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
Comments: 1 Comment
One Response to “Comics in Context #37: High Noon for Mutants”Leave a Reply |
August 5th, 2008 at 11:02 am
You mention Nevin’s contention that Haggard is the father of the Lost World school of fantastic fiction, but I wonder if there is not an earlier and more obvious candidate, and that is Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Lost World’ novel, the influences of which are still very much with us.
I once read an interview with Moore in which he explained his idea that magic exists, and that literally it is language. I’m sure I won’t do this justice, but the point was that if magic is a kind of transmutation (lead
into gold), then that is what happens with the creation of fiction, and the characters of the alphabet are the tools of magic. Reading that interview was a jaw-dropping moment for me, a rare experience where I was suddenly given the insight for seeing something near and dear to me for almost my whole life, fiction, in a totally new way.
As always, thanks for a stimulating column.
Rick B.