinister “elder brother,” a previous creation, who takes on colossal size: his ranting about being God seems not the usual comics villain’s bluster but a look into true insanity. Or there is the ghostly wolf-girl’s lament that God must hate her to inflict this fate upon her. In “Conqueror Worm” the vision of Earth burnt to a planet-sized cinder seems more chilling than the more familiar sci-fi image of the planet blowing up. Though Mignola says in an introduction that his short story,. “A Christmas Underground,” is based on a folk tale, I see in it a variation on the Greek myth of Hades’ abduction of Persephone to the underworld, and hence I was surprised by its far bleaker denouement. Hellboy’s vision of an encounter between what are presumably his parents ““ a great devil and a human woman ““ in “The Chained Coffin” is perhaps the most unsettling scene in the two volumes.

What impresses me most about the Hellboy movie is something I haven’t seen mentioned in any reviews. In his Conqueror Worm introduction, del Toro says, “I humbly confess that many a time I have aspired to imitate Mignola’s mysterious style in the design of my films, especially the cold, velvet backdrop of darkness from which his characters emerge.” What struck me in watching the movie is the degree to which the movie duplicates in live action terms the look of the Hellboy comics: the look of Hellboy and his fiend Abe Sapien, the red color of Hellboy moving through a blackly shadowed world, the designs of sets and props. We’ve seen a previous movie adapted from Mignola’s art style, Disney’s animated Atlantis, but it is more impressive to me to see del Toro evoke the look of Mignola’s fictional world within a live action movie. (And when the movie shows us a comic book about Hellboy, it is clearly done in an imitation of Jack Kirby’s style, a fine and unexpected homage!)

That in turn changes my standards for evaluating live action movies based on comics. What if the Daredevil movie had genuinely looked like Frank Miller’s artwork? Wouldn’t it be amazing if the forthcoming Fantastic Four live action movie captures the look and feel of Jack Kirby’s art? (What if its set designers, matte painters, and CGI artists modeled their work directly on Kirby’s?) I’m not holding my breath, but it would be so wonderful if it did.

ANALYZING NEMO

Lately I’ve watched the Disney-Pixar Finding Nemo again twice, once in its recent premiere on the Starz! cable network, and before that, on its DVD with a commentary track by its director Andrew Stanton and others.

Now I have a trick for listening to DVD commentaries: I activate the subtitles, so I can follow the movie’s dialogue while listening to the commentators. But when I listened to the commentary track, the subtitles turned out to be transcriptions of the commentary, not the film’s dialogue! Foiled! Then again, the people for whom DVD subtitles are really intended, the hearing-impaired, are no doubt delighted that Pixar, Disney, or both, has thus made it possible for them to follow the commentary, something other DVD makers apparently don’t care about.

Watching the movie (without the track) I once again admired its genuine humor, its appealing characters ““ not only the leads, but even minor supporting cast members ““ and, of course, its sheer visual beauty in depicting its underwater universe. Most of all, this time around, I was impressed by its story construction. There are two major story lines that begin and end together, but diverge for most of the film. The lead character, the clownfish Marlin, has never gotten over the death of his mate and most of their eggs; as a result, he is both obsessively overprotective towards his surviving child, Nemo, and himself fearful of taking any chances in life, or of venturing beyond the safety of home. Nemo, on the other hand, longs to move beyond the boundaries of home, and hence feels stifled by his parent.

When Nemo is captured by divers, their stories diverge. Marlin embarks on a classic, Campbellian quest, leaving his “normal” world, the coral reef he calls home, to journey through a symbolically enchanted realm, the vast ocean beyond, in search of his son. Marlin even spends time in a literal version of Campbell’s “belly of the beast,” in this case, the mouth of a whale.

Nemo, in contrast, has a very different kind of adventure, built on a motif that Michael Chabon would appreciate: an attempt at escape. Nemo finds himself trapped in a fish tank in a dentist’s office and must join forces with new allies, the tank’s other inmates, to somehow get back to the ocean and then home. Surely we are meant to think of prison movies and The Great Escape as parallels.

Marlin and Nemo are each ultimately seeking the same goal: reunion with each other and return to home. But each must take a different route.

Moreover, each is facing his specific fears. Nemo, who felt confined by life at home, is now genuinely imprisoned and must escape. Marlin, so shattered by past tragedy that he never wanted to let go of his son or leave home, has now indeed lost his son and must traverse the great ocean, risking many dangers, to find him and become “whole” again.

Audiences will identify with both protagonists, but kids will no doubt relate more fully to Nemo, while adults will identify more with Marlin. Nemo’s own saga is, unsurprisingly, about learning to function as an independent adult. It makes mythic sense that his new comrades in the fish tank even enact a tribal-style initiation ritual as if to mark his entrance into their world, the adult world.What I find most intriguing is that Marlin and Nemo are each paired with a surrogate version of the other. Nemo is mentored by his cellmate, er, tankmate Gil, who, unlike his father, encourages him to escape their confines and to take chances to achieve his goals. Gil even ends up risking his own life to ensure Nemo’s escape. Marlin is paired with Dory, wan adult fish with a childlike personality, complicated further by her comic difficulties with short-term memory. She embodies Marlin’s fears that his son is too irresponsible to act without him. If you want a sign that this is what the filmmakers intend, consider a dramatic moment in which Marlin angrily scolds Dory for her risk taking and finds himself calling her “Nemo.”

Marlin and Nemo each gets a few symbolic death and resurrection scenes. A particularly good one comes in the scene in the whale’s mouth, in which Dory encourages Marlin to let go and fall down the whale’s throat. That would seem to be giving in to death, but Marlin, who would remain trapped if he remained where he was, nonetheless trusts Dory, lets go, and instead he and Dory are shot out to safety through the whale’s blowhole.

Towards the end, when Marlin and Nemo are reunited, each shows how he has evolved as a character through their rescue of Dory, who in part represents the helpless child that Marlin thought Nemo was. Nemo insists that Marlin allow him to execute his plan to enable Dory and many other fish to escape a fishing net (another escape motif), and Marlin, after initial refusal, consents, recognizing his son’s ability to take charge of his actions, and even helps him out.

As for the Finding Nemo commentary track, I quite like the way that the commentators appear on screen initially, and at times the movie will be interrupted so as to show us video clips of related artwork, or of the voice actors performing their lines, or of other members of the Pixar creative team making observations. Moreover, everyone from Pixar who’s on the commentary track seems genuinely enthusiastic about his or her work and about being part of this creative team. This is clearly a creative group that is a true community, that is performing at their artistic peak, and that isn’t afraid of being shoved out the door by corporate overlords. In short, it reminds me of what the comics industry used to be like. Now if only they needed someone to write The Official Handbook of the Pixar Universe. . . .

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

In the world of comic strips in recent years, there have been major series whose creators brought them to an end (Bill Watterston’s Calvin and Hobbes, Gary Larson’s The Far Side) or who went on lengthy sabbaticals (Berke Breathed’s Bloom County and its subsequent spinoffs). But traditionally the great comic strip artists have devoted lifelong careers to one or two series. In my childhood many of the titans were still active, working on strips they had been doing for decades: Milton Caniff (Steve Canyon), Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), Harold Gray (Little Orphan Annie), Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), Al Capp (Li’l Abner), and my favorite, Walt Kelly (Pogo). In recent times there have been such examples of longevity as Charles Schulz, who only retired from Peanuts shortly before his death, and Garry Trudeau on Doonesbury. (Perhaps it is surprising that in many such cases, the creator did not actually own the strip, but was allowed by his corporate bosses to continue working on it.) Followers of such longrunning strips can watch them evolve over time as bodies of creative work. Especially when comic strips comment on real life events, as in Doonesbury and Pogo, or allow their characters to age, famously in Gasoline Alley and also in Lynn Johnston’s For Better or for Worse, we readers can see how the strip’s creators respond to changing times and the different phases of life itself. (There will be more on this subject in another of my future, long-gestating columns.)

But such long runs by a single creator are far less common in American comic books. Roy Thomas’s ten-year original stint as writer of Marvel’s Conan titles (now being reprinted by Dark Horse in recognition of their enduring, classic worth) is unusual and remarkable. In fact, I have been told that in some quarters in today’s comic book business it is believed that a creative team should only stay on a series for a year. Had this been the mindset in the 1960s, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would never have gotten to do their Galactus trilogy.

The major exception to the rule is Chris Claremont, now approaching the thirtieth anniversary of his first writing the X-Men in 1975, scripting the first “regular” issue of the “new” X-Men, Claremont began his unbroken sixteen-year run on the series now known as Uncanny X-Men, while co-creating and writing related series like The New Mutants, Wolverine, and the original Excalibur on the side. His absences from the X-Men books have been due primarily to editorial and corporate decisions; were it up to him, I suspect he would never have left the X-Men. Even in this ever more fickle comics industry, Marvel has recognized that Claremont’s new X-Men work continues to find a large audience. Thus, in the course of Marvel’s current “X-Men Reload” marketing ploy, though Claremont’s X-Treme X-Men series has wound to an end (see Comics in Context #37), he is now back where he belongs, writing the original X-Men series, Uncanny X-Men, starting anew with issue 444 (cover-dated July 2004 and out right now), teamed up once more with artist Alan Davis, his collaborator on the first Excalibur series.

And, this same month, Claremont has launched a new Excalibur series as well, with a familiar title but a very different premise. (Those series is drawn not by Davis but by Aaron Lopresti.)

The very first page of Uncanny #444 presents a new and welcome variation on a familiar scene from Claremont’s X-Men work. “It’s been a long time since the X-Men have indulged in a game of baseball,” the narrator dryly observes. Indeed, it has. Like the ones he has done in X-Men books in the past, this new baseball sequence provides opportunities for humor that other X-Men writers neglect in order to concentrate on what conventional wisdom deems the X-Men‘s principal stock-in-trade: unrelieved angst. But Claremont, like Stan Lee before him, believes in balancing the dark with the light. Moreover, the baseball games provide a strong sense of the X-Men’s spirit of community. The fact that these outsiders, who feel out of place in a hostile society, find a sense of community, identity, and family within the X-Men is a major source of the concept’s appeal. I used to hear other comics professionals mock what they called Claremont’s “jeans and T-shirt” scenes in his books, but those scenes, with characters happily, affectionately interacting, supplied X-Men with an emotional warmth lacking in many other comics writers’ work.

This baseball scene set me thinking back to one of Claremont’s earliest Marvel stories, way back in Marvel Premiere #24 (August 1975), in which Danny Rand, who is secretly the martial artist Iron Fist, encounters a bearded guy named Chris (the author himself) in a park and joins him and his friends (other Marvel staffers, recognizable to those who know) in a softball game. Marvel’s summer softball games were an annual event in sunnier times, and perhaps Claremont is intentionally harking back to the spirit of the comics community back then in staging new baseball games for the X-Men.

Certainly the sense of community for X-Men readers would be enhanced by seeing the sheer number of characters that Claremont and Davis put into this scene, many of whom are Claremont co-creations, from the original New Mutants as well as the X-Men titles themselves.

The game not only allows for introducing various characters to new readers and, in some cases, establishing their powers (as with Nightcrawler’s teleporting), but also provides opportunities for nice characterization bits, and even subtle references on recent developments in the series. Up at bat, Emma Frost, the White Queen, who was once one of the X-Men’s leading enemies, finds catcher Nightcrawler’s characteristic humor irritating. “One more word, Kurt,” she sneers, “and I’ll banish you to your father’s dimension myself!” There’s a reference to the recent revelation (by another writer) that Nightcrawler’s father was a demon. (Apparently mutation was deemed insufficient to explain Nightcrawler’s appearance and powers, though it should have been enough. So Nightcrawler has been given an origin imitating Hellboy’s, or maybe even Rosemary’s Baby’s.)

The dominant figure in this sequence is Rachel Summers, the daughter of an alternate reality’s versions of Scott Summers and Jean Grey, who were members of the first “class” of X-Men as Cyclops and Marvel Girl. It would appear that the whole convoluted 1990s story line which dispatched Rachel to the far future to become the ancient Mother Askani is no longer relevant, since here she is back in the present, still young. (I assume this has something to do with the alteration of the timeline that originally led to Cable’s future era. This is fine with me: the whole future Cable/Rachel history had gotten too convoluted for the series’ own good. It’s bad enough that we need to have two sets of Scotts and Jeans to explain Rachel’s present-day existence.)

Rachel is not only now calling herself “Marvel Girl,” in honor of the Jeans of this timeline and her own, but she’s calling herself “Rachel Grey.” This is news to me, as it was to the folks at Manhattan’s Cosmic Comics, where I picked up this issue. But I assume that Rachel’s new last name is not only a salute to her mom but a sign of her disapproval of the behavior of this timeline’s version of Scott Summers. “Our” reality’s Jean is dead again, thanks to ex-X-Men-writer Grant Morrison, although with Jean’s talent for resurrection one might well wonder who actually thinks she’s “dead” for good. But even before Jean’s latest demise (collect ’em all!), Scott had inexplicably started a romance with Emma Frost. This is the sort of thing that exasperates longtime readers and makes them wonder what Scott was thinking, or, even better, what in heaven’s name the editors and writers were thinking.

So amidst the overall good spirits of the game, a sort of duel ensues between Rachel, the pitcher, and Frost, up at bat. Though Frost is hardly old, there’s still a generational edge to the conflict here, especially since Davis draws Rachel looking so youthful and sexy. Rachel needles Frost (“Made you flinch”) and, when Emma ignominiously strikes out, makes the point of the duel clear: “That one was for my Mom, Emma!” But though Emma gets genuinely angry, the tone of the duel remains comedic, in keeping with the high spirits of the game. Rachel maintains a sense of humor throughout, Frost ends up falling on her butt in a bit of slapstick comedy, and Rachel bursts into infectious laughter, complete with a thought balloon containing Davis’ caricature of the comically defeated Frost. There’s a more somber undercurrent here, too. Though Claremont doesn’t make this explicit, since Emma, like Rachel, is a telepath, she would “see” Rachel’s image of her; Davis has Emma look momentarily genuinely sad over her moment of humiliation, before she then forfeits any sympathy by bursting into rage at Rachel’s telepathic mention of Jean.

The mixture of tones in this baseball sequence ““ warmth and joy, vengefulness and sadness, comedy and pathos ““ is unusual in comics, but Claremont and Davis bring it off. I also am impressed by the subtlety with which they handle Wolverine’s reactions in the scene. Having been in unrequited love with Jean himself, it is no wonder he disapproves of Scott’s “betrayal” of her with Frost, as demonstrated by his subtle, pointed comments to Scott and Emma in this scene. Scott and Emma don’t seem to understand what he’s getting at, but the attentive reader will. A comics editor once explicitly directed me to write “purple” prose; I much prefer Claremont’s skillful use of understatement in delineating character.

Soon afterwards follows another familiar sort of scene from Claremont’s past X-Men work: the X-Men at leisure around the swimming pool. This too is one of Claremont’s means of showing the X-Men take pleasure in each other’s company, and affords more comedic opportunities: here the Beast’s dive splashes the onlookers.

But look how Claremont and Davis mix the dramatic tones here, as well. Sage, formerly Tessa of the Hellfire Club, appealingly garbed in a bathrobe, sits amid the X-Men’s computer systems, surveying the estate, including the pool area. But initially she does so by tapping into the surveillance systems of various government agencies. On the previous page, Claremont refers to Morrison’s “outing” of the X-Men: the world now knows that Professor Charles Xavier’s school is their headquarters. Morrison presented the “outing” as primarily a good thing, enabling the X-Men to take a more public role in advocating mutant rights. Now Claremont and Davis are showing some of the negative results of the “outing.” The F.B.I. and even the Department of Homeland Security are spying on the Xavier estate; the latter department’s presence is another sign of how 9/11 and subsequent events have influenced comics.

The X-Men now have to cope not only with government surveillance but with intrusions by the news media. We next see a foolishly grinning TV reporter doing a report from what is presumably a helicopter flying over the estate. While on camera, Cannonball angrily orders her, demonstrating a lack of PR savvy comparable to that of the unseen government operative who swung the camera away from Secretary of State Colin Powell during his Meet the Press interview last Sunday (May 15).

Davis provides some interesting overhead shots of the rebuilt Xavier mansion: it’s been redesigned and expanded, presumably to account for where everybody is housed since Morrison radically expanded the size of the student body. (Back in 1963, there were only six people living in the entire mansion!)

In another nice touch, we are shown that the mansion now has a “memorial garden,” where flowers are placed before a photo of Jean, who is not shown alone, as one might expect, but with Scott. One gets the feeling that it is not just Rachel and Wolverine who disapprove of the Scott-and-Emma romance. Indeed, next Sage monitors Scott’s office, inside of which Scott and Emma are busily snogging away instead of being “in conference.”

Think about this scene some more, and it becomes ominous: Sage is spying on Scott’s love life, just as the government is spying on the outside of the mansion.

Here’s another nice bit: various X-Men trainees (all in the original uniforms) look on aghast as Wolverine and Storm undergo a violent session in the Danger Room, while senior X-Man Rogue breaks into a big smile, saying this workout was “mostly. . .just for fun.” Now there’s a way of dramatizing the contrast between newbies and veterans.

Next Storm takes a more serious approach to the theme, stating that “The first generation of mutants needs to take responsibility for their heirs.” We will see more of this generational theme when we look at Excalibur later in this piece. But for now, ask yourselves where else in the Marvel canon you have read a phrase about “responsibility.”

Claremont has the old school Marvel writer’s sense of duty about establishing characters and situations for new or infrequent readers, an especially important task for an issue Marvel is promoting has a “jumping on” point for newcomers. So next he shows us two scenes of X-Men in their new roles as government-sanctioned “marshals” battling mutant criminals. Again there’s a sign of the 9-11 influence: the first band of bad guys, the Weaponeers, are Arab raiders.

These scenes also showcase the fact that after several years of wearing relatively nondescript black uniforms, the X-Men are back in traditional, colorful superhero costumes. I dislike the too-short “horns” on Wolverine’s new outfit, but I quite like the new costume for Rachel. (Its green and yellow colors and boots are also reminiscent of the original Marvel Girl’s late 1960s costume.)

You may recall that around the time of the first X-Men movie, which put the team in black uniforms, Avi Arad and others at Marvel were busy badmouthing traditional superhero costumes as stupid. So the X-Men in the comics were put into black uniforms as well, which look drab and dull in the comics medium. Then out came the Spider-Man movie, a far greater financial success, and not an ill word was uttered about the fact that Spidey wore his usual colorful costume in the film. Now we learn from various sources that Avi Arad decreed that it was “time” for the costumes to return. I suppose this is yet another example of how when comics creators misguidedly try to drop an essential element from a major series, it usually makes its eventual return. I doubt that anyone really thought through the importance of costumes several years ago when they were dropped; we should breathe a sigh of relief that this corporate whim has reversed itself, and the costumes are back.

The ominous aspect of Sage returns towards the end. I wonder if, when Claremont wrote Sage’s dialogue here ““ “Leave their interrogation to me, Rachel. I have ways of making people. . .talk.” ““ it seemed as sinister as it does in the wake of the recent controversy over mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.

I can’t say I’m thrilled by the concluding action scenes in this issue: they seem the most conventional part of the book. No, for me what is interesting are the characterizations, the themes, the new look at the X-Men’s place in a changing world.

This is even more true of Claremont’s new Excalibur #1. This, by the way, is not to be confused with his first Excalibur #1, though from now on it surely will be. Claremont’s first Excalibur series began in 1988, but, to judge from the indicia, Marvel couldn’t be bothered to assign the new series a new volume number. This sort of thing has happened so often in the past, complicating the lives of collectors or anyone (surely including Marvel personnel) trying to keep accurate records of the company’s publishing history. And to think that when editor Julius Schwartz revived the Flash comic in the 1950s, he was told to pick up the numbering from where the original Flash comic had left off. Those were simpler and more sensible times.

Excalibur is the name of King Arthur’s sword, and that made an appropriate title for the original Claremont Excalibur, which was about a British-based team of superheroes, a kind of latter-day Round Table. The central figure, indeed, was Captain Britain (one of Claremont’s earliest co-creations), a patriotic icon for the United kingdom just as Captain America is for the United states. The first issue of the new series has nothing to do with Britain or any British characters, though the initial story arc is titled “Forging the Sword.” What connection this new Excalibur may have. literally or figuratively, to the Arthurian legend remains to be seen.

To judge from issue one, the new Excalibur is about Professor Charles Xavier, the founder of the X-Men, and Genosha, the island nation off the coast of Africa that Claremont co-created in the 1980s.

I look at the new Excalibur in terms of a question that must face many comics creators of the Baby Boom generation, who came into the business in the 1970s and 1980s. Can the superhero genre continue to serve as an effective means of personal expression for writers in middle age? (It was for Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who created the Marvel Universe in their middle age.) So many people still think of superhero comics, indeed of comic books in general, as material for children; even the major comics companies seem to be targeting a demographic of teenagers and men in their early 20s. But can the genre be made relevant to middle-aged creators and readers who are seeking more than adolescent nostalgia?

This is a question that faces the world of rock music as well (and perhaps it is relevant that the rise of rock music paralleled the Silver Age in comics). Most of the audience is young, even juvenile, and yet there is an older audience as well, and middle-aged creators who do not simply rely on recycling oldies. Actually, this is a problem that seems prevalent throughout contemporary American culture. The youth culture advocated by the Baby Boomers in their own youth has now turned against them, as movie companies, television studios, and, indeed, businesses in general pursue a young demographic to the exclusion of the middle-aged and seniors.

Consider, then, how unusual and bold Claremont’s new Excalibur is: its central character is a middle-aged man. And he is no fantasy figure of steroid-style musculature and aggressive attitude like other middle-aged Marvel heroes, Cable or the Punisher. Charles Xavier is physically crippled; he’s bald; his strength lies in his mind. Yet he tells us at one point that “My telepathy’s grown too soft. . . .” He blames this on his overreliance on devices like Cerebra, but perhaps we can see it as a sign of aging, as well.

Moreover, this is a story about the dreams, hopes and ideals of youth, something the superhero concept embodies quite well, turning to disillusionment. This is a theme that has been powerfully dramatized in the superhero genre before, in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Frank Miller’s original Dark Knight, Paul Jenkins’ Sentry, the final issue of Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s Marvels, and their predecessor, the recently republished novel Superfolks, not to mention Stan Lee’s “Spider-Man No More” in Amazing Spider-Man #50, which, as one can see from the trailer, is quoted in the second Spider-Man movie. In some of these cases the hero succumbs to disillusionment and gives up the world of superheroes; in others he finds a means to regain his faith and renew his career in that world. What will be Xavier’s choice in this story?

The issue opens with Xavier, eyes shut and jaw set in an expression that looks like mourning, telling us that “once upon a time, I had a dream” of a world in which mutants and “baseline humans” coexisted in peace. “Xavier’s dream” is a familiar phrase from past X-Men stories, and his phrasing, “I had a dream,” might evoke Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”: Xavier, as an non-violent advocate for mutant civil rights, has been compared to Dr. King before. The “once upon a time” phrase is the standard beginning of a fairy tale. Xavier may be suggesting not only that the days when he hoped he could turn his vision, his “dream,” into reality not only seem long past, but that his hopes now seem naive, perhaps even childlike to him, as a fairy tale might seem to an adult.

Turn the page and you will find a double-page spread of Xavier, sitting in his wheelchair, alone amid a scene of devastation. Referring back to his “dream” of a world of racial peace, Xavier says simply, “This isn’t it. This is today’s reality.” It is as if he has awakened from a blissful, youthful dream to face up to a harsh reality in which hope seems naive.

In part, perhaps this scene is another conscious or subconscious evocation of the events of 9/11: it is reminiscent of Superman standing amid the debris of the demolished Daily Planet building in Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, a scene that was clearly a 9/11 reference (see Comics in Context #34).

These are the ruins of Hammer Bay, the capital city of Genosha, a nation of mutants that was obliterated by Sentinel robots dispatched by Xavier’s “evil twin,” Cassandra Nova, early in Grant Morrison’s stint as X-Men writer. So the destruction of Genosha is a testament to the genocidal hatred that Xavier has failed to overcome. It could also be seen as a contemporary, fictional counterpart to the Holocaust.

There is another level of meaning as well, since Genosha, as a fictional concept, was Claremont’s creation. Originally, Genosha seemed to be inspired by South Africa and Rhodesia in the days of apartheid: African nations that were dominated by whites, in which blacks were reduced to second class citizenship. In Genosha white “baseline” humans ruled over a population of mutants, whom they had effectively enslaved.

After Claremont left the X-Men books in the early 1990s, Genosha seemed to become a parallel for Bosnia, with the “baseline” humans and the mutants waging a bloody civil war against each other. Still later, the United Nations turned the nation over to Magneto, in a gesture of appeasement. As Claremont has Xavier tells us in this issue, “It had become the self-proclaimed mutant homeland, presenting itself to the world as a sanctuary and a place of hope.” That might make Genosha sound like the mutant race’s counterpart to Israel, but notice that, despite the Chamber of Commerce-style pictures he shows us of Genosha as a utopia, Claremont is careful to say that this is the image that Magneto’s Latveria sought to present to the world. In fact, under other writers, Magneto made the island nation a base from which he plotted world conquest: Genosha was not the mutants’ Israel but was to him what Latveria is to Doctor Doom.

Finally, Morrison wiped out the population of Genosha, an act that read to me as another example of the tiresome syndrome in which Writer A creates a concept, and his successor, Writer B, dislikes it and wrecks it, either not anticipating or caring that other writers might find the concept useful, or even that Writer A himself might someday return. In this case Claremont is Writer A, Morrison is Writer B, and Genosha was the victim. So Xavier sitting amidst the ruins of a society of mutants might even parallel Claremont finding himself faced with the destruction of one of his own fictional creations. The new Excalibur looks in part to be Claremont’s effort to rescue Genosha and revitalize it as a concept.

Most significantly, the visual image of Xavier amid the ruins of Genosha is a metaphor for Xavier confronting the ruination of his hopes. Looking at this scene of genocide, Xavier must wonder whether all his work on behalf of mutants has been in vain. Is his “dream” dead? Does it lie in ruins like Genosha? On page four artist Aaron Lopresti places Xavier within a panel shaped like a coffin, symbolically entombing him. Claremont has Xavier spend the issue carting a coffin behind his wheelchair. And what is that wrapped, human-sized bundle within the coffin? Here are symbols aplenty of the death of mutants, the death of ideals, and the death of hope.

Cassandra Nova could be dismissed as a single madwoman who does not represent the rest of humanity. But what Xavier tells us about the world’s reaction to the massacre does point to “baseline” humanity’s intolerance towards mutants, which he calls “almost as contemptible as the attack itself.” According to Xavier, the world’s great powers have virtually ignored the plight of Genosha, and are “far more worried about a terrorist response from any survivors.” That seems all too credible. (Consider the current fate of Afghanistan after its supposed liberation from the Taliban.)

What Xavier tells us next may well be inspired by current events in the real world. “I’ve been to war,” he says. “I know firsthand the cost. What matters here isn’t ideology or policies. What matters are people in desperate need. And those with the means ““ and more importantly the will ““ to help.” Like Storm’s line that I quoted from Uncanny X-Men #444, this is, at heart, a reworking of Stan Lee’s famous maxim from Spider-Man’s origin in Amazing Fantasy #15: “With great power must come great responsibility.” Often this line is misquoted, and the “must” is omitted. But “must” conveys the point: it is the moral duty for a person to take responsibility for helping those in need if he or she can. I suspect that Claremont, who has thus alluded to Stan Lee’s maxim in both of his initial “X-Men Reboot” issues, may see it as the prime moral principle underlying stories in the classic Marvel tradition.

Xavier now informs us that in combat he was nicknamed “the Good Shepherd,” because :if you were lost, I’d find you and bring you home safe.” The Good Shepherd, of course, is a character in perhaps Christ’s most celebrated parable, and the character has been regarded as a metaphor for Christ himself. Claremont may be casting Xavier as a Christ figure, though I doubt that Xavier, who seems humbled in this story, is egotistically thinking of himself that way. Instead, Xavier is making the point that he puts his money where his mouth is: he carries out his responsibility to aid those in need, who are metaphorically “lost.” “After a lifetime,” he tells us, acknowledging his age, “that hasn’t really changed.”

Here hope and moral ideals begin to reemerge in the story. The world around Xavier may have changed for the worst, but he remains steadfast: he will not give up. He is a rock solidly fixed amid the chaotic maelstrom.

From there, logically enough, Xavier goes on to describe his role as a teacher, who instructs young mutants in “both the practical and ethical use of their abilities.” This has been Xavier’s role from Lee and Kirby’s X-Men #1 onward. But usually in X-Men stories it is Xavier’s students who take center stage. In fact, through his long run on the X-Men, Claremont repeatedly wrote Xavier out of the series, as if he were not essential to it. Maybe this was even ageism. Now, perhaps because Claremont and Xavier are closer in age, he puts the spotlight on Xavier himself in Excalibur. Through what Storm said in Uncanny #444 and what Xavier says here, Claremont is focusing on the responsibility of a generation that has gained wisdom and experience to aid the younger generation rising up.

As if marking a transition from one act of the story to another, Xavier literally falls and then rises to see the spirit of his deceased lover and colleague, Moira MacTaggart. Xavier does not know if she is “real” ““ a ghost ““ or not; Moira guesses she is a “figment of your imagination.” This reminds me of the story’s opening, with its contrast between Xavier’s dream and the reality in which he finds himself.

Moira’s ghost is an interesting dramatic device, and a familiar one: the ghost who may or may not be real. This reminds me of the ambiguity with which John Byrne initially treated Alfred’s ghost in Generations before finally making clear he was real in the sequel. There’s the meeting between President Bartlet and his recently deceased secretary, Mrs. Landingham, in the Season 2 finale of The West Wing. Going further back, to more literary sources, there’s Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and there are even those who think that Hamlet may have imagined his father’s ghost.

If the ghost is not real, this should raise questions about the living person’s sanity. It is one thing for Xavier to consciously decide to imagine what Moira might say to him. For Xavier to hallucinate Moira’s presence, without knowing if she is real or not, is worrisome.

Still, this is a good scene, and perhaps the heart of the story. Moira is a reminder of the theme of aging, death, and loss, and also of the way past memories provide inspiration for the present and future. Moira’s ghost first appears as a middle-aged woman, in glasses and suit, but then reverts to the appearance of her earlier self, wearing considerably less.

“The way you see me is the way you remember me best,” she tells Xavier: “From when we were young an’ in love. . .an’ our world was rich wi’ possibilities.”

Actually, from her earliest appearances in the1970s, Moira has always represented lost love, lost youth, and lost possibilities She was the woman whom Xavier loved in his university days, but whom he lost to a man she married but did not love. Though Xavier and Moira remained close friends and colleagues, it seemed as if they could not return to the relationship they once had.

Now Claremont has sharpened the tragic aspect of their relationship, having killed Moira off a few years ago, but perhaps seems more willing to explore the themes she represents. That last line, about “when we were young an’ in love. . .an’ our world was rich wi’ possibilities” seems particularly meaningful. Claremont gives us the space of a panel to mull this over before Xavier replies, with understatement, “This isn’t how I thought things would turn out.”

Think again back to that double-page spread of Xavier amid the ruins. Perhaps those ruins also represent his concept of the world, and his plans of how he could help the world, both destroyed by events he did not foresee. Now there’s something that one should learn as he or she ages: that the world will change in ways that you cannot expect. How many people fifty years ago foresaw the coming of the civil rights movement, feminism, gay liberation, the end of the Soviet Union, the coming of AIDS, the rise of the Internet, gay marriage, the threat of radical Islamic terrorism, or so much more? How many people in their 20s correctly foresee what their lives will be like in a quarter century?

Perhaps Xavier has achieved a quiet epiphany here. Later in the story he tells a young mutant, “Life’s a work in progress. . .It doesn’t always work out the way we plan, or hope.”

Meanwhile, the compulsory action subplot begins stirring, with the appearance of longtime X-Men villain Unus the Untouchable and some anonymous mutant bad guys. How nice to see Unus, a Lee-Kirby creation, back, especially since for a long time Marvel considered him to be dead: in one story he had lost control of his force field and seemingly suffocated to death inside it. I suspect that in today’s Marvel no one who had anything to do with the current story even knew about Unus’s “demise.” But that’s okay: I’m glad to see he’s back.

The unforeseen development that most worries Xavier is the fact that there are now far more mutants on Marvel-Earth than he ever thought back in the X-Men comics of past decades, in which finding a mutant was a comparatively rare occurrence. This may also represent Claremont’s own reaction to another change that Morrison wreaked in the X-Men concept. Morrison clearly wanted to emphasize the idea of mutants as not rare anomalies but as a significant minority group by radically increasing their numbers. Xavier explicitly points to the devastation of Genosha as a symbol of the “backlash” by the “baseline human” majority against their race.

Xavier notes that “Not even cockroaches survived” the annihilation of Genosha, alluding to the conventional wisdom that these bugs would even survive a nuclear war (see Peter David’s Hulk: The End in Comics in Context #2 for an example). As if Moira’s ghost and the ruins of Genosha aren’t enough reminders of mortality, here’s another one.

The notion that cockroaches did not survive the attack on Genosha seems to induce Xavier to wonder if mutants really are the next phase of human evolution, which Morrison and Magneto both claim will outlive and supplant “normal” humanity. Xavier wonders, “Suppose we were wrong about other things? Suppose mutants aren’t the culmination if the evolutionary process, the crest of a coming norm. . .but some aberration? How then will nature deal with us?” Are mutants inevitably doomed? And hence, are Xavier’s efforts on behalf of the mutant race all in vain? This raises Xavier’s mid-life crisis to new philosophical dimensions.

This moment of despair seems to mark another act break, for now Xavier turns from Moira’s ghost to another Jungian anima figure, named “Wicked.” No, Broadway musical fans, this has nothing to do with Kristin Chenoweth. This “Wicked” is a young, female mutant who dresses in “bad girl” fashion and has the antagonistic attitude to match. But in context she comes off not so much as a Bill Jemas-style effort to pandering to the audience for “bad girl” comics, but more as a representation of the way that a person in the mid-life generation might view the rebellious younger generation. (Jack Kirby pictured the youth of 1970 as the peaceful, hippie-like Forever People; in 2004 Claremont gives us instead “wicked” and her 21st century variation on punk.) The name Wicked gave herself is an example of the role of angry rebel in which she casts herself. In Junging terms it also marks her as a “shadow” figure, which Xavier must cope with.

Wicked keeps calling Xavier “old man,” in another way the story emphasizes the theme of age and generational change. From what she says, she appears to represent the young Genoshan mutants’ anger that Xavier could not save them, and, perhaps beyond that, the anger of the younger generation at the failures of their elders. Interestingly, Wicked seems accompanied by real ghosts, presumably of deceased Genoshans. Perhaps this parallels Xavier with his mysterious coffin.

Xavier paraphrases Stan Lee’s maxim once more, “Having powers means assuming the obligation to use them responsibly,” but this time he says it to Wicked, thus demonstrating his goal of teaching his precepts to a new generation.

As they go to attack Xavier, Unus directs his underlings, “Leave him naked as the day he was born!” I wonder how long ago Claremont wrote that line. Had the stripping of Iraqi prisoners been revealed in the press?

Menaced by Unus and company, Xavier rises to the occasion, and interestingly does so by remaining in his chosen role as teacher. When Unus claims to be invulnerable to Xavier’s telepathy, Xavier says, :I could argue the point, or demonstrate it,” like a good academic.

Instead, Xavier has another young mutant, Freakshow, take care of Unus by turning into a giant monster and swallowing him! That’s a clever bit that Claremont came up with, though it wouldn’t have worked had Unus projected his field as far from his body as he did in the Stan Lee/Roy Thomas days.

Xavier even thinks of the fate meted out to Unus as a kind of lesson, though he doubts Unus will learn from it.

Through rising to and winning this battle, Xavier has reasserted himself as a leader, a fighter, and, indeed, as a mentor: he has reclaimed his belief in his life’s work. Again, speaking with powerful simplicity, Xavier says, “I’m a teacher, Freakshow,” and instructs him and Wicked to return tomorrow to begin their “lessons.”

Now, for those of you who need spoiler warnings, read no further.

After all of the symbols of mortality in this issue, it concludes with an act of resurrection. Symbolically, the mysterious coffin glows and rises into the air. And on the last page, out walks the supposedly deceased Magneto. But he is not in costume, not dressed for warfare. Instead he is unmasked, in civilian dress, and shakes hands with Xavier.

Perhaps you will recall that towards the end of his run, Grant Morrison had Wolverine apparently behead Magneto. I was going to say that was particularly unfortunate considering the subsequent, real-life beheading of an American prisoner by Muslim terrorists. But then I remembered the terrorist beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl took place before Morrison wrote that issue. Wolverine really shouldn’t be imitating Arab terrorists.

In any event, now we see that Magneto’s “death” didn’t even last a year. This is further proof that this kind of fake death is becoming meaningless as a dramatic device in comics. Morrison’s “deaths” for Magneto and Jean Grey are just exasperating annoyances.

Now, what does Claremont have in mind for Magneto? In the 1980s Claremont veered away from the traditional portrayal of Magneto as outright villain, and instead stated that he saw him as a former terrorist evolving into a statesman. This was an interesting development, though I think that Claremont took it too far, even turning Magneto into the New Mutants’ new headmaster. But as I have observed about the X-Men’s costumes, if comics creators try to dispose of or radically change an important element of a series, it will inevitably snap back to the way it was. So, in the 1990s editor Bob Harras had Magneto return to his more familiar villainous role. Over the last few years Grant Morrison (in the main continuity) and Mark Millar (in the alternate continuity of Ultimate X-Men) came up with the most evil versions of Magneto to date, ruthless, consumed with hatred for humanity, bent on mutant domination of the world. Millar’s Magneto even fantasized about mutants eating “normal” humans. Though Ian McKellen’s Magneto in the X-Men movies has a certain charm, he too is genocidal, and nearly exterminated the “normal” human race in X2.

Is Claremont changing course with Magneto? I think Magneto works best in the role of Xavier’s former friend turned into his ideological opposite and greatest enemy, the archvillain that the series needs. Neil Gaiman handled this duality well in his treatment of Magneto in 1602. I am nonetheless interested to see where Claremont takes Magneto now. I have no doubt he can explore Magneto’s personality with the same depth and insight he demonstrates with Xavier in this first issue.

So, here was Excalibur #1, a superhero comic book centering on a middle-aged man who faces middle-aged concerns ““ mortality, loss, adapting to changing times, disillusionment and doubt ““ and finding new resolve to continue his quest for his lifelong goals.

In one of the nice examples of synchronicity that occur when I write these columns, today’s New York Times (May 21, 2004) has an Op-Ed piece by Nick Hornby on the subject of middle-aged people creating and listening to rock music. “You’ve heard the argument a million times: most rock music is made by the young, for the young, about being young, and if you’re not young and you still listen to it, then you should be ashamed of yourself.” Hornby says he “mostly” agrees with that description, though it doesn’t take into account “recent, mainly excellent work” by a number of middle-aged rock veterans such as Dylan and Springsteen. But, he continues, he disagrees with the “conclusion” that the middle-aged shouldn’t listen to rock music.

“Youth is a quality not unlike health: it’s found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it. . .I’m talking about the energy, the wistful yearning, the inexplicable exhilaration, the sporadic sense of invulnerability, the hope that stings like chlorine. When I was younger, rock music articulated those feelings, and now that I’m older, it stimulates them, but either way, rock ‘n’ roll was and remains necessary because: who doesn’t need exhilaration and a sense of invincibility, even if it’s only now and again?”

As far as I’m concerned, the same applies to the best superhero comics. Professor Charles Xavier is no longer young and his world is in ruins. But invincibly, exhilaratingly, he carries on, giving his readers of every age hope.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

On the very night that I e-mailed to FilmForce my previous column, about Columbia Pictures’ deal with Major League Baseball to place Spider-Man symbols on the bases, it was announced that the deal was off. And the fun lay in listening to the strange whirring sounds that corporate spokespersons make as they spin. According to the New York Times (May 7, 2004), “Bob DuPuy, baseball’s president and chief operating officer, said, ‘We decided collectively that it wasn’t worth jeopardizing the entire feel-good promotion based on the fact that a few people seemed to object to a small feature of it.” Ah, but if it had only been “a few people,” they wouldn’t have backed off the deal, and certainly not so quickly. Again according to the Times, Columbia Pictures “had monitored polls on ESPN.com and AOL yesterday showing that fans were overwhelmingly against the idea of commercial endorsements on bases during the games. . . .” So let us thank the gods of technology for the Internet, which can puncture corporate self-delusions about what their audience wants.

How ironic that this should happen to Spider-Man, who is traditionally portrayed as the everyman, the underdog, the little guy who goes up against the big guys, the guy who’s continually broke but isn’t interested in making big bucks. For one day he instead became the character through whom corporate executives tried to sully the integrity of everyman’s sport, baseball. (Some articles about this dispute suggested that this was only a brief moment of resistance to the ongoing, inevitable further commercializing of the sport.) Columbia and Major League Baseball managed to turn their critics into real life J. Jonah Jamesons, but this time on the right side. What a tangled web Spidey wove, indeed. (Still, it gave David Letterman an excuse to talk about Spidey on his show; that’s always a pleasure to hear.)

But let us turn from baseball leagues to leagues of a different sort.

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

As testimony to its popularity and impact, there is now a parody of one of this column’s recurring topics, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. This is “The Enclave of Incidental Individuals!, or Moore or Less!” in Claypool Comics’ Soulsearchers & Co. #65 (March 2004), co-plotted by Peter David and Richard Howell, scripted by David, edited by Howell, and with art by John Heebink and Al Milgrom.

This issue also features a characteristically, and enchantingly witty cover by Soulsearchers‘ original penciler, the amazing Amanda Conner, and inked by Steve Leialoha.

Were this an example the standard sort of comics parody that originated in Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad and has been imitated ever since in books like Marvel’s Not Brand Ecch and others, the “Enclave” story would merit no more than an appreciative but brief mention here. But, though “Enclave” does feature the expected broad burlesques of Moore’s series, it is also the vehicle for David’s and Howell’s explorations of some serious ideas that connect with certain continuing themes in this column. (As usual, in order to do a thoroughgoing lit crit analysis of a story, I will give away more about what happens than you may wish to know. So you may wish to read the story before reading the closing pages of this critique.)

I’ve discussed the small independent comics company Claypool and Soulsearchers before (see Comics in Context #9). Soulsearchers is that rare but valuable phenomenon in today’s comic book market, a comedy adventure series that is genuinely and consistently witty. The team after whom the series is named is a group who investigate and combat supernatural menaces; some team members have supernatural abilities themselves. (Soulsearchers may have followed Ghostbusters, but it debuted before Buffy‘s “Scooby Gang” or Angel Investigations.)

In this issue the only two team members who appear are newlyweds Bridget and Baraka, the latter being a benevolent demon from a hell out of Arabic mythology. Having encountered Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat in the previous issue, Bridget and Baraka tumble, like Alice, through a portal into another time-space continuum, which turns out to be “the literary dimension,” nicknamed “lit/dim.”

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Though to my surprise she herself does not make this analogy, the Virgil who guides Bridget and Baraka through this literary realm is Portia Prinz of the Glamazons, an early alternative comics character whom Claypopol editor Richard Howell created back in the 1970s. (You may be aware of others who have used the name “Glamazons,” but, as far as I know, Howell was the first.) As the name “Glamazons” might suggest, Portia’s series was in part a variation on Wonder Woman with its Amazons”: both featured a race of immortal women, and, indeed, the Glamazons’ patron goddess, the black Afrodite, also shows up in this issue. (You may have seen the name “Afrodite” elsewhere, too, but, again, as far as I know, Richard was the first.)

But though they are both princesses, the resemblance between Portia and Wonder Woman stops there. Actually, Portia and the Glamazons remind me more of Jack Kirby’s Eternals: a race of immortals, each of whom cultivates a specialized interest and/or an eccentric persona. Hence, two of Portia’s friends, Appaloosa and Joette, are singers and musicians, and another, Sgt. Shrew String, who appears in this issue, might best be described as what Nick Fury might be like after a sex change operation.

Like Wonder Woman, Portia is, to quote her own words in this issue, “fabulously stunning”; in contrast with Wonder Woman, Portia’s specialty is not physical strength but sheer brain power. “I’m an intellectual titan,” Portia tells Bridget and Baraka, “not a magical goddess.” And, as you can see, she is not averse to saying so. In fact, she can exasperate other characters she meets. “Oh-h-h! You are the most aggravating ““ !” grouses Bridget at one point. Portia, with a big, beaming smile, cuts her off: “Thank you. I live for superlatives.”

And this brings me to the subject of the alleged “know-it-all” amid traditionally anti-intellectual American society. It’s a subject that affects comics. It’s been pointed out that Peter Parker, as originally depicted by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, was the Good Son (albeit to his uncle and aunt), studious, devoted to his family: it wasn’t his fault that the popular kids like Flash Thompson and Liz Allan, arrogant, shallow, downright cruel, treated him like dirt. For the last decade and a half, at least, people, including some of Spider-Man’s own writers, dismiss the early Peter Parker as a “geek” and “nerd.” It’s even a subject that reaches into politics: in the last presidential election Al Gore was typed as the nerd/geek/wonk while George W. Bush was the regular guy, not particularly brilliant but fun to be with, with results that I will leave it to readers to discuss among themselves.

Elsewhere in popular culture, I recall an episode of The West Wing in which press secretary C.J. Cregg brings up a topic, and President Bartlet, a former academic, begins reeling off interesting facts about it. C.J., looking weary, tells him no one likes a “know-it-all” In another episode a staffer calls Bartlet a “nerd” to his face. Why can’t they be entertained by these dollops of knowledge? It’s not as if the staffers aren’t brainy themselves. Obviously series creator Aaron Sorkin and/or his writing staff knows this stuff Bartlet says. But it seems that even bright people are embarrassed about looking smart. (To Sorkin’s credit, later episodes questioned why the President should hide his level of intelligence from the American public in his campaign, and decided he shouldn’t.)

A few weeks ago I saw an episode of Disney’s House of Mouse on the Toon Disney channel (and more about this another time), in which Mickey Mouse gets annoyed with Professor Ludwig Von Drake for being a “know-it-all,” and, indeed in this episode Ludwig does seem rather full of himself. So Mickey challenges Professor Von Drake to answer correctly every question put to him in the course of the episode. Ludwig does just that, culminating with a tour de force in which he reels off the names of every classic Disney character in the audience of the show’s night club setting. This is the high point of the episode, and one might well assume delighted the show’s writers, who must be bright Disney aficionados themselves, as well as the viewers. But Ludwig overlooks naming one of them, himself (and I thought that Fred MacMurray was Disney’s Absent-Minded Professor) and Mickey wins the bet. As the episode closes, Minnie comforts Mickey, saying it’s all right not to know things.

Well, perhaps this was sincerely intended to let kids watching the show know that they need not be depressed if they’re not as smart as someone else. On the other hand, the episode seems to be saying that being smart isn’t a good thing.

Though House of Mouse plays Ludwig entirely for laughs, Ludwig was introduced in the debut season of Walt Disney’s NBC series The Wonderful World of Color to serve as a frequent host. Though funny, Ludwig was presented as a genuine authority on a wide variety of subjects, and could talk about serious subjects as well as introducing cartoons about his nephew Donald. In other words, here was an animated character who prized and exemplified knowledge. Hence, despite his comedic eccentricities, as a child I regarded Ludwig Von Drake as a role model. (Here’s another measure of how American pop culture has changed: as the frequent master of ceremonies for a show with a large audience of children, Walt Disney chose a character who was clearly elderly!)

Portia Prinz defies the anti-intellectualism in pop culture.

She takes a matter-of-fact pride in both her looks and her braininess. And, although supporting characters get annoyed by it, Portia’s high self-esteem, along with her ironic awareness of it, comes across as part of her charm. She is indeed smart and gorgeous, and her good-humored pleasure in the fact is infectious. (Howell also takes some of the sting off through Portia’s buddy, who jokes about her friend’s self-regard just as her fellow cigar aficionado, Ben Grimm, humorously undercuts his friend Reed Richards’ high-faluting speeches. Neither Shrew nor Ben show any malice toward the friend in question, but simply an affectionate tolerance.)

It turns out that it was Portia who had the Cheshire Cat bring Bridget and Baraka there. In other words, Joseph Campbell fans, Portia and the Cheshire Cat are heralds bringing the call to adventure, and Portia will also be acting as a mentor to our heroes, befitting her Greek mythological background and her status as a first generation Howell creation guiding his latter-day co-creations.

DILUTION AND DISSOLUTION

With Portia as tour guide, Bridget and Baraka arrive in the “literary dimension,” which David and Howell immediately establish as having a scope like Moore’s, albeit a scrambled geography: Beowulf and the monster Grendel, Mr. Bumble from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (see Comics in Context #25 for another comics version of Bumble), and Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters all co-habit within the same panel.

Bridget asks, “Is it my imagination or does the landscape keeps changing?” and Portia replies, “Yes to both questions.” The “Lit/Dim” is the product of the collective human imagination; this idea is comparable to Moore’s own remarks that the world of imagination has existed as long as the real world of humanity (see Comics in Context #37).

Portia explains further, “the Lit/Dim stems from human longing” and that people “can never decide on what they want. Luckily for all concerned, the more iconic aspects of said longing remain relatively fixed.” This makes me think of the malleability of continuity in mainstream comics nowadays, in which individual stories of the past, however classic, get dumped from the canon, and series may get rebooted in comics or in adaptations into other media over and over. Yet the essence of certain great characters, like Superman, Batman or Spider-Man remains relatively stable amidst this maelstrom of writers changing their minds.

Portia reveals the problem that she has brought Bridget and Baraka in to help solve: major characters (as examples we see portraits of Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan) are disappearing from the literary dimension. She explains that “lack of originality in the real world is causing the strip-mining of the truly great characters The more often such paucity of imagination is displayed, the more it simply eats away at the life force that perpetuates the greats.”

In other words, lesser writers who make use of the great creations of their betters of the past, turning out lesser works, diminish the mythic power of those great characters. As we shall see, the lesser writers may distort those characters as well.

“You might say it dilutes them,” Portia says. “Enough dilution and they lose their effectiveness as great creations. . .and fade away entirely.”

Think of public domain characters, such as the ones that Moore draws upon in League. How many of the more recent books and movies and television series with versions of Dracula or Sherlock Holmes even approach the greatness of the originals? (What might Bram Stoker think of what movie director Stephen Sommers has just done with Dr. Van Helsing?)

Legal theorist Lawrence Lessig and others have been recently argued against the extension of longrunning copyrights; press reports on this movement spotlight the Walt Disney Company’s so far successful efforts to keep Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain. The articles I’ve read tend to take Lessig’s side, as he burbles on about the great array of creations that will arise once anyone can legally use Mickey. I wish that I’d see more articles presenting the other side. There are companies that are founded on specific intellectual properties. Can we really imagine Disney without Mickey, who is not only the symbol of the company, but the leading icon of its canon of animation and its theme parks? Can we imagine Warners Animation without Bugs Bunny, or DC Comics without Superman, or Marvel without Spider-Man? What would these characters be worth if everyone is allowed to do his own versions? I predict dilution aplenty: there’ll be the porn versions of Mickey and more. A recent article in the New York Times (Sunday, April 18, 2004) in which various artists create their own versions of Mickey, inadvertently demonstrates the horrors that await. (This article will be further addressed in a future column.) Maybe there’s a point to having an official custodian of the character.

But that’s not the entire solution, either. Look at how many hundreds of mediocre and downright bad stories have been produced at Marvel and DC about some of their genuinely great characters. With rare exceptions, like Neil Gaiman’s Morpheus, whom only Gaiman has so far been allowed to write, how many leading DC or Marvel characters have not undergone “dilution”?

Bridget comments that such “dilution” “sounds like literary hell,” whereupon Portia remarks that she once visited a number of literary hells, including Dante’s Inferno, that of Milton’s Satan (see Comics in Context #37 for more about him), and even that of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huit Clos (which Portia assumes we will translate as “No Exit”). As footnoted, this was in Portia Prinz Vol. II #1, back in 1986 (I remember reading it), and this serves as further evidence that Moore is far from the first person to mix the worlds of different literary fictions together, even in comics.

LOOK FOR THE SILVER LINING

This issue of Soulsearchers strikes me as something of a satiric comics equivalent of a Shavian play of ideas, for now, under Bridget’s prodding, Portia extends her theorizing into a new area. Speaking of the “dilution” of classic characters, Bridget asks, “Is this part of why people have become so cynical?”

“Oh, yes,” agrees Portia, “and why the heroes are nearly indistinguishable from the villains nowadays.. . The absence of true, classic heroes creates a vacuum. ““ and nature abhors a vacuum, which means one is left with ““ ” While some of us admire Portia’s perfect use of grammar, Shrew finishes her sentence with an image out of the Hoover catalog: “Heroes who suck.”

Dilution, it seems, also entails distortion. Through misuse and misinterpretation, the characters are no longer such powerful archetypes of good and evil.

Regular readers of this column can see where I am heading: this Soulsearchers story is yet another manifestation of comics’ Neo-Silver movement, a longing for classic heroes after the grim and grittiness of the last two decades in comics. Certainly Peter David and Richard Howell, Baby Boomers who grew up with the comics of the Silver Age, fit the profile of Neo-Silver creators.

As I have thought about Moore’s League, I have come to realize that it represents another aspect of the movement that takes it beyond comics. Moore is something of a paradox: his series like Watchmen and Miracleman are landmark works in creating a darker, more morally complex vision of the superhero genre. And yet his Superman story, “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow,” though incorporating genuinely tragic elements, is the first Neo-Silver tale. His 1963 series and his work on Supreme were variations on Silver Age stories, though what I’ve seen of them was too parodic for my taste.

Moore’s work on his America’s Best Comics line reaches further back than the Silver Age, coming up with contemporary reworkings of archetypal characters from Golden Age comics or even their pulp forebears: hence Doc Savage inspires Moore’s Tom Strong.

Moore has described his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as originating in his effort to trace contemporary superheroes back to their roots in Victorian English science fiction and fantasy. League acknowledges the present by incorporating contemporary concerns and explorations of character, such as Mina’s sexual trauma and Quatermain’s addiction. But in reviving so many great Victorian characters and, despite their flaws, presenting them as genuinely, classically heroic (or villainous) figures, Moore is pursuing the same method as the Neo-Silver writers. Perhaps I need to find a new word to describe this movement, to demonstrate that it involves more than the Silver Age superheroes. Perhaps I should call these writers the Neo-Classicists.

THE MINOR LEAGUERS

Let’s return to the story at hand. With the great heroes having vanished from the literary dimension, we are left with the “heroes who suck”: supporting characters from famous works. This is the Enclave of Incidental Individuals, comprised of Inspector Lestrade from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories; Ezzy, a virtually (and understandably) forgotten stereotypical black maid from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan; H.G. Wells’s Time Traveler from The Time Machine; Jules Verne’s Passepartout, Phileas Fogg’s valet from Around the World in 80 Days; the mad, bug-eating Renfield from Bram Stoker’s Dracula; and a talking Martian from Wells’s The War of the Worlds.

In Wells’s War, as well as Moore’s retelling in League Vol. 2, the Martians were killed off by Earth germs; the Enclave’s Martian survived but seems to have a permanently running nose, if “nose” is actually the proper terminology.

Passepartout explains that he is “not, as many mistakenly believe, remotely Mexican,” an allusion to Cantinflas’ portrayal of him in the famous movie version of Verne’s book. (Neither the Enclave’s Passepartout nor Howell and David betray any awareness that soon many people will assume he is Chinese: Jackie Chan plays him in Disney’s new remake.) Especially on page 9, the Enclave’s Passepartout looks like someone out of Herge’s world-spanning Tintin, appropriately enough.

The Time Traveler shouldn’t be in this group, since he is the star of his book. He claims to have avoided dilution because Wells never gave his real name in The Time Machine. I don’t find that particularly convincing: the Time Traveler has fallen into other authorial hands, too, including Moore’s in the backup story in League Volume 1. Indeed, by intention or coincidence, the Enclave’s Time Traveler bears a slight resemblance to Rod Taylor, who played him in the MGM movie version.

It is pointed out that some of these supporting characters have also turned up in pastiches or adaptations of the original stories in which they appeared. So how did they so far avoid dilution? Lestrade says that “it’s a matter of focus.” He explains that no one has starred him in his own stories. However, I think a better point might be that the writers of new Sherlock Holmes stories (or adapters of the originals) feel less motivated to tinker with a minor character like Lestrade, so he tends to remain recognizably himself. Ezzy points out that she gets entirely left alone by modern-day writers because she is considered too politically incorrect to use. (David and Howell do include some subtle references to Gone with the Wind, through whose continuing popularity stereotypical black characters linger on, and the recent parody/pastiche it inspired, The Wind Done Gone.)

The Enclave receives a ghostly visitation from yet another 19th century character, “the lost Lenore,” the beloved of the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven. Here she speaks a pastiche poem that in a cleverly imitation of The Raven‘s rather rigid rhythms and rhyme scheme, complete with its own jab at “grand theft author crimes forsaken/for their homage projects makin’. . . .”

As the Enclave, Portia and company head off to the mystery villain’s lair via blimp power, the readers may observe that, like League, this story puts jokes and allusions in its backgrounds, too. A signpost bears signs pointing to various locales, some entirely fictional, such as Middle-earth and Lankhmar, while others are real places about which fictions have been written, including Troy and Dublin. The Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses is depicted in such elaborate detail that it is a genuine fictional counterpart to the real city. The Troy of Homer’s Iliad is grander than the actual city appears to have been; Time (May 10, 2004) quotes Nigel Phelps, production designer for the new Troy movie as saying that the real “Troy just didn’t have the size or the spectacle the movie demanded. . .most of the buildings were maybe 10-ft. high and made of mud.” One sign points to Verona, where Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet. Nearby stands an Italianate building with the requisite balcony, but the wall bears the graffiti “Shark vs. Jets,” a reference to the famed reworking of Shakespeare’s play, West Side Story.

One character comments that it was “lucky” that Lenore turned up to tell them where to go. Lestrade replies that “At Scotland Yard, we prefer the term ‘contrivance.'” This reminds me of Sir Richard Reed’s theory in Neil Gaiman’s 1602 that he lives in a universe governed by “the laws of story.” Lestrade appears to be at least partly aware that the “literary dimension” functions the same way.

When the heroes arrive at the docks, there are background references to not only the Iliad, but the Odyssey, and, leaping ahead several millennia, Moby Dick.

Continuing her own theorizing, Portia observes, “An interesting side note is that these supposedly-dated characters provide an originality and innocence in this post-proto-modernist world of writing.” This is yet another indication of the Neo-Silver sensibility at work in this story. Neo-Silver works are reactions against the grim and grittiness of the last two decades of comics and against ironic subversions of the heroic adventure genre. As Portia suggests, these classic characters from the past, when treated correctly, convey qualities that today once again seem fresh and vital.

DISTORTION AND DISAPPEARANCE

Entering the villain’s lair, Lestrade suspects that Holmes’s archfoe Professor Moriarty is behind this. Shrew responds, “Your instinct is in another series entirely.” This, perhaps, suggests that Shrew is even more aware than Lestrade that they are operating within a fiction. By another series she may be referring to the Sherlock Holmes canon, or possibly even to the fact that Moriarty is the lead villain in League Volume 1.

Now even Enclave members begin to succumb to disappearance through dilution. Passepartout vanishes, allegedly because a Canadian TV company has just concocted a bad television series for him. (Maybe the new Asian version of Passepartout might have served as a better excuse for his disappearance.)

Out rush the Three Musketeers, but as they appeared in the 1993 Disney remake: the likenesses of Kiefer Sutherland and Oliver Platt are actually rather good. The terrible trio shout “Dude!” as their battle cry, and Portia explains that “They were condemned to remain in limbo until an even worse version of the Dumas classic was made ““ if possible.” And yet it did prove possible, as the more recent The Musketeer, which Portia calls “The Male Model Musketeer.”

Here David and Howell are making clear that they are not just talking about bad new stories about classic characters, but bad adaptations of the characters’ original tales. Moreover, David and Howell are targeting distortions of the original characters and their stories. In the case of The Three Musketeers, they are pointing specifically to supposed updatings along the lines of then-current trends that instead undercut the strength of the original material. Aramis refers to his “Aramis cologne,” so perhaps here the authors are also observing how iconic characters get transformed by business into commercial shills.

And again, as with Passepartout, David and Howell are possibly unaware of yet another dilution on the way: Disney is releasing yet another Three Musketeers later this year on video, this one starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy in the title roles. (But this actually might be fun, and you should not be surprised to see it reviewed in this column later this year.)

For that or some other reason, the Disney live action Musketeers disappear. “Characters are vanishing before our eyes!” Portia, again careful about grammar and clarity in writing, asks, “So-o-o-o you’re worried your eyes will vanish next?” Instead it’s Lestrade who disappears. According to the Cheshire Cat, that’s because he was just put in a new, gay-themed series in which “Lestrade’s got a big ol’ yen for Holmes.” Thus David and Howell target yet another way in which contemporary writers can distort literary characters from the past. The Cheshire Cat adds, “You won’t be seeing Alfred the butler around anytime soon.” This is not only an indication that what Howell and David are saying about the “dilution” of classic characters in prose also applies to great comics characters, but is perhaps also an allusion to Dr. Fredric Wertham’s notorious misreading of Batman. Characters can also be “diluted” and distorted through gross misinterpretation.

Now David and Howell demonstrate how their arguments apply to comic characters by subjecting Bridget and Baraka to this kind of distortion. The mystery villain uses gas to put both Soulsearchers to sleep and in his power. Baraka finds himself transformed visually into a big-headed midget holding a pitchfork, such as one might see in an old Harvey comic, prompting his comment, “I know I’m Hot Stuff, but this is way too literal!” (Bridget even affectionately called him “Hot Stuff” earlier in this issue, something I only noticed on my third reading.)

The unseen villain tells him, “We’re just trying to make you more kid-accessible. You know. . .like at Marble [sic] Comics.” Baraka angrily retorts, “I will not be kiddified in order to pander our adventures to your concept of child intelligence!”

Well, Baraka clearly doesn’t meet Portia’s exalted grammatical standards (“pander” is an intransitive verb) but he makes the author’s point. David and Howell are attacking the way that the corporate owners of intellectual property can mandate the distortion of the artistic integrity of characters, and the intentions of their creators. The mystery villain taunts Baraka that “nothing is sacred. Any concept that be twisted to pander to the taste of modern audiences.”

It is intriguing to see that “Marble” is here accused of dumbing its characters down to appeal to a juvenile audience. It seems only a short time ago that Marvel’s Max line was trying to reach an older audience by giving us a Nick Fury who spoke on-panel obscenities, as if that was the definition of mature art. So now Marvel has allegedly reversed course and is chasing an audience of children, as if the market hadn’t irreversibly become dominated by teens and adults decades ago.

Meanwhile Bridget goes “all retro,” abruptly transformed into a modern-day counterpart to Millie the Model. I don’t know if David and Howell have some recent change in comics that they are parodying here. But the brainwashed Bridget’s banter about her “own doll line” that will be “a Diamond exclusive” suggests that they may be aiming at changes in characters driven by merchandising concerns. Reverting to her true personality, Bridget protests, “I don’t want to be arbitrarily changed! If I change. . .it should be organic, a natural progression. . . .”

DIMINUTION AND DENOUEMENT

Having woken from their trances, Bridget and Baraka and their allies find themselves tied to the “Wheel of Mishegoss,” noted as being from a “Just’a League” comic. That’s a reference to Professor Amos Fortune’s Wheel of Misfortune from the cover of an early Justice League of America comic (and I was only recently saying it should have been referenced in the JLA/Avengers limited series!).

Thinking back to the War of the Worlds, the Enclave’s Martian starts quoting Chuck Jones’s Marvin the Martian: “Where was the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!” Moore went to so much trouble in League Volume 2 to meld various fictional versions of Mars together in Vol. 2 but he didn’t get to the Looney Tunes version.

I have decided to be good and not reveal the identity of the mystery villain, though I will say that his motives make no sense to me. If he is upset by lesser writers diluting and draining “creative energies” from classic literary creations including himself, why is he trying to speed up the process? But his wheel drains the remaining Enclave members of those energies and they disappear.

Bridget declares that she won’t be affected by the wheel because “we’re real ““ not. . .not fictional characters!” Portia knowingly replies “You don’t get out much, do you, dear?” More than Lestrade or Shrew had, Portia thus demonstrates clear knowledge that she and her allies are fictional characters. Portia and John Byrne’s similarly aware She-Hulk should compare notes.

I will also allow you readers to discover for yourselves how Bridget, Baraka, Portia and Shrew manage to escape from the wheel.

Once free, to the villain’s and perhaps the reader’s surprise, Portia voices the other side of the argument over “recycled culture.” She tells the villain, “It’s what one does with the source material that matters. As Landor wrote of Shakespeare: ‘He was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life ““ !'” Portia is here referring to the fact that most of Shakespeare’s plays were based on history or were adaptations of previous works, not original plots.

Portia goes on: “Furthermore, Bayles’ ‘Dictionaire historique et Critique’ maintains that there is “not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book than in being the first author of that thought.'” (Mr. Howell has informed me that these two quotations constitute a Bartlett pair.)

The reader may have been wondering as he or she goes through this story whether David and Howell are actually condemning Moore for recycling classic characters in League. But perhaps they are not. After all, they themselves have incorporated characters created by authors of the past into this very issue. Moreover, Peter David is well known and justly celebrated for writing significant work set in fictional universes created by the likes of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Gene Roddenberry. Howell’s Glamazons are inspired by William Moulton Marston’s Amazons, who are in turn inspired by the Amazons of Greek mythology, and Portia herself once went on a League-style journey through other author’s hells, as she mentioned earlier. Much as David and Howell’s story attacks hackwork, their specific parody of Moore’s League seems affectionate.

In the DC and Marvel Universes, the original creators of characters and concepts do not get to control them. As noted, this results in loads of bad and mediocre stories. Then again, the creators of great comics characters are not always the best people to guide their series indefinitely: their creativity may ebb, or they may prove unable to change with the times. Eventually Bob Kane and his ghosts had to depart Batman in order for the series to remain artistically vital and continue to evolve.

Moreover, the fact that new generations of writers, artists and editors get to work on classic characters makes it possible for innovative talents to develop the characters in new, artistically valid ways that reveal new facets of the original creation. For example, the groundbreaking work of Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, and Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli on Batman produced not only artistic and literary high points in the character history while remaining faithful to creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s original concept.

Portia can see both sides of the issue, whereas the mystery villain can only see one; she recognizes that truly inspired creators can build on the work of the past, while the villain refuses to acknowledge any distinction between the talented and less talented. He grouses that “it’s just hacks standing on the shoulders of giants,” though he seems oblivious to the way this visual image applies to himself (you’ll have to see it).

At least the villain smashes right through the fourth wall as he makes his exit, complaining that he won’t get “any understanding from independent comics characters. . .who’ve always been written only by their creators ““ !”

So the issue of Soulsearchers leaves us with a creative issue that is too complex to easily be resolved. As the Cheshire Cat (himself a character borrowed from a great author of the past) observes on the last page, “Fictional icon’s’ll always be vulnerable to bad remakes and creative theft. . . .” Afrodite states that such iconic characters possess “purity of concept. . . and immortal value.” So, if one is to create new work based on the iconic characters of the past, his or her duty is to understand and adhere to that conceptual purity as well as possible. That’s why informed critics play an important role in evaluating new work about established characters and series in the context of the great work of the past. And that, after all, is what this column is about. Even a critic is, in effect, creating a work of art inspired by the works of others.

–Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

I find myself not that interested in comics that were specifically done about the September 11 attacks, perhaps because I’ve been disappointed with what I’ve seen of them. (I am still annoyed by the scene in the 9/11 issue of Amazing Spider-Man with Doctor Doom standing amid the World Trade Center ruins, weeping. This manages to be both out of character and mawkish.) I’m much more interested in how 9/11 and the ensuing events have influenced comics stories about other subjects. As noted in an earlier column, Frank Miller was working on The Dark Knight Strikes Again on Sept. 11, 2001, and the scene of Superman standing in the rubble of the Daily Planet building clearly references the attack on the World Trade Center. At last year’s San Diego Con, Neil Gaiman said that in creating the 1602 series he was consciously attempting to avoid dealing with contemporary events, and yet found himself writing about his heroes invading another country, Latveria, that was amassing weapons of mass destruction.

Yet another example is writer Kurt Busiek and artist Kieron Dwyer’s 2002 story arc in The Avengers, in which Kang the Conqueror, the team’s archnemesis from the future, launches an all-out invasion of Earth. Once again there are attacks on New York City and Washington, D. C.. The United Nations building is destroyed. Not only are iconic buildings in Washington wrecked, but everyone who had not succeeded in escaping the city was killed. Parts of Avengers Vol. 3 #55/470 (August, 2002), which chronicles the war’s aftermath, are set at a memorial ceremony on the National Mall, which evokes the national mourning after the 9/11 attacks.

(Let me briefly, grumpily digress. One might think that a worldwide war and the devastation of Washington D. C. would dominate most of the other comics set in the Marvel Universe during the period that this Avengers story line was published. But no, Marvel no longer takes continuity and the shared universe concept as seriously as it should: what amounted to World War III was pretty much confined to The Avengers, just as Asgard’s recent takeover of Earth, which one might think would absorb the other superheroes’ attention, seems confined to Thor. I recall that back in the 1980s other writers volunteered to tie their books in with Walt Simonson’s “Casket of Ancient Winters” story line in Thor. Yes, that seems long ago and far away.)

What I find particularly intriguing, though, is Busiek’s exploration of Kang’s personality in the preceding issue, #54 /469 (July,. 2002). His armies defeated, his war machines and futuristic weaponry wrecked, Kang will not surrender. Knowing he has no hope of defeating them, Kang goes out to battle the Avengers personally. He tells himself, “It will be a glorious end. Glorious.” But he seems not heroic but deluded by visions of grandeur and even suicidal. Is this like the mentality of modern day suicide bomber, or the terrorists who crashed the planes into the World Trade Center?

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Kang in the 1960s, but, as with all their great, enduring characters, Kang can take on new relevance decades after he debuted in comics. Busiek shows us that Kang may be from the far future, but he has an outdated warrior mentality that modern civilization has left behind. When Busiek has Kang emerge to confront the Avengers, it is, appropriately, Captain America who fights him one-on-one. In the course of their duel, Kang boasts of what he regards as his extraordinary achievements, and even compliments Captain America on having the “honor” of defeating him. Captain America is aghast. “You’ve killed millions, devastated a world ““ and you say it’s an honor to defeat you!?”

With his outdated warrior ethic, Kang is a throwback, and yet he is armed with futuristic technology. This reminds me of today’s Islamicist terrorists, with their medieval mindset, who nonetheless will use contemporary high tech ““ computers, airplanes, weapons of mass destruction ““ in their cause.

Pages later, the scene has shifted to Kang, wearing a prison uniform, sitting alone in a cell. It is strange to see Kang without his mask and costume: he looks so unfamiliar. Rereading this story now, I am reminded of the capture and imprisonment of Saddam Hussein, though that happened a year after this issue was published.

Though Kang has lost all trappings of physical power, he pronounces himself to be “content. I have everything,” he tells himself. Now I find myself thinking of Stephen Sondheim’s black comic musical Assassins, recently revived on Broadway. Kang has the assassin’s mindset writ large. Proud of the death and destruction he has wreaked, Kang knows he will be executed. “But it is nonetheless a good ending. A fitting ending,” he tells himself, “And my legend will never be equaled. My name will be immortal. My achievements spoken of ’til the end of time.” It’s not so different from one of Sondheim’s presidential assassins doing a joyous cakewalk to the gallows.

But Kang’s dreams of glory, at least in his own mind, are dashed when his son Marcus rescues him from prison, spoiling his plans. “I would have died. And my life would have been complete. My legend eternal,” says Kang. He would have died a martyr to his own legend. And here I am reminded of the Al Qaeda members who claim to love death more than they love life.Nearly two years after Busiek’s Kang arc, the impact of September 11 continues to be felt in X-Treme X-Men #46 (June, 2004), written by the most prolific X-Men scribe, Chris Claremont, and drawn by Igor Kordey. This is the final issue of the X-Treme X-Men series; Claremont next returns to the place he belongs, as writer of Marvel’s longest-running X-Men series, Uncanny X-Men. He takes the opportunity of the final issue to survey and sum up the current state of X-Men continuity following the catastrophic events with which Grant Morrison climaxed his run on New X-Men. (See Comics in Context #28.) Claremont thus extends his readers a courtesy that is all too rare nowadays. Most comics writers nowadays, it seems, can’t be bothered bringing new or infrequent readers up to speed on who the characters are and what their current situation is.

Claremont starts out this last issue by having longtime members of his stories’ supporting cast, National Public Radio reporters Neal Conan and Manoli Wetherall, set the scene. (Manoli’s real, so she’s the only X-Men recurring character I’ve actually met. And here’s another digression. In this issue Claremont includes another NPR correspondent, Bob Edwards, as a salute to his real life counterpart. In a nice bit of synchronicity, the day that I picked up this issue of X-Treme X-Men was the real-life Edwards’ final day as anchorman for NPR’s Morning Edition. NPR had forced Edwards out of his anchor role, despite thousands of protests from their audience; NPR spokesmen gave various rationales for this move, but I know corporate ageism when I see it.)

Neal Conan begins by reporting that “America ““ and the whole world ““ are reeling in the aftermath of recent events in the city of New York,” and readers should inevitably think of 9/11. Edwards states that “Now the world must deal with the consequences of this deadliest terrorist attack of the 21st century.” Claremont thus establishes Magneto’s recent attack on Manhattan as a metaphor for the real life September 11 attacks.

Once again, an iconic Manhattan structure has been demolished: not the real-life World Trade Center, or Busiek’s United Nations headquarters, but the Statue of Liberty itself. The devastation of the World Trade Center site is extended to more of Manhattan: we are told that Magneto used his powers to begin literally reshaping the city’s buildings. Later we see the damage done to the Brooklyn Bridge and the Chrysler Building.

Wetherall reports that Magneto regards “the human race as dying,” and I am reminded of Islamicist extremists who declare that the West is decadent and in decline, doomed to fall. Magneto said that mutants “must deliver the mercy stroke.” Wetherall says that “many of his followers took this pronouncement literally.” And this reminds me of real life reports that Osama bin Laden is said now not to be the direct leader of terrorist cells around the world, but rather, his words serve as inspiration to cells that take action on their own.

Claremont must have written this issue many weeks ago, yet one of his lines has especial resonance as I write this in early May: he has Edwards refer to “continuing reports of atrocities and reprisals by both sides.” And this is the week dominated by controversy over evidence of American soldiers’ mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.

Edwards further reports that “a number of” mutants “have openly declared their determination to claim the Earth for their own.” Only last week, on April 26, the New York Times ran a front page report about Muslim radicals in the United Kingdom who “have turned against their families’ new home. They say they would like to see Prime Minister Tony Blair dead or deposed and an Islamic flag hanging outside No. 10 Downing Street. They swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden and his goal of toppling Western democracies to establish an Islamic superstate under Shariah law, like Afghanistan under the Taliban.” In short, such radicals do not simply want Islamic rule for Muslim countries: they even want to take over countries where Muslims are a small minority. The kind of worldwide, supranational terrorist movement like Magneto’s mutants or Hydra, that in the 20th century seemed merely the stuff of comic book fantasy, has real life analogues in the 21st.

Other X-Men worry about Storm’s current emotional state. “She has entered a liminal state,” asserts Sage; my dictionary indicates that “liminal” means that Storm is on a “threshold,” presumably of change. “As has our world,” Sage continues. “We find ourselves in a state of chaos. And what will replace it, for good or ill ““ that is not yet clear.”

But Claremont also provides reason for optimism. A considerable number of people turn up at the X-Treme X-Men’s door, offering help to New York City, just as so many people did following the actual 9/11 attacks. Says one volunteer, “don’t matter some of us are mutants. We’re all Americans. We stand together.” A few pages later we are shown super heroes (including, of course, Captain America) and “civilians” working together on rebuilding New York. “Healing the physical scars of Magneto’s attack would be easy. . .The emotional and psychological wounds. . .[would] likely take a while longer,” Claremont tells us in the narration. (As the slow progress at the real World Trade Center demonstrates, it would actually take years, even with superheroes, to repair all the damage, but never mind.) The narration rhapsodizes, “For this brief and evanescent moment, humanity was one magnificent family, and what mattered above all else was the common good.”

Mind you, Manhattan suffered a lot of wreckage during Busiek’s Kang War, and before that, in Onslaught’s capture of the island, and in comic book time, these and Magneto’s attacks would have all taken place within a few years! Perhaps the current fashion is not to care about repeating the past. Thankfully, Claremont has a better appreciation of the wide sweep of Marvel history. For example, he has characters acknowledge that Xavier’s mansion has been destroyed for the umpteenth time, and has the good sense to make a witty joke about it.

I also notice that Claremont, creator of Amara Aquilla, alias Magma, undoes Fabian Nicieza’s previous undoing of the origin that Claremont gave her in the first place. It can be exasperating how writers gratuitously trash the continuity that previous writers set up; at least Claremont got the opportunity to return and set Amara aright.

This issue is another example of something Claremont has done well throughout his career. He can write a superhero story with no fight scenes, that consists merely of a sequence of vignettes exploring and developing the personalities of his characters, and make it entirely satisfying for the reader. Having shown us large numbers of people working to help the New Yorkers whom Magneto victimized, Claremont shows us Storm and Angel bonding like brother and sister in response to Jean’s (latest) death; Rogue playfully and sexily seducing Gambit; characters gathering at the X-Men’s favorite tavern, Harry’s Hideaway; and Gambit and Bishop cooking for their teammates. Such scenes create the sense of personal warmth, of genuine family and community, that Claremont has always given the X-Men, whose stories so often seem cold and grim in the hands of other writers.

Claremont concludes this issue with a lengthy speech by Storm, in which she invokes Charles Dickens’ opening line from A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” which refers to another time of terror, the French Revolution.

She deals with the “worst” part first. Grant Morrison’s “outing” of Charles Xavier and his school, turning the X-Men into public advocates for mutant rights, seemed a positive move at the time. Now, one might wonder if this was a mistake; the mutant status quo has returned, but worse than ever. Storm tells her colleagues, “All our progress, all our hopes, have been reduced by Magneto to ashes.” She continues, “There are proposals in virtually every nation to declare us outlaws To brand us.” (And Claremont and Korday show us Bishop, who came from a future in which he was indeed branded with an “M” for mutant.) “To cast us into concentration camps. To make sure we never have any children.”

Again I am struck by the power and adaptability of the metaphor underlying the concept of the X-Men: mutants as a persecuted minority group. Now, in the wake of 9/11, we can see the X-Men as standing for any minority group that suffers oppression because of the actions of a relative handful of their members. In World War I America it was German-Americans; in World War II Japanese-Americans were confined in concentration camps; now it is Arab-Americans who face suspicion because of the relatively few Muslim extremists in this country.

Another New York Times article, “Lesser Evils” by Michael Ignatieff, published on May 2, 2004, contends that after a second major terrorist attack on the United States, possibly using a “dirty bomb,” “a pall of mourning, melancholy, anger and fear would hang over our public life for a generation.” He goes on, “A succession of large-scale attacks would. . .destroy the trust we have in each other.. .we might find ourselves. . .living in a national-security state. . .with. . .permanent detention camps for dissidents and aliens. Our constitutional rights might disappear from our court, while torture might reappear in our interrogation cells. The worst of it all is that government would not have to impose tyranny on a cowed populace. We would demand it for our own protection.”

Now perhaps we should take Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s classic tale “Days of Future Past,” depicting mutants confined to concentration camps in the early 21st century, more seriously than we might have in 1980. The X-Men, unfortunately, has become all too relevant to our times.

But Claremont never turns to the cynicism of the Grim and Gritty school of comics in his work. Storm shifts from the “worst” to the “best,” praising the X-Men’s sense of community and their traditional ideals, Xavier’s vision of peaceful coexistence between the “baseline human” and mutant races. She is confident “Because of our fellowship. Because of the dream that inspires us and which I pray will sustain us through the dangerous days ahead.”

The heads of the world’s leading nations have appointed Storm and her team “To keep the peace along the boundary between these two warring houses of humanity. . . .”

Interestingly, Storm says they will serve as “marshals,” and even hands out badges. This is an image that conjures up the idea of John Wayne deputizing allies in a Western directed by Howard Hawks, whose work Claremont admires. Thus Claremont is linking the X-Men to the great, specifically American tradition of the Western. “In effect they will assume the role of Marshals,” he writes in this issue, “responsible for protecting the worldwide frontier between mutants and baseline humanity, for the good of all.” That word “frontier” is important. Though the nation is settled, it is as if it has once again become a war-torn frontier, and the X-Men see their role as keeping the peace until both sides “learn to live together,” until a peaceful society is firmly established. (For more on Claremont’s interest in classic Westerns, see my interview with him in the forthcoming Back Issue #1 from TwoMorrows Publishing.)

In this issue, Claremont turns the X-Men into a new incarnation of the Western hero. He voices the longing for genuine heroism, ideals, and optimism that has long characterized his own work: as Storm says, simply, “Someone has to stand for hope.” And Claremont reaffirms the classic Marvel tradition, born in the Silver Age, with a variation on Stan Lee’s most famous line of dialogue. “With great power comes great responsibility,” affirms Storm, adding as the kicker, “Who will join me in shouldering it?”

MARVEL-TIME MARCHES ON

Of course, the line “With great power must come great responsibility” first appeared in Spider-Man’s origin story in Amazing Fantasy #15, published in 1962. But Peter Parker, who was fifteen when he became Spider-Man, is not now fifty-seven years old; “Marvel-time” moves far more slowly than real time.

Hey, look, here’s Volume 4 of Marvel’s trade paperbacks of Brian Michael Bendis’s Alias comic, which is not to be confused with the TV series of the same name, starring Jennifer Garner, who, ironically, plays an altogether different Marvel heroine onscreen, Elektra. (I will pause while you digest all of that.) And the paperback begins with a flashback to Spider-Man’s origin. And it states that it happened “fifteen years ago.”

How’s that again?

So if Peter Parker was fifteen when he became Spider-Man, and fifteen years of Marvel-time have passed since then, he is now thirty.

What’s more, since Marvel has established that Johnny Storm, Scott Summers, and Jean Grey (when she is not dead) are the same age as Peter, then they are all thirty, as well.

Now what about Silver Age Marvel characters who started their careers as adults? When Daredevil began in 1964, Matt Murdock had just graduated law school. So, let’s say he was 22 when he graduated college, and three years of law school takes him to age 25. If we further assume that Daredevil started his career in the same year in Marvel-time as Spider-Man, and add fifteen to twenty-five, that makes Matt Murdock forty years old today.

When the Fantastic Four debuted in 1961, Reed Richards’ hair was already turning white at the temples, so he was clearly older than Matt, so how old would he be now?

I believe you can see the problems that are emerging. I predict that at some point there will be Marvel editors who will establish that, no, no, Peter Parker is not a thirtysomething. But right now it’s annoying. (In fact, I know of at least two former Marvel writers who I know have read my weekly column who will be seething if they read this installment.) I wonder if there’s anything else annoying about Spider-Man lately. Oh, look.

SPIDEY OFF BASE

Now here’s a surprise. According to the May 6 issue of The New York Times, Major League Baseball will place a Spider-Man symbol atop the bases on the weekend of June 11 through 13 to promote Columbia Pictures’ new Spider-Man 2 movie. This has created controversy among baseball aficionados who don’t want such commercialism so blatantly making itself visible in a sport they regard as having a noble tradition. They worry that this is the proverbial slippery slope, and advertising might end up on players’ uniforms next. But according to the Associated Press, Major League Baseball is getting $3.6 million out of this deal, so noble tradition falls by the wayside.

[Editor’s Note: Columbia Pictures and Major League Baseball have since announced that the bases will no longer have the Spider-Man 2 logo.]

Here’s what really astonishes me. According to the Times, Major League Baseball’s motivation for promoting Spider-Man is “to attract youngsters to the game.” It quotes Jacqueline Parkes, baseball’s senior vice president for marketing and advertising, as saying, “We said we’d love to get more kids in the park” Slipping into corporate jargon, she exults, “This is an opportunity for us to reach out to a young demographic.”

And the world as I knew it turns upside down. The impression I had growing up was that it was the studious, nonathletic kids like myself who were comics fans, not the jocks. But nowadays it seems that Spider-Man is more popular with kids than baseball, the national sport. How did this happen?

(And yet the Times gives sports a whole daily section of its own and only infrequently covers the comics medium, and not always well when it does. In this same issue the Times runs an article about Fantagraphics Books’ new Peanuts reprint series that never mentions Fantagraphics by name.)

By the way, Times columnist Murray Chass quotes baseball’s chief operating officer, Bob DuPuy, as admitting that kids attending the games would “not necessarily” be able to see the Spider-Man webbing on the bases.

The article concludes with this ominous exchange:

“Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner and a former president of Columbia Pictures, sees no good in the marriage of baseball and Spider-Man. ‘I guess it’s inevitable,’ he said, ‘but it’s sad. I’m old-fashioned. I’m a romanticist. I think the bases should be protected from this.’

“Parkes dismissed the objections of Vincent, who is 64. ‘We are trying to reach people 8 to 18,’ she said. ‘He is past that category in all respects.'” Blatant commerciality, philistinism, and corporate ageism, all in one package! (Oh, look: another recurring theme in this week’s column.)

DuPuy is quoted as saying “there was some talk about some webbing in the netting,” but they decided against it. What next? Trying to talk tennis tournaments into giving their nets a spider web pattern? (Webbing at Wimbledon?)

So here I am defending the traditions of baseball, a sport I care nothing about, over advertising for Spider-Man, whom I do care about. The world is indeed upside down. Maybe it’s because I’m a romanticist, or rather a romantic, too.

FINDING TRUE COMPANIONSHIP

On to cheerier subjects. Having finally gotten hold of master annotator Jess Nevins’ Heroes & Monsters: The Unofficial Companion to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (MonkeyBrain Press, 2003), I found it a hard book to put down the rest of that day.

It begins with a remarkable introduction by Alan Moore, author of the League stories (covered in Comics in Context #22 and 23). For all I know, Moore labors for days over a piece like this introduction, but it reads as if a torrent of creativity simply poured forth. I feel mixed astonishment and envy at how he can pack so much wit, insight and vivid turns of phrase into such a short space.

It is Moore and League co-creator Kevin O’Neill who have constructed what Moore terms League‘s “vast, imaginary global edifice” constructed from references to characters and stories throughout the history of Western literature. Moore writes that he and O’Neill have entered “our obsessive and demented stage, a phase which, worryingly, shows no signs of yet abating.” He continues,

“This stuff drives you mad. I’m serious. And it’s not the kind of mad that knowing every corner of, say, Marvel comics continuity for the last sixty years can drive you.” (Now I realized in the one brief conversation that I ever had with Moore that he had no idea who I was or what I did at Marvel. Nonetheless, I am delighted: it’s as if he had mentioned me by name in print!) Moore says that working on League is worse: “This is big-time mad.”

But, of course, though Moore protests, “I’m serious” about all this being mad, he’s not. By Moore turning his wit on himself, it’s clear he is making a joke. And that makes it all the funnier when he directs his satiric cannon against Nevins, who is so dedicated to decoding the myriad allusions League makes. Moore memorably begins his introduction, “I am both afraid for and of Jess Nevins,” and claims, after learning of his online League annotations, to have thought of him as “this possibly dangerous cyber-stalker.”

But eventually Moore drops the jester’s mask and praises Nevins as a “clearly gifted and dedicated person,” and even acknowledges him as a sort of collaborator, ensuring that through Nevins’ work, interested readers will be able to understand whatever allusion Moore makes to past literary works, however obscure.

There may be a serious aspect to Moore’s joking about Nevins as “this implacable monster” who seems dedicated to exposing the source of his every idea for League. In my columns I deal not so much in annotations as in critical analysis. I wouldn’t be surprised if an author whose work I’ve put under close scrutiny, unraveling his themes, dredging up insights the author might himself be consciously unaware of, might wonder if I’m trying to read his mind. In a sense, I am.

Moore, in his introduction, and Nevins, in the main body of the book, demonstrate their appreciation for the kind of cataloguing and analysis of the continuity of fictional universes that was once to be found at Marvel and DC as well. I may no longer get this sort of work from The Big Two with regard to their fictional universes, but I’m very pleased to see Nevins carrying on the tradition in the realm of alternative comics like League.

In the introduction Moore talks about working George Orwell’s 1984 into the twentieth century history of League‘s imaginary reality. I wonder if he is serious about that. Orwell’s book would still be under copyright, but there’s a bigger problem. There are some works of fiction that envision such radical changes to the world that they preclude most other stories set in the same time period. Orwell’s 1984 has the world divided into immense totalitarian empires like Oceania. Once Moore set up 1984‘s megastates, how could the world ever revert to a place with an England or United States or Russia that we would recognize? If he incorporated Doctor Strangelove, which ends with the destruction of all life on Earth, into the League timeline, then humanity would have become extinct in the 1960s. There are fictions that he can’t incorporate into the League universe, unless he’s willing to set up alternate timelines as well.

The majority of Nevins’ book consists of his copious annotations to Volume 1 of League, which I have commented upon in past columns. I will add, though, that I find it interesting that he can successfully sell a book containing so much material that is still available online. This seems proof that there are plenty of people who find it easier and preferable to page through a book than to go online and click and scroll through information. As a writer of online material myself, I may see a profitable future before me.

Nevins’ companion also contains numerous essays that serve as excellent literary research and criticism on subjects relating to League. These are really scholarly essays minus the footnotes, but so accessibly written as not to frighten off the general readership. And perhaps they will inspire readers to further thoughts on the subjects, as they did me.

For example, Nevins’s first essay is about character archetypes in League. In the section about H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, the progenitor of the modern adventure hero, Nevins notes that it was Haggard who created the archetypal story element of the “Lost World.” So, I thought, then Haggard is ultimately responsible for such “imaginary places” in the Marvel Universe as the Black Panther’s Wakanda, Ka-Zar’s Savage Land, the Inhumans’ Great Refuge, and the Eternals’ Olympia. And then I realized all of them are the creations or co-creations of Jack Kirby. And Kirby even titled a Black Panther story “King Solomon’s Frog,” in half-joking homage to the most famous Quatermain book, King Solomon’s Mines.

Nevins also credits Haggard with reviving and reenergizing the genres of adventure fiction and what he calls “scholarly fantasy,” naming the fantasy works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis as examples. So, would Vertigo books, notably the Sandman mythos also fall under this heading?

Nevins turns next to Mina Murray as exemplar of the Victorian “New Woman” and demonstrates that her role as the leader of the League, though still unusual for Victorian times, was not the anachronism one might have thought. I suspect that Nevins may be overstating his case that Victorians were much less repressed in their sexual attitudes than we tend to think.

I can’t even begin to approach Nevins’ or Moore’s knowledge of Victorian fiction, but certainly most of those 19th century British plays and novels I do know seem to conform to what one usually thinks of as the proper Victorian attitude towards sex. Perhaps the key is that Victorian British society tolerated sexual freedom as long as it was not explicitly acknowledged. I’ve seen the point made that society had no trouble with Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality until it was discussed in open court. In the film Topsy-Turvy Sir Arthur Sullivan and his lover, Mrs. Ronalds, are welcomed in proper society: their friends and acquaintances presumably knows their relationship, but it is apparently kept quiet.

I also like Nevins’ point that many Victorian women rejected the ways of the “New Woman” while actually following them in their own lives. It’s like independent women with careers today who claim to disdain feminism, or even like my own mother, who had a job but claimed she’d prefer to stay home as wives were supposed to do.

It is a surprise to learn from Nevins’ book that there were women detectives in fiction before Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, who is so often credited as being the first real detective in literature.

As for the archetype underlying Captain Nemo, I fear that Nevins, and Moore, who agrees with him, only get it half right. Yes, Nemo is indeed the Man with the Machine, but he is also the Lone Rebel, waging a hopeless war against the rest of society with only a relatively small following of his own. That other undersea prince and sometime terrorist, Namor the Sub-Mariner fits the Lone Rebel archetype, as, alas, does the real life Osama bin Laden.

But Nevins discusses this archetype in the next section, concerning Professor Moriarty, as the embodiment of the “Master Villain” archetype. Nevins relates the “Master Villain” to Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, whom he calls “a Promethean rebel, heroically defying a power he knows he cannot beat.” That’s Captain Nemo, too.

Nevins traces the descent from Milton’s Satan to the “Hero-Villain” of Gothic novels and then to the Master Villain such as Moriarty. Nevins is particularly good in describing the Gothics’ Hero-Villain, who, he says, “was never purely evil. The Hero-Villain is always a paradoxical mix of passions and impulses which he knows to be evil but cannot resist or overcome..”

Now, first, this interestingly counters the axiom that no one thinks of himself evil. (If that were true, then no one would ever feel guilt.)

Moreover, Nevins’ description of the Hero-Villain gave me insight into another of my favorite topics, the classic supernatural TV serial, Dark Shadows, which, it appears, will be revived in a new incarnation this fall on the WB Network. (For more about Dark Shadows, see Comics in Context #11 and 12.) I find it interesting that the show’s creator Dan Curtis originally intended the vampire Barnabas Collins, who became the principal character, to be an outright villain. When Curtis did a movie version, he forced Barnabas into that mold. Yet on the television series Barnabas evolved into a Gothic Hero-Villain, unable to control his bloodlust, and the audience enthusiastically responded, making the show a hit. Nevins’ description of a variation of the Hero-Villain, the Byronic hero, “whose passions are great and who can be both cruel and courteous, sympathetic and sadistic,” is an apt description of Barnabas. The pattern was repeated on the show with its second most popular character, Quentin Collins, who evolved from villain to romantic lead, and there was even a female version of the Hero-Villain in the person of the witch Angelique.

Another surprise is Nevins’ reference to writer James Malcolm Rymer’s 1845 creation Varney the Vampire. Nevins comments that “Varney’s tormented personality is a good example of the Hero-Villain”; this suggests not only that there was a sympathetic vampire character who predated Barnabas, but that a sympathetic vampire predated the character who most firmly established the image of the vampire as ruthless villain, Dracula.

And it also occurs to me that Marvel’s Doctor Doom likewise fits into the Hero-Villain mold.

Describing the first recurring Master Villain in serial detective fiction, Dr. Jack Quartz in the Nick Carter stories, Nevins says that “Quartz is well-educated, very intelligent, a charming conversationalist, and honorable in his way, but he is utterly without a conscience, feels no remorse over his acts, and enjoys his crimes.” This sounds like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley to me.

I also wonder how Fritz Lang’s master villains in his German silent films, like Dr. Mabuse and Rotwang in Metropolis fit into the evolution of the 20th century Master Villain in prose, film and even comics.

Nevins argues that the other members of the League, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde and the Invisible Man are not prototypes of character archetypes. Nevins contends that Jekyll/Hyde is actually an example of an earlier archetype, the doppelganger, or, we could say, the evil twin. I see the point, although I expect that Jekyll/Hyde represents an important evolution of that archetype by casting the “evil twin” as an alternate personality within the protagonist’s own mind. I also like Stephen King’s contention, if I remember it correctly, that Jekyll/Hyde is actually a variant on the archetype of the werewolf, the man who transforms into a physical incarnation of the dark, bestial side of his personality.

As for the Invisible Man, whom H.G. Wells casts as an unseen killer, a symbolic embodiment of death, I wonder if he is actually a science fiction version of an archetypal figure of the supernatural, the ghost.

Next comes Nevins’ essay on the history of “crossovers” between fictional characters, ranging from the teaming of mythical heroes as Jason’s Argonauts through the Marvel and DC Universes. I started thinking about crossovers in a medium that Nevins doesn’t deal with: television.

There are the obvious links between TV series and their spinoffs: Dr. Frasier Crane starts out as a supporting character in Cheers, and then stars in his own series, in which other Cheers characters, especially his ex-wife Lilith, make guest appearances.

Then there are cases in which a show’s creators consciously create a fictional universe in the style of comics and science fiction series. All the Star Trek series are part of the same fictional reality that even gets chronicled in Star Trek encyclopedias. Then there’s what creator Joss Whedon himself calls the “Buffyverse,” which includes Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, comic book spinoffs thereof, and even the original comics series Fray. (Couldn’t the word “Buffyverse” just as well refer to an epic poem about vampire slayers?)

But there are stranger, odder connections. Richard Belzer’s character from Homicide turns up in an episode of The X-Files and later permanently moves into a Law and Order series. X-Files lead characters Mulder and Scully crossed over into The Simpsons. The character Alan Brady from The Dick Van Dyke Show appeared in an episode of Mad about You; Ursula the waitress in Mad about You is the twin sister of Phoebe on Friends; so, theoretically, Rob and Laura Petrie would be part of the fictional reality of this fall’s Friends spinoff, Joey.

And then there are cases in which TV series specifically demonstrate that other series are not part of the same fictional universe. The X-Files had a spinoff, The Lone Gunmen, and had crossovers with Chris Carter’s series Millennium, but in one X-Files episode people are shown watching yet another Carter series, Harsh Realm, on television.

Seinfeld, in which Jerry Seinfeld played a fictional version of himself, is only a fictional TV series in the “reality” of Seinfeld co-creator Larry David’s HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which David plays a fictional version of himself. And then in a recent episode of HBO’s The Sopranos, Uncle Junior was shown watching Curb on television. It’s like a series of Chinese boxes.

And how does one make sense of Disney’s House of Mouse, in which characters from throughout the Disney canon, no matter what century their adventures are set in (or whether they are alive or dead at their movie’s end), interact at Mickey Mouse’s night club? (Answer: one doesn’t; at this point, as Mystery Science Theater 3000 used to advise, one should just sit back and relax.)

Nevins’ essay on “Yellow Peril” makes short work of the fallacy that Dr. Fu Manchu is the prototype for this stereotyped archetype. The biggest surprise in this essay was that Mary Shelley took pains to establish that the Frankenstein Monster had yellow skin, and that readers of her time would have thought the Monster looked like a Mongol. Though Nevins does not say so, the image of Boris Karloff as the Monster from Universal’s Frankenstein has so established itself in popular culture that Shelley’s concept of the Monster’s appearance is now virtually forgotten.

Nevins’ list of “Yellow Peril” characters inspired by Fu Manchu is amazingly long, but I found one he missed: Batman’s enemy Dr. Tzin-Tzin, who debuted in Detective Comics #354 (You can look him up in DC’s original Who’s Who series.).

More importantly, Nevins points out that Batman’s archfoe Ra’s al Ghul is actually a variation on Fu Manchu; Talia would obviously be a variation on Fu Manchu’s similarly sultry daughter, Fah Lo Suee. Strangely, in next year’s new Batman movie, Ra’s will be played by Ken Nakamura, a Japanese man, as if acknowledging the character’s “Yellow Peril” roots. How the film will explain a Japanese man having an Arab name, I have no idea.

Nevins’ demonstration that the “Yellow Peril” stereotype can be turned into an Arab villain, Ra’s, makes me wonder if other Arab villains in popular culture are also variations on the “Yellow Peril.” What about the Jafar in the movie The Thief of Baghdad or his namesake in Disney’s Aladdin? (And does the Arab version of the “Yellow Peril” stereotype affect the way that Westerners view Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein?)

The League companion concludes with Nevins’ extended interview with Moore, which has various points of interest. For one thing, there’s a fine example of a writer creating something with a meaning he hadn’t intended. Asked how he came up with the name League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore says it just popped into his head, and he only remembered similar names, like the film The League of Gentlemen, later. Unless he’s simply avoiding tempting Marvel and DC lawyers, he doesn’t even seem to realize what seem to me the title’s obvious allusions to the Justice League and X-Men.

Moore gives a nice explanation of how he avoids copyright problems in his use of Fu Manchu (basically by never calling him by name), though how he gets away with using Wells’ Invisible Man is not addressed.

The interview also whets my interest for Volume 3, as Moore reveals it will consist of stories about Leagues in the 17th, 18th and early 20th centuries: he even has long-range plans for a 1950s version.

Best of all are Moore’s discussion of the relationship between the creator and his creation. Asked by Nevins why he writes, Moore says simply that “It’s largely if there’s something that I want very much to exist in the universe and it doesn’t,” so he creates it himself. It’s as if the writer is the God of the fictional universe he creates, bringing it into being. I can even see a parallel with my work as a critic: I write essays expressing my specific ideas about certain works of art, because I think they’re worth setting down, and if I don’t “create” them, then who will?

Best of all comes at the very end of both the interview and the book itself, as Moore sets out his philosophy about the “reality” of fiction. He says that in League‘s Almanac, “I actually feel that I am in some way mapping a world that actually exists in a certain sense.” What he calls “this planet of the imagination” may be fictional, composed of thoughts, yet “thoughts are real” in the sense that “They have an effect upon us.” The worlds of the imagination are “real” in the same way. “We create these ideal characters and we carry them around in our heads, we try to measure up to them, they affect our behavior. That would seem to me to grant them a certain reality and a certain importance beyond mere entertainment.”

While we wait for the third volume of League, readers should take a look at Peter David’s recent parody of Moore’s series in Claypool Comics’ Soulsearchers & Company #65, soon going on sale, about which I will have much more to say in my next column.

–Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson