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In his book Disguised as Clark Kent, which I’ve been reviewing over the last several weeks, Danny Fingeroth writes about the effect of Jewish-American culture in originating and developing the superhero genre. But this does not account for every major superhero of the Golden Age (1930s-1940s) and Silver Age (1950s-1960s) of American comic books.

For instance, Fingeroth contends that the closest that the original Captain Marvel, whose creators weren’t Jewish, comes to embodying “a Jewish concept” is the fact that the “S” in his magic word “Shazam” stands for King Solomon, whose wisdom the hero possesses (Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent, p. 64) . The other letters stand for deities and heroes in Greek and Roman mythology. Perhaps Solomon was included because the god of wisdom in the Olympian pantheon is female, Athena, called Minerva by the Romans, so maybe the captain’s creators wanted him to derive all his powers from male mythic figures. Of course, Solomon is part of the Christian Bible as a figure in the Old Testament.

Captain Marvel’s mentor Shazam, with his robes and long white beard, conforms to the archetypal image of an old wizard, such as Merlin. Shazam also looks like the common image of an Old Testament prophet. But the fact that Shazam was eventually identified as a sorcerer from ancient Egypt complicates that interpretation.

Fingeroth states that “In the post-World War II era of Superman stories, the metaphorical relationship between the Holocaust of European Jewry and the destruction of Krypton can more clearly be seen. He continues that “the longing for a lost world that could not be returned to was, of course, part and parcel of the exodus of the Jews from Eastern Europe” (Fingeroth p. 44).

Under the editorship of Mort Weisinger, Krypton was portrayed as a futuristic paradise, combining the benefits of advanced science with natural wonders, such as the Jewel Mountains and the Fire Falls. Fingeroth points out that Weisinger edited “Superman Returns to Krypton” (Superman #61, 1949), in which Superman not only first discovered his alien origin, but also “became an untouchable phantom returning to Krypton for a brief glimpse of his parents’ life in the past” (Fingeroth p. 66). Later, Fingeroth recalls, Weisinger and writer Jerry Siegel, Superman’s co-creator, “elaborated on” the theme in the similarly titled “Superman’s Return to Krypton” in Superman #141 (1960). As Fingeroth recounts that in the latter story Superman falls in love with “a Kryptonian woman”–beautiful actress Lyla Lerrol– whom “he would be unable to save when the doomed planet inevitably exploded” (Fingeroth p. 83).

There’s even more to the story than that. Through a trick of fate, Superman finds himself on the planet Krypton at a point before his own birth. Thus Superman is able to fulfill the fantasy of being reunited with his parents and leading the kind of life he would have had if he had grown up on Krypton: although he does not tell Jor-El and Lara he is their son from the future, he becomes Jor-El’s assistant and thus a member of their household. Superman seems to forget all about Lois Lane when he romances Lyla Lerrol, but then again, at this point Superman thinks he will never see Lois again. Superman thus falls in love instead with a fellow Kryptonian, a member of his own community. Of course, he also resumes his Kryptonian name, Kal-El, giving up both of his Earth identities.

Although Fingeroth points out that Lyla Lerrol is doomed, he overlooks the chilling point that in this story, Superman himself seems doomed to perish in the destruction of Krypton. Back on Krypton, with its red sun. Superman has lost his super-powers and is unable to leave the planet. Hence he is metaphorically like a Jew who has been transported back in time and space to Europe in the 1930s, knowing that the Holocaust is coming and unable to prevent himself from becoming its victim. Only through another improbable twist of fate does Superman escape Krypton before its annihilation.

Later in the book, Fingeroth discusses a Silver Age contribution to the Superman mythos: the Bottle City of Kandor, a Kryptonian city that had been reduced in size and stolen by the evil Brainiac, and thus survived the destruction of the planet. Superman recovered the miniaturized city and placed it in his Fortress of Solitude (whose name arguably alludes to Superman’s status as an alien on Earth), which Fingeroth correctly describes as “the survivor’s living museum to the memory of Krypton. He was now no longer fully alone and could revisit a piece of the culture and society from which he had been simultaneously saved and exiled” (Fingeroth p. 83).

Two years ago when I was listening to a BBC radio program “Is Superman Jewish?” (see “Comics in Context” #75: “The Rubber Band Theory of Cartoon Art”). I was startled when it made the argument that Kandor represented the nation of Israel: a community of Jews, small compared to the millions who once lived in Europe, that survived after the Holocaust.

Something that Fingeroth does not address is that the Weisinger-era Superman exhibits mixed feelings towards the “Old Country” of Krypton? What, after all, is Superman’s greatest weakness? It’s Kryptonite, which literally consists of chunks of his alien homeland, radically transformed into a substance whose very presence can kill him. Did Weisinger and Siegel subconsciously think of Kryptonite as representing Europe, which once was home but had transformed into the site of the Holocaust, a place of death?

What about the familiar trope in Superman stories in which Clark Kent becomes weakened by the presence of Kryptonite, which thus threatens not only to kill him but to expose his dual identity as Superman? In other words, the Kryptonite would metaphorically destroy the disguise by which Superman had assimilated into American society, revealing Kent’s true racial background as a Kryptonian, and literally bring about his death.

Then there’s the Phantom Zone, which is a science fiction analogue to hell, in which immaterial phantoms of Kryptonian criminals–science fictional versions of damned souls–wait for the opportunity to escape back to the world of the living and wreak havoc on Earth. If Superman mourns the loss of his parents and of the Kryptonian population in general, here are Kryptonians whom he does not want to see return to “life.”

But it was also important in the Weisinger-era stories that Superman could, from time to time, visit the people of his native race in Kandor, and that he
discovered and bonded with a relative who had also miraculously escaped the end of Krypton: his cousin Kara, alias Supergirl.

Yet in the mid-1980s the powers that be at DC Comics decreed that Superman must be the sole survivor of Krypton. Supergirl was brutally killed off in Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985), and in the reboot of the Superman mythos, Supergirl was an artificially created being, not a Kryptonian, Kandor was no longer a city of Kryptonians, and when three Kryptonians from the Phantom Zone showed up, they were swiftly executed by Superman himself.

Arguably, making Superman the sole living member of his native race strengthens the theme of holocaust survivor that has such cultural resonance for Jewish-Americans. But perhaps deleting the other Kryptonian survivors from official continuity actually demonstrates how far Superman had moved from its Jewish-American roots by the mid-1980s. The new generation of editors and writers felt no motivation to show Superman longing for his homeworld or bonding with fellow survivors of his race.

Had the Superman creative teams of the 1980s and 1990s missed out on an important element of Superman’s appeal? Isn’t Superman and Supergirl bonding together as family members and fellow immigrants like, say, the X-Men as minority members who band together to form their own community?

According to my “Rubber Band Theory” of comics, if a character or series is stretched too far away from its essential concepts, it will eventually snap back into something resembling its original shape. Thus, DC has reintroduced a Supergirl who is Superman’s Kryptonian cousin into the official continuity, brought back the Phantom Zone criminals, and has even reinstated Superman’s Kryptonian-born Superdog, Krypto, into the current canon.

But I notice that the current versions of the Superman mythos still have not truly returned to the Weisinger-era treatment of the Man of Steel’s Kryptonian heritage. In Mark Waid’s revisionist Superman: Birthright, Krypton had an aggressively militaristic culture, though this is not considered canonical, if it ever truly was. (It is hard to tell what DC currently considers to be canonical regarding Superman’s origin.)

In the television series Smallville the young Clark Kent has recently met two positive Kryptonian figures: his cousin Kara and his mother Lara (or some sort of reasonable facsimile thereof; the show contends that the real Lara is dead, but the Lara who showed up in the November 15, 2007 episode titled “Blue” seems indistinguishable from the real thing). But almost every other Kryptonian who has shown up in Smallville has been a menace, including Kara’s dad Zor-El (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), who in that same episode attempted to carry out the genocide of the human race. Even Clark’s birth father Jor-El (or the you-know-what thereof) seems to be there primarily to make arbitrary demands and impose punishments on Clark. It’s no wonder that Smallville’s Clark feels no loyalty or connection to Krypton.

Fingeroth moves on to the subject of Marvel in the 1960s, which began its Silver Age with the Fantastic Four. He correctly observes that Ben Grimm, the Thing, demonstrates “the classic Jewish use of humor to offset tragedy,” which takes the form of his entrapment within a monstrous body (Fingeroth p. 97).

Doesn’t the Thing’s body, which looks as if it were made of rocks or bricks, also link him with the golem, which is made of clay? Stan Lee and Jack Kirby may not have consciously intended such a connection. But consider the Thing’s savage temper in the early issues of Fantastic Four, and the fact that Lee and Kirby did two long storylines in which the Thing temporarily went bad, turning violently against his teammates (in FF #41-43 and 68-71). Weren’t these reminiscent of the uncontrollable, destructive potential of the golem?

In recent years Marvel has explicitly identified Ben Grimm as Jewish. Fingeroth notes that the “evidence” that Grimm is Jewish was a celebrated drawing that Kirby had done showing the Thing wearing a yarmulke and prayer shawl. Fingeroth persuasively argues that Kirby may have intended the drawing simply as a joke, and observes that he did a similar drawing of the Hulk similarly garbed. Still, Kirby and Lee did establish that the Thing was somehow connected with “Yancy Street,” which was obviously based on Delancey Street, which is in what was a largely Jewish section of Manhattan. John Byrne not only established that Ben was once a member of the Yancy Street Gang (in The Thing #1, July 1983), but also hinted that he was Jewish by giving him an Uncle Jake (short for Jacob), and establishing that Ben’s middle initial, J.,” likewise stood for Jacob.

I was quite surprised when Fingeroth revealed the Jewish themes behind Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four storylines concerning Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner: “He began a quest to find his people [the Atlanteans] in their diaspora and lead them back to some renewed version of their “˜ancient homeland,’ echoing the biblical Jews’ search for their God-promised land, as well as their expulsion from that land and the Zionist quest to re-find it” (Fingeroth p. 97).

Fingeroth also draws the readers’ attention to the romantic triangle in the early Fantastic Four, with Namor and FF leader Reed Richards as rivals for “the blond-haired, blue-eyed Susan Storm” (Fingeroth, p. 97). Let me spell it out further: here was Namor, the racial outsider, competing for the affections of an (apparent) WASP, and being portrayed as a more virile and passionate Alpha Male than the rather introverted (apparent) WASP Reed Richards.

And there’s still more that Fingeroth does not get into here. In Fantastic Four #4, Namor finds what he considers evidence that his Atlantean people were at least partly wiped out by nuclear tests conducted by humans of the surface world. In other words, the Atlanteans may have been the victims of genocide. (Later stories not only established that much of the Atlantean race had survived but that it was a single human supervillain named Destiny who was responsible for the massacre of the Atlanteans, not Americans or the surface world in general.)

And how does Namor react to the evidence of genocide? He launches an attack on New York City, raising a monster from the ocean depths to level buildings in Manhattan. (Nowadays, of course, Namor would be termed a terrorist.) Although Lee and Kirby clearly sympathize with Namor’s anger over the loss of his people, they also are clearly opposed to his assault on New York City.

Consciously or not, Lee and Kirby were dealing with a recurring theme in their early Silver Age Marvel stories: how does one morally combat persecution?
Obviously, Lee and Kirby presented Captain America as heroic in battling the Nazis. But they also indicate that Namor went too far in attacking Manhattan in FF #4, and later in leading an Atlantean invasion of the surface world in Fantastic Four Annual #1.

This issue underlies Fingeroth’s discussion of the Fantastic Four’s archenemy Doctor Doom, whom Lee and Kirby establish in Fantastic Four Annual #2 as having been born a gypsy in the fictional Eastern European country of Latveria. Both of Doom’s parents died as a result of persecution. Fingeroth points out that in real life the gypsies suffered “collective persecution similar to the Jews, including destruction in Nazi death camps”; hence Doom is “a surrogate sufferer on behalf of his American Jewish creators’ European counterparts” (Fingeroth pgs. 97-98).

In response to the persecution of his people, “Doom took on the tactics of his oppressors, deciding that the only way to save the world was to dominate it. This is a fantasy of power–of refusing ever again to be a victim–which, coming from Jewish creators, is tinged with meaning” (Fingeroth p. 98).

In Doom’s origin story, it was a Latverian baron who drove Doom’s father to his death; as an adult Doom makes himself monarch of Latveria. Yet although Doom regards himself as a benevolent ruler of the Latverian people, he is nonetheless a tyrant bent on world conquest. If the Latverian aristocracy regarded gypsies as inferiors, Doctor Doom regards the entire human race as his inferiors, whom he deserves to rule. Believing that he was battling his enemy, Doctor Doom became the enemy of all humanity.

To my mind Doctor Doom represents the dark side of the Old World attempting to conquer the New World as represented by the Fantastic Four. Doom is Europe; the FF are America. Doom represents the old order of absolute monarchy–or absolute dictatorship; the Fantastic Four embody freedom. This explains why Doom, although he is the master of advanced science, nonetheless wears a suit of armor, vaguely medieval robes, and lives in a castle: he embodies the repressive forces of the past, which Europeans fled to America to escape.

Of course, Lee and Kirby made this theme about extremism in response to persecution most explicit through the character of Magneto in X-Men. Fingeroth points to the scene in X-Men #4 (March 1964) in which Magneto rescues his fellow mutants Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch from an angry Eastern European mob. Fingeroth asserts that this “”˜raging villagers” motif. . . would resonate especially with Jews in view of the history of Eastern European anti-Semitism, specifically the mob violence of the pogroms, as well as the Holocaust in general” (Fingeroth p. 117).

But Magneto decides that the only way to assure the freedom of his people, the emerging race of mutants, is to seize control of the planet from the majority population. Like the Nazis, Magneto believes in a “master race”: they believed it was Aryans, Magneto believes it is mutants. Therefore, it should be no surprise that, as Fingeroth points out, Magneto even adopts the trappings of Nazism: in X-Men #4 Magneto has his underling Mastermind create the illusion of “a jackbooted army, garbed in Nazi-like uniforms” to help them conquer a small country (Fingeroth p. 117).

In this same issue Lee and Kirby present their alternative to Magneto’s strategy for overcoming racial persecution: Magneto and Professor Charles Xavier, founder of the X-Men, debate their differing approaches. Xavier has what was later called his “dream” of a society in which mutants and non-mutants coexist in harmony. The X-Men famously fight to protect non-mutant humans from “evil mutants” like Magneto who seek to harm or dominate them. Moreover, the 1960s issues of X-Men continually tell the readers that the X-Men risk their lives to protect “normal” humans even though those “normal” humans “fear and distrust” mutants. That reminds me of the Christian maxim to “turn the other cheek”: to return good for evil. Xavier’s optimistic strategy is that by helping the majority of the human race, mutants will finally win their acceptance.

Back on the subject of the Fantastic Four, Fingeroth perceives that in Lee and Kirby’s great “Galactus trilogy” (FF #48-50), Galactus is like “the vengeful deity of the Old Testament, preparing to unleash the flood of the Noah story” (Fingeroth p. 98). I found it interesting that Fingeroth refers to the Watcher in that storyline as a rabbinically wise entity” (Fingeroth p. 98). As regular readers know, I think that in the trilogy the Watcher instead represents an alternative vision of God as a benevolent paternal figure (see “Comics in Context” #184: “Clobbered Again” and #185: “Get Off of My Cloud”).

Fingeroth briefly refers to the “Hebraic-sounding names” like Arishem in Jack Kirby’s The Eternals, a series that was recently one of the subjects of “Comics in Context” #194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199. It’s amusing to learn that Zuras’s name is a blend of Zeus and “the Hebrew/Yiddish tsuris (the ts is pronounced like a z) meaning trouble or woe” (Fingeroth p. 98), though I don’t know if that combination has any special meaning. Perhaps it means that you’d better not get Zuras angry at you. Fingeroth also states that the name of one of the Celestials, Oneg, means “joy or pleasure” in Hebrew. It’s too bad that Kirby never showed us why he gave Oneg that particular name. (Could Oneg be Sersi’s Celestial patron?)

Fingeroth also deals briefly with Kirby’s “Fourth World” books such as The New Gods at DC Comics, pointing out that the character Izaya (better known as Highfather) is named after the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. Fingeroth doesn’t mention that Izaya also looks very much the part of an Old Testament prophet, complete with white beard, robes, and staff, and that he communicates with “the Source,” who, at least metaphorically, is God Himself.

Fingeroth also claims that in the “Fourth World” books Darkseid’s planet Apokolips resembles “Nazi-dominated Europe,” and notes Kirby’s name for a place called “Armagetto” (Fingeroth p. 99). The latter combines “Armageddon” and “ghetto” into what Lewis Carroll would call a portmanteau word, and should alert us that Kirby makes use of Christian as well as Jewish cultural references. I believe that Darkseid is an analogue to both Satan and fascist dictators like Hitler, and that Apokolips is both a planetwide forced labor camp and a metaphor for hell. The flames of Apokolips’s fire pits evoke factories, hell, and perhaps even the Nazi death camps.

Here’s something else about the Fourth World books: Kirby created Forager and his people, who were long considered to be an inferior race by the New Gods of New Genesis. Here’s a clear parallel to the experience of being in a minority group. Kirby called Forager’s people the “bugs,” which may renmind you abo ut last week’s column, in which I explained how Jerry Seinfeld uses bees as metaphorical Jews in Bee Movie.

In turning to Spider-Man, Fingeroth initially diappointed me by repeating the contemporary conventional line that Spider-Man’s civilian self, Peter Parker “was a nerd” (Fingeroth p. 99). Back in 1962, when Spider-Man debuted, the words “nerd” and “geek” were not nearly as commonly used as they are now and certainly never turned up in Stan Lee’s Spider-Man scripts in the 1960s. Oh, the introverted, studious Peter Parker could be described back then as a bookworm or a wallflower, but such terms didn’t carry the nasty implications of being somehow subhuman that “nerd” and “geek” do. (And for those of you who think that “nerd” and “geek” are complimentary terms, I have no patience with you.) Years ago John Byrne told me that the early Peter Parker wasn’t depicted as a “nerd” but as the “good son,” who did what he was supposed to at school and at home. Indeed, take a look at the opening page of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s first Spider-Man story in Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962), and it’s clear that the supposedly cool kids who are mocking Parker are superficial fools.

But then Fingeroth more than redeems himself by going right to the heart of Spider-Man’s appeal: “But what Lee and Ditko understood was that to any outsider–nerd, Jew, teenager–in his own eyes, and in the eyes of those who love him, he is not a freak, but is perfectly normal (as Jack Kerouac put it, the hero of his own movie), with a good reason for every seemingly odd thing that he does. . . . It was an exhortation to not judge anyone until you understand what he has been through. Spider-Man is a call to not give in to prejudice, to literally not “˜pre-judge’ anyone” (Fingeroth pgs. 99-100) This is the best written and most insightful paragraph in the entire book.

Next Fingeroth writes about the similarity between Spider-Man and Charles Schulz’s Charlie Brown. Now, this interests me because Fingeroth’s book is about New York Jewish creators of superheroes and Schulz was famously a Midwestern Protestant. Yet Peter Parker and Charlie Brown are very much alike: continually suffering from bad luck and lack of appreciation and angst. Different cultural influences produced similar results.

As David Michaelis’s new biography Schulz and Peanuts reveals, Schulz had his own reasons for feeling himself to be an outsider, who was insufficiently appreciated or loved. Fingeroth states that Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko and his successor John Romita, Sr., “both of whom were significantly involved in plotting the Spider-Man stories they worked on–weren’t Jews, but they were of immigrant descent–Slavic and Italian, respectively”–and hence could comprehend the same feeling of alienation from society, which, after all, “is individually a part of the human condition” to one extent or another for everyone (Fingeroth p. 101).

Perhaps, too, there was something about the zeitgeist of the conformist, consumerist 1950s that led Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and Charles Schulz to create such similar protagonists as Peter Parker and Charlie Brown. In a culture that glorified success as the American dream, Charlie Brown and Peter Parker personified the supposed loser as hero, who struggles on despite failure, self-doubt, lack of appreciation, and endless hard luck.

In his book Michaelis shows that Charlie Brown and Snoopy represent the two poles of Charles Schulz’s creative persona, but he does not efficiently emphasize how Snoopy’s joie de vivre and ability to transcend the limitations of his role in life (as a dog) balance out Charlie Brown’s melancholy and continual frustrations.

A former Spider-Man editor and writer, Fingeroth points out a similar balance in Stan Lee’s Silver Age Spider-Man stories, not between two different characters but between the ups and downs of Spider-Man’s existence. “Despite the dramatics, he was having fun. in Spider-Man the balance between angst and action, between introspection and exuberance, was skillfully maintained. It was a balance that succeeding generations of comics creators and filmmakers would struggle to get right” (Fingeroth p. 101). I believe that Sam Raimi gets the balance right in his Spider-Man movies, but the balance has long been lost in this grim and gritty world of 21st century superhero comics.

As for the Hulk, although Fingeroth comments “that the Hulk wanders from place to place, seeking acceptance, like the proverbial Wandering Jew, there seems little else about the character that one can identify as evoking Jewish themes, despite the fact that he is sometimes referred to as “˜the Green Golem’” (Fingeroth p. 102). I haven’t seen that many references to the Hulk as a “golem,” although Roy Thomas should be credited with drawing an explicit parallel between the Hulk and the golem way back in Incredible Hulk #134 (December 1970). Of course, the Hulk has frequently been called the Green Goliath,” and hey, that’s an Old Testament reference! And so is Henry Pym’ former identity as the giant-size Goliath.

Returning to Captain America, Fingeroth explains that Lee and Kirby established that the Captain had been in suspended animation since the last days of World War II in Europe. “The ostensibly WASP superhero had metamorphosed into the most metaphorically Jewish aspect of his existence,” Fingeroth writes: “Captain America was a survivor. The people he had known before the war, especially the comrade he cared so much about, were gone” (Fingeroth p. 104).

That “comrade” is Captain America’s young sidekick Bucky Barnes, who was (as far as Lee and Kirby were concerned) killed before the Captain’s eyes just before he went into suspended animation. Fingeroth could have done more with this. Captain America was like a surrogate father to Bucky. In losing him, Captain America is like any World War II survivor who lost a member of his family in the war or in the Holocaust. And, as Fingeroth remarks, Captain America unmistakably suffers from survivor’s guilt in Lee and Kirby’s stories, mourning the loss of Bucky and blaming himself. (This, by the way, is one reason why it was a mistake to resurrect Bucky: that survivor’s guilt is key to the characterization of Captain America in modern comics.)

Fingeroth explains further that due to spending years in suspended animation, the revived Captain America is “physically in his twenties, but his alienation and psychological trauma make him older” (Fingeroth p. 104). Fingeroth sees the Captain’s condition as a metaphor for the situation that that Lee and Kirby found themselves in in the 1960s, as men who “even if you feel energetic and enthused by life,” have nevertheless become middle-aged and find a new generation arising that questions the value system of their elders (Fingeroth, p. 106).

This, of course, doesn’t specifically reflect Jewish culture, but the universal condition of growing older, something that Danny and I can now better understand than we did when we entered the comics profession. It strikes me, though, that Captain America was revived in the 1960s by two middle-aged men, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, as a child of the Great Depression who came of age in World War II, was thrust by fate into the radically different world of the 1960s, but holds fast to the patriotic vision of his youth. But since then, Captain America has usually been written by young men who haven’t experienced moving into middle age. Can younger writers really understand the personality that Lee and Kirby gave the Captain? I cannot imagine Lee and Kirby writing that infamous recent scene in which a young reporter told the soon-to-be-seemingly-assassinated Captain that he did not understand America because he didn’t frequent YouTube or NASCAR events.

Captain America is like Rip Van Winkle as a superhero: the man who awoke after sleeping for years to find that the world had changed almost unrecognizably. Then again, Hawkeye used to call him “Methuselah,” and hey, there’s another Old Testament reference!

I still have more to say about Danny Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent (and you can read my interview with him) . But other subjects, like the new Beowulf movie, clamor for my attention, so I shall turn to some of them after Thanksgiving.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

One of the highlights of 2008 in the world of comics art is bound to be the February publication of Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier. You can read my interview with Mark about his book in the November 13, 2007 edition of Publishers Weekly‘s Comics Week.

In the near future I will be reviewing Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s new The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier here in “Comics in Context.” For help in understanding Moore’s profusion of cultural and historical references, be sure to consult Jess Nevins’s indispensable list of Black Dossier annotations. (I’ve contributed several annotations to his list myself!) The annotations will become part of Nevins’ forthcoming Impossible Territories: The Unofficial Companion to the Black Dossier, which MonkeyBrain Press will publish in July 2008.

One of my own cultural references is the title of the section of “Comics in Context” about my own current projects, “Advertisements for Myself,” which I named after a 1959 book by Norman Mailer, who passed away on Saturday, November 10 of this year. In my student days I was greatly impressed by Mailer’s ventures into “New Journalism” with his 1968 books The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago. Thinking about him after his death, I realized that these books, without my consciously realizing it, had influenced my own novelistic approach to writing reports about comics conventions, memorials, and other events in “Comics in Context”–even waiting in line (and in vain) on a frigid day to try to get into a theater to watch a discussion between Joss Whedon and Stephen Sondheim (see “Comics in Context” #77: “Gone with the Steam”).

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Over the last few weeks I have been examining Danny Fingeroth’s new book, Disguised as Clark Kent, which examines how the superhero genre reflects the Jewish-American background of many of the genre’s founders. As a lapsed Catholic, I have no trouble spotting the religious imagery in say, fellow Catholic Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again, but I can use the help of Fingeroth’s book in understanding how Jewish-American culture influenced the work of Stan Lee (who wrote the book’s introduction), for example.

A measure of Fingeroth’s success is that he has opened my eyes to looking for such influences even in works outside the scope of his book, which is devoted to the superhero genre. For example, the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, which was hosting half of the “Masters of American Comics” exhibit last year at this time, is now presenting “From the New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig,” marking the centennial of his birth. One of Fingeroth’s themes is that being Jewish in American society confers an “outsider’s” perspective. It is therefore illuminating to consider Shrek, both in Steig’s book and in the movies, as a representative of the minority group member as outsider. In Steig’s book, Shrek embodies an adamant refusal to conform to mainstream society’s norms: it is a fable that takes a defiantly comedic stand against assimilation (see “Comics in Context” #186: “Le Petit Chef”).

Then there’s the new computer-animated film about anthropomorphic bees, Bee Movie, whose auteur is unmistakably comedian and television icon Jerry Seinfeld. Various reviewers have mentioned the exchange of dialogue that obviously signals that Seinfeld’s bees are, in part, metaphors for Jewish-Americans. On an expedition outside the hive, protagonist Barry B. Benson (voiced by Seinfeld) meets Vanessa Bloome (voiced by Renee Zellweger), a kindly human with a symbolic last name: she is the flower to his pollinating bee. (She even owns a flower shop.) On a literal level, though, they start a platonic romance. (Computer-animated films have had varying levels of success in depicting humans. DreamWorks Animation has succeeded in making Vanessa look appealingly pretty and even sexy.) Back in the hive Barry’s mother asks, “Was she beeish?” and Barry states that his new friend isn’t a “wasp.”

A delightful surprises in Fingeroth’s book is his discovery of parallels to Jewish-American culture in what initially seems a highly unlikely source: Marvel’s Thor, which is about the gods of Norse–and Germanic–culture. Back in the 1960s, series creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby devised a longrunning subplot in which Thor had fallen in love with the mortal woman Jane Foster, despite the opposition of his father Odin, monarch of the gods.

When I interviewed him for Publishers Weekly‘s Comics Week, Fingeroth told me, “Immigrant families are often concerned that their children will marry within the group. Jews, with their small numbers, are famous for this concern. So when I reread the Thor stories about Odin forbidding Thor to “˜intermarry’ with mortal Jane Foster, it just seemed plain to me that this was reflective of the conflicts that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. . .had to have experienced in their own lives and families.”

Fingeroth also points out in his book that the initially forbidden romance between Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four and Crystal. who belongs to a different racial community, the Inhumans, similarly reflects this conflict. (Of course, this theme isn’t restricted to Jewish-American creators: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet find themselves in similar situation.)

So, then, Barry’s leaving the hive to explore the outside world is like someone moving beyond his ethnic community to investigate the majority culture. Barry’s platonic romance with Vanessa is a metaphor for a Jewish-American man falling in love with a Gentile woman.

But, although the mainstream reviews I’ve read take no notice, the Jewish-American themes extend much further than this in Bee Movie. Barry discovers that humans are “stealing” honey from the bee population. This is a metaphor for the majority culture’s exploitation of the labor of a minority group. It’s not surprising to find this as a subject of an animated film for families. But, startlingly, Seinfeld and his collaborators go further.

Bee Movie establishes that humans harvest honey from hives in what the dialogue calls “work camps” for bees. Of the mainstream critics whose Bee Movie reviews I read, only Rex Reed in The New York Observer came close to finding the buried subtext, referring to “a honey farm that is like a Nazi work camp staffed by slaves”. The movie shows us that before the humans remove the honey, they gas the bees. We see smoke get released and watch the bees collapse. It’s not lethal, but, considering that the Vanessa subplot has already likened bees to Jews, the metaphorical implications should be obvious.

Horrified by the exploitation of the bees, Barry fights back by initiating a class action suit against the human race. During the trial the racial subtext becomes more explicit. The opposing lawyer is a caricature of the stereotype of the racist Southerner, who openly argues against granting bees “equal rights” and publicly exposes the relationship between Barry and Vanessa to foment bigoted reactions. In the trial sequence Seinfeld and company appear to be likening bees to African-Americans as well, as Barry refers to the bees as the humans’ “slaves.” The climactic point of the trial comes when Barry produces a “bee smoker” in court, which gets triggered: in full view of everyone present, bees in the audience are gassed and collapse. even in the context of a “funny animal” movie, it struck me as startling, even somewhat shocking. For a moment Bee Movie had become Maus.

Do you think I’m reading too much into this? In his review in The Onion (Nov. 8-14, 2007) film critic Nathan Rubin missed the Holocaust imagery but nonetheless observed, “Yet the darkness endemic to Seinfeld [the TV series] manifests in some satisfying, unexpected twists” such as “a loopy dream sequence that ends tragically”. He’s referring to a strange sequence in which Barry dreams of Vanessa attempting to fly, as he does, but in a one-woman aircraft which crashes in flames. Watching this I wondered why this sequence was in the movie, since Vanessa is in no danger in the story. But Rubin may be right that there is a dark undercurrent beneath Bee Movie‘s bright, shiny surface.

Moreover, Seinfeld told PBS’s Charlie Rose (on the latter’s show on November 5, 2007) that he was surprised that children liked Bee Movie so much because he had principally aimed it at adults. He told Roger Ebert, “To be honest. . .I wrote it for adults”. It seems strange that he would think that there was a large enough adult audience for what is basically a funny animal animated film to make Bee Movie a commercial success, but this does indicate that Seinfeld wasn’t averse to dealing with “adult” subjects in the film.

Despite its ambitions, I still found Bee Movie disappointing. Seinfeld and his co-writers labored for over two and a half years on the screenplay, but to my mind the story still seems deeply flawed.

The initial premise is that Barry is a young bee who, having just finished bee college is expected to commit to a job in the hive, which is depicted as a company town run by a corporation called Honex: we are told that once he makes his choice, he will never be able to switch to another job, he will never get a day off, and he will literally work until he drops dead. A Honex orientation guide cheerfully declares, “You’ve worked your whole lives so you can work your whole lives.” Barry rebels at this prospect, as well he should.

Brad Bird’s great animated film Ratatouille starts with a somewhat similar premise: the protagonist, Remy the rat, is pressured to conform to the lifestyle of the rest of his species, which is basically to eat garbage for the rest of their lives. (Again see “Comics in Context” #186: “Le Petit Chef”). But Remy has a driving passion to eat and create fine foods, and he envisions a different, better life for himself, which he successfully achieves.

In contrast, Barry has no ambition or dream he pursues from the start of his movie. Moreover, Bee Movie and Seinfeld himself seem to have contradictory feelings about Barry’s future in the hive. Seinfeld told Entertainment Weekly that “I love utopian societies, which is what they [bees] live in — it seemed like a very ’60s corporate environment to me, where people believed in the company, and government, and society. I love that. To me, utopia is an old Jack Lemmon movie. Growing up, I thought that would be the ultimate life, to have a convertible and work in an office in Manhattan”. Somehow I think that writer/director Billy Wilder would not have considered Jack Lemmon’s character’s corporate life in his film The Apartment (1960) as utopian.

Even though Barry is tempted by the life of a “pollen jock,” one of the macho bees who flies out of the hive to gather honey (a task actually performed by female bees in real life, by the way), he still balks at making any choice that would commit him for the rest of his life.

But this storyline takes a back seat to Barry’s evolving relationship with Vanessa. In speaking to her and thereby initiating the relationship, Barry says he is violating the rules of bee society. Metaphorically, Barry is breaking a taboo about close association with people outside his community. Now you might think that the Barry-Vanessa storyline, with its strong subtext, would become the main plotline of the movie. But no, except for the very brief uproar at the trial over it, and the occasional fits of anger from Vanessa’s human boyfriend, Barry and Vanessa’s relationship doesn’t hold onto center stage. It’s as if Barry had picked up a sidekick to provide him with moral support for the next half of the movie. It’s as if after the balcony scene Romeo and Juliet took off to star in an entirely different play.

So if Bee Movie isn’t really about finding an alternative career or finding love outside your community, maybe it’s about an oppressed people (the bees) revolting against their oppressors (the humans). Here I must issue the requisite spoiler warning: if you don’t want to learn about the last act of the film, skip the next fourteen paragraphs.

Barry triumphs in court, the bees are legally granted possession of all their honey, and this turns out to be disastrous. With all the honey they could want, the bees stop pollinating flowering plants, apparently all over the world. From her apartment overlooking Central Park (And just how can the owner of a one-woman flower shop afford this?), Vanessa shows Barry that all of the plants there are dying. As she explains, this will destroy the entire ecosystem of Earth: if flowering plants die, there’ll be no food, and animals and the human race will perish as well. (Yes, it’s another end of the world movie.) The only flowering plants left alive, she informs him, are the roses that were saved for the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California.

All right, let’s stop here. Is the movie suggesting that Barry was wrong to sue the human race, and that humans should have continued to exploit, enslave and gas the bees? (By the way, in real life, “Centuries of selective breeding by humans has created honey bees that produce far more honey than the colony needs.”).

Once Barry won the lawsuit, wouldn’t humans have negotiated with the bees to obtain some of their honey? People don’t just use honey for food; it also has medicinal benefits. Since Seinfeld and company have portrayed a bee society that has its own tiny automobiles and television shows, among other trappings of human-style civilization, surely some sort of trade agreement could have been worked out, wherein the bees would exchange honey with the humans for consumer goods. So why would honey production grind to a halt? Besides, even though honey has a long shelf life, wouldn’t the bees eventually have to replenish their stores?

Wouldn’t lots of human beings–and Seinfeld’s intelligent bees as well–have realized, as early as the trial, that if the bees stopped pollinating plants, ecological catastrophe would strike? Wouldn’t scientists have realized this before it got to the point that all the plants in Central Park were dead? Wouldn’t the human and talking bees have reached some sort of agreement to start pollinating plants again long before this point? And if plants all over the world were dying, why would humanity only save the roses for the Tournament of Roses Parade!?! Isn’t food–like wheat–more important?

Does Seinfeld mean to suggest that the bee community (metaphorically representing a minority group) is so lazy that none of them would want to continue working after they won the lawsuit? Considering that he and his co-writers had established that bee society was perfectly happy never taking any time off in their entire lives, wouldn’t retirement be anathema to most of them?

And just how stupid is Barry, the protagonist, that he didn’t notice the ecological catastrophe until it was nearly too late to reverse it? If this movie was aimed at adults, then it has to deal with the kind of logical questions that adults would ask.

Once Barry sees the light, does he first try to persuade the rest of the bees in his local hive that they have to start pollinating again? No, instead he and Vanessa embark in a scheme to steal a truckload of roses from the Tournament of Roses Parade and fly it to New York City. When the plane is in danger of crashing, the rest of Barry’s hive goes to his rescue, and only then does he fill them in on his master plan.

And so the bees use the pollen from the stolen roses to restore the plant life of Manhattan to health. Meanwhile, I found myself thinking, wouldn’t it have been easier if Barry had organized the bees that live in California to use the pollen from all the roses in Pasadena to pollinate plants out there, first? And since presumably there are talking bees out in California too, wouldn’t they have already figured this out? If Earth’s entire ecosystem is in danger, why is it important to start the repollination process in New York City? Okay, granted, as a New Yorker myself, I can sympathize with Mr. Seinfeld’s Manhattan-centric world view, but in this case it’s still wrong.

So, with Story Arc #4 resolved, Bee Movie moves into its happy ending, in which Barry not only runs a law office in the back of Vanessa’s flower shop, but also has become a member of the “pollen jocks.” This brings the movie full circle back to Story Arc #1, but the movie seems to have lost sight of that storyline’s initial point. What about not wanting to be stuck in the same job for the rest of hs life? What about never getting time off or working toll one drops dead? Barry does have his new legal career, but he doesn’t seem enthused about it, and tell the “pollen jocks” that he couldn’t wait to get out of the office.

I suppose that Bee Movie could be interpreted as a fable about a youth who rebels against the ways of his community, but then learns to value them when the community is endangered (by the humans’ oppression), and ultimately rejoins the community. That interpretation would certainly have resonance for the members of a minority group within a larger society. But to me, Bee Movie ends up seeming like a parable about giving up one’s dreams and settling for the status quo.

In Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman writes, “It’s also a fable for our 24/7 worker-bee age. We’re used to animated films like Ratatouille that salute those who don’t go with the flow, but Bee Movie takes a paradoxically fresher tack. In this movie, the power of the individual turns out to be overrated. It’s the system that’s precious, and if that message sounds a tad…reactionary, Bee Movie finds a touching beauty in it. Who’d have guessed that Jerry Seinfeld, the maestro of nothing, would spearhead a fairy tale about the inspiring glory of punching the clock?”
I’d put it differently. Who’d have guessed that Jerry Seinfeld, who did not pursue a conventional career, like that of a lawyer or doctor, but instead followed his muse into the realm of stand-up comedy, and triumphantly beat the odds, co-creating a masterwork of television comedy and becoming fabulously wealthy as a result, would spearhead a fairy tale about punching the clock? He told Charlie Rose in that November 5 show that he is still motivated by the quest to unearth “nuggets of comedy.” Seinfeld’s life is more like Ratatouille, and yet he told Roger Ebert that “I was myself on the TV show and I am in this too, except if I were born as a bee, this is what I would be like”. Really?

I’ve been following my muse into middle age. I may not be rich, but I’m proud of my growing body of work, and think I would have been bored and felt unfulfilled had I not pursued ny fascination with comics and cartoon art, a subject that mainstream culture is finally beginning to take seriously. At the end of Ratatouille, Remy loses his chance at great commercial success, but he continues to pursue his art, and thus the film comes to its satisfyingly happy conclusion. Given a choice between Bee Movie and Ratatouille as a fable for my life, I unhesitatingly choose the latter.

Oh, yes, and at the end of Bee Movie it trns out that cows talk, too, and one of them complains to lawyer Barry that humans exploit them for their milk. Perhaps this is a can of worms that Seinfeld and the other writers should have left unopened, since humans don’t just milk cattle. So would Barry B. Benson put folks like J. Wellington Wimpy and myself on trial for eating hamburgers?

Let’s return to my chapter by chapter survey of Danny Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent. Fingeroth is good at evaluating and explaining away mistaken pieces of conventional wisdom on his subject. For example, he notes that the second syllable of the Kryptonian names for Superman–Kal-El–and his father –Jor-El–sound “like one of the Hebrew names for God” (Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent, p. 45). Fingeroth points out that Superman’s co-creator Jerry Siegel is on record as revealing that “Jor-El” is simply a shortened version of his own full name, Jerome Siegel. But Fingeroth acknowledges that “it’s quite possible” that Siegel and artist Joe Shuster’s “memories of childhood Hebrew school lessons” could have “inspired” these Kryptonian names (Fingeroth p. 45). Here we should remind ourselves of one of Fingeroth’s guiding principles in writing this book: the power of the subconscious on the creative mind. Isn’t it possible that while Siegel consciously believed that he named Jor-El after himself, that the name sounded right to him because it subconsciously reminded him of a Hebrew name for God? We can never know for certain, but we should recognize the possibility.

As I argued last week, examining the work of the original creators of the superhero genre may show us whether and how its contemporary practitioners have strayed from the essential elements of the superhero concept.

For example, at one point Fingeroth speculates about Siegel and Shuster’s intentions in creating Superman: “they would have their creation embody the best of the Good Immigrant qualities. “˜Everyone says all Jews care about is money? Well, look at this: we’ve invented the most powerful man in the history of the world–and he still insists on having a day job at The Daily Planet. He is selfless and, by extension, so are we.’ He’s a tzaddik, literally “˜righteous man’ in Hebrew” (Fingeroth p. 47).

The early Superman treated criminals brutally at times, but the character quickly developed a strict moral code of behavior, truly becoming a “righteous man,” as Fingeroth says. In recent years, however, there was Marvel’s X-Statix team, mutant superheroes who were motivated primarily by seeking fame and fortune. More importantly, the “grim and gritty” trend in superhero comics that began in the 1980s and continues through the present day has brought the superhero who is quite willing to kill. Is such a character truly an archetypal “righteous man,” or is he morally compromised? The “goddamn Batman” of Frank Miller’s current All Star Batman and Robin takes a sadistic pleasure in injuring his criminal opponents (see “Comics in Context” #119; “Bats and Spats” and “Comics in Context” #178: “The Whole World Is Watching”). For the genre to progress creatively, the characterizations of superheroes must be portrayed with more complexity and sophistication. But writers must beware of diluting and subverting the superhero concept and genre in the process.

Speaking of Batman, Fingeroth references Rabbi Simcha Weinstein’s hypothesis that Batman’s origin was inspired by Kristallnacht, the 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany. As Fingeroth puts it, “Like the Jews in Europe, Bruce Wayne and his family thought they had all they needed to be insulated from the vagaries of life. Yet, like the Jews of Europe, it was all taken away from them in an instant” (Fingeroth p. 56). It’s certainly possible that this provided the inspiration for Batman’s origin.

But who created Batman’s origin? Was it Bob Kane, whom DC Comics officially credits as Batman’s creator, or Bill Finger, who, like Kane, was Jewish, and who co-created most of the original Batman mythos, or even Gardner Fox, who wrote some of the earliest Batman stories? My guess is that it was Finger, who generated most of the concepts for the early Batman, right down to the name Bruce Wayne and major elements of Batman’s costume design. Moreover, Finger’s body of comics work has a darker edge than Fox’s. In his great Silver Age work, Fox never approaches the bleak, haunting quality of the origin story in Detective Comics #33.

Then again, as Fingeroth demonstrates, Batman co-creator Bob Kane went to great lengths to conceal his Jewish background; reading this, it seems to me that Kane may even have been in a state of denial. Since, in the early days of Batman, Finger and Fox worked for him, why would Kane approve the origin story if he thought it was a parable about the plight of European Jews?

Fingeroth also wonders if Joe Chill’s shooting of Bruce Wayne’s parents was inspired by the murder of Jerry Siegel’s father. This is possible, too. Then again it appears that Kane lifted the scene of the murder of Thomas Wayne directly from a 1938 “Big Little Book” called Gang Busters in Action, illustrated by Henry Vallely. So maybe Kane wasn’t copying reality, but another artist.

But here I believe that Fingeroth comes close to a simpler answer to the question. Why couldn’t the story of Batman’s origin simply be a response to the widespread urban crime of Depression-era America? It was the lawlessness of that period that similarly inspired Dick Tracy and the classic gangster movies of the 1930s. The simple concept of a mugger appearing, seemingly at random, and gunning down a prosperous couple is a perfect image of the dangers of a lawless urban environment. It could equally well be an iconic image of the big city in the 1970s, which, not coincidentally, is the decade when the Batman returned to his late 1930s roots as a grim, avenging figure in the comics.

Following the lead of comics historian Gerard Jones, Fingeroth argues that Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s creation Steve Rogers a. k. a. Captain America was “a kind of surrogate Jew” (Fingeroth, p. 58). “If Steve Rogers was blond, well, there are blond Jews. . . . “˜Rogers’ could have been a fake name, too. So, maybe despite all outward appearances, an argument could be made for Captain America as some sort of Jewish-inflected character, the “˜weary, old-country survivor reborn as the new fighting Jew,’ as interpreted by Gerard Jones” (Fingeroth, p. 60).

I think that Fingeroth may be pushing this point further than is justified. But he’s on target when he writes that “Perhaps the most “˜Jewish’ thing about Captain America’s stories is the concerted attempt by the creative staff to make every story universal” (Fingeroth p. 59). Since Simon and Kirby intended Captain America to be a symbol of America, then it made sense that they would cast him as a member of the largest ethnic group in the country in that time before multiculturalism: in other words, as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

But yes, it’s true that the earliest Captain America stories reflect Simon and Kirby’s Jewish background. On the cover of Captain America Comics #1 the title character punches Adolf Hitler in the jaw. Though Fingeroth doesn’t, it should be noted that the first issue was cover-dated March 1941, nine months before America’s entry into World War II. Back then there was considerable isolationist sentiment against becoming involved in the war, and so Simon and Kirby’s open opposition to Hitler was rather daring.

Fingeroth is also correct to point out that the creator of Captain America’s “super-soldier serum” was “Professor Reinstein,” whom Simon and Kirby obviously based on the Jewish scientific genius Albert Einstein. Hence, the subtext is clear when, in the origin story, a Nazi agent guns down the Jewish Reinstein, and Captain America then avenges Reinstein’s death.

It’s surprising that Fingeroth doesn’t do more with his observation that the “super-soldier serum” transforms Steve Rogers into “a one-of-a-kind, perfect, Aryan-looking specimen of humanity” (Fingeroth p. 58). Ironically, Captain America physically matches the Nazis’ idealized vision of a member of the Aryan “master race.”

Were Simon and Kirby conscious of the irony? Decades later, the late Marvel writer Mark Gruenwald seemed to be, when he transferred the consciousness of Captain America’s Nazi archfoe, the Red Skull, into a cloned copy of the Captain’s own body: thus the Red Skull became Captain America’s literal evil twin.

Whether consciously or not, Simon and Kirby had turned the Nazis’ image of the Aryan superman to their own purposes. Captain America was not fighting for the dominance of a master race, but for the freedom of a democratic society in which immigrants from other ethnic groups could find refuge from fascist tyranny.

Fingeroth perceptively points to Reinstein’s declaration that Captain America will be “one of America’s saviors” and comments that “the metaphor system at work here is as much Christian as Jewish” (Fingeroth p. 58). So Captain America is a Christ figure, but couldn’t he also be viewed as a Messiah? And since Professor Reinstein remodels the once frail Steve Rogers into a physically perfect soldier, to go out and combat tyranny, couldn’t Captain America also be seen as a variation on a golem? I’ll let you ponder all of this until I continue my review of Dressed as Clark Kent next week.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF AND OTHERS

I will be interviewing Tim Sale, the artist who has frequenty collaborated with writer Jeph Loeb (on Batman: The Long Halloween, Daredevil: Yellow and Hulk: Gray, among other projects) and who does artwork for the television series Heroes, on Saturday, November 17 onstage at the Big Apple Con‘s annual “National” convention. The convention runs from Friday afternoon, November 16 through Sunday, November 18 at the Penn Plaza Pavilion at 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan.

Writer/artist Richard Howell has moved his Claypool Comics series about vampires, Deadbeats, to the Internet, and recently reintroduced a character named Edwin, who first appeared in Richard’s indie comic Portia Prinz of the Glamazons. Take a look at strips 79, 80, and 81 and see if you can figure out what they have in common with “Comics in Context.” Here’s a hint: in strip 81 Edwin delivers one of the best worded defenses of continuity I’ve ever read.

And I am pleased to welcome Fred Hembeck back to Quick Stop Entertainment, where he has resumed work on “The Fred Hembeck Show” with episode 101.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Last week I began my commentary on Danny Fingeroth’s new book Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero. The book demonstrates that Fingeroth, a former editor and writer at Marvel Comics, has realized two principles that, in my experience, most mainstream superhero comics editors and writers don’t grasp.

One is that the superhero genre works through metaphor. For example, Superman was sent from his home planet of Krypton through outer space to Earth, where he was raised as an American by Jonathan and Martha Kent. This can be read as a metaphor for the immigrant experience; it also parallels the Biblical tale of the infancy of Moses, who was born of Jewish parents, was cast adrift for his own safety, and was found and raised by Egyptians.

The second principle is related to the first. This is that stories may have meanings that their authors did not consciously intend. When I interviewed Fingeroth for Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week, I asked him, “Were any of the Jewish comics creators of the Golden and Silver Ages consciously aware of putting themes that specifically reflected their ethnic background in their work?”

Fingeroth, who is himself Jewish, replied, “I don’t think so. I think they were, if anything, trying to divest their work of any such content and make it as “˜all-American’ as possible. But the human mind is a strange and wonderful thing, and years later we can look at the work and tease out all sorts of below the surface meanings that weren’t intended to be there.”

The In his book Fingeroth asserts that “there are and were–for the most part unconscious and subconscious–true Jewish content, meaning, and themes in various seminal superhero works.” (Fingeroth, p. 19). He recognizes that such “content,” reflecting the Jewish-American experience, is present even if the authors deny its presence. “There was nothing overt or conscious about this, of course,” Fingeroth writes about such “Jewish content”: “Even creators who do not share [Will] Eisner’s disavowal of Jewish intent have only come to see it in retrospect” (Fingeroth, p. 18).

Fingeroth declares that “the creation of the superhero seems to have been more than a function of happenstance. The creation of a legion of special beings, self-appointed to protect the weak, innocent, and victimized a a time when fascism was dominating the European continent from which the creators of the heroes hailed, seems like a task that Jews were uniquely positioned to take on” (Fingeroth, p. 17).

Jerry Siegel stated that the Nazi persecution of Jews was one of his motivations for co-creating Superman, although he also points to the economic devastation of the Great Depression, which affected Americans of all ethnic backgrounds: “being unemployed and worried during the depression and knowing hopelessness and fear. Hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed Jews in Nazi Germany. . .I had the great urge to help . . . help the downtrodden masses, somehow. How could I help them when I could barely help myself? Superman was the answer” (Fingeroth p. 41). However, since Siegel wrote that in 1975, perhaps this is a case of a Jewish-American creator coming “to see it in retrospect.”

Another Hewish comics creastor of note, Neil Gaiman, told Fingeroth that “Jews had been culturally and for so long the underdog that dreams of wish-fulfillment and dreams of power crystallized into superheroes. . . .the oppressed have their stories and fantasies. Those in power don’t need fantasies” (Fingeroth pgs. 143-144).

Fingeroth maintains that, whether Jewish or not, “immigrants have an outsider’s view of a society and so understand it, in many ways, more clearly than someone born into that society” (Fingeroth p. 23). In my interview with Fingeroth, he stated “that the Jewish and other immigrants, as outsiders, were able to see what was important to the majority society, then distill those values and ideas and reflect them back through the vehicle of popular culture.”

The problem here, I suggest, is that the founding fathers of the Golden and Silver Ages of superhero comics were the children of immigrants, not immigrants themselves. Right now America is going through another great period of immigration, with New York City once again as one of its centers. Looking through my New York City neighborhood, I see Asian and Latino immigrant families all around me. What I notice is that the immigrants’ children, who were born and raised in this country, seem thoroughly Americanized. I assume that the superhero genre’s founders, who grew up within American culture, would not have had the same perspective on it as their immigrant parents would have had.

Nonetheless, second and third generation Jewish-Americans would still have felt themselves to be outsiders to some extent since they did not follow the same religion as the majority of Americans. Moreover, anti-Semitism was more overt and widespread in America in the 1930s than today. In his introduction to Fingeroth’s book, Stan Lee writes that he encountered “very little” bigotry in his life, but states that “I certainly had read, heard and known about the prejudice so many Jewish people faced”; significantly, Lee says, “I was very lucky” to have experienced so little of it (Fingeroth p. 10).

Jules Feiffer grew up reading the superhero comics of the Golden Age of the 1940s and began his own career in comics at the Golden Age’s close as Will Eisner’s assistant on The Spirit. Fingeroth quotes Feiffer’s observation that “Superman was the ultimate assimilationalist fantasy” (Fingeroth p. 24). As noted, Superman was an immigrant from another world who was raised out in the countryside, the traditional cradle of American values, to be an American himself. He even acquired a WASP-sounding name, Clark Kent. Feiffer goes on to say that “The mild manners and glasses that signified a class of nerdy Clark Kents was [sic], in no way, our real truth. Underneath the schmucky facade, there lived Men of Steel!” The “fantasy,” then, is that Superman the Kryptonian, who represents Jewish-Americans’ true ethnicity, is not only vital, powerful and downright cool, but that he is also hailed as a hero by the majority culture. (However, as Fingeroth points out later in the book, it was not until 1948 that Superman himself first discovered he was from Krypton. In the 1930s and 1940s the general populace in Superman comics had no idea he was an alien!)

I wonder if Clark represents another side of the “ultimate assimilationalist fantasy” for a minority group: being able to blend into mainstream society so perfectly that one’s true background–one’s inner identity–is undetectable. Part of the fantasy is that all you have to do is put on the glasses, adopt the proper set of “mild manners,” wear the same business suit as everyone else, and not draw attention to yourself, and voila! The disguise–and the assimilation– are complete!

As Fingeroth observes, “It’s the traditional immigrant attitude of keeping a low profile, not standing out. To stand out is to be a target, and who needs that?” (Fingeroth, p. 25).

Later, Fingeroth states that “Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, it was the desire to escape from the Jewish past that in many ways led to the creation of the superhero” (Fingeroth p. 34). He points out that “For the Jewish immigrant families like those from which Siegel and [Superman co-creator Joe] Shuster came, the dual identity was more than a convenience. When your history tells you that you can be murdered because of who your parents happened to be, the freedom provided by being able to blend into the mainstream culture is essential to survival” (Fingeroth p. 49).

Last week I showed how John Byrne subtly but sharply revised the treatment of Superman’s dual identity in The Man of Steel (1986). In the traditional view, Clark Kent is the “facade,” as Feiffer puts it, and people cannot see through to his true self, which is Superman. In The Man of Steel Superman is the public persona, and people cannot see through it to his true self, which is Clark Kent.

In justifying Superman’s dual identity in Man of Steel, Byrne appears to be using as his model the celebrity seeking privacy, rather than the immigrant assimilating in order to escape becoming the target of prejudice. But in both the traditional approach to Superman’s dual identity and Byrne’s, there is the sense that the secret identity is protection against a palpable threat. In The Man of Steel Clark Kent adopts his public persona of Superman after he is mobbed by a grateful public after publicly using his powers to save a space plane from crashing. As I noted last week, Clark tells his foster parents that “They were all over me! Like wild animals. Like maggots. Clawing. Pulling. Screaming at me” and confesses to feeling “fear” (Byrne, The Man of Steel #1, p. 28) He describes a physical threat that seems not unlike that posed by a mob of bigots attacking a member of a minority group.

Despite recasting Superman/Clark as a beleaguered celebrity, Byrne still seems to have realized, consciously or not, that the motivating force behind adopting a secret identity is fear of persecution.

Fingeroth recognizes that “To modern sensibilities, that unquestioning need for a disguise flies in the face of, if nothing else, our current ideal of the whole, integrated, non-hypocritical, complete human” (Fingeroth p. 35).

In recent years superhero comics have become more lax in their treatment of the secret identity motif. Think of all the superheroes who have been “outed” or have “outed” themselves lately, including such major figures as Spider-Man, Daredevil, Iron Man and the X-Men. As Fingeroth says, this may reflect a contemporary idealization of the “integrated” human personality. It surely also reflects an American society that has become more tolerant towards racial and ethnic differences than it was in the 1930s and 1940s. Today’s superhero writers grew up in a very different circumstances than the founders of the genre did.

There is also the more recent phenomenon of “identity politics.” The Jewish members of the superhero genre’s founding generation tended to play down their Jewish identities, in many cases even to the extent of adopting new names, in order to fit into a Christian-dominated society. (In his book Fingeroth examines how Batman co-creator Bob Kane continued to conceal his Jewish background as late as 1989 in his autobiography.) As Fingeroth points out in his book’s later chapters, starting with the Baby Boom generation, comics creators such as Howard Chaykin and Peter David are not only open about their Jewish background but even explicitly portray comics characters, like Dominic Fortune and Doc Samson, as Jewish. Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent and other books on the same subject, including Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, are efforts by Jewish-American writers to openly claim the superhero genre as a product of Jewish-American culture. Indeed, nowadays, at least some immigrant groups seek to retain elements of their native culture while settling into American society.

Marvel’s original version of X-Factor may have marked a turning point. This series’ original premise was that the original members of the X-Men posed as humans who hunted down mutants. In actuality, the original X-Men would then train the mutants they found not only how to manage the use of their powers but also to “pass” as ordinary non-mutant humans. Indeed, the original X-Men had “passed” as humans in their civilian identities from the beginning of the original X-Men comic book. But comics fans objected to this premise, recognizing that “mutants” at Marvel were metaphors for members of minority groups, and contending that it was immoral to insist that they hide their true group identities. X-Factor‘s second writer, Louise Simonson, reached the sane conclusion, created a storyline showing that X-Factor’s public stance that mutants were dangerous played into the hands of bigots, and finally had X-Factor publicly renounce it.

Years later in New X-Men, writer Grant Morrison took the next step by “outing” Professor Charles Xavier as a mutant, and thus exposing his Xavier Institute as a school for mutants (see “Comics in Context” #28: “Adapt and Assimilate”). Morrison portrayed this turn of events as a blessing in disguise, enabling the X-Men to openly campaign on behalf of mutant rights.

Since X-Men is about a team of superheroes who represent a minority group, rather than about an individual superhero, Morrison may have been correct in disposing of secret identities in this case. Having Xavier go public may well have been a necessary move in keeping X-Men relevant to 21st century America’s multicultural society.

But as I wrote last week, contemporary writers in the superhero genre may be making mistakes by downplaying or ignoring elements that were inspired by the Jewish-American culture of many of the genre’s founders.

The secret identity trope did not originate with Superman; the Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro, among others, had used it earlier. But it’s clear that the secret identity motif had particular resonance, even if unconscious, for Jewish-Americans. As Fingeroth indicates, such elements of the superhero genre that reflected Jewish concerns also proved to have great appeal to the wider audience. Feiffer’s quotation goes on to state that “America cloned itself into a country made up of millions of Clark Kents. and day after day, you could hear them muttering to themselves, I’m not really like this. If they only knew my true identity” (Fingeroth p. 24).

Fingeroth concludes, “The concept that in a modern technological society we all had inner Supermen and Superwomen yearning to be revealed was an idea that the world was waiting for even if it didn’t know it” (Fingeroth, p. 42). This society still exists. In a modern nation that encompasses millions of people, in which each of us may seem to be only a cog in the capitalist system’s wheels, in which the power of technology dwarfs that of the individual, the superhero makes sense as a fantasy by which the individual can assert himself and achieve recognition.

Fingeroth argues that “The Siegel-Shuster Superman concept was in its way the diametric opposite of the contemporary [meaning the 1930s and 1940s] fascist and communist solutions to the modern dilemma of finding meaning and identity in mass society. As expressed through Superman, the self was not to be subsumed to the collective” (Fingeroth p. 42). Nietzche didn’t believe that his ubermensch should “be subsumed to the collective,” either, and, of course, the German fascists adapted the ubermensch concept to their ideology. Nonetheless, I think that Fingeroth makes a good point that the American superhero stood for the potential value of the individual in a period when people sought solutions in ideologies that led to totalitarian systems that would crush individual liberty. “The primacy of the individual was what so many immigrants, including Eastern European Jews, came to America to partake of and conribute to” (Fingeroth p. 43).

But I think that the secret identity would have an appeal in a society of any size. You don’t have to be Jewish or a member of a minority group to identify with Clark Kent; all you need is to feel that other people don’t fully understand the real you, and that is probably a universal sentiment. Fingeroth writes of “the fantasy that having a second self touches in all of us. We all want to think there is greatness in ourselves that the world cannot see, or that we cannot allow it to see, that the facades we display in everyday life are just that–masks that society forces us to wear” (Fingeroth, p. 49).

As I have written many times in the past, the duality of human nature, whether it is between one’s “good” and “evil” sides, or between one’s public and private selves, is one of the dominant themes of the superhero genre.

The dual identity also serves as a metaphor for everyman as he is (the “civilian identity,” like Peter Parker) and everyman’s potential to become a success, to achieve his dreams, to become a “hero” (the superhero, like Spider-Man).

Moreover, the dual identity represents the necessary duality in the superhero, who is at once demigod (or demigoddess) and man (or woman). As Dr. Peter Coogan shows in his book Superhero: The Secret Origin of the Genre, the “science-fiction supermen” before Siegel and Shuster’s creation were often threats to society (see “Comics in Context” #165: “The Supervillain Defined”). The concept of Nietzche’s ubermensch, the superman “beyond good and evil,” was easily twisted by the Nazis to their own purposes. Because the American superhero is grounded in humanity through his “civilian” persona, he is our benefactor, rather than a potential tyrant: he is one of us. (Coogan notes that the secret identity is a “customary” element of the superhero genre. See “Comics in Context” #162: “The Superhero Defined.”)

Looking at Silver Age superhero comics, the contemporary reader might be surprised to see how many “normal” people appear in their pages. For example, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby loved to show their thunder god Thor interacting with ordinary folks on the streets of Manhattan. This is in part because Lee and Kirby must have recognized the necessity that their superheroes must be part of the society that they defend. The secret “civilian” identity makes the superhero into a member of that society.

In contrast, nowadays, not only have secret identities fallen out of fashion, but it often seems that virtually everyone in a contemporary superhero comic is a costumed character. This is the situation that Mark Waid and Alex Ross critiqued in Kingdom Come, which depicts a world in which there are too many superheroes, and they fall to fighting among themselves. Back in a 1996 interview for Westfield Comics, Ross said, “I would criticize modern superheroes as being little more than gangs fighting gangs. When they’re removed into their own environments that are all these techno-babble, Kirby-derived playgrounds and you’ve got characters upon characters and not one person looks like they live in the real world, after a while it feels like another planet.” When the Westfield interviewer suggested that “It’s the contrast between real life and the life they lead, in other words, that is the source of what’s interesting about them,” Ross responded, “Yeah, because ultimately, as far as I’m concerned, once you remove them to their own environment, where it’s just a land of superheroes, then it’s literally become as boring as real life [laughter].”

As my regular readers know, I dislike DC’s Identity Crisis and Marvel’s Civil War. But I recognize that each represents a backlash to the fashion of disposing of secret identities and separating superheroes from the rest of society.

In Identity Crisis writer Brad Meltzer directs readers’ attention back to the impetus for adopting dual identities: fear of persecution. He shows that when superheroes publicly reveal their dual identities, they expose their loved ones–“ordinary” people–to attack.

Civil War pulls in different directions at once. By having Spider-Man and Iron Man publicly reveal their secret identities, Civil War actually separates them from the rest of society, since they can no longer lead normal lives within it. (Spider-Man‘s current “One More Day” storyline makes the negative consequences clear.) On the other hand, the climax of Civil War comes when a group of ordinary citizens emerge from seemingly out of nowhere and restrain Captain America from further assaulting Iron Man. These citizens claim that Captain America has lost sight of what the people want, which is greater government supervision of superheroes. I disagree with the idea that Captain America was wrong to fight for individual freedom in Civil War. Yet it is appropriate that the “ordinary” people on the street, who were so visible in Silver Age Marvel Comics, should reemerge to remind the superheroes, who were behaving like what Ross called “gangs fighting gangs,” of their duty towards them.

The psychological appeal of the dual/secret identity should be more evident in this age of the Internet, in which people masquerade behind screen names and adopt alternate personas in virtual worlds like Second Life.

I’m writing this only a few days after Halloween, which is society’s annual celebration of alternate identities. At the annual Halloween parties at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA), “ordinary” people dress as costumed superheroes, thus expressing more assertive, liberated sides of their personalities for an evening. This year, at the party and outdoors on Halloween, I saw examples of that contemporary Halloween trend in which adult women dress in a more erotically charged manner than they would ordinarily attempt.

It is wearisome to see newspaper or television reports on San Diego’s Comic Con that give the impression that everyone there is in costume, rather than the one percent or less who actually are. But New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, who attended this year’s San Diego Comic Con, has the right perspective on Comic-Con cosplay (July 28, 2007). “Every day we wake up to navigate through a faceless, inhuman, Made-in-China existence,” she wrote, with a certain political incorrectness, but “events like Comic-Con. . . give men, women and children of all ages permission to dress up and act out.” Like Halloween, Comic Con suspends the normal rules of society, enabling people to outwardly assume different identities. Dargis described Comic-Con as a place “where people can give physical form to the passions that the rest of the year remain safely hidden from the cruel world.” (So what happens at Comic-Con stays at Comic-Con?)

Yes, this happens at fantasy and science fiction cons, too. But the superhero genre, which originated in comics, is the area of pop culture that is most identified with the concept of alternate identities. Writers and editors of the superhero genre should be wary of departing from one of the major factors in the genre’s psychological appeal.

New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella recently wrote that “Art is personal; it makes people think about their secret lives” (Nov. 5, 2007). Intelligently handled, the superhero genre can deal with exactly that: the “secret lives” of the characters, the writers, and the readers. This, Acocella is saying, lies at the heart of art.

Turning to the creation of the superhero genre, Fingeroth observes that “There are the legends surrounding the golem, and surely these were part of the superhero mix” (Fingeroth p. 33), noting further that Michael Chabon deals extensively with the golem in Kavalier and Clay. In Jewish folklore a golem is a superhuman being created from clay (as in the name of Kavalier’s partner?), soil or mud by a holy man (thereby paralleling God’s creation of Adam) to serve him. Golems are of low intelligence and are potentially dangerous. In the most celebrated golem story, Rabbi Judah Loew creates a golem to protect the Jews of Prague from persecution; the golem eventually begins attacking and killing people, and the rabbi deactivates him. Fingeroth asserts that the golem legend was “riffed on in Frankenstein,” meaning the 1931 movie, though he doesn’t demonstrate a direct connection. I see that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel was first published in 1818, whereas the story of Rabbi Loew’s golem first appeared in print in 1847. In any case, the two tales parallel each other.

I wonder how much the golem legend really is applicable to the superhero genre. Although the “science-fiction supermen” (like Frankenstein’s monster) that preceded Siegel and Shuster’s Superman could be dangerous, like the golem, the American superhero isn’t a threat to the public at large. I suppose that one could say that Siegel and Shuster, in creating Superman, were comparable to the holy men of legend creating a golem to combat evil and protect the innocent, albeit in a fictional world. But within the context of the stories, the superhero is usually neither unintelligent nor a servant of a master who created him. Perhaps one could say that the typical superhero is his own golem, creating a heroic identity for himself in which he goes out to perform good deeds.

In fact, it seems to me that the early superhero who is most like a golem may be Wonder Woman, whose creator, William Moulton Marston, wasn’t Jewish. Wonder Woman originated as the figure of a child, molded from clay by the Amazon queen Hippolyta, and endowed with life by the Olympian gods. But was Marston thinking of the golem, or of the creation of Adam? Considering the role of Greek mythology in the Wonder Woman mythos, Marston may have been thinking of the story that Prometheus created the first human beings out of clay. (It suddenly strikes me that in Jack Kirby’s The Eternals, the Forgotten One, a benefactor of humanity who was punished by Zuras, may in part be based on Prometheus.)

Fingeroth contends that “there’s little evidence of [Carl] Burgos’s Jewish roots” in his stories about his creation, the original Human Torch (Fingeroth p. 65). But the original Torch’s origin (in Marvel Comics #1, 1939) certainly parallels the golem legend: a modern version of the wise man of legend, a scientist named Professor Horton, creates an android with superhuman powers, which breaks free and goes on a rampage before finally settling into his career as a superhero.

In writing about Jerry Siegel, Fingeroth reveals something that had escaped my notice before this: that Siegel’s immigrant father, Mitchell (born Michel) Siegel, died during a robbery of his store, either from being shot or from a heart attack. Fingeroth correctly argues that the loss of his father gave Jerry Siegel strong psychological impetus to create a fictional superhero. Oddly, Fingeroth overlooks the fact that Siegel wrote not one but two deaths of father figures into the pre-Byrne Superman legend: Jor-El dies in saving his son from the destruction of Krypton, and Clark Kent’s foster father makes a deathbed speech instructing Clark to use his powers to benefit humanity.

At the MoCCA Halloween party, I was taken aside and asked my expert opinion: is Superman like Moses or Jesus? I gave the same answer that Fingeroth does in his book: Superman has parallels to both. Fingeroth says that “Moses is viewed by some theological thinkers as a precursor to Jesus, both figures having been sent as babies to save their people and change the world” (Fingeroth p. 44).

Here I can draw upon my background as a Catholic. Not just “some theological thinkers,” but also the whole Catholic Church finds many parallels in the Old Testament to the life of Jesus, and interprets them as precursors to Christ. Hence, for example, Jonah’s stay in the belly of the whale for three days foreshadows Christ’s death and subsequent resurrection on the third day.

What’s really going on is that Biblical figures like Moses and Jonah and even Jesus are following archetypal mythical patterns, and it should be no surprise that Superman, a figure from modern “mythology,” likewise parallels elements of the lives of Moses and Jesus.

Next week I will further explore the ideas in Danny Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent, which should be a key book for students of the superhero genre.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

Titan Books has just published Steve Saffel’s lavishly illustrated coffee table book Spider-Man: The Icon, which covers the web-slinger’s history in comics, movies, television, records, toys, and every other relevant form of media and merchandising. You can read my interview with him for Publishers Weekly‘s Comics Week here.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

How time flies when you’re having fun. I started writing “Comics in Context” back in the summer of 2003, and now I’ve reached this column’s bicentennial. Each installment runs at least 5000 words, so by now I’ve written over a million words for “Comics in Context.”

Originally the column appeared at the IGN website, and, at the point that I’m writing this, you can still find the first 134 installments over there through Googling. When my redoubtable editor, Ken Plume, left IGN for Quick Stop Entertainment, my column and I followed. As I write this, Ken is in the process of posting the entire run of “Comics in Context” on its Quick Stop archive page: he’s already put the first thirty up. All of my Quick Stop columns (135 through the present) are available there, of course. Towards the end of my stay at IGN, it began altering the titles for my column; when Ken posts them here at Quick Stop, the original titles I gave them will be restored.

Reaching a hundredth or two hundredth anniversary of a column is a good point at which to take stock of what I’ve done in the past, and to determine what I should do in the future. As “Comics in Context” neared its hundredth installment, I told Ken that I realized that I hadn’t yet written about the most important figure in cartoon art. “Jack Kirby?” he asked. No, I meant Walt Disney, and with “Comics in Context” #100 I began a good number of installments about Disney and other important figures of the Golden Age of Hollywood animation. But Ken was right that I should have written about Kirby more than I had, and I took the opportunity with my recent columns about the “Galactus trilogy” and The Eternals.

For my readers’ benefit and my own, I have compiled an incomplete index of the many writers and artists about whom I’ve written in “Comics in Context” so far. Each person’s name is followed first, usually by the name of at least one of his or her works that I’ve mentioned, and then by the numbers of the columns in which he or she appears. Longtime readers will not be surprised that Neil Gaiman is far out in front of the competition.

Adams, Neal (Batman): 129
Adams, Scott (Dilbert): 66
Addams, Charles (The New Yorker cartoonist): 72
Arno, Peter (The New Yorker cartoonist): 157
Arriola, Gus (Gordo): 66
Austin, Terry (sketchbook): 90
Avery, Tex (MGM animated cartoons): 100, 101, 173, 188, 189
Bails, Jerry (comics historian): 157
Baker, Kyle (Plastic Man): 27
Barks, Carl (Uncle Scrooge): 24, 114
Baum, L. Frank (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz [prose novel]): 25
Bird, Brad (The Incredibles, Ratatouille [animated films]): 62, 186
Blake, William (illustrator): 72
Block, Herbert (“Herblock”) (editorial cartoons): 159
Bolland, Brian (Batman: The Killing Joke): 193
Boreanaz, David (Bones [TV]): 144
Bradbury, Ray (science fiction author): 8, 98
Brinkley, Nell (illustrator): 159
Brunetti, Ivan (“Speak: Nine Cartoonists” exhibit): 122
Burns, Charles (“Speak: Nine Cartoonists” exhibit): 122
Burroughs, Edgar Rice (Tarzan of the Apes [prose novel]): 132
Burton, Tim (Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride [film]): 103
Bushmiller, Ernie (Nancy): 66
Busiek, Kurt (Astro City): 14, 21, 37, 63, 70, 178
Byrne, John (Generations 2): 25, 66, 200
Caniff, Milton (Terry and the Pirates): 66, 71, 154
Capp, Al (Li’l Abner): 66, 71, 177
Chabon, Michael (JSA All-Stars): 21
Cho, Frank (Liberty Meadows): 66
Clampett, Bob (Warners animated cartoons): 101
Claremont, Chris (The Uncanny X-Men): 37, 39, 124, 134, 135, 172
Cleese, John (True Brit): 66
Clowes, Daniel (Eightball): 64, 122
Cockrum, Dave (X-Men): 156, 172
Colan, Gene (Daredevil): 170, 171
Cole, Jack (Plastic Man): 27
Coogan, Peter (Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre [prose book]): 98, 141, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166
Cooke, Darwyn (The New Frontier): 30
Cornwell, Dean (illustrator): 131, 159
Crane, Roy (Wash Tubbs): 71
Cronenberg, David (A History of Violence [film]): 111
Cruikshank, George (Charles Dickens’ illustrator): 159
Crumb, Robert (Mr. Natural): 64, 122, 156
Curtis, Dan (Dark Shadows [TV]): 11, 12
Daumier, Honore (caricaturist): 159
David, Peter (Hulk: The End): 2, 38, 81
Davis, Stuart (painter): 159
DeFalco, Tom (Comic Creators on Spider-Man [book]): 44
Dini, Paul (Zatanna): 24, 27, 29, 180
Dirks, Rudolph (The Katzenjammer Kids): 59, 71
Disney, Walt (animated feature films): 109, 110, 136, 157, 158, 160, 161, 165, 177
Ditko, Steve (The Amazing Spider-Man): 64, 113
Donner, Richard (Superman: The Movie [film]): 90, 143
Doran, Colleen (A Distant Soil): 6, 123
Drake, Stan (The Heart of Juliet Jones): 66
Dr. Seuss (Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas): 24
Dunst, Kirsten (Spider-Man [films]): 45, 46, 181, 182, 183
Dushku, Eliza (Tru Calling [TV]): 10, 120
Eisner, Will (The Spirit): 6, 25, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71, 80, 81, 94, 155, 159, 179, 180
Englehart, Steve (Batman: Dark Detective): 84, 87, 88, 90, 93, 104
Evanier, Mark (San Diego Comic Con panel moderator): 6, 8, 94, 95, 141, 145, 147
Feiffer, Jules (The Great Comic Book Heroes [book]): 26
Feininger, Lyonel (Kin-Der-Kids): 59, 71, 151, 152
Finger, Bill (Batman): 94, 97, 145
Fingeroth, Danny (Superman on the Couch [prose book]): 41, 200
Fisher, Bud (Mutt and Jeff): 71
Flagg, James Montgomery (illustrator): 131, 159
Fleischer, Max and Dave (Betty Boop and Popeye animated cartoons): 116, 117, 118, 152, 157, 177, 190
Foster, Hal (Prince Valiant): 71, 177
Franklin, Benjamin (political cartoon): 159
Freleng, Friz (Warners animated cartoons): 101
Frid, Jonathan (Dark Shadows [TV]): 11, 149
Gaiman, Neil (1602, Anansi Boys, Eternals)–5, 8, 13, 17, 18, 21, 25, 28, 32, 33, 35, 36, 65, 67, 72, 85, 105, 106, 107, 108, 129, 144, 164, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199
Garis, Howard Roger (“Uncle Wiggily” books): 177
Geppi, Steve (Geppi’s Entertainment Museum): 176, 177
Gerber, Steve (Superman: Last Stand on Krypton): 27
Gibbons, Dave (Watchmen): 65, 193
Gillray, James (caricaturist): 71, 72
Gould, Chester (Dick Tracy): 66, 71, 153
Gray, Harold (Little Orphan Annie): 71, 177
Groening, Matt (The Simpsons [TV and film]): 8, 188
Gruelle, Johnny (Raggedy Ann and Andy [book illustrator]): 159
Gruenwald, Mark (Squadron Supreme): 150
Guisewite, Cathy (Cathy): 66
Guston, Philip (cartoon-like paintings): 20
Hamill, Mark (Comic Book: The Movie [film]): 7
Harris, Thomas (Hannibal [prose novel and film]): 165
Harvey, R. C. (The Art of the Comic Book [prose book]): 69
Hembeck, Fred (“The Fred Hembeck Show” [Quick Stop column]): 76, 79, 113
Henson, Jim (The Muppets): 47, 96, 114, 115
Hernandez, Jaime (Love and Rockets): 122
Herriman, George (Krazy Kat): 59, 71, 152, 177
Hinton, S. E. (Hawkes Harbor [prose novel]): 70
Hogarth, Burne (Tarzan): 66
Hogarth, William (18th century sequential artist): 71, 159
Homer, Winslow (illustrator): 159
Howell, Richard (Soulsearchers and Company): 38
Idle, Eric (Monty Python’s Spamalot [musical]): 82
Irving, John (“An Evening with Harry, Carrie and Garp”): 148
Jackson, Peter (King Kong [film]): 31, 99, 121
Jenkins, Paul (The Sentry): 63
Johnston, Lynn (For Better or for Worse): 66
Jones, Chuck (Warners animated cartoons): 24, 72, 101, 102
Kanigher, Robert (Enemy Ace): 64
Kelly, Walt (Pogo): 24, 66, 76, 177
King, Frank (Gasoline Alley): 122, 153
King, Stephen (The Dark Tower): 26, 148, 169
Kirby, Jack (The Eternals): 6, 59, 64, 95, 155, 184, 185, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199
Kitchen, Denis (Will Eisner’s agent and publisher): 80, 145, 170
Kring, Tim (Heroes [TV]): 163
Kubert, Joe (Enemy Ace): 64, 193
Kuper, Peter (Metamorphoses): 28
Kurtzman, Harvey (MAD): 156
Landau, Juliet (Buffy the Vampire Slayer [TV]): 169
Lantz, Walter (Woody Woodpecker animated cartoons): 189
Lasseter, John (Cars [animated film]): 120, 137, 138
Lee, Ang (Hulk [film]): 2
Lee, Jim (All-Star Batman and Robin): 119, 178
Lee, Stan (Fantastic Four): 6, 15, 16, 59, 64, 71, 113, 142, 168, 170, 171, 184, 185
Leonardo da Vinci (caricatures): 159
Leyendecker, J. C. (illustrator): 131
Lichtenstein, Roy (comics-based paintings): 153
Loeb, Jeph (Hulk: Gray): 16, 27, 49, 75
Lucas, George (Star Wars [films]): 86
MacDonald, Heidi (“The Beat”): 167
Maguire, Tobey (Spider-Man [films]): 45, 46, 181, 182, 183
Mayer, Robert (SuperFolks [prose novel]): 63
McCay, Winsor (Little Nemo in Slumberland): 60, 71, 151, 157, 177
McCloud, Scott (Making Comics): 81, 156
McCracken, Craig (Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends [TV]): 55, 103, 115
McDonnell, Patrick (Mutts): 24, 66
McFarlane, Todd (Spider-Man): 124
McKean, Dave (MirrorMask [film]): 10, 85
McManus, George (Bringing Up Father): 60
Meltzer, Brad (Identity Crisis): 57, 58, 63, 67
Mignola, Mike (Hellboy): 40
Miller, Frank (The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Sin City, 300): 30, 31, 34, 65, 78, 79, 83, 92, 119, 125, 146, 175, 178
Miyazaki, Hayao (Howl’s Moving Castle [animated film]): 91
Moore, Alan (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta, Watchmen): 22, 23, 32, 65, 66, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 193
Morrison, Grant (New X-Men): 28
Nast, Thomas (editorial cartoons): 24, 159
Nelson, Michael J. (RiffTrax): 185
Nevins, Jess (Heroes and Monsters [prose book]): 37
Nolan, Christopher (Batman Begins [film]): 89, 90
O’Donnell, Peter (Modesty Blaise): 61
Oliphant, Pat (editorial cartoons): 159
O’Neil, Dennis (Batman): 32
Opper, Frederick (Happy Hooligan): 60
Otomo, Katsuhiro (Steamboy [film]): 77
Outcault, Richard (The Yellow Kid): 59, 71
Panter, Gary (Jimbo): 122, 156
Park, Nick (Wallace and Gromit): 47, 112
Parker, Lara (Dark Shadows [TV and prose novels]): 149
Pekar, Harvey (American Splendor): 6, 64, 73, 111
Powell, Michael and Pressburger, Emeric (The Tales of Hoffman [film]): 85
Raimi, Sam (Spider-Man [films]): 45, 46, 181, 182, 183
Raymond, Alex (Flash Gordon): 71
Reeves, George (The Adventures of Superman [TV]): 48
Revere, Paul (political illustration): 159
Rigg, Diana (The Avengers [TV]): 52, 53
Robinson, Jerry (Batman): 94, 97, 141, 145
Rockwell, Norman (illustrator): 131
Rodriguez, Robert (Frank Miller’s Sin City [film]): 78, 79, 83, 92
Rogers, Marshall (Batman: Dark Detective): 84, 87, 88, 90, 93, 104, 171
Romita, John Sr. (The Amazing Spider-Man): 124
Rosa, Don (Uncle Scrooge): 114, 119
Ross, Alex (Justice): 29, 30, 66, 159, 193
Rowling, J. K. (Harry Potter [prose novels]): 148, 187
Sale, Tim (Hulk: Gray): 16, 27, 49
Schaffenberger, Kurt (Hero Gets Girl): 27
Schulz, Charles M. (Peanuts): 24, 66, 120, 154, 157, 177
Schumer, Arlen (The Silver Age of Comic Book Art [history book]): 26
Schwartz, Julius (Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, etc.): 32, 176
Segar, E. C. (Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye): 63, 71, 152, 157, 177
Seth (“Speak: Nine Cartoonists” exhibit): 122
Simon, Joe (Captain America): 125
Singer, Bryan (Superman Returns [film]): 139, 143
Sinnott, Joe (Fantastic Four): 170, 171
Smith, Jeff (Bone): 78, 167
Smith, Kevin (Quick Stop); 146, 147
Snicket, Lemony (Little Lit): 24
Sondheim, Stephen (composer): 77
Spiegelman, Art (Maus): 24, 59, 60, 61, 64, 80, 122
Starr, Leonard (Mary Perkins On Stage): 66
Steig, William (Shrek! [illustrated book]): 186
Steinberg, Flo (Marvel legend): 170, 171
Steinberg, Saul (illustrator): 159
Steranko, Jim (Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD): 64, 124
Stern, Roger (Superman: The Never-Ending Battle [prose novel]): 90
Sterrett, Cliff (Polly and Her Pals): 71
Story, Tim (Fantastic Four movies): 93, 184, 185
Straczynski, J. Michael (The Amazing Spider-Man): 14, 58
Tarantino, Quentin (Kill Bill [film]): 10
Tartakovsky, Genndy (Star Wars: Clone Wars [TV]): 21, 55
Tenniel, Sir John (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland): 159
Thomas, Roy (Alter Ego): 66
Thurber, James (The New Yorker cartoonist): 157
Timm, Bruce (Batman: The Animated Series): 144
Topffer, Rodolphe (19th century sequential artist): 71
Travers, P. L. (Mary Poppins [prose novels]): 158, 160
Trudeau, G. B. (Doonesbury): 66
Uslan, Michael (The Spirit [film]): 80, 169, 170, 193
Vess, Charles (Sandman): 65
Walker, Brian (“Masters of American Comics” exhibit): 66, 71, 145, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156
Ware, Chris (Jimmy Corrigan): 122, 156
Watterson, Bill (Calvin and Hobbes): 66
West, Adam (Batman [TV]): 50
West, Billy (Futurama [TV]): 147
Whedon, Joss (Buffy the Vampire Slayer [TV]): 9, 13, 42, 43, 54, 58, 77, 98, 164
Zemeckis, Robert (The Polar Express [film]): 66, 83

This is an impressive list, even if I do say so myself. Even so, I see gaps. How is it that I haven’t gotten around to writing about Bill Sienkiewicz yet? Or Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat animated cartoons? Someday, here or elsewhere, I intend to write about the work of the two great Silver Age DC writers John Broome and Gardner Fox. There are also major figures who have already made my list, but I feel I haven’t written enough about them yet: expect to see columns about Walt Kelly’s Pogo and Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates in the foreseeable future. My main area of interest will remain American comics and animation, but I should make more forays into foreign language comics and cartoon art. The forthcoming Persepolis movie will afford one opportunity early next year, and since 2007 is the centennial of Herge’s birth, I should stop postponing taking a look at his creation Tintin. And of course there are always new projects on the horizon: Robert Zemeckis, Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary’s Beowulf film looms ahead, which will also give me the excuse to write about the original Beowulf, the earliest great megaheroic work in (archaic) English.

I will also continue exploring new creations by writers, artists, and even film directors whose work has interested me in the past. For example, back in “Comics in Context” #41 I wrote about former Marvel editor Danny Fingeroth’s book Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society. I recently interviewed him about his new book, Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics and the Creation of the Superhero, which was published this month (October) by Continuum.

Fingeroth’s book is about a subject that has been attracting attention of late: the role that Jewish-Americans had in originating the superhero genre in the 1930s and developing it right through the present day. Among the many important Jewish-American writers and artists whom Fingeroth discusses are Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of the first superhero, Superman; Bob Kane, Bill Finger, and Jerry Robinson, the creators of the Batman mythos; Joe Simon, co-creator of Captain America; Will Eisner, creator of the Spirit; and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, founding fathers of the Marvel Universe.

Lee, Eisner and Simon also worked as editors, and Fingeroth perceptively likens two other Jewish-Americans, Silver Age DC editors Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz, to auteur filmmakers. “In the same way that a John Ford or Orson Welles movie is always recognizable as such,” Schwartz and Weisinger projected “the personality of the editors” in their comics, as “interpreted through the skills of the writers and artists they employed” (Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent, p. 82).

Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay provided a fictionalized portrayal of Jewish-American comics creators of the 1930s and 1940s. In his excellent book Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, Gerard Jones revealed the true history of that generation, concentrating on Siegel and Shuster. Using that history as his basis, in Disguised as Clark Kent Fingeroth investigates how Jewish-American culture may be reflected in the thematic content of superhero stories over the decades, for example, through he sense of being an outsider (see Spider-Man) and concerns with coping against racial prejudice (see X-Men).

Fingeroth also looks beyond the superhero genre’s founding generation to Jewish comics creators of later generations. “As the Passover Seder. . . instructs Jews to tell the story of the Exodus as if they themselves were slaves freed from Egypt, then perhaps each generation of Jewish creators must define the superhero metaphor for itself” (Fingeroth p. 121).

But nowadays the population of superhero comics writers, artists and editors is not only far larger but also far more diverse in background than it was when the genre started out in the late 1930s. As Fingeroth told me (in a part that wasn’t included in the published interview), “I find it more interesting how many non-Jewish creators are attracted to superheroes these days. Thanks to the phenomenon of fandom, as well as other social factors, comics have become a business peopled, on the creative end, certainly, by people from all over the world, not just the highly Jewish New York metropolitan area.”

Moreover, it’s now been nearly seventy years since Superman first appeared. The first generation of creators in the superhero genre grew up during the Great Depression, in a world that was on the brink of war; many of them were the children of Eastern European immigrants. Today’s comics writers and artists have necessarily grown up in very different circumstances. How does this affect their approach to the genre and the characters that were created by a previous generation?

Let’s start by examining the familiar concept of Superman’s secret identity of Clark Kent. In his book Fingeroth repeats the familiar argument that the secret identity motif relates to the immigrants’ efforts at assimilation into mainstream American society. By giving him the WASPy name of “Clark,” “the Kents, literally and figuratively anglicized their newfound son,” (Fingeroth p. 46). Similarly, as Fingeroth pointed out earlier, Jacob Kurtzberg took the “Irish-sounding” name “Jack Kirby” (Fingeroth p. 31). Superman was the “real” identity; “Clark Kent” was the identity he and his foster parents invented so that he could blend in with mainstream society.

In “rebooting” Superman in the 1986 mini-series The Man of Steel, John Byrne followed his characteristic policy of going “back to the basics” with a longrunning superhero. But he was also sharply revising certain aspects of the Superman legend. Byrne rejected the tradition whereby “Clark Kent” was Superman’s disguise, in which he pretended to be not just “mild-mannered” but downright timid and clumsy, a “caricature” of humanity, in Jules Feiffer’s description (in his pioneering study, The Great Comic Book Heroes). In issue 1 of The Man of Steel, Clark and his foster parents devise the Superman persona as a means of preventing the general public from recognizing who he truly is: Clark Kent.

Byrne appeared to be thinking not of the immigrant’s problems with assimilation but of the contemporary concern for privacy in a culture that worships celebrity. (I refer you to Time TV critic Jamie Poniewozik’s description of Disney Channel character Hannah Montana as “Superman for tween girls”: a normal girl with a secret identity as a celebrity pop singer.)

Upon first publicly using his super-powers, Clark is mobbed by onlookers. Admitting to his “fear” of the mob, Clark tells his foster parents, “They were all over me! Like wild animals. Like maggots. Clawing. Pulling. Screaming at me” (Byrne, The Man of Steel #1, p. 28). That’s when Pa Kent comes up with the idea of the Superman persona and costume: the public will pay attention to Superman and leave Clark alone. Clark isn’t worried about assimilating into society; he is desperate to find privacy–a “fortress of solitude”–“where no one will ever think to look for me” (Byrne, The Man of Steel #1, p. 30)

The Man of Steel ends with Byrne boldly overturning another element of Weisinger-era tradition. In his book Fingeroth traces how editor Mort Weisinger and his writers (who included Jerry Siegel) portrayed Superman as longing for Krypton, as if it were a lost paradise. Fingeroth persuasively establishes that “survivor’s guilt” is a significant theme in Weisinger’s Superman, as well as in Batman and the Silver Age Captain America. These are concepts that would resonate with Jewish-Americans of Siegel and Weisinger’s generation, who were aware that they had survived, whereas the Jews of Europe perished in the Holocaust.

In the final issue of The Man of Steel, Superman discovers that he is from Krypton when one of his dead father Jor-El’s devices imprints that knowledge on his mind. At first Byrne seems to be evoking the theme of “survivor’s guilt” theme and even explicitly alluding to the Holocaust: Superman exclaims, ” A planet that died! Died in a terrible fiery holocaust that shattered the world. . .and left only one survivor. Me!!” (Byrne, The Man of Steel #6, p. 20).

But then, in an extraordinary speech, Superman denies that his Kryptonian background has anything to do with his sense of self: “I may have been conceived out there in the endless depths of space. . .but I was born when the rocket opened, on Earth, in America. I’ll cherish always the memories Jor-El and Lara gave me. . .but only as curious mementos of a life that might have been. Krypton bred me, but it was Earth that gave me all I am. All that matters. It was Krypton that made me Superman, but it is the Earth that makes me human!!” (Byrne, The Man of Steel p. 22). It’s not a question of assimilation. Byrne’s Superman was born and raised in America, and doesn’t consider himself truly Kryptonian at all.

Perhaps this shift in attitude was to be expected, nearly a half century after Superman’s 1938 debut. By 1986 perhaps the majority of Superman‘s readers were two or more generations removed from their immigrant forebears, and had no emotional connection to their ancestral homelands.

(I am well aware that the status of The Man of Steel in current DC continuity is questionable. My point is that it is an example of how contemporary creators in the superhero genre may view longrunning characters differently than a previous generation of creators did.)

Similarly, in the Smallville television series, Clark is the “real” person who is destined someday to adopt the Superman persona. Smallville‘s Clark clearly prefers to consider himself an Earthman, the show portrays Jor-El ambiguously, and its references to Krypton make it seem vaguely sinister rather than an idyllic lost world. Far from longing for Krypton, Smallville‘s Clark would probably be happier if he had no connection with the place (apart from his newly arrived cousin Kara).

Are these shifts in attitude towards Krypton necessary adaptations to changing times? Or is something important in the Superman concept being lost?

So I wonder what is the fate of the superhero genre seven decades after its start. Will it continue to be successfully reinvented and reenergized with each succeeding generation? Or is the superhero genre doomed inevitably to fade in vitality and purpose the further we get from the time and circumstances in which it originated in Depression-era New York City? I will return to this subject and explore Danny Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent further next week.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF AND OTHERS

You can read my interview with Danny Fingeroth about his book Disguised as Clark Kent in the October 23, 2007 edition of Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week.

Then go read Ken Plume’s interview with Monty Python’s Terry Jones, concerning topics ranging from Chaucer’s humor to the similarities between 21st century America and the Roman Empire, here at Quick Stop.

Now that I’ve written my two hundredth “Comics in Context,” “The Fred Hembeck Show,” which took a break at number 100, will never catch up with me! But the reason that Fred has taken a leave of absence from his Quick Stop column is that he’s been busy putting together a retrospective of his entire career in comics, The Nearly Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus, which comes out next February. You can find out more by visiting the Omnibus’s official site.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Chapter Six of Neil Gaiman’s Eternals series begins by forging the first known connection between the works of Jack Kirby and the collaborations of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Kirby created the original Eternals series in the 1970s, and Chapter Six’s title, “Modified Rapture,” is a famous line from Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1885 comic opera The Mikado.

Presumably Gaiman is alluding to the concept of the “rapture,” whereby at some point in the future, Christians will be transported into the sky to join with the returned Christ. The parallel in the Eternals mythos is the Uni-Mind, created when Eternals rise into the sky and merge together into a single being that represents their collective consciousness.

On the first page various people, most of them asleep, speak what appears to be the words of the awakening Dreaming Celestial, with the repeated declaration, “I am” (Gaiman issue 6 p. 1). This alludes to Yahweh or Jehovah, the Hebrew name for God, which is commonly believed to mean “I am.” The Dreaming Celestial is asserting his claim to be God, and through Thena’s son Joey, he even says, “Let there be light” (Gaiman issue 6 p. 4), the words with which the Biblical God began the creation of the universe in the Book of Genesis. Readers should remember that he is only one of an unknown number of Celestials, and that the Dreaming Celestial also seems to be based on Lucifer and Cthulhu. If the Dreaming Celestial is a God with a capital G, he is opposition to the other “space gods,” his fellow Celestials. As his blackened armor signifies, the Dreaming Celestial represents darkness, not light, even though the armor regains its original golden color as dawn approaches.

Note that Thena tells Ikaris that “I couldn’t fly well even when I was at full power” (Gaiman issue 6 p. 5). That seems unlikely, considering that she had thousands of years to practice self-levitation; based on the goddess of wisdom, Thena should be capable of mastering such mental feats, and there’s no indication in past Eternals series that she has trouble flying. But Thena’s statement is a reminder that, not having undergone a death and resurrection, she has not been restored to full Eternal status.

The Deviant Morjak captures and threatens to kill Joey. When Thena shows parental concern, Morjak sneers, “He’s not your son. He’s not even the same species as you. He’s your pet” (Gaiman issue 6 p. 9 panel 3). Well, ordinary humans (Homo sapiens), Deviants and Eternals are probably both separate species within the same genus, Homo: Zuras later refers to the Eternals as Homo immortalis (Gaiman issue 7 p. 9). The Deviants are driven by racial prejudices that, in the Kirby series, even led them to condemn other Deviants whose genetic makeup violated certain unstated standards. It is no surprise, then, that the Deviants have contempt for ordinary humans, and even regard them as potential food (see Gaiman issue 6 p. 9 panel 1).

As the Dreaming Celestial’s armor reverts to its original golden color, “the universe shudders and shifts” (Gaiman issue 6 p. 12). This dramatically indicates just how powerful a Celestial, the Dreaming Celestial in particular, can be. Miniscule as a Celestial’s physical armor may be in comparison to the unimaginable vastness of the universe, Gaiman is indicating that the Dreaming Celestial is enough of a “God” to endanger the entire cosmos. I appreciate the inclusion of cameos by Uatu the Watcher (the only character to appear in both Gaiman’s Eternals and 1602) and Galactus, which further establish the Eternals mythos as part of the Marvel universe, and also may allude to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s monumental “Galactus trilogy” in Fantastic Four #48-50 (March-May, 1966). Uatu and Galactus’s reactions to the awakening of the Dreaming Celestial reinforce the impression of the latter’s universe-threatening might. Possibly Gaiman is also alluding to Walter Simonson’s story about a final clash between Galactus and the Dreaming Celestial in an alternate future in Fantastic Four #339-340 (April-May, 1990). Since he refers to the universe “shuddering” as if it were alive, Gaiman could have even worked in Eternity, the living embodiment of the universe, but perhaps including the occult aspects of the Marvel Universe would not quite fit a science fiction/superhero series like Eternals.

Ikaris asks Thena if she is “ready” to help form a Uni-Mind, but Sersi replies that “I don’t think I want to be part of this. . . .I’m not even sure I like changing things into [other] things,” referring to her Eternal super-power (Gaiman issue 6 p. 17). Later she rejects her Eternal identity, declaring, “I’m nort on of you. Please just leave me alone” (Gaiman issue 6, p. 26).

Back when I began my critique of this series in “Comics in Context” #193, I pointed out that the dilemma of these apparent humans like Mark Curry and Sersi who are awakening to their true, godlike selves, was comparable to that of various other characters in fiction, such as Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ and even the Doctor in the 2007 Doctor Who two-parter “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood,” in which he has been transformed into an ordinary human with no memory of his true identity. A recurring theme in such stories is the protagonist’s need to choose between the potential happiness of an ordinary human life and the lonely, more difficult path of the hero or even of a godlike being. Jesus’s “last temptation” is the fast-forward vision of his future as a happily married man with children, ending in his peaceful demise; significantly, the Doctor has a similar vision in “The Family of Blood.”

The initial issues of Gaiman’s Eternals show that Mark Curry’s life has reached a dead end, so it’s not surprising that in the final issues Mark has no regrets about resuming his Eternal identity as Makkari. Sersi, though, clings to her life as a human even when she learns of her Eternal identity, powers and responsibilities. Perhaps Gaiman believes this is true to Sersi’s personality in the Kirby Eternals. KIrby’s Sersi does seem at first glance to be the ultimate hedonist, who devotes her millennia-long life to continual partying.

But I think that this is an incomplete view of the character. Gaiman portrays Sersi as a much more subdued, quieter character than the one in the Kirby series. Kirby portrayed Sersi as uninhibited and passionate in whatever she did. Sersi makes her entrance in the original series by literally dancing (Kirby Eternals hardcover p. 51). She speaks of “the joy of living” and says that Eternals “love a good laugh” (Kirby p. 97). Certainly she does, and she is willing to party at any opportunity, and she clearly loves using her powers to transform atomic structures: as soon as Ikaris and Thena leave her alone with Dr. Samuel Holden, she transforms Holden’s furniture into what appears to be a BIg Band out of the days of Kirby’s youth. “Shall we dance??” she asks Holden (Kirby p. 133).

What readers may overlook is that Kirby shows that Sersi is equally passionate about waging battle when the need arises. She erupts in fury against those party-pooping Deviants in Kirby’s stories. At the end of Kirby’s Eternals #16, the narrator asserts that “In a battle between males, the deciding factor is always an angry woman. . .Next–Sersi the Terrible” (Kirby p. 323), which is the title of the next issue (Kirby p. 325).

So it seems to me that in Gaiman’s series, as Sersi’s powers reemerge, she should be delighted by them, not frightened, and that she should discover that there is a side of her personality that enjoys combat. In Kirby’s version, Sersi was the Eternal who most enjoyed being an Eternal.

In a trance Joey continues to voice the thoughts of the Dreaming Celestial, who says that he once intended to reward whoever freed him by endowing him with “the power of a Celestial,” but then, as his imprisonment wore on, decided to reward his rescuer instead by sparing him “when I destroyed this part of the universe,” and finally, hundreds of millennia later, vowed that “whoever freed me would perish first, and that would be my only gift” (Gaiman issue 6, pgs. 22-23). Here the Dreaming Celestial seems like a genie, who will grant a reward to the person who frees him; instead of three wishes, there are three different versions of the “reward.” Once again, we are reminded that though the other Celestials’ motives are unknowable, the Dreaming Celestial’s passion for destruction is evident.

Ikaris, Thena, Zuras, Ajak and Druig form a Uni-Mind, and here is the greatest visual disappointment in the entire series. John Romita, Jr. draws the Uni-Mind as a glowing humanoid figure (Gaiman issue 6 p. 28), but this is a visual cliche. Kirby’s Silver Surfer is a superior version of the same image. Kirby visualized the Uni-Mind as a colossal floating brain, complete with brows, as if it had eyes (see Kirby p. 198). It may be grotesque, but it is unforgettable, and powerfully conveys in visual terms that it is the collective consciousness of an entire race. Radically altering a Jack Kirby design is usually a mistake, as it is here.

As the Celestials did to the Uni-Mind in Thor #300 (October 1980), the Dreaming Celestial causes this Uni-Mind to dissolve back into its component beings. So, you see, this “rapture” did not last long: it was only a “modified rapture.”

From there Gaiman and Romita shift into a sequence that takes place within Mark Curry/Makkari’s mind, as the Dreaming Celestial, in the guise of Sersi, converses with him. “Sersi” tells him that “I am a tiny part of the mind (a subroutine/a demon/the smallest circuit) of one of the order of beings you call Celestials” (Gaiman issue 6 p. 32).

In the interview in the back of the hardcover collection of this series, Neil Gaiman says that he was attempting to “remain true to the Kirbyness of it all. And that includes. . .making the Celestials rather more unknowable than they have been.” That’s surely why Gaiman specifies that only “a tiny part of the mind” of the Dreaming Celestial communicates with Makkari and, presumably, communicates through the minds of the various humans who voiced his thoughts earlier in issue six. Neither ordinary humans nor Deviants nor even Eternals can comprehend more than this “tiny” part of a Celestial’s consciousness, by which Gaiman probably means the simplest level of a Celestial’s inconceivably complex mind. I’d speculate that Ajak, whose specialty is communicating with Celestials, likewise only communicates with “tiny” parts of their minds. If God exists, humans like ourselves could not fathom what God’s consciousness, capable of monitoring all of time and space while existing beyond both, is like; presumably when God speaks to people in the Bible, it is only a “tiny” part of God’s mind that communicates with them.

Even so, I feel that it’s wrong to have the Dreaming Celestial speak, even in this allegedly limited fashion. Although Gaiman tells us that we perceive only a miniscule portion of the Celestial’s mind, we are nonetheless reading the Celestial’s thoughts. And one of the most important themes of the Kirby Eternals is the absolute inscrutability of the Celestials’ minds and motivations. Remember, in the Kirby series, we did not even know why the Dreaming Celestial was “destroyed.” (Kirby’s narrator even calls it a “tragedy”; it was later stories that established the Dreaming Celestial as a sinister rebel guilty of a “crime against life.”) In the final dialogue in Kirby’s Eternals, Ikaris declares that “The space gods remain an unconquerable enigma–mysterious and majestic among the creatures of the cosmos!” (Kirby p. 377).

When Kirby depicted rival images of God in the “Galactus trilogy,” both Galactus and the Watcher spoke. But in his Fourth World books for DC, the Source, who represents God, communicates only with Highfather, who resembles an Old Testament prophet, and only through “handwriting on the wall,” in an allusion to an episode from the Bible (see Rembrandt’s depiction here). In his Eternals Kirby went further: only Ajak could communicate with Celestials, but, significantly, Kirby never showed us the thoughts that the Celestials conveyed to Ajak. Nor did Celestials literally speak through Ajak the way that the Dreaming Celestial speaks through various people in Gaiman’s Eternals #6. Thus Kirby kept the thoughts and motives of the Celestials mysterious.

At the outset I linked Kirby to Gilbert and Sullivan in part as a joke. But I am serious now in linking Kirby’s Eternals with the works of the late filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. One of Bergman’s themes was the silence of God, and this is one of the principal themes of Kirby’s Eternals as well. Bergman may not have known if God existed or not; Kirby brings his “space gods” onstage but makes the point that we do not and cannot understand them or what they want. We are at the mercy of the judgment of the space gods–or the real God, if God exists–but do not know what they–or God–want from us.

As far as I’m concerned, it is always a misjudgment to portray Celestials as speaking at all. Marvel writers have made this error in the past, for example, with Ashema, the Celestial who took human form.

It no longer seems right to call the Dreaming Celestial by that name since he has woken up. He can’t be the Black Celestial now that his armor has changed color; maybe now he should be called the Golden Celestial. But I will continue to refer to him as the Dreaming Celestial until such time as Marvel gives him a new official name. (So he’s the Dreaming Celestial–with the initials “D. C.”–who threatens to destroy Marvel-Earth. Nah, that’s just a coincidence.)

The Dreaming Celestial claims to have personally created Makkari. But when? Kirby established that Makkari was a comparatively young Eternal, so he’s not a first generation Eternal like Zuras, who would have been created by the First Host. Gaiman and Romita show Makkari battling Deviants just before the arrival of the Second Host (Gaiman issue 1, p. 29). Then again, that’s part of Ikaris’s faulty memories, and also shows Sersi, who was a child at the time of Gilgamesh (see Captain America Annual #11, 1992), long after the Great Cataclysm that sunk Deviant Lemuria. Certainly the Dreaming Celestial has a reason to lie to Makkari, whom he is attempting to enlist as his willing servant. But perhaps, whenever Makkari was conceived, the Dreaming Celestial somehow manipulated his genetic structure from afar to endow him with super-speed.

The Dreaming Celestial instructs Makkari to bring a “message” from him to the ordinary humans, Eternals and Deviants of Earth. It makes sense that Makkari should be a messenger, since Jack Kirby based him on Mercury, the messenger of the Roman gods. Kirby established Ajak as the Eternal who communicated with the “space gods,” so arguably Neil Gaiman has made Ajak’s principal role redundant. Then again, a future writer could have Ajak conveying messages from the other Celestials while Makkari acts as spokesman for the Dreaming Celestial. In the original series Kirby seemed to be setting up the Forgotten One to serve as an agent of the One Above All, and in Thor #287 (September 1979), Roy Thomas brought the Forgotten One back, conveying a message from the Celestials. Now this may be one messenger too many.

So at the beginning of Gaiman’s Eternals, Ikaris was a Campbellian “herald,” delivering a message, a “call to adventure,” that Mark Curry/Makkari refused to heed. Now, as the series draws to an end, Curry has not only accepted his Eternal identity but has become a messenger himself, a herald for the Dreaming Celestial, who warns him that Makkari’s message will also be met with resistance and disbelief: “it is not a good thing to be a prophet, Makkari” (Gaiman issue 6 p. 33).

And what is the Dreaming Celestial’s message? He directs Makkari to proclaim “that I will (watch/listen} and that once I have seen enough, I shall judge” (Gaiman issue 6 p. 34). Thus Neil Gaiman restores a version of the status quo from Kirby’s Eternals series: once again a Celestial stands upon Earth, eventually to deliver a judgment upon it that could lead to the end of humanity.

I can understand why Gaiman did not bring Kirby’s Arishem the Judge back, as if he had changed his mind about the “thumbs up” he gave Earth back in Thor #300. Yet having the Dreaming Celestial serve as judge still weakens the original Kirby theme. Interestingly, Gaiman has Makkari say that he is not certain just what the Dreaming Celestial is judging: “Maybe judge the people on it, but that didn’t seem to be what it meant.” No, I think that Kirby meant for us to think of Arishem as judging the human race: Kirby was evoking the image of the Last Judgment, and even of a harvest: “They planted intelligent life on this planet–the crop has matured. . .the Celestials will test it and weigh its value” (Kirby p. 37).

Moreover, post-Kirby stories about the Eternals mythos made it clear that the Dreaming Celestial is predisposed towards destruction: the Dreaming Celestial tells Makkari that when he woke, he intended to “terminate this (Earth/Planet/Place) and all that walk upon it” (Gaiman issue 6 p. 33). Now the sentient denizens of Earth have to persuade the Dreaming Celestial not to carry out his original plan to annihilate him. It is like trying to persuade Satan or Cthulhu to mellow out: the odds don’t look good. But what made Arishem’s fifty year judgment a more powerful concept is that Kirby gave us no hint of what Arishem thought or what he wanted. How can you persuade a judge when you don’t know the standards by which he judges you? Arishem was utterly unknowable to human minds, just as God might be. “Inside the impregnable armor,” Kirby wrote about Arishem, “is a mind incomprehensible to man” (Kirby p. 123).

Insisting that Zuras and his fellow Eternals register as superheroes, Iron Man and Yellowjacket miss a rather significant point. Sersi is definitely a New Yorker, but the other Eternals in this series, as far as I know, are not American citizens (not unless Sprite legally established them as such when he gave them human identities). If Zuras were a citizen of any human nation, it would be Greece. But perhaps that doesn’t matter to Iron Man or to others with a post-9/11 you’re-with-us-or-you’re-against-us mindset. “Whose side are you on?” demands Iron Man. Drawn by Romita as if he is staring the Avengers down, Zuras points out that the immortal Eternals don’t take sides, that from their perspective countries are merely “lines in the sand” and empires (like the United States?) are transitory. Zuras seems to agree with Sersi, who indicated earlier that the superhero registration act really amounted to forcing persons to take a loyalty oath (Gaiman issue 5 p. 17). When Yellowjacket persists in telling Zuras to register, Zuras gets tougher and sternly informs the Avengers that to the Eternals humans–including Iron Man and Yellowjacket–are merely “children” (Gaiman issue 6 p. 39).

Earlier on that same page Makkari, smiling, informed Iron Man that the Dreaming Celestial “likes you.” Since the Dreaming Celestial is the Satan or Cthulhu of the Eternals mythos, this is not a compliment. It would be nice if that induced Iron Man to reconsider some of his recent Civil War-related behavior.

At the start of issue 7 Gaiman and Romita show us a caricatured family of tourists staring, unafraid, up at the Dreaming Celestial as it looms, unmoving, above San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Gaiman’s point is that people quickly grow blase even about a “miracle” in their midst (Gaiman issue 7 p. 1). This makes the necessary point that the presence of the Dreaming Celestial (who the public does not know is a menace) does not prevent other Marvel series from continuing as before: life goes on.

But I think that Gaiman is being too cynical here, even considering that extraterrestrials are nothing new in the Marvel Universe. (Gaiman establishes through the tourists that the public does not know that the Dreaming Celestial is alive, but they know that his armor is alien in origin.). Besides, I think that any Marvel story in which, say, a costumed superhero walks into a bar, and nobody pays much attention, is subverting what makes the superhero genre work. Superheroes aren’t just like normal people, and normal people should react–with awe and wonder, or with fear and distrust, but with some strong emotion– when a superhero flies by. In Kirby’s Eternals people were awestruck or frightened by the sight of the Celestials appearing in their midst; SHIELD attempted to take action against them. Kirby was also wise to put Arishem the Judge in a place far from civilization, where his presence could be kept relatively secret. Perhaps the Dreaming Celestial should stand in some similarly remote place. (Will any Marvel story set in San Francisco now have the Dreaming Celestial drawn into the background?)

Zuras and Iron Man resolve their staring contest through compromise. Zuras drops his superior attitude, conceding that “I’m not” a “god.” although Zuras declares that the Eternals “defend humanity,” he makes it clear that the Eternals intend to “return to Olympia” and find the missing members of their race (Gaiman issue 7 p. 10). In other words, Zuras indicates that he has no current plans of intervening in human affairs. Since the Eternals are leaving America for Olympia, Iron Man need not insist on forcing them to register, and he and Zuras shake hands. What might happen if, say, the Eternals wend up battling a menace to Earth on American soil remains to be seen.

So in the final issue Iron Man/Tony Stark ends up being more open-minded and lenient in enforcing the registration law, and more like the character I remember and admire. Although Sersi, as noted, is definitely a Manhattanite, he does not insist that she register, either, at least in part because she has no intention of resuming her superhero career. Sersi still cannot remember her stint as a member of the Avengers. (She’s lucky. Sersi was written so far out of character in those early 1990s Avengers stories about Proctor that I wish I could forget them, too.) Stark’s sympathy for Sersi has grown to such an extent that Gaiman and Romita even subtly hint that he is growing attracted to her, and feels hurt when she goes off on her own (Gaiman issue 7 pages 9-11).

Then comes what I expect is the most controversial segment of the series. Zuras finds Sprite on a bus and kills him by snapping his neck (Gaiman issue 7 pgs. 15-17). Yes, it’s another child star who has come to a bad end. Sprite had a death wish, and you know what they say about being careful what you wish for. Last week I observed that, despite his adolescent ambitions, Sprite was like an adult trapped in a child’s body. Here Zuras tells Sprite, “You haven’t been a kid for a million years.”

But Sprite was a child emotionally, and it is downright creepy (as Gaiman surely intended) to watch Zuras murder him. Was this the only possible solution? If Sprite had indeed turned into a normal human boy, couldn’t Zuras have simply imprisoned him somewhere to live out his life, which is all too brief by Eternal standards? (Of course we can’t be certain that Sprite won’t be resurrected by an Olympian reactivation chamber.)

Despite my qualms about Sprite’s characterization and fate, I’m quite pleased with the Gaiman-Romita Eternals, whose richness becomes more apparent on rereading. I wish that it had gone on longer. Neil Gaiman has said in interviews that he felt he had too large a cast in 1602 and did not want to face the same problem in Eternals. But there are many memorable characters from the Eternals mythos whom Gaiman did not use yet who are well worth reviving in the proper hands.

The Forgotten One: He only appeared in a single issue of the original series, yet Jack Kirby told us just enough about him so that this mysterious Eternal remains intriguing, even tragic, three decades later. He was a hero who overthrew tyrants and battled “beasts,” yet, Sprite tells him, “Zuras banished you for your pride! Your will to meddle in human affairs!” Just what did the Forgotten One do to provoke Zuras’s wrath, and was he right, or was Zuras? Confined to an isolated part of Olympia, the Forgotten One was even stripped of his name. Yet later writers established that he was Gilgamesh, the hero of the ancient Babylonian epic, that he was responsible for some of the feats attributed to Hercules, and that he was mistaken for the Biblical Samson. (Hey, Neil, maybe in the Marvel Universe, the Forgotten One was Beowulf, and Grendel and his mom were Deviants.) No writer after Kirby has treated the Forgotten One satisfactorily, but he remain a character of great, untapped potential.

Kro: Recently I brought up Kirby’s Eternals in conversation with a friend, who asserted that the greatest character in the series was Kro, the Deviant warlord. He may well be right, so it’s surprising that he’s missing from the Gaiman series. Kro can serve as the villain in the Kirby series, in which he even takes delight in masquerading as the devil by sprouting horns on his forehead to terrify superstitious humans. Yet for millennia Kro has been in love with the Eternal Thena, who recognizes he is “noble, wise and brave” (Kirby p. 131), values that seem to separate him from the rest of Deviant society. In the Kirby series Kro invites Thena to accompany him to the Deviants’ undersea city of Lemuria. It is a symbolic descent into the underworld. Thena tells him, “Once before I went beneath the waves with you. Mythology records it as an unhappy story” (Kirby p. 131). I believe she is referring to the myth of Hades and Persephone. Thinking about Kro’s undersea home today, I realized that the relationship of Kro and Thena echoes the sexual attraction between the Sub-Mariner and Susan Storm in the early issues of Fantastic Four. Unable to remain together as lovers, Kro and Thena are also unable to remain eternally apart from one another.

The Reject: His fellow Deviants regard him as physically repulsive because he looks exactly like a “normal” human being, who is so handsome that Thena calls him “sweet prince.” But she’s also being ironic. Kirby introduced the Reject (later dubbed Ransak) as a combatant in the Deviants’ gladiatorial ring, “I am what I am,” the Reject once explained: “A thing taught only to make its kill–and prepare for the next” (Kirby p. 244). Never having known love, having trained only to destroy, the Reject can suddenly become like a savage beast. “At that moment,” Kirby’s narrator states at one point, “the Reject’s eyes glaze and his jaws distend like a carnivore at the kill! A snarl escapes his lips!” (Kirby, p. 156). A little later the narrator tells us, “the killing frenzy is upon Reject! Combat is the only life he knows!” (Kirby p. 157).

Years earlier, Kirby had created Orion of The New Gods, a hero who was capable of savage violence, reflected by his cruel, bestial face. Orion needed his living computer, the “Mother Box,” to hide his true face, transforming his ugly features into handsome ones. Similarly, the Reject’s outer handsomeness conceals the beast within.

With his “animal instincts” (Kirby p. 224) and “killing frenzy,” the Reject reminds me of Wolverine and his berserker rages. The Eternals debuted in 1976, two years after Wolverine made his first appearance. I doubt that Kirby was paying any attention to the “new” X-Men at the time. Rather, I see the similarities between the Reject and Wolverine as further evidence of Kirby’s ability to tap into the zeitgeist. His Eternals may not have been a commercial success, but Kirby was still pioneering new developments in the evolution of the superhero genre.

The Reject’s handsome exterior hid his inner savagery, but Thena seemed to sense that perhaps he really had the potential, buried deep inside him, to be a “sweet prince.” She recognizes that his destructive urges are a form ofd self-destruction: “Poor Reject,” she says, “he has the death-wish!” (Kirby p. 204). So she takes the Reject under her protection, attempting to civilize him and even to teach him the meaning of love (Kirby p. 203). So perhaps Kirby was consciously or unconsciously tapping into another myth: Pygmalion and Galatea, with the sexes reversed?

But again, no one has successfully exploited the potential with which Jack Kirby endowed this character.

Karkas: You could regard this gigantic, grotesque Deviant “mutate” as a variation on the Thing in Kirby’s Fantastic Four. Outwardly Karkas appeared to be a ferocious monster, just as his opponent in the gladiatorial arena, the reject, looked like a handsome storybook prince. Yet it is the Reject who can become a monster of savagery, while, when not engaged in combat, Karkas is actually a sensitive intellectual. “Your intellect far exceeds your talents as a monster,” Thena tells Karkas (Kirby p. 202). Karkas even hopes that “I may yet become a philosopher of note!” (Kirby p. 204). Kirby paired these two paradoxical characters, Karkas and the Reject, as a team, mentored by Thena. But among subsequent Eternals writers, only Peter B. Gillis, a former academic, has demonstrated an understanding of Karkas’s personality.

Dr. Samuel Holden: One reason that Gaiman did not use Dr. Holden may be that he claims that even in “Marvel time” thirty years have elapsed between the events of the Kirby series and those of his own. But as I pointed out in column 194, that just doesn’t work: in “Marvel time” less than a decade would separate the events of the two series.

There’s something appealing, charming and even touching about the romantic relationship between Sam Holden, this rather proper academic, and the beautiful, uninhibited Sersi. Jack Kirby could depict their relationship with surprising subtlety: look at how Sersi places her hand affectionately on Holden’s chest on page 279 of the hardcover collection. Peter B. Gillis further developed the Sam and Sersi relationship in the second Eternals series, but other writers didn’t get it and didn’t follow it up.

Ghaur: This is the potentially great villain of the Eternals mythos, yet he was created not by Jack Kirby, but by Peter Gillis and artist Sal Buscema in the second Eternals series. (Ghaur’s name, by the way, is pronounced as “gore,” and I should point out that it was not intended as a reference to Al, who was much less famous in 1985.) As the Deviant priestlord, Ghaur should be even more relevant today, when the toxic mixture of religious fanaticism, violence, and lust for power poses such dangers around the world.

My favorite scene with Ghaur is his first appearance, which takes place in Eternals Vol. 2 #2 (November 1985). It is a meeting between Lord Ghaur and another Deviant, Ranar. On the surface Ghaur speaks quietly and politely, but everything he says has a sinister subtext, a lethal edge like a dagger’s: Ghaur is cutting Ranar to pieces with words that foreshadow his doom.

Stan Lee had a flair for heightened, melodramatic language: back in the 1960s he could make Doctor Doom’s boasts and threats work brilliantly. But in lesser hands, the standard Marvel style for villains’ dialogue degenerated into empty bombast. Gillis’s Ghaur was a new kind of Marvel villain, who spoke in a more sophisticated manner, and whose cunning seemed credible and real.

Many writers used Ghaur after Gillis, but once again, none of them understood what was revolutionary about the character, and they turned him into yet another Marvel villain given to pompous ranting. But in the 1980s first Alan Moore, and then Neil Gaiman brought a more realistic and sophisticated style to comic book dialogue, and a new generation of writers followed in their path. So perhaps today Ghaur could find writers who would understand and recreate the distinctive voice with which Gillis endowed him.

Here is a major problem with the ongoing continuity of the DC and Marvel Universes. Great writers and artists can create brilliant concepts and characters, which are then misunderstood and mistreated by lesser talents who follow on the same series. It is a cause for celebration when another major talent comes along on the series who not only grasps what its creators intended but builds important new work upon it.

This is the case with the Gaiman-Romita Eternals. It’s not perfect, but Gaiman and Romita “get” most of what Jack Kirby intended, and have created a worthy sequel to this underrated Kirby classic, that successfully revitalizes The Eternals for a new century.

And thus I bring my six-part critique of the new Eternals to a close. Please come back next week for a landmark event: the two hundredth edition of “Comics in Context”!

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

This week I continue my examination of Neil Gaiman’s recent revival of Jack Kirby’s Eternals. But first, I want to mention briefly a subject that turns out to be related: the newly released The Last Fantastic Four Story, written by FF co-creator Stan Lee and drawn by John Romita, Jr., the illustrator of Gaiman’s Eternals. It’s like one of the old Superman “imaginary stories”: what might the FF’s final adventure be like? In this saga, the Adjudicator, a gigantic armored alien being with virtually unlimited godlike powers, descends to Earth to deliver judgment on humanity. Seems familiar, doesn’t it? It would not surprise me if Stan Lee had never read Jack Kirby’s Eternals, or, if he had, had forgotten it over in the ensuing thirty years. But surely someone at Marvel should have pointed out that the Adjudicator is uncomfortably similar to Jack Kirby’s Arishem the Judge.

Reading the Gaiman Eternals is more rewarding. When I left off last week, Ikaris had regained his full Eternal memories and powers by thrusting his hand into a waterfall in the Eternal city of Olympia. Having already experienced resurrection, Ikaris thus underwent another kind of Christian imagery: baptism.

Then Sprite, revealed as the principal villain of Gaiman’s Eternals, conforms to standard supervillain practice by “monologuing”: expounding on his grand scheme and motivations to the helpless Mark Curry, alias the Eternal Makkari.

Though he has lived for “the best part of a million years” (Gaiman Eternals issue 4 p. 15), Sprite, for unknown reasons, has never advanced beyond the physical age of eleven, whereas the other Eternals are all adults. He’s right on the verge of puberty, but, as long as he is an Eternal, would never reach it.

Sprite once appeared to the British playwright James Barrie, who based Peter Pan, the boy who would not grow up, on him, “back when the only thing I had left to enjoy was messing with the transients,” by which Sprite means we mere mortals. Although most people today are probably more familiar with the heroic depictions of Peter Pan in the Disney film and the Broadway musical, Barrie’s original Peter Pan is a more ambiguous figure.

Sprite is a trickster, and his creator, Jack Kirby, established in the original Eternals series that William Shakespeare put Sprite in one of his plays (Kirby Eternals hardcover, p. 173). Presumably Kirby meant that Sprite was the inspiration for Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and those who know Gaiman’s Sandman story about that play know that Gaiman regards Puck as not some endearing, fun-loving sprite but as a potentially dangerous creature (see “Comics in Context” #65).

So, like Peter Pan, Sprite is a boy who will not grow up. There is a related figure in popular culture: the adult who refuses to admit to his or her true age, who refuses to move on from a time when he or she was younger. There’s Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, an elderly woman still wearing a young woman’s wedding gown, trying to make time stand still, and Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), fantasizing about playing the teenage Salome. In a more comic mode, there are Jack Benny and Absolutely Fabulous‘s Patsy Stone both insisting with increasing absurdity that they are only thirty-nine: Patsy and her friend Eddie are middle-aged women who behave as if the 1960s and their youth never ended.

A recurring variation on this figure is the adult who seems stuck in childhood. I wonder if this image originated with performers like Mary Pickford, the first great star of American silent film (and said to be a possible influence on Little Orphan Annie), who played prepubescent girls well into her thirties; apparently her public resisted her attempts to play characters her own age. Then there’s “Baby June” (later known as the actress June Havoc) who was forced to play little girls long into her adolescence, as dramatized in the classic musical Gypsy. In the 1960 book and 1962 film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? a fictional former child star by that name irrationally plans to revive her act.

Then there’s another variation that cartoon art makes possible: the adult with the body of a child, like Baby Herman in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), who looks like an infant but off-camera has a gravely adult voice and smokes cigars. Again, Baby Herman is a show business performer. Baby Herman is a comedic figure, but an adult mind in a child’s body represents a violation of the normal natural order that can seem sinister. One of the villains in Batman: The Animated Series is Baby Doll, a former television child star who suffers from a rare disease that forces her to remain a small child physically, even though she is psychologically an adult. Then there’s Family Guy‘s Stewie Griffin, the infant who not only speaks in an adult voice but has ambitions of ruling the world.

There is also the reverse: the child in the body of an adult, or with abilities that he or she lacks sufficient psychological maturity to handle responsibly. There’s the Billy Mumy role as the sinister, all-powerful child in the classic Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life,” based on the Jerome Bixby short story. The traditional portrayal of the Hulk is of a being with a tantrum-prone, childlike mind within a superhumanly strong adult body.

On first viewing, Gaiman’s version of Sprite is the emotionally immature child with vast “adult” powers. Enraged at being treated as a child by the other Eternals for a million years, Sprite misused his super-powers to punish them. Using his powers of illusion, he manipulated his fellow Eternals Zuras and Ajak into joining with him in a “Uni-Mind,” a collective consciousness, that drew power from the Dreaming Celestial. (Earlier in the series Gaiman established that it takes at least four Eternals to form a Uni-Mind, but perhaps only three Eternals are necessary if they are psionically linked with the Dreaming Celestial.) Through this Uni-Mind, Sprite stripped the other Eternals of access to their memories and super-powers, effectively turning them into ordinary human beings, with implanted, false memories of leading ordinary human lives. Sprite also transformed himself into a normal human, minus any Eternal powers, so that he could physically age.

But it seems to me that Sprite is also like the adult in the body of a child. Consider the complexity and execution of Sprite’s master plan. Leaving Sprite’s super-powers aside, could an actual eleven-year-old have conceived, planned, and carried out such a scheme? Although Sprite uses words like “cool” and “dumb” the way a real kid might, most of the dialogue that Gaiman gives him, including his monologuing here, reads like an adult speaking.

Moreover, one of Sprite’s principal motivations seems to be intense sexual frustration. He tells Mark about Sersi, “Of course, by then she’d had sexual relations with all the straight male Eternals, all sixty of them, except me. . .because I was eleven. . . “ (Gaiman issue 4 p. 15). This doesn’t seem like a typical crush an eleven-year-old boy might have on an attractive adult woman. That “sexual relations” phrase suggests to me that Sprite, despite being physically prepubescent, psychologically has a very active postpubescent sex drive.

That Sprite quotation also prompts me to digress for a bit. Out of roughly a hundred Eternals, sixty are straight males. So the other forty Eternals are either females or gay males? Seems a bit odd that the male/female ratio isn’t more even. And Sersi has had “sexual relations” with all the straight male Eternals past puberty? Sersi isn’t a first generation Eternal (in fact, you can see her as a child in ancient Mesopotamia in Captain America Annual #11, 1992), so what about her father (who is named Helios, by the way)? Or father figure Zuras? Well, this is the intensely jealous Sprite saying this, so perhaps he’s exaggerating. One of the points of this page of the fourth issue is that over their incredibly long lives the Eternals have sexually paired up in all possible combinations considering their individual sexual orientations. It is gratifying to know that Sersi never stooped to having sex with children, much as Sprite may regret it.

It seems to me that Sprite’s intellect and even his sexual desires have matured, but not his emotions or his capacity for moral judgment. Why does he want to become an adult? “I wanted to be a film star and a rock star and a TV star. I wanted everyone to love me. I’m going to stay a star until I’m in my twenties, for the girls. And then. . .Well, that depends.” Actually, despite his claim that he wants to be treated as an adult, Sprite really seems to want to be an adolescent. He has no concrete goal for himself once he has passed the physical age of nineteen. His current goals are shallow, self-centered, and deeply immature: he just wants to be famous and to be universally loved, and, I suspect, to get laid a lot by “the girls.”

Sprite claims he wants to get older, but emotionally he represents an extreme case of arrested development, or, more specifically and appropriately, the mindset that pop psychology terms “Peter Pan syndrome,” which entails both irresponsibility and narcissism.

The clearest sign of Sprite’s narcissism is his ambition to be a “star” whom everybody loves. Like so many of the other characters I mentioned earlier who are simultaneously children and adults, Sprite is in show business, a field which encourages aging people to take extreme measures to hold onto their youth, and which bestows fame, celebrity, wealth and power upon people who may be too psychologically immature to cope with it wisely.

In Gaiman’s Eternals, television programs consist of Sprite’s lowest common denominator sitcom for tweens and a superhero reality show that turns the noble calling of the superhero into a quest for fame and fortune. (As the Spider-Man theme song observes, “Action is his reward,” not big bucks.) I wonder if Gaiman means to suggest that there is something emotionally immature and adolescent about, not just the current state of the superhero genre, but about American (or British and American?) popular culture as a whole, or perhaps even the American fascination with celebrity and wealth. No wonder that the immature Sprite prospers in such a culture.

I also recall that in Lev Grossman’s profile of Gaiman in July 26, 2007 issue of Time, Neil said that “Five years ago, I was absolutely as famous as I wanted to be. . . .I’m now more famous than I’m comfortable with,” and Grossman observed that Gaiman is “leery of selling out to the popular crowd.” I wonder if in Eternals Neil is using the platform of a Marvel comic, supposedly aimed at the more “popular crowd” among comics readers, to examine the dark side of fame and its pursuit and the dangers of selling out rather than following one’s true calling.

And this is a variation on a classic Marvel theme. Remember that Spider-Man started out as a boy who, upon acquiring super-powers, initially went into show business, until he had to face the terrible result of his self-centered pursuit of fame and fortune: his failure to prevent his uncle’s death.

“I could have done whatever I wanted to the world,” Sprite says. Remember when the Red Skull or Thanos acquired the Cosmic Cube in past Marvel epics, and how they wanted to use it to alter reality on a grand, visionary albeit evil scale. And then consider what Sprite says: “I could have made the seas run red, or made snow taste like chocolate. I thought about it.” Claiming to want to be merely an adult human, Sprite instead achieved godhood, yet he ends up seriously considering juvenile trivialities. “But in the end I settled for this. Stardom and puberty,” which in this context seem merely a higher order of triviality. “I’m a real boy now,” Sprite declares, as if he were Pinocchio’s evil twin (Gaiman issue 4 p. 20).

Trying to imagine his future beyond turning twenty, Sprite says, “But whatever I do, I do it as a human. I can leave the solar system, which is more than any Eternal can” (Gaiman issue 4, p. 20). Well, first, leaving the solar system is not something that humans ordinarily do. Unless Sprite thinks he can steal the Fantastic Four’s spaceship, just how is he going to do this? Second, back in Avengers #248 (October 1984) most of the Eternals, united into a Uni-Mind, departed Earth for outer space, and I do not think that the Eternals, who seem to be such social beings, would be interested in merely exploring the uninhabited planets in our solar system; I expect they left to visit other, inhabited worlds. This also means that Sprite must have used the power of the Dreaming Celestial to bring all those Eternals back from outer space and give them human identities on Earth. I suppose Sprite would think that was a safer course of action for him rather than worrying that the other Eternals might someday return and disrupt his plans.

Then Sprite tells Mark Curry, “I can even die–do you know how cool that is?” (Gaiman issue 4 p. 20). Yet it is hard to believe that someone who is so infatuated with being famous and universally beloved, goals which require being alive, has any comprehension of what death is. Perhaps here Gaiman is criticizing the shallowness of an adolescent fascination with death. Or perhaps Gaiman is indicating that Sprite, who has disposed of his entire community of Eternals, and who has bonded with the Dreaming Celestial, a potential bringer of death, is ultimately motivated by a death wish.

It seems odd that Sprite wants to be mortal when he shows such contempt for mortal humans, calling them “transients” and “mayflies”: remember, he used to devote himself to playing pranks on mortals. To become mortal himself may subconsciously be to direct that hatred towards himself, as if he were punishing himself–as well as his fellow Eternals–for his long life of continual frustration.

Sprite claims he wants to grow up, and “be a man” (Gaiman issue 4 p. 20), but what he really wants is to indulge all his childish fantasies without there being any adult Eternals to tell him no. He really is Peter Pan gone bad, after all. In drawing upon the power of the Dreaming Celestial, the Satan of the Eternals mythos, Sprite has metaphorically made a deal with the devil to remain eternally young–and dangerously immature–to the end of his life, which would come far more quickly than an Eternal could imagine, even if he lived to be a hundred.

Here’s another digression. Gaiman establishes that the prison of the Dreaming Celestial is beneath San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. This enables Gaiman to tie in the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake to his story, and look, Sprite indicates that Olympia was in Antarctica, not Greece, back then, too (Gaiman issue 4 p. 16). But past stories have placed the Dreaming Celestial’s prison beneath the Diablo Mountains (appropriate name) (see the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entry). The northern part of the Diablo range lies near San Francisco, but not within the city limits. Well, I suppose this is close enough. It seems that even imprisoned space gods move in mysterious ways. It does seem rather impractical for the Celestials to have imprisoned the Dreaming Celestial in such a seismically active area, though.

A more important question is whether Neil Gaiman’s treatment of Sprite fits Jack Kirby’s original conception of the character. Kirby seems to allude to Shakespeare’s Puck, but Sprite also fits into the long tradition of boy pranksters in comics and cartoon art that encompasses the Katzenjammer Kids and Bart Simpson. Such characters are troublesome, but certainly not evil, and their rebelliousness against authority is appealing. “Kirby’s Margo Damian observes about Sprite, “He’s only a boy! Even young Eternals love to play pranks!” (Kirby p. 173).

Still, I can see from Sprite’s initial appearances in the Kirby series why Gaiman took the character in the direction that he chose. Sprite’s pranks are rather mean, inconsiderate, and even dangerous (see Kirby pgs. 147-149). When Ikaris punishes Sprite by spanking him, Sprite implies he will take revenge (Kirby pgs. 172-173). One Eternal even says, “That little fool, Sprite, will cause a war someday” (Kirby p. 150). Zuras comments, “the youth ignore all but their youth!!” (Kirby, p. 150), a remark which, in hindsight, takes on ominous implications considering Sprite’s behavior in the Gaiman series. It seems to me that Kirby’s version of sprite even vaguely resembles a boyish Loki.

It’s Sprite’s later appearance in the Kirby series that indicates that there may be more to Sprite than the “brat” Makkari claims he is (Kirby p. 173). While most other Eternals have merged into a Uni-Mind, Sprite learns that the Deviants are about to attack the Celestial mothership. I get the impression that the imminent danger has shaken Sprite out of his usual childish misbehavior and forced him to behave like a mature adult. “Oh, stupid Sprite–! Monarch of muddle-heads! You’ve seen too much! The fate of the Earth has been thrust into your quaking lap! Something must be done!” the frightened Sprite tells himself (Kirby p. 260). Sprite goes to the long-exiled Eternal known as the Forgotten One and asks him for help. One could argue that Sprite is merely trying to save his own skin, since he obviously fears that the Celestials might again devastate the Earth in retaliation for a Deviant attack. But it seems to me that Kirby portrays Sprite as genuinely impressed by the Forgotten One’s heroic qualities: “I call upon you for your strength. . .and one unselfish universal act. . .” (Kirby p. 262). (It seems that the outwardly childlike Sprite always spoke in an “adult” manner.)

The original Eternals series was canceled before Kirby could bring either Sprite or the Forgotten One back, so we will never know what he intended to do next with these characters. My hypothesis is that Kirby thought that Sprite was capable of redemption, and that perhaps he intended Sprite to become the Forgotten One’s sidekick when the latter presumably eventually returned to Earth as an agent of the Celestials. Neil Gaiman has taken Sprite in an intriguing direction, but I suspect that this represents Gaiman’s most significant deviation from what I guess were Kirby’s intentions for his Eternals characters.

In a dream Thena recalls a battle in which she single-handedly defeated a hundred thousand Deviant warriors (Gaiman issue 4 p. 21). The sequence reminds me of how much and how quickly Jack Kirby’s concept of superheroines evolved in a decade and a half. In the early Fantastic Four Susan Storm’s super-powers–invisibility and projecting force fields– seemed designed for hiding and shielding her from danger; her male FF partners took much more active roles in combat. The Wasp fired her sting, and Marvel Girl and the Scarlet Witch stood and gestured to use their powers; none of them grappled hand to hand with their adversaries. Big Barda, who debuted in Kirby’s Mister Miracle in 1971, initially seemed like a caricature of a woman warrior, but soon evolved into a more appealing, three-dimensional personality while remaining a formidable fighter. With Thena and Sersi in Eternals in 1976, Kirby created women warriors who were both fierce and feminine.

Chris Claremont rightly gets credit for reimagining the superheroine as the formidable equal of the male superhero in X-Men and other titles in the latter half of the 1970s, but it’s important to note that Jack Kirby was simultaneously moving in the same direction. Though they were from different generations, both Claremont and Kirby were responding to the emerging feminist zeitgeist.

Here’s another problem posed in attempting to deal with “Marvel time,” which moves more slowly than real time. Thena has a son who seems not much younger than Reed and Susan Richards’ son Franklin. But Franklin was born in 1968 in real time, while Joey was presumably born since Thena appeared in New Eternals: Apocalypse Now in 2000. All right, so maybe Sprite used the Dreaming Celestial’s power to alter reality to speed up Joey’s aging process, or maybe even to create him, and make Thena and her husband think he was born and grew normally. (I’m going to expect a pile of No-Prizes once I’ve finished solving all the continuity conundrums in these Eternals essays.)

Waking from her dream, Thena finds herself in her Eternal costume. She tells the confused Joey that “It’s still Momma,” but the omniscient narrator informs us that “And even as she says it, she knows it isn’t true” (Gaiman issue 4 p. 23). (By the way, it’s commendable that Gaiman employs third person narration in captions, which is a classic Marvel tradition but had fallen from favor in recent years.) Notice how John Romita, Jr. draws Thena holding her son up by the back of his shirt. This is hardly the way that a loving mother would carry her child: “Momma” has indeed changed. I disagree with what Gaiman and Romita are hinting here about the Eternals’ attitudes towards humans, but I will return to this subject later.

At the end of issue 4 Ikaris teams up with Thena to stop the Deviants from awakening the Dreaming Celestial, and at the beginning of issue 5 the Deviants Morjak and Gelt capture Sprite. Obviously in transforming himself into an ordinary human, Sprite badly blundered in not anticipating that he might need his superpowers in a circumstance like this. Another Eternal who was long thought dead, Ajak, acts as Campbellian “herald” to the Eternals” leader Zuras, who has been reduced to a mad derelict. Ajak issues the “call to adventure” to Zuras, who awakens to his true identity.

Ajak says that he sent Morjak and Gelt after Ikaris, thinking Ikaris would be safer in the “regeneration chamber” in Olympia. I don’t understand why Ajak couldn’t have just told Ikaris to lie low, or how much “safer” Ikaris really was considering that Ajak admits that he had those Deviants kill him. Ajak confesses that he made mistakes; yes, I’d agree with that.

Then Ajak tells Zuras, “Ikaris is fully reactivated. The other four”–Makkari, Sersi, Thena and Druig–“will not reactivate completely until they go though a death and rebuild, but they are no longer human” (Gaiman issue 5, p. 6). By the end of Gaiman’s series, Ikaris is the only Eternal who has gone through death and rebuilding. What does this mean about the others? They have their powers back, and Zuras and Ajak seem to have their full memories back. Does this mean that, except for Ikaris, the others can be killed, albeit with great difficulty, and then Olympia’s technology will resurrect them and restore them to full Eternal status?

Ajak warns that if the Dreaming Celestial wakes, then the “Horde” will come and wipe out all life, not just on Earth, but in “this part of the galaxy” (Gaiman issue 5 p. 6). This time the word “Horde” is not mistakenly being used to refer to a Celestial Host, nor is this horde to be confused with the Horde from Marvel’s 1980s cult series Strikeforce: Morituri, which is not set in the Marvel Universe and which was co-created by Peter Gillis, one of the authors of the second Eternals series. The Dreaming Celestial later describes the Horde as “the locusts of the universe” (Gaiman issue 6 p. 33). Kirby indicated that Arishem could use a “formula” imprinted on his hand to destroy the Earth. (This is reminiscent of the “anti-life formula” in Kirby’s Fourth World books.) Is Gaiman implying that the Dreaming Celestial isn’t powerful enough to destroy the Earth by himself, and needs to call in the Horde to do it for him?

Then again, Gaiman’s series never explicitly states that the Dreaming Celestial summoned the Horde. Maybe the Horde is used by the other Celestials as a fail-safe: if the Dreaming Celestial should wake then they will wipe out all life in his subgalactic vicinity, thus making sure that he is destroyed.

In a scene that follows, Druig uses his powers to perpetrate a massacre, which he plans to blame on a minority group as part of his plan to take control of the nation of Vorozheika. One of his captives calls, “Hail Druig!” (Gaiman issue 5 p. 13), which should remind readers of “Heil Hitler!”

Last week I observed that there is a trend in pop culture of supervillains succeeding in taking over countries. Several hours after posting last week’s column, I found myself watching an episode of Warners Animation’s Pinky and the Brain on Toon Disney, in which the Brain, mouse turned megavillain, provides me with further evidence by taking over a South Pacific island and renaming it “Brainania.” (From the vantage point of 2007, it strikes me that this 1990s animated series seems unwittingly to foreshadow the partnership of our current President and Vice President: Bushy and the Chene, if you will.)

Morjak tells his captive, Mark Curry, that the Second Host of the Celestials ate Deviants; that Ajak, who can communicate with the Celestials, told the Deviants this; and that the Dreaming Celestial was imprisoned for protesting the devouring of the Deviants (Gaiman issue 5 p. 16).

Readers should be wary of believing this. For one thing, later on, Mark Curry asks the Dreaming Celestial why the other Celestials put him “to sleep,” and the Dreaming Celestial says that Curry “wouldn’t understand” (Gaiman issue 6 p. 32). If the Dreaming Celestial was punished for trying to prevent the Deviants from being eaten, why wouldn’t Mark understand that? No, Gaiman appears to be signaling that the Dreaming Celestial’s offense was something different, something that humans–and Eternals–cannot comprehend. Besides, Kirby did not show the Second Host eating Deviants; rather, Kirby seemed to indicate that the Second Host remained aboard their mothership and struck down the Deviants from above. Moreover, if the Celestials regarded the Deviants as “delicacies,” why didn’t they take the Deviants into space with them, in case they get the munchies during those long interstellar journeys?

The main reason that I object to the idea that the Celestials eat Deviants is that it diminishes what should be the godlike grandeur of the “space gods.” The key to Kirby’s Celestials is their inscrutability. Their reasoning is beyond mortal comprehension; we do not know what they want or what they think. If they gobble up Deviants, who, remember, are closely related to ordinary humans like us, then the Celestials’ motives are all too clear: they are evil beings who regard their sentient creations as if they were livestock bred for the dinner table. The Eternals would therefore be evil themselves for serving such masters. Besides, it diminishes the Celestials’ godlike status even to suggest that they eat. We should not even be certain that the Celestials have physical forms beneath that armor: Kirby never let us see a Celestial without his helmet.

Notice that Morjak says that the Deviants “were the food of the gods” and that Celestials considered a Deviant soul to be a “delicacy” (Gaiman issue 5., p. 16). Morjak doesn’t seem appalled by this; he appears to be speaking with pride. That’s the key to recognizing that Morjak’s speech to Curry is merely self-aggrandizing fantasy. The Deviants want to believe that the Dreaming Celestial, who, like them, rebelled against the Second Host, is their benefactor. But notice that once the Dreaming Celestial wakes, he shows no interest in the Deviants whatsoever, not even as potential snack food. As for Morjak’s claiming that Ajak told the Deviants about this, well, this is hearsay, which would be inadmissible in court. Maybe Morjak genuinely believes Ajak told a Deviant this, but that could be an unfounded rumor. Or perhaps Morjak is just lying to Mark.

Ikaris and Thena, in Eternal costumes, visit Sersi, who says, “I get it. You’re super heroes. This is like an arrest. I’ll be dragged to a secret government CIA torture camp until I sign your frickin’ loyalty pledge” (Gaiman issue 5 p. 17). How interesting that, thanks to Marvel’s Civil War, Sersi now assumes that superheroes work as enforcers for the United States government. Moreover, isn’t it quite possible that by having Sersi talk about a “loyalty pledge,” Gaiman wants to remind us yet again about Civil War‘s superhero registration act? And hey, in Civil War, superheroes who refused to register did get locked up in a secret prison.

Only a few pages later, Sersi’s friend Abigail is watching the reality TV show America’s Next Super Hero, and hears its host say that “If you’re a super hero, doing the right thing is the important thing to do. The right thing.” Like saving lives? Like fighting thieves and murderers? The host continues, “Like getting registered.” And then he welcomes back Grace Darling, the super-powered contestant who had earlier defied “legal waivers” to help fight the terrorists at the Vorozheikan party. Apparently she has been pressured into knuckling under. “This is such a dumb show,” Abigail significantly comments (Gaiman issue 5 p. 21).

As the fifth issue comes to an end, Morjak and Galt utilize Mark Curry’s Eternal powers to free the Dreaming Celestial from his underground tomb. Then the two Deviants wait for sunrise, when the Dreaming Celestial, like dreamers in general, will awake. And you readers must wait a week for the sixth and, I hope, final installment of my critique of Neil Gaiman’s Eternals.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

In the October 9, 2007 edition of Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week, you can read my report on the New Yorker Festival’s “Superheroes” panel, whose participants included Tim Kring, creator of TV’s Heroes; novelist Jonathan Lethem, writer of Marvel’s revival of Omega the Unknown; Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy; and Grant Morrison, writer for Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Flash, JLA, Superman, X-Men and many more superhero comics.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Last Sunday I was watching Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey on Turner Classic Movies, and recalled that Jack Kirby did a comics adaptation of this movie, and an ongoing series based on it, during the same period that he was writing and drawing The Eternals at Marvel. And both 2001 and The Eternals deal with mysterious godlike aliens who intervene in the course of human evolution.

Over the last several weeks I have been undertaking a close analysis of Neil Gaiman’s recent revival of Eternals. I pick up the story at the party that Sersi organized at the Vorozheikan consulate (not embassy), as Thena, in her human identity as Dr. Thena Eliot, arrives with her husband Thomas, who edits “famous authors” (Gaiman Eternals issue 2 p. 13). Since Thena is based on Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, it is appropriate that she should marry someone who works with literature. (This relationship also reminds me of the seemingly unlikely but decidedly charming liaison between Sersi and the academic Dr. Samuel Holden in the first two Eternals series.)

So Thena’s husband is Thomas Eliot, who works in publishing. Would his middle name be Stearns, like that of T. S. Eliot, the great poet who worked at the British publishing firm Faber & Faber?

Just as Sersi characteristically dresses in green in Gaiman’s series, as if remembering her Kirby costume, Thena arrives at the party in a gold-colored gown, evoking the colors of her costume from the original Eternals series.

Druig, the Vorozheikan Deputy Prime Minister, has secretly arranged for terrorists to invade the party and take hostages. The terrorists shoot Thena’s husband dead when he stumbles upon them. Then the terrorists confront the rest of the party guests.

Some of the contestants from the reality show America’s Next Super Hero are present, but one of them, Tantrum, says “we’re not allowed” to intervene: “We signed these legal waivers. If we use our powers without authorization, we’re out of the show” (Gaiman issue 2 p. 18). This may be another of the series’ comments on the current state of the superhero genre. A superhero traditionally follows the dictates of his conscience, and acts as an individual, or as a member of a relatively small team. But for Tantrum and company, their superhero careers are inextricably linked with show business. Tantrum won’t stop the terrorists and potentially save lives because he doesn’t want to be dropped from the TV show. The fact that the contestants are obliged by “legal waivers” not to use their powers “without authorization” (By whom? The government? The TV network?) also suggests the downside of putting superheroes under government control, as happened at the end of Marvel’s Civil War series.

Meanwhile, two Deviants, Morjak and Gelt, who are holding Ikaris naked and captive, in what resembles a crucifixion pose (Gaiman issue 2 p. 19), finally succeed in finding a way to destroy him, through what looks like disintegration.

With Ikaris’s demise this first phase of the series reaches a critical point: Sersi, Mark Curry and Thena are also in danger of being killed. These four Eternals have sunk to a low point, indeed.

It is then that the sheer stress of facing death finally forces the reluctant Mark Curry over the Campbellian threshold, in more ways than one. First, his Eternal telepathic abilities activate, and his eyes go blank, as if they were glowing, as an outward sign (Gaiman issue 2 p. 21, panel 3). Curry hesitatingly takes a major step in his budding relationship with Sersi by telepathically telling her, “I think I–I think I may possibly love you” (Gaiman issue 2, p. 22). Finally, at the point of his coming face to face with death, as the terrorists shoot at Curry and the woman he loves, Makkari’s principal Eternal superpower–super-speed–kicks in. As he reacts at superhuman speed, the bullets appear to slow down and stop.

Once again Gaiman reminds us of one of his characteristic themes by having Mark liken his situation to “some kind of dream” (Gaiman issue 2 p. 22), but the pain he feels when he touches the bullet provides evidence that it is real.

Then he realizes that “I’m not dressed for this” (Gaiman issue 2 p. 23). Perhaps he means that ordinary clothing cannot withstand the stresses of moving at super-speed. (Were this a Silver Age Flash comic, an editor’s note would inform us that the heat of friction at such speed would burn ordinary clothing off.)

Perhaps there is a second meaning to “not” being “dressed for this.” Maybe Curry is coming close to realizing that he should be operating in his Makkari costume and identity. Indeed, as he thinks about the kind of costume he should be wearing, we see it materialize about him. Is he imagining this? Or are his Eternal powers somehow bringing the costume partly into being?

Lately I’ve been wondering about the degree to which Kirby’s Eternals fit Dr. Peter Coogan’s definition of the superhero (see “Comics in Context” #162). Dr. Coogan contended that a superhero typically possesses powers, identity (ordinarily meaning a costumed identity that is separate from his everyday self), and mission (meaning an ongoing mission, usually to fight injustice and protect the innocent, not simply resolving a temporary problem). In the original Kirby series, the Eternals certainly had super-powers, but they did not have dual identities, except for Ikaris’s short-lived guise of “Ike Harris.” Moreover, although they responded when Deviants made trouble, the Eternals otherwise seemed to lack a sense of mission, except for Ajak, though his service to the Celestials doesn’t qualify as combating evil. In the Kirby stories, Sersi’s “mission,” if you could call it that, was having a good time, and she considered fighting Deviants necessary interruptions in her chosen life of hedonism.

The Gaiman series more clearly presents the principal Eternals as superheroes. Gaiman gives them human identities and roles in human society, so that their identities as Eternals more closely resemble the costumed identities of conventional superheroes. “Mark Curry” is a much more fully realized human identity for Makkari than “Ike Harris” was for Ikaris in the Kirby series.

Furthermore, Gaiman later explicitly states that the Eternals have a mission: their leader Zuras says that “We preserve life, We defend humanity. We will protect the Earth, until the Celestials decide that the Earth is done” (Gaiman issue 7 p. 10). Indeed, one of Sprite’s major sins is to forsake this mission for which the Celestials seemingly intended the Eternals.

So Mark Curry briefly perceives his own costumed identity. Initially he resorts to his default setting, the state of denial: “I’m hallucinating.” But he immediately corrects himself and crosses the threshold, accepting the truth about himself: “I’m not hallucinating. It’s happening. I’m moving at hyperspeed. . . ” (Gaiman issue 2, p. 24).

It’s rather surprising that Jack Kirby, creator or co-creator of a number of super-speedsters (including Quicksilver and the New Gods’ Fastbak) was rather uninventive in the uses to which Makkari put his super-speed in the original Eternals series. Kirby obviously wasn’t a reader of Silver Age Flash comics.

So it’s very rewarding to see how thoroughly Neil Gaiman has thought out what it would be like to move at super-speed, as he demonstrates in the opening pages of his third Eternals issue. I can’t recall ever previously reading a superspeedster story that makes use of the “red shift” and “blue shift” in the electromagnetic spectrum to indicate movement (Gaiman issue 3 p. 3, panel 1).

In the course of his super-fast battle with the terrorists, Mark explains that he “must have crashed into the gunmen at the speed of a racing car. . . .It was a miracle that no bones were broken, Mine, I mean. They weren’t so lucky” (Gaiman issue 3 p. 4). This makes me wonder about all those Silver Age tales with a racing Flash socking Captain Cold or the Mirror Master: The Flash would have had to slow down just before hitting them or he would have shattered his hand–and their jaws.

Two of the superhero reality show contestants watch the melee. One of them, Grace, wants to intervene, despite the legal waivers that bind them. Another contestant refuses, making his priority clear: “I’m going to be a star.” (Notice: his choice mirrors that of Sprite.) To her credit, Grace declares, “The show be damned” and goes into action against the terrorists (Gaiman issue 3 p. 4). Readers should recall at this point that Gaiman has established that although Grace is physically only seventeen, she was born in the 1820s (Gaiman issue 2 p. 10). Hence she is not as much a part of 21st century American culture as her fellow contestants are.

Narrating the battle and its aftermath, Mark says that “if I have super-speed, then I have to become a registered super hero, and I don’t really want to be a hero, registered or otherwise” (Gaiman, issue 3, p. 5). So Mark still hasn’t crossed his final threshold: emerging from his rut of an existence to become a superhero. Moreover, he still clearly does not understand or accept that being an Eternal means more than being a conventional superhero.

But notice that he immediately thinks that he has to become a “registered superhero.” Civil War has so redefined the status of superheroes in Marvel’s America that Mark doesn’t think superheroes–who should be symbols of individual liberty and conscience– have any other option than to report to the government.

“So I didn’t know what to say,” Mark continues, “But then there’s an amplified metal voice, and it says. . . .” (Gaiman issue 3 p. 5). Right on cue, it is Iron Man, the foremost advocate of superhero registration in the Civil War series and its tie-ins, and Gaiman seems to be suggesting that if Mark doesn’t know what to “say” about superhero registration, Iron Man will tell him.

When I started reading Iron Man stories back in the Silver Age, Iron Man–as Tony Stark–was the innocent target of government investigations. I recall how in the 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam War, Stark gave up making munitions, and how during the “Armor Wars” storytline of the 1980s Iron Man even defied the law in order to destroy what one might call battlesuits of mass destruction that had fallen into dangerous hands. So I find it hard to accept the Iron Man/Tony Stark of Civil War, who has become the spokesman for a federal government seeking to maximize its control over the nation’s superheroes.

Significantly, Iron Man smashes in through a window and then, not bothering to go back the way he came, exits by smashing a hole in the ceiling. He is government authority acting like the proverbial bull in the china shop. You may also notice that he doesn’t bother to inquire (unless it was between panels) if anyone is hurt. No, it’s not like the Iron Man who was once my favorite Marvel hero.

It appears that the crisis situation likewise forced Sersi over the threshold: Mark recalls that “I saw a knife turn into a flower” (Gaiman issue 3 p. 5), indicating that Sersi, perhaps unconsciously, used her psionic power to rearrange the atomic structure of matter.

Gaiman then reveals that so far in issue 3, Mark has been narrating his story to Sprite. Since Ikaris had told him that Sprite was also an Eternal, Curry sought him out. Mark tells Sprite that now that the crisis is over, he can no longer move at super-speed. Curry says that when he was at the “embassy” (Consulate!), he felt “as if I became part of some huge greater mind” (Gaiman issue 3 p. 7). This indicates that, in the face of extreme danger, Makkari, Sersi, Thena, and, as we learn later, Druig, had subconsciously linked together telepathically into a mini-version of the Eternals’ collective consciousness, the Uni-Mind. But perhaps another reason that Curry can’t use super-speed is that he still doesn’t want to be a “hero” or Eternal, and has therefore subconsciously blocked his super-powers. He has crossed an early Campbellian threshold by deciding to actively investigate his possible Eternal background, and even traveled to a sort of enchanted realm–California–but metaphorically Curry sttill has a long way to go.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, one of the subjects of Gaiman’s Eternals is religion, at least as a metaphor. In the next scene, in which Morjak and Gelt drop their human disguises and assume their true Deviant forms, Gaiman points to the dark side of religious faith: religious fanaticism, which is all too relevant a theme in the early 21st century. The warping of religion into something destructive was a theme of the Kirby Eternals series, through “Purity Time,” and in Peter B. Gillis’s Eternals Vol. 2, in which the principal villain was the Deviant priestlord Ghaur.

Morjak and Gelt worship the Dreaming Celestial, who has also been called the Black Celestial, the Great Renegade, and Tiamut in past stories.

The Deviants credit the Dreaming Celestial with creating their race. Actually, in What If Vol. 1 #23 (October 1980) a backup story (which was canonical, not a “what if”) established that the Celestial known as Ziran the Tester created Earth’s Deviants. So perhaps the Deviants are wrong. But it makes sense that they–or their ancestors–decided that the Dreaming Celestial created them, because the Deviants look upon themselves as outsiders and rebels, just as the Dreaming Celestial was with regard to the Celestials’ Second Host.

Morjak and Gelt’s error about who created the Deviants should remind us that we should not accept anything that they say about the Dreaming Celestial’s past as absolute truth. What they and the other Deviants say about the Dreaming Celestial is what they want to believe about him. For example, Morjak and Gelt state that the Dreaming Celestial was “the greatest of all the Celestials.” But this seems unlikely: Jack Kirby seems to have intended the “One above All,” who remained in a starship orbiting the Earth, to have been superior to any of the Celestials who descended to the planet. The Celestial known as Exitar the Exterminator, whose size dwarfs Arishem’s, and who was introduced in Thor #387 (January 1988), also appears to be “greater” than the Dreaming Celestial.

Though the Deviants believe that the Second Host punished the Dreaming Celestial for creating their race, this is unlikely. It is standard operating procedure for the Celestials to create Deviant races in their genetic experiments on various planets: for example, the shapeshifting Skrulls are an extraterrestrial race of Deviants (see The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entry).

Rereading the Kirby Eternals in its new hardcover collected edition, I was surprised to realize how little he tells us about the Dreaming Celestial in it; Kirby never even calls him the Dreaming Celestial or gives him any other name. In the original Eternals series the Dreaming Celestial only appears on two pages (Kirby Eternals hardcover, pgs. 344-345). We see that the Dreaming Celestial wore golden armor, suggesting that he once shone like Lucifer. Kirby tells the readers that this golden Celestial was a member of the Second Host that visited Earth when he committed some mysterious, unknown act. The rest of the Second Host responded by utilizing a mighty weapon to destroy him. Kirby’s seems to use this outcast Celestial merely as a set-up for his storyline in which Druig attempts to locate this Celestial weapon. As far as the original Eternals series is concerned, the golden Celestial was dead.

It was the second Eternals series, from 1985-1986, and Walter Simonson, who wrote its concluding issues, that revealed that Kirby’s outcast Celestial was still alive, named him the Dreaming Celestial, and established that he was imprisoned, sleeping, beneath a mountain range in California. Should the Dreaming Celestial be awakened, catastrophe would ensue; either the Dreaming Celestial would perpetrate havoc of some kind, or the other Celestials would return to Earth to wage a battle against him that could cause incredible devastation.

In the original series Kirby had the Deviant warlord Kro pose as the devil by using his shapechanging powers to grow horns on his head. But, as reconceived in the second Eternals series, it is the Dreaming Celestial who is the true counterpart to Satan in the Eternals mythos. Like Lucifer, he once shone with light, but he rebelled against the “space gods” and was cast deep underground, the traditional location of hell: his shining golden armor turned black. Sleeping in a deathlike coma beneath the mountains, the Dreaming Celestial is like a combination of Dante’s brobdingnagian Satan, imprisoned, nearly immobile, at the bottom of the pit of hell, and Cthulhu or another of H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional monstrous deities, now imprisoned but awaiting a time when they will break free and reconquer the Earth.

In Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), a cult chants the line “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” Gaiman’s Morjak and Gelt refer to “our dead lord dreaming” (Gaiman issue 3 p. 10).

Considering Gaiman’s interest in Lovecraft’s work, as demonstrated by short stories in his collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things, it should be no surprise that he chose to use the Dreaming Celestial in his Eternals series.

Iron Man remembers Sersi from her stint as a member of the Avengers. Since the Avengers is such a high profile superhero team on Marvel-Earth, one might think that Sersi would have been recognized as a former Avenger by somebody–any member of the general public–long before this. Did Sprite wipe out everybody else’s memory of Sersi’s Avengers membership but somehow overlook Iron Man?

Mind you, it’s also odd that Sersi, who prefers to pursue a life of pleasure, would ever have chosen to become a full-time Avenger in the first place. But if I have to rationalize this, since Eternals lead such long lives, I suppose she might have decided to try being a full-time superhero for a while as a change of pace.

Iron Man is supposedly Sersi’s friend and colleague. In fact, it’s likely that as Tony Stark he would have known Sersi as the reigning hostess of Manhattan parties long before she went public as an Eternal. But rather than express any delight in seeing her again, Iron Man immediately tells her “to get registered” as a superhero or “face any potential consequences,” a not particularly veiled threat (Gaiman issue 3 p. 13). Suffering from Sprite-induced amnesia, Sersi denies having super-powers or ever being in the Avengers. You might think that it would occur to Iron Man that she has lost her memory and to show concern for her, but no, he decides that she’s just putting on an act to avoid registration.

I really liked Iron Man for decades, and as recently as when Kurt Busiek was writing his series. But that was before Civil War.

The formation of the Uni-Mind awakened Druig’s psychic ability to manipulate minds. Mark Curry can no longer access his briefly reawakened super-speed, perhaps because he is not yet willing to accept his super-powers and Eternal identity. In contrast, Druig wants power and embraces it: he retains his reactivated mental powers and uses them to kill his treacherous associate Prykrish. Notice how Druig’s eyes glow when he uses his powers. In the original series Jack Kirby established that the Eternals’ powers manifested themselves through their eyes.

Held captive by the terrorists, anguished over the murder of her husband, and concerned for her missing son, Thena is still undergoing the stress that played a role in activating her fellow Eternals’ powers at the party. Again, Thena was inspired by Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Gaiman here establishes that Thena, as an Eternal, possesses superhuman intelligence as her distinctive super-power. I like the way he does this: as this power reasserts itself, the narrator tells us that Thena “is used to being smart. But her head is changing–strategies and tactics present themselves, are rejected or accepted faster than she can cope with on a conscious level” (Gaiman issue 3, p. 16). Compared with a normal human mind, Thena’s is becoming more like a computer: she has the “computer-like mind” that Legion of Super Heroes stories have long told us was Brainiac 5’s super-power.

Athena was also the Greek goddess of war. So that’s why, as Thena’s Eternal abilities resurface, she discovers that “she is a weapon” (Gaiman issue 3, p. 17). She hurls a plate at one of her captors as if it were a discus, an object that originated in ancient Greece.

Thena calls Iron Man for help, and when he arrives, he says “I don’t know what to say” about the death of his employee’s husband. When Thena asks him if he knows “who’s looking after my son,” Iron Man replies, “I don’t. I should have checked.” This armored Avenger seems to have let his capacity for human empathy grow rusty. Quietly angry, Thena observes that “The rules don’t apply to you,” which is a more ironic comment than perhaps she realizes, since Iron Man has been busily enforcing the superhero registration rule. Iron Man replies, “Thena. . .I said I was sorry” (Gaiman issue 3, p. 21). Actually, he hadn’t, but he’s saying it now, and that’s a good first step.

Then on the final page of the third issue, the scene shifts to Antarctica, where we find Ikaris’s body intact, and a voice, presumably that of a computer, states, “Ikaris complete. Prepare to reactivate” (Gaiman issue 3, p. 22). In the opening pages of the next issue Ikaris is indeed returned to life, and he finds himself in the Eternals’ city of Olympia. Having been “crucified” and killed, Ikaris has now undergone resurrection and finds himself in a science fiction equivalent of heaven, the home of the Eternals.

Jack Kirby set Olympia atop or near Mount Olympus, in Greece, which, according to Greek myths, was the home of the gods. I can see why Gaiman decided to move it: in an age of air travel and spy satellites, it would be impossible to keep a city atop a mountain in Greece secret. I assume that mountain climbers have been scaling Mount Olympus for centuries.

So Gaiman has moved Olympia to Antarctica, where human visitors are far less likely to intrude. Since Gaiman establishes that Olympia is apparently run by a computer system, perhaps this artificial intelligence has the ability to move the entire city from place to place. Or maybe Sprite, using the Dreaming Celestial’s power, moved it there to put the city out of the way. So, if Ikaris and Druig are Polar Eternals, I suppose that the Olympian Eternals are now South Polar Eternals.

Olympia’s new polar location is inevitably reminiscent of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Even Ikaris’s resurrection in an Antarctic chamber reminds me of Superman’s return to life within a “regeneration matrix” in his Fortress in the course of the 1990s “Death of Superman” storyline.

So now we have an all-purpose explanation for the resurrection of Eternals, like Zuras and Ajak, who were believed to be dead. Even if an Eternal dies far away from Antarctica, Eternal technology can retrieve his remains and reconstruct and reanimate them. So presumably the Forgotten One, a. k. a. Gilgamesh, who was supposedly killed in the “Avengers: The Crossing” storyline, is still alive somewhere out there.

A few pages after this Olympia sequence, Druig states that he has “a country to take over” (Gaiman issue 4 p. 5). It used to be that supervillains tried to take over countries, or even the world, and failed. But the supervillain actually controlling a nation is an increasingly common phenomenon. Doctor Doom, as monarch of Latveria, was the pioneer, and has been followed by Magneto with Genosha, Lex Luthor becoming President of the United States, and even the Master being elected Prime Minister of Great Britain in this year’s series of Doctor Who.

On the following page (Gaiman issue 4 p. 5) artist John Romita, Jr. draws Sersi wearing a string bikini. Jack Kirby never did this. This is an unquestionable improvement over the original series.

Sersi, still refusing to believe she has super-powers, playfully tries to turn a cat into a dragon, and to her horror, succeeds. Mind you, in terms of personality, there isn’t that much difference between dragons and many cats that I’ve met.

On a Campbellian hero’s journey, the protagonist often has a mentor or guide. I believe that various stories also feature what we could call the false mentor, who seeks to lead the protagonist astray. Mark Curry has turned to Sprite for guidance in solving the mystery of his true origin. The fact that Sprite, though he has lived for a million years, looks like an eleven-year-old child, rather than like the wise older man who usually fills the role of the hero’s guide, may be a sign that Sprite is a false mentor.

Sprite has always been characterized as a trickster, and tricksters come in many varieties: good (Figaro, Bugs Bunny, Spider-Man), morally ambiguous (like Star Trek‘s Q), and downright evil (like the Joker). Neil Gaiman wrote an entire novel about tricksters, Anansi Boys, which this column has analyzed at great length (starting with “Comics in Context” #105). Anansi Boys‘ protagonist, Charlie, gains the abilities of a trickster deity while becoming genuinely heroic. Sprite proves to be the primary villain of Gaiman’s Eternals.

Acting as false mentor, Sprite tricks Mark Curry into crossing an ominous threshold: Sprite persuades Curry to touch a black rock that provides them entrance to the underground prison of the Dreaming Celestial (whose armor, remember, is black like the rock). Of course, this is a symbolic descent into the underworld, especially considering that the Dreaming Celestial is the Eternals mythos’s counterpart of Satan.

Then Sprite manipulates Curry into trying to cross another threshold, a literal “barrier” (Gaiman issue 4 p. 7) which is likewise black. Curry hurls himself at this threshold but cannot breach it, and instead causes himself to start to “shut down,” as Sprite puts it. Instead of passing through a threshold and entering a world of new life, Curry, by following the false mentor’s guidance, has instead fallen victim to symbolic death.

Sprite explains that “as an Eternal, you’re hardwired not to be able to attack or harm a Celestial. . . You shut down if you try” (Gaiman issue 4 p. 8). Thena confirms this later in the series (Gaiman issue 6, p. 23). But the Eternals attacked Celestials in Thor #300 (October 1980) and in Eternals Vol. 2 #12 (September 1986).

Well, I suppose that in the case of the latter story, the Celestial in question was actually the Deviant Ghaur in Celestial form, so that might have made the difference. In Thor #300 the Uni-Mind’s unsuccessful attack on the Celestials caused the (temporary) death of Zuras, so perhaps Zuras somehow took the entire “shut down” effect upon himself. So here’s another case in which I can figure out how to reconcile revisionism with past continuity, but I wish the revisionism hadn’t occurred in the first place. So why didn’t the Celestials “hardwire” the Deviants not to attack them?

Meanwhile in Olympia, Ikaris symbolically crosses another threshold by thrusting his hand into what seems to be a waterfall. Water symbolically gives life, and Ikaris regains his full memories and thus his true identity (“I am Ikaris of the Eternals”), his full Eternal powers, and even his mission (“I was created to protect the Earth, and everything that moves upon it.”), thereby satisfying Dr. Coogan’s three requirements for being a superhero (Gaiman issue 4, p. 14). Ikaris’s literal resurrection and symbolic rebirth are now complete.

Dr. Coogan would surely be pleased that Sprite now engages in classic supervillain behavior: what The Incredibles termed “monologuing.”

But wait! Since when did Sprite, treated by Kirby and other writers as merely a juvenile prankster, become an archvillain? That is a question I will explore next week.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR OTHER PEOPLE

Last month I reviewed the exhibition “Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes” at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey (see “Comics in Context” #193). On Saturday night, October 13, at 7 PM, comics writers Danny Fingeroth, Tom DeFalco and Denny O’Neil, and Michael Uslan, an executive producer of the Batman live action movies and the forthcoming Spirit film, will be holding a panel discussion at the museum, thereby recreating the panel they did at the Smithsonian Institution last year. I recommend that those of you who live in the vicinity go see the exhibit and hear what these veterans of the superhero genre have to say.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

In the interview in the back of the hardcover collection of Neil Gaiman’s revival of Jack Kirby’s Eternals, Gaiman says, “One of my favorite things about this – which… takes advantage of… the nature of time in the Marvel Universe–is that in my story, the Third Host did indeed arrive; Arishem came down to judge. In 1976.”

First, as those of you who have been reading this column for the last two weeks may recall, Arishem came to judge Earth as a member of the Fourth Host of Celestials. More importantly, Neil Gaiman has a different understanding of “Marvel time” than I do.

Time passes much more slowly for Marvel’s fictional characters than it does in the real world. Otherwise, Peter Parker (alias Spider-Man), who was fifteen in his first appearance, published in 1962, would now be sixty. When I was active at Marvel in the 1980s, the rule was that in Marvel time it had been seven to ten years (depending on who you talked to) since the events of Fantastic Four #1, published in 1961. My impression is that John Byrne, a staunch defender of the “Marvel time” concept, would contend that no matter how much time has now passed since the publication of FF #1, it is still seven-to-ten years in Marvel time since the FF’s origin (see “Comics in Context” #25). I also have the impression that the current editorial team at Marvel, if they think about Marvel time much at all, may have now stretched the seven-to-ten years to as much as fifteen. This is a mistake (Should Spider-Man be thirty?), but that’s a subject for another day.

Had the original Eternals series by Jack Kirby been completely divorced from other known characters in the Marvel Universe, I would have no problem with the idea that it took place thirty-one years ago in Marvel time. But in the Kirby series two kids put together a robot simulacrum of the Hulk, and Sersi temporarily turns a student’s face into a replica of the Thing’s (Kirby Eternals collection p. 106). There is no way that in Marvel time the origins of the Hulk and the Thing occurred thirty-one years ago. Therefore, the Fourth Host had to arrive sometime within the last seven, ten or fifteen years of Marvel time, depending on your interpretation.

Ultimately, though, exactly when the Fourth Host arrived is a minor matter in the story: what is important is that they did, some years before Gaiman’s Eternals storyline begins. In the context of the series, it is Ikaris, who confesses that he has a faulty memory, who says it was “thirty years” since the Fourth Host came, so we can easily interpret this reference as a mistake on Ikaris’s part that nonetheless serves as a winking acknowledgment to the readers that Gaiman’s series marked the thirtieth anniversary of Jack Kirby’s original opus.

As for what happened after the Fourth Host landed, Ikaris admits that “I don’t really remember all of it after that,” but he does recall that the Fourth Host returned to outer space (“I guess you must have been okay,” Ikaris says, and, indeed, Arishem literally gave humanity a thumbs-up in Thor #300 in 1980), and thinks (correctly) that he “succeeded Zuras as the leader of the Eternals” (Gaiman Eternals issue 1 page 33).

Ordinarily I believe in strict adherence to Marvel continuity. But I also believe in not dragging more references to past continuity into a story than are necessary. Actually, Zuras died (or so we readers thought), and he was initially succeeded as the Eternals’ leader by his daughter Thena, before Ikaris succeeded her. But there is no need in the present storyline to go into that much detail, so Gaiman wisely leaves it out. Similarly, for the purposes of the new series, we do not need to know the circumstances under which the Fourth Host departed Earth.

Thus the injured Ikaris, alias “Ike Harris,” finished recounting the backstory of the Eternals to a medical student named Mark Curry, who has lost his memory of his true identity, the Eternal known as Makkari. Curry reacts with utter disbelief, pointing out that if the Fourth Host had landed, then their existence would be public knowledge. Back in the first issue of the second Eternals series, in 1985, writer Peter B. Gillis established that when the Fourth Host left Earth in Thor #300, they wiped out humanity’s memories of the Eternals, Deviants and Celestials, making a few exceptions, such as Sersi’s companion Dr. Samuel Holden. (In fact, Dr. Holden discovered that even when he told his students about the Eternals, Deviants and Celestials, they immediately forgot!) Arguably this violates Jack Kirby’s intentions, since he not only did numerous scenes in which humanity reacted to the colossal Celestials in their midst, but even did an issue in which Dr. Holden publicly revealed the existence of the Eternals and Deviants at New York’s City College (in Eternals Vol. 1 #6, 1976). But I expect that Gillis and Gaiman both believe that, now that Eternals is so explicitly set in the Marvel Universe, whose denizens are already well aware of the existence of superheroes and aliens, that the Eternals and Deviants can retain a certain mystery by operating out of public view.

Curry then demands to know why, if there were millions of Deviants before the coming of the Second Host, why they haven’t rebuilt their numbers to millions again. Gaiman never answers this question in the new series. In Iron Man Annual #6 (1983) the Eternals got rid of many Deviants, including their leader Brother Tode, by rearranging their atomic structures into a gigantic block which they transported into outer space. This was probably an effort by Marvel to reduce sharply the number of Deviants on Earth, but it still doesn’t explain why the Deviant population had not soared into millions.

Kirby provided a possible answer in the original series through the Deviants’ “Purity Time,” described as “an infamous ritual which never ends” (Kirby, p. 137).

Each Deviant is radically different genetically from the others. The Deviants nevertheless believe that this genetic variety must be kept within certain bounds. Through the endless “Purity Time,” any Deviant whose genetic deviations are judged to be too extreme is sentenced to be destroyed. The Deviants’ leader Brother Kro declared, “Killing serves a practical purpose here! It rids us of the unwanted” (Kirby p. 141). It is unclear what the Deviants’ standards for acceptable genetic variety is, but Kirby shows us that one Deviant, whom he called the Reject, was condemned because he looked exactly like a handsome normal human being. Since all other Deviants look grotesque, and look different from one another, then Kirby is showing us that their standards of racial purity make no sense (and by extension, that any standards of racial “purity” are nonsensical). The Deviants in power are simply venting their violent hatred and exercising their will to power by seemingly arbitrarily seeking out and executing scapegoats.

Deviants condemned in “Purity Time” are transported in “death wagons” (Kirby, p. 137). What happens to them? The Deviant warlord Kro points towards a structure emitting flame, like a gigantic oven (Kirby, p. 139). Kirby also makes reference to “Purity Time” as a “solution.” As in “the Final Solution”?

Lately much attention has been given to the role of Jewish-Americans, including Kirby, in creating and developing the superhero genre. (For example, Danny Fingeroth’s new book on the subject, Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero, will soon be available in bookstores.) On rereading the Kirby Eternals series, it’s obvious to me that “Purity Time” was inspired by the Holocaust.

Hence, it was a serious mistake when the second Eternals series purported that “Purity Time” did not execute “unwanted” Deviants after all. Instead, it contended that the Deviant priesthood placed the supposedly condemned into suspended animation, so that they could eventually serve as the priesthood’s private army. The people responsible for this reinterpretation of “Purity Time” didn’t understand Kirby’s Holocaust imagery at all.

So, if we follow Kirby’s original vision of “Purity Time,” arguably the Deviants, through their fanatical obsession with genetic “purity,” have ended up self-destructively restricting the size of their own population.

Later in Gaiman’s series, after Druig takes over the government of a former Soviet republic and causes the brutal murders of numerous people, the narration informs us that “Tomorrow they will announce that atrocities have been committed by. . who? Gypsies, perhaps, or homosexuals or Slavs. And he will have them rounded up. And it will be necessary to bring back the secret police. And without knowing why, he feels like this is a return to the good old days, the very old days” (Gaiman issue 5, p. 13). So perhaps Neil Gaiman did spot the Holocaust imagery in Kirby’s Eternals, and this is his own allusion to it.

Elsewhere in the Kirby series, the Eternals and human guests Margo Damian and Sam Holden form a group “Uni-Mind” by plunging into what appears to be a gigantic flame. Sersi tells Sam, “That flame is life, not death! It is life as you have never known it before!” (Kirby p. 212). This is another variation on the familiar death and rebirth motif, with the Uni-Mind serving as a kind of afterlife, a higher spiritual state beyond mortal existence. But it also strikes me now that the Uni-Mind “flame” is the opposite of the flame that rises from the “Purity Time” oven. As Kirby intended it, the fires of “Purity Time” bring annihilation, but the “flame” of the Uni-Mind brings a higher, transcendent form of life.

Curry asks Ikaris if Eternals could “interbreed with humans,” and Ikaris replies, “I guess so” (Gaiman issue 1 p. 35). At this point Ikaris is unable to recall that long ago he had a human son, also named Ikaris, for whom he built a flying device. After the younger Ikaris fell from the sky to his death, inspiring the myth of Icarus [sic], his father took the name “Ikaris” in his honor. (See Eternals Vol. 2 #5, February 1986, and here.) Curry points out that Ikaris claims that Eternals can also breed among themselves.

So, Curry asks, why are there still only a hundred Eternals? With their genetic immunity to illness and death, why hasn’t the Eternal population risen into the billions? Through interbreeding, Curry points out, “we’d all be Eternals now.”

This is another question that Gaiman raises without answering. In the original series Kirby wrote that “The Eternals bred few in number” (Kirby p. 11). Perhaps this suggests that it is quite rare for a mating between Eternals to produce Eternal offspring. It also appears, from such examples as Ikaris’s son in Eternals Vol. 2 and Thena’s son in the Gaiman series, that when Eternals interbreed with normal humans, their offspring are normal humans. My hypothesis is that this is all a result of the Celestials’ “intelligent design” of the Eternals. The Celestials did not want the Eternals to dominate Earth, and so they genetically designed the Eternals to prevent their numbers from rising significantly.

Curry accepts the fact that Ikaris is a superhuman; he simply does not accept Ikaris’s explanation for his powers: “If Spider-Man told me that he got his spider-powers from reading Chariots of the Gods, I guess I’d figure he was full of it too” (Gaiman issue 1 p. 35). Obviously Mark Curry is unaware of J. Michael Straczynski’s recent stories in Amazing Spider-Man asserting that Spider-Man’s powers are in part mystical in origin, and that he is the “totem” of a spider-like force.

This Curry-Ikaris scene serves as a transition into a section of the first issue in which Gaiman begins exploring what makes the Eternals different from the many superheroes who populate Marvel-Earth. One of the differences appears to be that, despite Straczynski, most superheroes’ powers are rooted in science; therefore Curry, a man of science, can believe in them. But the Eternals origins have religious overtones, since they claim to have been created by “space gods.”

We next see Ikaris in his hospital bed watching another of the seemingly dreadful American TV shows that Gaiman has devised for this series: America’s Next Super Hero (Gaiman issue 1 p. 36). I wonder if Neil Gaiman knew about Stan Lee’s reality TV series Who Wants to Be a Superhero? when he started work on this Eternals series. (Neil’s show has a “super hero house” a la Big Brother, whereas in Stan’s, the hero wannabes room together in their secret “lair.”) I rather like Who Wants to Be a Superhero?, which is not only entertainingly kitschy, but also, surprisingly, enforces moral standards for superhero conduct that contemporary comics often ignore (see “Comics in Context” #142).

Then again, the New Warriors, one of Marvel’s superhero teams, was appearing on a reality TV series at the time of the disaster which led to the events of Marvel’s Civil War series. Before that, Marvel’s new X-Force team, later renamed X-Statix, were primarily out to become rich and famous media celebrities, relegating fighting crime and saving innocents to secondary importance.

There should be an inspirational majesty to the superhero concept: the idea of a human being who achieves godlike status. I wonder if Gaiman is suggesting that the image of conventional superheroes is being overwhelmed by their status as commercial properties. So here are the contestants for America’s Next Super Hero–Tantrum, ZeeBee, Trucker, and others–who aren’t following the traditional origin path of going out of their own to battle evildoers, but are competing against each other on a tacky TV show. Janet Van Dyne, alias the Wasp, flies in to make an appearance. (So Stan presides over Who Wants to Be a Superhero?, and Jan appears on America’s Next Super Hero. Stan and Jan. Hmm.) Then we see Mister Fantastic doing a Public Service Announcement on behalf of reading. lowering himself with a kitschy catchphrase (“It’s fantastic!”). However, the contestants rave with praise not over these classic Marvel superheroes, but over Sprite, who, as far as they know, is only a TV star for “˜tweens. They’d rather be TV celebrities than champions of justice. Trucker says, “I am now officially the coolest kid in my school” because he’s going to meet Sprite. Shouldn’t he be more impressed that he’s working with a co-founder of the Avengers? Mind you, she seems to have sold out by appearing on this show.

(However, I like the fact that Mr. Fantastic is holding up a copy of Gulliver’s Travels, which is arguably a forebear of science fiction novels. According to Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the book’s title character, Lemuel Gulliver, is an early member of the League, making him a forerunner of today’s superheroes.)

In the interview in the back of the hardcover collection of his Eternals, Neil Gaiman says, “You know, you’ve got the sort of “˜Marvel Civil Warry’ stuff going on in the background, in a way that I hope won’t bug anybody who has no idea what this is but will actually be kind of fun for anybody who does.” Well, I know what this “Civil Warry” stuff is, and I’m bugged. I am no fan of Civil War and its repercussions, and I should think that Gaiman’s many readers who are not superhero fans might indeed be puzzled by his references to Civil War in Eternals. Aren’t superheroes traditionally supposed to act on their own or in small teams? So what’s all this about government registration of superheroes?

Indeed, I contend that the superhero is a metaphor for the freedom, power and potential for greatness within the individual. Clark Kent and Peter Parker are nobodies, swallowed up by contemporary urban society, who assert themselves as individuals by shifting into their superheroic identities. By the end of Civil War Marvel’s superheroes are instead forced into the roles of government servants.

I would like to think that decades from now, Neil Gaiman’s Eternals, as well as Sandman and 1602 and his other works in comics, will still be in print, whereas Civil War, like virtually every other Marvel and DC company-wide crossover series event, will have faded into obscurity. Decades hence new readers of the Gaiman Eternals may well need footnotes to explain the Civil War references.

So why did Gaiman put the Civil War references in Eternals? Did Marvel urge him to put them in, just as back in the 1970s Marvel allegedly pushed Kirby into putting Marvel Universe references into his Eternals?

In Gaiman’s case, though, I tend to think that if he worked Civil War connections into Eternals, he did so for thematic purposes.

In the episode of America’s Next Super Hero that is excerpted in this first issue, Jan tells a contestant, “You see, Grace, when you’re a government-registered super hero, you’ll need to record public service announcements, like this one,” whereupon we see Mr. Fantastic in his aforementioned PSA (Gaiman issue 1, pgs. 36-37). Some readers may recall when government registration of mutants was considered a Bad Thing in Marvel stories, a first step towards the dystopian “Days of Future Past.” How interesting that Jan says that once Grace has registered with the government, she will “need” to do public service announcements. One might have thought that recording PSAs was done on a volunteer basis. Just what else does the government require registered superheroes to do? (Hint: consult Avengers: The Initiative.)

Then, with her characteristically cheerful demeanor, Jan tells the contestants they are off to visit the set of It’s Just So Sprite, “where the lucky winner of today’s hero trial is going to record a PSA about getting registered” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 37). Oh, Jan, I always thought of you as an irreverent free spirit, not a smiling propagandist. And that phrase “hero trial” seems disconcertingly ominous.

Soon afterwards we see Sprite himself on television with Orlando, an America’s Next Super Hero contestant. Sprite is secretly an Eternal, so, like other Eternals, he should be a “protector of the Earth.” But, as we shall see, he has devoted his life to becoming a celebrity instead. On television Sprite reels off his show biz credits, and tells us, “I’m not a super hero. If I were, I’d get registered,” just like Orlando here (Gaiman issue 1, p. 38). So Sprite is a willing propagandist for the government as well.

To reinforce the point, Gaiman has Orlando tell us, “It’s just so Sprite. If you’re gonna be a super hero, get registered” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 37). Gaiman thus links the Civil War superhero registration program to Sprite and the mind-numbing mediocrity of his TV show. By linking the registration program to Sprite, Gaiman also links it to Sprite’s sinister agenda, which is later to be revealed.

The TV show excerpt ends with a close-up on Orlando as he concludes about superhero registration, “It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 37), which carries an implicit threat. This is a rather different slogan for a superhero than “With great power must come great responsibility,” isn’t it? And isn’t there something odd about Orlando’s wide-eyed look in that closing panel, a hint of innocent fanaticism, perhaps?

Come to think of it, doesn’t the fact that the government is putting PSAs about superhero registration on television imply that there must be an awful lot of superhumans out there? Is Gaiman suggesting that perhaps the Marvel Universe has too many super-people? Maybe the limited number of Eternals is another factor that sets them apart from other Marvel superheroes.

Ikaris tells Curry, “There are so many mysteries to solve, and I need you by my side” (Gaiman issue 1 p. 39). At this point Ikaris reminded me of Fox Mulder in The X-Files, a man who believes in and investigates the paranormal but is considered by many to be delusional. Maybe that’s one reason why Gaiman put in a reference to Roswell earlier on (Gaiman issue 1 p. 34). And hey, Mulder’s partner was Dana Scully, a medical doctor, and Mark Curry is a medical student.

But Curry instead injects Ikaris with a sedative to put him to sleep; perhaps Curry was also motivated, consciously or unconsciously, to keep him from talking any further. Considering Ikaris’s high level of “durability,” as The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe puts it, I’m surprised that a hypodermic needle could penetrate his thick skin. And wouldn’t it take a dose of sedative that was far higher than normal to knock Ikaris unconscious? (Think of the various past stories in which someone uses knockout gas on the Hulk and says that it’s a dose sufficient to put something like a herd of elephants to sleep.)

Gaiman will establish that Ikaris’s Eternal powers still aren’t back to full working order at this point. Nonetheless, the issue ends with two Deviants, whose names are later established as Morjak and Gelt, returning to capture Ikaris, and in issue two, Ikaris seems pretty damn resistant to the physical tortures they put him through.

Issue two is titled “Identity Crisis,” which is an obvious reference to Mark Curry’s questioning of his own identity, which reaches the crisis point when armed men who invade a party at the Vorozheikan embassy attempt to kill him. I wonder if it may also be an allusion to DC’s Identity Crisis series, which also concerned characters who lost and regained their memories (see “Comics in Context” #57, 58, 63, 67).

By the way, here’s something that I discovered when I was researching my forthcoming book, The Marvel Travel Guide to New York. Countries usually situate their official embassies in the capitals of other nations. Their official outposts in other cities are known as consulates. Hence, what Marvel calls the Latverian, Symkarian and Wakandan embassies in New York City (for the respective nations of Doctor Doom, Silver Sable, and the Black Panther) are really consulates. And the “Vorozheikan embassy” in New York City in Gaiman’s Eternals is probably a consulate, too.

Not responding to the Campbellian “call to adventure” always has bad repercussions. In issue 2 we learn that Mark Curry has not just refused to heed the “call” but has gone so far as to turn the “herald” who issued the “call,” Ikaris alias “Ike Harris,” over to two men who, as Curry’s superior points out, only “claimed to be doctors” (Gaiman issue 2 p. 8). In actuality, they are Deviants who are busily experimenting in efforts to kill their allegedly unkillable captive Ikaris. Curry’s active rejection of the “call” has imperiled Ikaris.

Ikaris desperately sends another “call,” a telepathic call for help, to Curry, calling him “Makkari,” but Curry fails to respond. This time his refusal to heed the call is immediately followed by catastrophe for himself: Curry’s superior tells him he is “suspended from working here,” and that a policeman “wishes to talk to you” about Harris’s disappearance from the hospital. (Gaiman issue 2 p. 8). In plainer words, the police suspect Curry is involved in the illegal abduction of Ike Harris (and, in a sense, they are correct) and intend to interrogate him. Already in a low position at this start of his “hero’s journey,” Curry has descended to an even lower one.

This issue contains many Campbellian “calls.” There is Ikaris’s telepathic call for help. Another “call” comes through his chance encounter with Sersi, another Eternal who is unaware of her Eternal identity. They are immediately attracted to each other, and we shall learn later that, in their Eternal identities, they are former lovers. Perhaps part of their attraction to each other now is that they subconsciously remember each other: “I feel like I’ve known you forever,” Sersi tells him (Gaiman issue 2 p. 5). She also says that she wishes she could invite him to the party she is organizing at the Vorozheikan embassy; not having been suspended yet, Mark responds that the hospital probably wouldn’t give him the night off. So here’s Sersi wanting to “call” Mark to a party–and to romance, and perhaps subconsciously to a connection to a fellow Eternal–and deciding that she can’t, and Mark, who seems a rather passive fellow, not seeming all that disappointed about it.

After Curry is suspended, Gaiman provides us with a major revelation: Mark has been refusing another “herald’s” “call to adventure”: his own. Curry had been dreaming about Ikaris, the Deviants and the Celestials “before I’d ever met him” (Gaiman issue 2, p. 9). Curry is so far into denial that “I wanted to think that I was going crazy” (Gaiman issue 2, p. 9) rather than accept the truth about his origins. Makkari is the counterpart of Mercury, messenger of the gods, and here we see that Makkari’s subconscious self is acting as messenger to “Mark Curry.” Of course it is right that Mark dreams of his higher potential, as do we all. It is also appropriate to find Neil Gaiman, auteur of Sandman, utilizing dreams once again as a motif.

Right after Mark says he would prefer to be “crazy” rather than accept the call of his dreams, Sersi’s friend Abigail tells her she is “crazy not to” invite Mark to the party (or, if you prefer, issue her call to romantic adventure to him) (Gaiman issue 2 p. 10). Abigail argues that this could be Sersi’s “only chance” to “impress” Curry. This reinforces the idea of the importance of accepting the “call” when it occurs. lest the opportunity never again present itself. (Mark/Makkari is fortunate in that he keeps getting “calls” to return to his true identity, rather like those innumerable invitations to attend Hogwarts that owls keep delivering to Harry Potter until the Dursleys finally give in).

Sersi tells Abigail that there will be some superheroes attending her party, namely “the kids from America’s Next Super Hero“; Abigail disapprovingly comments, “That’s kinda C-list. Any word from Julia Roberts?” (Gaiman issue 2 p. 10). Notice that Sersi and Abigail are discussing superheroes as if they were simply celebrities, not heroic champions or godlike figures. Abigail talks as if Captain America and Julia Roberts were interchangeable. It’s as if Spider-Man were no different than Tobey Maguire.

As Sersi and Abigail chat, they ignore another “herald,” an apparently insane homeless man who shouts, “They took it all away!” Longtime Eternals aficionados should realize from the man’s red beard that he is Zuras, monarch of the Eternals and counterpart of Zeus. “They took it all away!” is his mad reference to what happened to the Eternals, and his cry of “All one!” may be a reference to the Eternals’ Uni-Mind. But Sersi, lacking her memories of being an Eternal, cannot understand Zuras’s message.

Reducing a powerful being into a homeless, amnesiac derelict is a familiar trope in Marvel history”: it has happened to the Ancient One, to Odin (I think), and most famously to the Sub-Mariner in Fantastic Four #4 (May, 1962).

Eternals aficionados should be surprised to see Zuras, since he was killed in combat with the Fourth Host in Thor #300 (even though Gaiman’s series contends that the Eternals are mentally programmed not to fight Celestials); Zuras’s spirit departed from his body in Iron Man Annual #6. However, I always thought that killing off Zuras was a mistake, so I am pleased to see him back. (In general, killing off characters created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, or any combination thereof, is usually a bad idea. Most such characters have too much potential for further stories.)

Usually I expect that when a writer resurrects a supposedly deceased character in the superhero genre, he or she will explain how the character survived. Later in this Eternals series Gaiman does reveal how an Eternal can literally be resurrected, and in issue four Sprite indicates that Zuras, as well as Ajak, who was killed off in The Eternals: The Herod Factor (1991), went through this same “reactivation” process.

Sersi and Mark Curry turn out not to be hopelessly stuck in their respective ruts: she invites him to the Vorozheikan party, and he accepts.

But then Mark receives the most disturbing of his “calls”: a vision of Ikaris tormented by flames, pleading telepathically for his help. Like the Apostle Peter denying Christ, Curry rejects the call yet again. His face set in anger, and even cruelty, Curry demands that Ikaris “Get out of my head!” (Gaiman issue 2, p. 12).

Mark Curry has now gone too far, and soon it is he will be in dire need of help. Rejecting the call will once more be followed by serious consequences, as we shall see next week.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

I haven’t done one of these sections for awhile, but I’ve continued to do writing for Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week. You can find my interview with David Michaelis, author of the psychologically penetrating biography Schulz and Peanuts, to be published in October, here, and my review of R. C. Harvey’s Meanwhile. . . , a lengthy and extensively researched biography of Milton Caniff, creator of the classic comic strips Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, here.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

This week I continue my exploration of the recent Eternals series written by Neil Gaiman and drawn by John Romita, Jr., reviving the characters and concepts from Jack Kirby’s last great comics series. Both series are now available from Marvel in hardcover collections.

When I left off last week, I wrote about the scene in Gaiman’s first issue in which medical student Mark Curry is first confronted by a blond stranger with gold-colored eyes who says that Curry is actually “an immortal, indestructible being” who has lost his memory. Readers who are familiar with the Eternals will recognize the stranger as Ikaris the Eternal and will deduce from the name “Mark Curry” that Mark is another Eternal, Makkari.

As I noted last week, readers of Kirby’s original Eternals series may be surprised by Mark’s physical appearance. Whereas in the original series and his other previous appearances, Makkari has been portrayed with typical Caucasian skin color, in the Gaiman/Romita series he has brown skin. I am advised that this was intended to show that Curry was from either Greece or Italy, since people from Mediterranean countries have darker skin. Well, then, wouldn’t the other “Olympian Eternals” from Greece–Zuras, Thena, Sersi, and Ajak–have dark skin, too? There’s no established convention at Marvel or DC of portraying characters with Greek or Italian background with brown skin: think of Kirby’s Hercules in Thor, or Gaiman’s Orpheus from Sandman, or even Wonder Woman! Moreover, although Kirby never depicted Makkari without his helmet (A crash helmet for traveling in super-fast vehicles?), subsequent stories have established that he has reddish-blond hair (as noted here) and sometimes portrayed him with just plain blond hair (look at the picture of Makkari as a member of the Monster Hunters here), not Mark Curry’s black hair. John Romita, Jr. draws Mark Curry’s facial features distinctly differently than the unmasked Makkari’s looked in his appearances in series like Quasar.

So to make sense out of this in terms of continuity, I have to assume that Makkari’s physical appearance underwent a change at some point. As I hypothesized last week, possibly Sprite did it when he created a new identity for Makkari, or perhaps Makkari, as an Eternal with “absolute mental control” his body, did it himself.

By the way, in doing further research, I have discovered that Makkari previously went under the alias of “Mac Curry” (rather than Mark, which I still find preferable) in Roger Stern and John Byrne’s Marvel: The Lost Generation #2 (January 2001). (Lost Generation was a very imaginative series that created an enormous number of superheroes who operated between the Golden Age of the 1940s and the debut of the Fantastic Four–including a delightful female Eternal named Pixie–and deserves to be revived in a trade paperback reprint collection.)

Ikaris is indeed correct that Mark Curry has lost his memory of being Makkari. Further research has reminded me that Marvel has done this theme of godlike beings suffering amnesia before, only a decade ago. To stave off the threat of Ragnarok, Odin wiped out the memories of the Asgardians and created new identities for them on Earth. This “Lost Gods” story arc ran in the 1990s Journey into Mystery series while Thor was off in the “Heroes Reborn” version of The Avengers. This is a further indication that Gaiman is working with what seems to be an archetypal storyline: the seemingly ordinary mortal who is unaware of his true heroic or even godlike identity. Even Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s origin of Marvel’s Thor (Thor #159, December 1968), in which Odin transforms him into the mortal Don Blake, who is unaware of his godly identity until he finds his hammer, fits this pattern.

Mark Curry dismisses Ikaris’s message and walks away from him, but Ikaris has nonetheless triggered a memory: Curry thinks of Ikaris’s “gold-colored eyes I’m sure I’ve seen before” (Gaiman Eternals #1 p. 5).

Significantly, Curry thinks of Ikaris as “a religious maniac” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 6). Of course, Ikaris is correct about who and what Curry truly is. I am not arguing that Gaiman is literally making a case for religious faith in his Eternals series. The superhero genre deals in metaphors, and the Celestials, who created the Eternals, are “space gods” who are metaphors for God. But I suspect that through Eternals Gaiman is making the case that there is more to life, the universe, and individuals including ourselves, than meets the eye, or that can be defined by science. Indeed, this is a case that the literature of the fantastic makes just as religion does.

It is also significant that, following his encounter with Ikaris, Curry tells us how empty his life (which, Ikaris knows, is not his true life) is: he goes home to an empty apartment to find an unpaid bill, “no girlfriend, no cat, and nothing on TV” (Gaiman issue 1 p. 6).

The “nothing” that is on TV is a stereotypically stupid sitcom for “˜tweens called It’s Just So Sprite, whose title is its catchphrase. (Gaiman may have the same negative attitude towards sitcom catchphrases that Ricky Gervais shows in Extras.) This banal show, complete with a nonstop laugh track, fits the impression of emptiness in Curry’s solitary life.

Past Eternals readers will realize that the show’s lead character, Sprite, is another Eternal from the Kirby series. The TV refers to Sprite’s upcoming “all-star concert at the Hollywood Bowl.” In interviews Gaiman has said that he wanted to define the role of the Eternals in the Marvel Universe, as opposed to its other superheroes. Here Gaiman subtly introduces this theme. The Eternals are meant to serve the “space gods” and protect the Earth; Sprite, on the other hand, has embarked on a show biz career appealing to the lowest common denominator. (The Eternals‘ other show business star, Kingo Sunen, apparently worked with Akira Kurosawa and had a much more artistically respectable career.) It’s as if in Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962) Spider-Man continued performing stunts on TV instead of becoming a costumed crimefighter.

Curry is overwhelmed by exhaustion, which he attributes to his busy life. But I wonder if the real cause is his deep dissatisfaction with his life. “I want to sleep. I want to sleep so bad it hurts” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 6). This looks like a symptom of deep depression to me. It’s as if he wants to be dead to the world.

And then comes a tapping at Curry’s window, he responds, and it turns out to be Ikaris again, the Campbellian herald issuing the call to adventure for a second time, standing out on the fire escape. This time he identifies himself as “Ike Harris,’ his alias from Kirby’s The Eternals #1.

Again, “Ike” speaks in terms that could be interpreted as religious: “I’m talking about the purpose of life. The meaning of everything. Why we’re here” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 7). As a medical student, Curry responds with a scientific explanation, arguing that the creation of life came about by sheer accident. As far as Curry is concerned, there is no higher meaning to existence. Without allowing “Ike” to make his case, Curry rejects his “nutso-religion.” Notice how Curry identifies himself as a man of science, not of religion: “Dude, I’m a doctor. Well, I’m a med student.”

Even that “dude” has a certain significance. As The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe put it, Makkari “retains an adolescent fervor, especially for his interest in building and riding vehicles that move faster than he himself can with his superhuman powers.” (Trapped in a life that does not suit him, Mark Curry is pictured immobile and exhausted in his apartment, rather than racing at high speed. As “Ike” tells Mark on page 8, “You like going fast.”) The late Mark Gruenwald used to write Makkari in Quasar as a counterpart to the youthful, somewhat naive Lightray in Kirby’s “Fourth World” books. Mark Curry’s calling Ikaris “dude” suggests a certain adolescent spirit.

But rereading Kirby’s Eternals, I didn’t see his version of Makkari as having “adolescent” high spirits so much as he was short-tempered. Kirby’s Makkari is repeatedly short-tempered with Sersi, impatient with her lighthearted attitude. And you see Makkari’s temper in Mark Curry’s early interactions with “Ike Harris.”

Notice how in the fire escape scene Ikaris’s coat flies out behind him, as if it were a superhero’s cape. (Frank Miller employs the same trick for his heroes’ coats in Sin City. The black and white shot of Ikaris in the rain in the third panel of page 12 even looks like a Sin City panel.) Ikaris heads off for the “Royer Building” (Gaiman issue 1, page 8), whose name is a homage to Mike Royer, inker of the Kirby Eternals series.

The next pages reintroduce another Eternal, Sersi. She does not recall being an Eternal either, but one of her main interests in life–partying– remains intact: Sersi is embarking on a career as a party planner. She even wears green, the color of her Eternal costume, throughout the issue.

Gaiman’s handling of Sersi reminds me of other latter-day bohemian characters in his work. Sersi may be unkillable, but I can imagine her getting along quite well with Gaiman’s Death character.

On page 12 “Ike” stands on a small tower atop a building, which is the closest he can come to standing on a mountaintop, as “gods” traditionally do. Making the point explicit, Gaiman and Romita shift to what appears to be Ikaris’s memory of standing on an actual snowy mountaintop with his fellow Eternal, Thena, as they discuss their race’s affinity for cold climates. according to Kirby, Ikaris is a “Polar Eternal,” who dwelled on mountains in Siberia. On the other hand, Thena’s home was the Eternals’ city of Olympia, atop Mount Olympus in Greece, and Kirby drew the city to look as if it had an idyllic, sunny, warm climate. Thena may not really be that fond of cold weather; then again, we discover later in Gaiman’s series that Ikaris’s memories are imperfect.

Thena compliments Ikaris on being “a delightful bedmate. . . .But you do not think” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 13). Thena is modeled on Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, so thinking is especially important to her. Gaiman’s revelation that Ikaris and Thena are former lovers fits in with his later revelation that Sersi was once Makkari’s lover. Gaiman is suggesting that since the Eternals are so long-lived, over the millennia they would inevitably have gotten around to such sexual liaisons. (Now there’s an appealing fantasy: if only I and certain women I know were unaging immortals. . . .)

“Ike” is confronted by two sinister strangers, who will eventually be revealed as members of the Deviants, the Eternals’ perennial enemies. The Deviants attack Ikaris, clearly hurt him, and knock him unconscious. It is unclear whether Ikaris possesses his Eternal superhuman strength at this point in the story, but the two Deviants probably do. (These assassins, traveling in a pair, may remind Gaiman readers of Mr. Croup and the taller, stronger Mr. Vandemar of Neverwhere, albeit minus Mr. Croup’s gift for language. See “Comics in Context” #18.) The larger Deviant throws Ikaris off the top of the building, perhaps reminding us that Ikaris’ namesake, the mythological figure Icarus, fell from the sky to his death. The large Deviant throws a bomb after him, which detonates.

Sersi gets her first party planning assignment from Ivan Druig, Deputy Prime Minister of the fictional former Soviet republic of Vorozheika, which is now an independent nation. I’m amused by the lettering style used to indicate that Druig and his associate are speaking in Russian, translated for our benefit, with “N’s” and “O’s” made to look like letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. (Actually the letter resembling a backwards “N” represents an “E” sound, and the letter resembling a bisected “O” represents our “F.”) Walt Kelly used to use a similar trick for the dialogue of the Russian characters in Pogo.

“Ivan Druig” is really just plain Druig, who. like Ikaris, is one of the Polar Eternals. It’s appropriate that Druig is an official in a former Soviet republic, since he was a member of the K. G. B. in the Kirby series.

Druig was also the villain in the Kirby Eternals‘ final story arc. One of the flaws in the Kirby series is its lack of a great villain, to provide a worthy adversary for its noteworthy heroes. Zakka, Tutinax, Dromedan and the Deviants’ leader, Brother Tode, all suffer from one-dimensional personalities; they lack the sort of grandeur, color, and memorable individuality that we would expect from the co-creator of Doctor Doom. It’s as if, having created such a monumental figure of evil in Darkseid for the Fourth World books at DC, Kirby felt that he couldn’t top himself. (However, while he was doing The Eternals, Kirby was also writing and drawing Captain America and the Falcon, in which he admirably handled the Red Skull and created another memorable villain, Arnim Zola, yet another of his genetic engineers.)

Druig and Ikaris are cousins, reminiscent of Kirby’s many pairings of heroes with evil siblings: Thor and Loki, Professor Xavier and the Juggernaut, Black Bolt and Maximus, Orion and Kalibak. Druig also enjoys engaging in torture, a passion that links him to Darkseid’s underling Desaad. But Druig pales in comparison with all of these predecessors. As Gaiman’s Eternals continues, he improves upon Kirby’s characterization, sharpening the portrait of Druig’s sadism, but still doesn’t elevate him to star villain status.

The one truly distinctive and memorable adversary in Kirby’s Eternals series is the Deviant warlord Kro (who is not to be confused with Gaiman’s Deviant named Kra), yet Kro is arguably more an antihero than a true villain. Kro is one of the greatest characters in Kirby’s Eternals, so it surprising that Gaiman chose not to use him.

There is a potentially great villain in the Eternals mythos, but he appears in neither Kirby’s series nor Gaiman’s, as we shall see.

Learning of a “miracle survivor” of a bombing, Mark Curry somehow realizes that it is Ikaris (perhaps because Ikaris had implied that he was indestructible) and goes to his bedside for their third meeting. It seems right that it is in their third encounter that Curry finally responds to the “call,” at least in limited fashion. “Are you ready to listen?” asks Ikaris. “I guess,” Curry responds (Gaiman issue 1 p. 18). That may not seem a very positive response, but notice that this time Curry went to Ikaris, rather than Ikaris coming to him. Perhaps Curry is willing to listen this time because Ikaris’s survival of the fall and bombing does seem like a literal “miracle.”

Longtime Eternals aficionados might be surprised to see Ikaris covered with bandages and clearly seriously injured. In the past Marvel stories and Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entries have treated the Eternals’ physical “durability” as if it were like Superman’s invulnerability. This is true even in what we see on panel in the Kirby Eternals stories. For example, when Ikaris combats the “cosmic-powered,” superhumanly strong Hulk robot in issues 14 through 16, Ikaris’s face is not bloodied and his bones are not broken.

In issue one of the Gaiman series, Ikaris has not fully regained his Eternal powers, as later issues make explicit. But it also appears that Gaiman is playing the Eternals’ indestructibility more like the “fast healing” ability popularized by Wolverine.

Dialogue in the Kirby series supports this approach. He emphasizes that “Eternals can be hurt but they cannot die” (Kirby Eternals hardcover, p. 48). When the cosmic-powered Hulk threatens to drop Makkari off a rooftop (a fate similar to what Ikaris suffers in the Gaiman series), Sersi worries that “the fall will not kill him–but it could injure him for eternity” (Kirby p. 284), suggesting there are limits to the fast healing power, Shortly afterwards during the battle with the robot Hulk, a concerned Ikaris warns Sersi that “you have a lovely neck, but it can easily be snapped” (Kirby p. 290). Some of us at Marvel found amusement in Kirby’s contention that “Eternals can’t die. . .but they can be twisted out of shape for all time!” (Kirby, p. 305).

Gaiman indicates that there are seemingly no limits to the Eternals’ self-healing power. In his last issue Makkari challenges the Deviant leader: “Take my head, and I will still come back, stronger, faster” (Gaiman issue 7, p. 16), implying that he could even grow his head back. (Or would the head grow its body back? This might also be an allusion to a classic work of medieval literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which the latter survives beheading.)

On page 19 we learn that Thena, now known as Dr. Thena Eliot, is currently working for Tony Stark, developing a new weapon. This makes sense, inasmuch as Thena is based on Athena, the Greek goddess of both war and wisdom. Designing advanced weaponry combines both fields.

Although Mister Fantastic makes a brief cameo appearance, there are three longtime Marvel superheroes who play important roles in the Gaiman Eternals: Iron Man (Tony Stark), Yellowjacket (Henry Pym), and the Wasp (Janet Van Dyne). These are three major heroes of Marvel’s Silver Age who were not included in Gaiman’s previous Marvel series, 1602, so it is gratifying that Gaiman found ways to use them in Eternals.

This brings up the subject of whether Jack Kirby intended the Eternals to be part of the Marvel Universe. One of the premises of the series is that the people of ancient civilizations believed the Eternals to be gods. Hence, the ancient Greeks and Romans worshipped Zuras as Zeus, Thena as Athena, and Makkari as Mercury. Yet Kirby and Stan Lee had already introduced Zeus, Hercules, Pluto, and other Olympian gods into the pages of Thor.

Moreover, there is something odd about Kirby’s references to other Marvel characters in The Eternals. SHIELD agents turn up in issues 6 and 7, but they are new characters, not Nick Fury or any other previously established member of the organization. As noted, it is a Hulk robot that battles Eternals in issues 14 through 16, not the actual Hulk. The robot is referred to as “a computerized replica of a popular Marvel character” (Kirby, p. 301) and one character comments that “these comic fans think that all of Marvel’s characters are running amuck!” (Kirby, p. 297). The fact that people in these stories refer to superhumans as “Marvel’s characters” doesn’t mean that they aren’t also real. After all, as far back as Fantastic Four #10 (January, 1963), Doctor Doom visited Stan Lee and Jack Kirby at the Marvel offices, where they were doing the Fantastic Four comic! Still, this is strange.

Various people have hypothesized that Kirby did not intend the Eternals to be part of Marvel continuity, but Marvel put pressure on him to integrate the series into the Marvel Universe, so Kirby responded in these ambiguous ways.

This is certainly possible. However, it could also be that Kirby preferred working on new concepts and characters, and had no real interest in using past Marvel characters, even those he had co-created. Maybe he preferred not using his old characters since so many other writers had been using them during his absence from Marvel. It may be significant that even in Kirby’s work writing and drawing Captain America and the Falcon in the 1970s, he used surprisingly few of his previously established characters: Sharon Carter, the Red Skull, Magneto in an annual, and Bucky in Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles (1976). So maybe Kirby did intend the Eternals to be part of the Marvel Universe, but simply chose not to use any guest stars from other series.

It’s possible, too, that Kirby didn’t care one way or the other whether the Eternals fit into Marvel continuity. There have been plenty of Marvel editors and writers whose attitude has been to ignore continuity and leave it to others to try to make sense of it all (as any longsuffering writer of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, past or present, can tell you). Except for Stan Lee himself, it is writers and editors of later generations who care about continuity, not those of Kirby’s generation.

Not that long after the cancellation of the original Eternals series in 1977, a full thirty years ago, Roy Thomas began unmistakably integrating them into the Marvel Universe, first with a flashback in which Thor encountered Eternals at the time of the Third Host in Thor Annual #7 (1978), and then with stories set in the then-present day beginning with Thor #284 (February 1979).

Should this have been done? I believe Roy Thomas acted wisely, in that the Eternals would probably have vanished from sight if they had not started appearing as guest stars in series set in the Marvel Universe. The second Eternals series did not start until 1985, but it too was not a commercial hit, and so the Eternals resumed their guest star stints.

But in Kirby’s Eternals the Eternals and Deviants appear to be the only superhumans around, and the Celestials the only extraterrestrials. As Gaiman has said in interviews, he had to define what makes the Eternals and the Celestials unique on a Marvel-Earth in which super-powered beings and alien visitations are commonplace.

Tony Stark does not recognize Dr. Thena Eliot as one of the Eternals. At first I thought this was a mistake, but no, the Iron Man who visited Olympia and met Thena in Iron Man Annual #6 (1983) was a substitute, James Rhodes. But wouldn’t Tony Stark as Iron Man have met Thena when the Avengers and Eternals teamed up against Ghaur in Eternals Vol. 2 #12 (September 1986)?

Ikaris begins telling Mike Curry the backstory of the Celestials, the Eternals and the Deviants, while advising him that “There are. . .a few things that I don’t remember” (Gaiman issue 1, p. 21). In other words, Ikaris–and Gaiman–are warning that this flashback sequence will not be entirely accurate. The most obvious example is that Ikaris states that there were three “hordes” of Celestials that visited Earth. Actually, they were known as “hosts,” a word with Biblical overtones, and there were four of them, as Sprite points out later (Gaiman issue 4 p. 8). Similarly, Ikaris claims that the Egyptians called Makkari “Osiris,” but Sprite says (if he can be trusted) that they actually knew Makkari as Thoth. (By the way, the ancient Egyptian pantheon also exists in the Marvel Universe: the real Osiris made his Marvel debut in Thor #239, September, 1975. And the “Horde” in Gaiman’s Eternals turns out to be something different from the Celestial Hosts.)

It seems to me an odd strategy to present the series’ backstory through an admittedly unreliable narrator. In the Kirby Eternals, it was also Ikaris who recounted the history of the Celestials, Eternals and Deviants, but he was in full possession of his memories then and had no reason to lie; moreover, that version has been thoroughly established as canonical through subsequent retellings. However, the fact that the Ikaris of Gaiman’s Eternals #1 has a faulty memory gives me an excuse me to dismiss anything that he gets wrong.

For example, in the Kirby series the First Host experiments on human ancestors who are covered with fur and are clearly more apelike than human. In the Gaiman/Romita version, the “proto-people” don’t have fur and look more obviously human.

Through the Celestials’ genetic experiments on these “early hominids,” they created both the Eternals and the Deviants. Romita’s picture (Gaiman issue 1 p. 26) implies that Ikaris and Sprite were directly created by the First Host. Actually, Ikaris was a member of a later generation: Ikaris is the son of an Eternal named Virako and the nephew of Valkin, who is Druig’s father. Even Zuras is a second generation Eternal, being the son of Chronos; Zuras’s brother A’lars is Mentor, the leader of the Eternals of Titan, and father of Thanos, as seen in various stories by Jim Starlin. There’s no need to go into all this complexity in Gaiman’s series, but the picture is misleading.

According to the Kirby series, the Celestials also created the normal human race, namely us. In his interview in the back of his Eternals collection, Neil Gaiman reports that people at Marvel “mentioned that they were very concerned about Celestials creating humanity. They said, “˜Nope! Celestials definitely didn’t create humanity, but they did create the Eternals and the Deviants!’”

This was also the policy that Marvel applied to The Eternals when I was working there in the 1980s, and I understand why: they correctly didn’t want to alienate readers with strong religious beliefs about the creation of humanity.

It’s too bad that apparently no one at 21st century Marvel knows the alternate explanation that Mark Gruenwald’s editorial office established for what the Celestials did to the “normal” human race. As I myself wrote in the “Celestials” entry in The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: “the First Host created two sub-species of humanity, the Eternals and the Deviants. Their sole legacy to the mainstream human race was the implantation of a dormant DNA complex which would one day permit benevolent mutations” (reprinted here). By this I meant not only X-Men-style mutants but all super-powered humans that arose in the late 20th century on Marvel-Earth. (I first postulated this in an article for the unpublished third issue of Mark Gruenwald’s magazine Omniverse, and this was long before DC came up with the similar “metagene” concept.) Presumably this explains why Arishem gave a literal “thumbs up” when Gaea, goddess of the Earth presented the Fourth Host of the Celestials with the “Young Gods,” humans whose evolution had been accelerated, giving them superhuman abilities, in Thor #300 (October, 1980). As far back as the end of the Kree-Skrull War in Avengers #97 (February, 1972), when Rick Jones briefly exhibited cosmic powers, Marvel (through Roy Thomas) had established that humanity would evolve into a super-race.

Gaiman titled his first issue “Intelligent Design” and has Ikaris say, “It’s like the arguments for intelligent design. I know my designers were intelligent. I just don’t know what they wanted me for” (Gaiman issue 1 p. 26). That neatly sums up the quandary that characters face in Kirby’s and Gaiman’s versions of Eternals: they know that the “space gods” (representing God with a capital “G”) are real, but they don’t know what the gods expect of them. Kirby’s Eternals is, surprisingly, the superhero genre’s venture into existentialism.

Here’s something I consider a mistake. It is true that the Deviants conquered the human race in prehistory, but Ikaris claims that the Eternals “called” the Second “Horde”/Host from outer space for help in defeating the Deviants (Gaiman issue 1 p. 30). I find it hard to believe that Kirby’s Celestials were at the beck and call of their creations.

In the Kirby version the Second Host arrived, presumably to monitor the progress of their genetic experiments. “When the gods appeared in those times, they were met by massive, hostile action.” we are told (Kirby p. 27). The Deviants “struck first and failed” (p. 28). In other words, this is a classic case of hubris and overreaching. The Deviants launched an unprovoked attack on their creators, thereby arousing the Celestials’ terrible wrath.

The Gaiman/Romita series shows the giant Celestials of the Second Host striding through the Deviants’ realm, picking up Deviants or shooting energy beams at them (Gaiman issue 1 pages 30-31). This seems to me to be rather mundane behavior for beings who are supposed to be “gods,” not just science fictional giants.

Kirby devised a much more resonant image. “The gods struck in turn, and succeeded in toppling the Deviants with a weapon “˜til then unknown to them.” Kirby shows us what is unmistakably a mushroom cloud, implying that this was a nuclear weapon powerful enough to affect the entire world.

Of course this image taps into our own fears of nuclear bombs, which not only haunted America during the Cold War but have revived in the present, due to the possibility that terrorists could acquire atomic weaponry.

Moreover, the “space gods’” destruction of the overreaching Deviants should remind readers of divine punishments from the Old Testament, such as the destruction of the Tower of Babel and the annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah. The detonation of the Celestial weapon unleashed “tidal waves the size of mountains” that “drowned the land and all that lived upon it.” The Deviants’ homeland of “Lemuria and its sister continents vanished in just one dark day” (Kirby, p. 28). I suspect that Kirby meant us to identify one of those “sister continents” as Atlantis. And then comes the capper: Ikaris tells the archeologist Doctor Damian and his daughter that during the flood he guided a great ship to safety, and believes its passengers mistook him for a dove. The Damians realize that this is the Flood from the Book of Genesis, and the ship was the Ark (Kirby, p. 29).

Now doesn’t the Kirby version have considerably more mythic resonance?

And, yes, I know, I haven’t even gotten to the end of the first Gaiman/Romita issue yet. So please come back next week for further exploration of Jack Kirby’s last great creation, the Eternals mythos.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson