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In a recent TV Guide interview (June 13-19, 2004), Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, jokingly complains about the title of the new comics series he is writing for Marvel, Astonishing X-Men. “I kinda wish they hadn’t saddled me with that title. Does it have to be astonishing every month?”

As his interview in the first volume of Fantagraphics’ new Peanuts reprint series reminds us, Charles M. Schulz hated the title his comic strip was saddled with, but not even with all his tremendous success did he ever get to change it. Despite all his clout, Whedon is similarly stuck. (Would he have found it easier to be “uncanny” every month?)

When I left off in my last column, halfway through Astonishing X-Men #1, Scott Summers (Cyclops) and Emma Frost (the White Queen) were in bed together when suddenly Logan (Wolverine) appeared at the foot of the bed and accuses Scott of unfaithfulness to the memory of his deceased (yet again) wife Jean. Royally pissed off, Scott fired one of his optic power beam, blasting Wolverine through the window.

Last time I mentioned that Astonishing X-Men #1, perhaps inevitably, carried echoes of some of Whedon’s past work. Here I am reminded of the way Spike would needle Angel about their past sexual relationships with Buffy.

In fact now the similarity between Wolverine and Spike comes clear: each is an outsider with a violent past, a former outlaw, a rebel by temperament, and an observer with an ironic perspective.

I wonder whether anyone at Marvel is really happy with the Scott-Emma relationship. Rachel in Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men #444, Kitty in Whedon’s Astonishing #1, and Wolverine in both books seem to be voicing not only their own but the writers’ dislike of this relationship. It was other writers who turned Scott and Frost into a couple; Claremont and Whedon have inherited the situation. I wonder how long it will last.

If Wolverine resembles Spike here, then Cyclops is the Angel analogue, reacting the way that Angel might to Spike’s taunts: though he resorts to violence, Scott’s attitude in talking to Wolverine is ““ more proper and reserved, but rage is clearly seething beneath. In fact, Scott, beneath the contained facade, seems angrier than Wolverine.

“This is good,” Scott says, masking his fury beneath understated dialogue. “The guy who’s tried to steal my wife since the day he met us is gonna tell me all about what’s proper.”

Well, to nitpick, Wolverine met Scott before he met Jean: Cyclops helped Professor Xavier recruit Wolverine and the other “new” X-Men while Jean and other original team members were being held captive by Krakoa the Living island in Giant-Size X-Men #1.

It’s more important to observe that there’s also a certain revisionism at work here, and Whedon’s not the only one guilty of this. Chris Claremont toyed with showing Wolverine’s attraction to Jean in his early years writing the series. Later, in Classic X-Men #1, Claremont wrote new scenes set soon after Jean was rescued from Krakoa. In one of these Claremont showed Wolverine making advances towards Jean, and depicted the chemistry between them.

Nonetheless, for decades since those early days, Wolvy did not seem interested in Jean romantically. For one thing, beginning with Uncanny X-Men #118, way back in 1979, he was in love with the Japanese noblewoman Mariko. But since the first X-Men movie revived the Scott-Jean-Logan triangle, the comics have brought it back. Indeed, from what Scott says here, it seems we are to believe that the triangle has been active all along.

Wolverine responds to Cyclops’ accusation with one of his own, claiming that the only reason” Jean and Scott remained a couple is that she was “too strong to give in to what she really wanted” (meaning her attraction to Wolverine), “and you were too scared.” Attempting to compliment Jean’s strength of character, Logan actually comes off as presumptuous. What if Jean really wanted Scott? Logan’s egotistical enough to think that Jean really wanted him; maybe Scott isn’t the only one in denial.

Then again, by saying she was “strong enough” to resist him, perhaps Logan is actually admitting he would not be good for her. In that case, Logan’s surface egotism covers over his insecurities.

So there’s a question here as to what Logan’s motives are in challenging Scott this way. Are they still fighting over who should have Jean? Or is Logan angry because he believes Jean and Scott belonged together as a couple, and that Scott betrayed her by turning to Frost, even before Jean’s (most recent) demise?

And what does Logan mean by that last part about Scott being “too scared” to give in to what he really wanted?

Does he mean that Scott really wanted a “bad girl” like Frost all along, and that Scott really didn’t love Jean? No wonder Cyclops replies first with an understated threat (“Hey, Logan. That healing power’s about to come in really handy.”) and then an off-camera power blast. For the traditionally introverted Cyclops, actions convey his emotions more powerfully than words.

Notice Scott’s dry wit just before he lets Logan have it with another optic blast: “Hey, Logan. That healing power’s about to come in really handy.” Again, this is not the humorless Cyclops of yore. Moreover, though it is hardly a mature response to reply to insults with violence, Whedon is making an important point here: his version of Cyclops is no wimp.

At times in the past one might have wondered just how suitable Scott is to be leader. Claremont once (in Uncanny X-Men #201) even had Storm defeat him in a duel to determine who should lead the team. How could Scott, who could seem to be teacher’s pet, keep a strong-willed, born rebel like Wolverine in line? Certainly Cyclops does not seem to be a strong leader in the X-Men movies: in X2 he is captured and the team members mostly operate independently of him. Viewers unfamiliar with the comics might even wonder why Jean sticks with the bland movie version of Scott instead of giving in to Wolverine. This romantic triangle is sagging on one side.

Whedon’s Cyclops is tough-minded in his own way, perhaps as much so as Wolverine. It now becomes clear why Cyclops outranks Wolverine on the team.

Watching the two men fight over the absent Jean, Frost comments, “Superpowers. A scintillating wit and the best body money can buy. . .and I still rate below a corpse.” This is a line so good it puts virtually every other superhero writer in the shade. It is the White Queen’s bitter acknowledgement that Scott still does not love her as much as he loves the (repeatedly) dead Jean. Frost has vanished from the panel in which she finishes the line, as if she has disappeared at this moment from Scott’s consciousness.

How about Frost’s throwaway line that she has the “best body money can buy”? And you may have thought that all these super-people with spectacular bodies had them naturally. Considering how Rachel baits Frost for being older than she is (though Emma is hardly middle-aged) in Uncanny #444, I suppose that this may be another reference to her age.

More likely, in these days when even the young get breast implants and plastic surgery, it’s a suggestion that there’s something false about Frost. (By using the phrase “the best body money can buy,” Emma may even inadvertently be commenting on her own sexual morality.) On television Whedon has dealt with heroes self-destructively entangled with lovers who are wrong for them: Buffy with Spike, Angel with Darla. Here’s another such pairing.

The next scene begins with what appears to be a flashback to the reactions of young onlookers watching Cyclops and Wolverine fighting, as the Beast, in the present, is castigating them for battling “in front of the students.” Actually, the girl in front seems to be Kitty, who looks grimly, directly at the senior X-Men, while the three students seem shocked. (To artist John Cassaday’s credit, each person in the shot has a different facial expression.) Grouping Kitty here with the students again emphasizes the dual nature of her position: she’s not that much older than the students, yet she is a member of the faculty. Having returned to her former “home” at Xavier’s she can’t be happy about this turmoil among her elders.

Again, the focus is not on the X-Men themselves as youthful students, but as authority figures dealing with the young. The Beast’s speech to Logan and Scott is on that classic Marvel theme of power and responsibility, but in this context it’s not about a teenager learning to take responsibility as he grows older, but about exercising a kind of parental responsibility towards kids.

Having read Uncanny #444 and Astonishing #1, I wonder if the latter will be the series that will be more oriented around the school side of the X-Men.

Though this issue is primarily a talking-heads story, Cassaday and Whedon use imaginative visual techniques to keep it from seeming static.

One of them is the setting for this scene, a meeting of the senior X-Men. At first the setting is a surprise; not for another page does the Beast explain that they are in the Danger Room, in which, in its current version, holograms can create artificial environments. (It’s comparable to the holosuites and holodecks on Star Trek series.) Here the X-Men look like giants, sitting atop the Hawaiian islands, as if they were chairs. Amusingly, smoke arises from Wolverine’s body: presumably he is sitting atop a volcano. Since his hair style gives him devil-like “horns,” it’s appropriate that he’s giving off smoke, as if he’s seated in hell.

In a nicely understated bit of staging, Cassaday and Whedon have the White Queen sitting to the side, her face turned away from the others. She does not participate in the discussion for two pages, and then interrupts basically just to try to get them to hurry up and finish. Likewise, the others ignore her. Frost may be a member of the team, but she’s not a part of their community or “family,” even though it can contain the feuding Cyclops and Wolverine. Nor, it appears, does she care about being part of the group: Scott is the only one of interest to her.

Scott now begins a long speech. Since the rise of the original Image artists, I’ve been dismayed by the way so many recent comics artists devote huge panels to poster-like images, and then jam action into tiny panels instead. Cassaday and Whedon know how to make the current fashion for such large panels work. They devote a big panel to a shot of Scott uttering a single, simple line: “We’re a team.” This lends emphasis to Scott’s idea and to what seems the confident, idealistic way in which he says it (further emphasized by shooting his face from below, so he seems to tower against the sky).

Moreover, Scott continues, “We’re a super hero team. And I think it’s time we started acting like one.” Kitty looks towards Scott, interested by this idea. Logan looks forward, away from Scott, listening but not as impressed as she is.

Then Logan turns his face just slightly, looks warily at Scott, and says, as if startled, “Ho. Whoa. Wait. Is this gonna be about tights?”

It’s a funny reaction, perhaps suggesting a certain reflexive homophobia on the macho Logan’s part. It’s also the sort of remark one could imagine Spike saying.

And again there’s a certain revisionism at work here. No one forced Wolverine to wear a superhero costume through many of his past solo adventures. Wolverine’s attitude here reflects the movie version of Logan, who found the idea of superhero names and uniforms silly.

Scott reacts to Logan’s comment by dismissing his insecurity about looking silly in tights and taking the theme to a higher level: “It’s about everything. Truth. Perception. We’ve saved the world ““ worlds, even ““ time and again. That’s the truth. That’s what we do. But the perception is that we’re freaks or worse. That we’re Magnetos waiting to happen. We’ve been taking it on the chin so long, just trying to keep from being wiped out. I think we’ve forgotten that we have a purpose. I know the rest of the world has forgotten.”

Scott’s speech is about public relations: letting the world know that the X-Men are a positive force for good. But it’s also an effort to put the X-Men back in touch with another aspect of Xavier’s original vision: that the X-Men fight to save the human race, despite the fact that so many of them fear and hate mutants. Hence Scott’s speech serves as a contrast with Frost’s address to the students earlier in the book. Frost asserted that humans will never trust mutants; Scott, following Xavier’s ideas, argues that the X-Men’s good deeds can win humanity over.

I wonder if through Scott’s speech Whedon is also commenting on the direction of the X-Men as a series. Perhaps he feels it’s also the readership who may have “forgotten” the X-Men’s “purpose.” Is Whedon asserting that the comics have been spending too much time dealing with the X-Men fighting off persecution ““ playing defense ““ and not enough about them taking an active role, protecting humanity from dangers?

Certainly in the movies the X-Men appear to keep to themselves, not asserting themselves publicly as protectors of humanity. In the films the X-Men stay in hiding, not venturing out into battle unless they are fighting against their own kind (Magneto and his Brotherhood in the first film) or are themselves attacked by Stryker in the second).

Despite what Kitty said earlier in the issue, perhaps things have changed at the X-Men’s school. They’ve gotten away from the X-Men’s true purpose, so Whedon plans to put things back the way they were, so that Kitty’s statement that nothing has changed will indeed be true. Again, it’s like John Byrne’s “back to the basics” approach to longrunning comics series. (I would imagine, though, if Byrne were back on X-Men, he would boot his co-creation, the White Queen, out of the team immediately!)

As if anticipating close, analytical readers like myself, Kitty asks, looking at the holograms about them, “Is this like a theme thing, us being so big?” The Beast dismisses the notion with a joke about having misprogrammed the Danger Room. But the metaphor stands: the X-Men as giants. This ties in with the theme of Scott’s speech: superheroes are larger than life, serving a greater purpose, acting as players on the stage of the entire world.

Looking wistful, Kitty says, “Remember when thus place was just flame-throwers and rotating knives. I miss that.” Yes, indeed, that’s what the Danger Room was like when Kitty first arrived at Xavier’s school, back in 1978 in our time. Here is more nostalgia for the Claremont X-Men tales of decades past. So yet again we see the duality of Kitty’s role: the girl who has aged only a few years since joining the X-Men, yet who remembers comics from a quarter century ago. She’s a young person who has gone through experiences that make her feel older than she is. Perhaps, too, she embodies the way an older adult might feel that in ways he or she still feels young, not yet the master of his or her life. “Now I have cloud-hair,” Kitty says, literally referring to the holograms of small clouds floating around her head, but perhaps metaphorically suggesting her role bearing adult responsibilities in the world at large. No wonder she feels uncomfortable at seeming so “big.”

The Danger Room circa 1978 was basically the way that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, its creators, had depicted it in the 1960s. It is appropriate that, as Scott speaks of the original purpose of the X-Men that Kitty should invoke an image that goes back to Lee and Kirby’s original X-Men stories.

Scott began his speech by acknowledging the absurdity of what he was about to propose. Obviously in part he meant that he intends to be part of the same team as Wolverine, despite the current tension between them. Possibly he ““ or Whedon ““ also meant the “absurdity” of the superhero concept, dressing up in costumes to fight evil, but Cyclops, and through him, Whedon, are arguing that the superhero, however absurd on the surface, is something positive. even necessary.

“We need to get into the world,” Scott declares. “Saving lives, helping with disaster relief. . .We need to present ourselves as a team like any other.” pointing out that the public accepts the two leading superhero teams, the Avengers and Fantastic Four. The X-Men would thereby be demonstrating why “baseline” humanity should accept mutants. The idea of “getting into the world” is a fundamental part of Xavier’s vision, which is not about mutants and ordinary humans existing in separate but equal societies, but about racial integration. Grant Morrison, in outing the Xavier and his students, was pushing them to play a more active role in the world, but Morrison’s priority seemed to be turning the X-Men into mutant rights advocates, not as champions aiding the rest of humanity.

Here I wonder how much coordination exists among the current X-Men books. In the final issue of X-Treme X-Men and his new stories in Uncanny X-Men, Chris Claremont has cast team members as official agents of the world’s government in battling mutant menaces. Claremont even has the X-Men refer to themselves as “marshals,” evoking the imagery of the Western. (That’s something one might have expected Whedon to do instead, considering that his Firefly series was explicitly created as a science-fiction version of classic Western motifs.)

Whedon seems so far to have a more positive focus: Scott says the X-Men will “save lives,” whereas Storm’s “marshals” seem to emphasize combating criminals.

But really, Claremont and Whedon are having their teams of X-Men follow similar paths: as heroes operating in public to protect the populace at large. Each writer is working primarily with a different assortment of X-Men, yet Wolverine participates in both series. And all of them are based at Xavier’s mansion. So it’s odd that in Astonishing Scott does not mention Storm’s “marshals,” or that in Uncanny Storm and the others don’t mention Cyclops’ effort to revive the X-Men’s reputation as superheroes.

Once Scott implies that he wants the public to think of the X-Men the way they do of the superhero teams the Avengers and Fantastic Four, Wolverine says, “Here come the tights. . . ,” still troubled by the thought.

“Sorry, Logan,” replies Scott, “Super heroes wear costumes.” Here, through Cyclops, Whedon is recognizing costumes as an important element of the superhero concept. Whedon has stated in an interview that it was not his decision to bring back the costumes. (It seems to have been the idea of Marvel executive Avi Arad, who only a few years ago was publicly disparaging superhero costumes.) But I gets the sense that Whedon is far from displeased about it.

“And quite frankly,” Scott adds, “all the black leather is making people nervous.” That reminds me of an observation former Marvel writer Peter B. Gillis made to me years ago: didn’t anyone notice that the Blackhawks were a bunch of men who dressed in black leather and lived together on an island? (How did Dr. Wertham miss that?) So there’s irony for you: people think it’s stupid to put the X-Men in superhero costumes, so they dress them up in black leather uniforms instead, seemingly oblivious to the kinky implications.

Then Kitty raises her hand, just as a student would: yet again here’s a sign that she occupies this middle ground between the kids and the adults. Kitty says, “I’m not a fighter, not like you guys.” Wolverine replies,: “You’ve been in it plenty, kid. I’d take you at my back any day.”

What’s going on here? Whedon says that Kitty was a major influence on Buffy, yet Buffy is certainly a fighter, and Kitty is claiming she isn’t, or at least not in the same sense as the other X-Men. And am I the only one who thinks that Cassaday, especially in this shot, makes Kitty look something like Buffy’s friend Willow?

Wasn’t the point of the “Professor Xavier Is a Jerk!” story (Uncanny #168) that Whedon referenced earlier in this issue that Kitty insisted on being treated as an equal of the older X-Men, and that she could hold her own in dangerous situations (as in her battle against the alien Sidrian Hunters in that story)? It’s difficult to imagine Chris Claremont contending that Kitty isn’t a fighter.

I’d like to think that in this exchange Kitty is being modest and that Logan is subtly reminding her of Claremont’s Kitty Pryde and Wolverine series, in which he taught her to be a martial artist. More likely, Whedon isn’t remembering it. Then again, maybe he is dealing in revisionism here, consciously dismissing that aspect of her past, preferring to present Kitty as a non-warrior.

Here Whedon’s foreword to the trade paperback collection of Fray, a series he did for Dark Horse, is relevant. In it Whedon discusses his boyhood interest in Marvel comics. “At least in the Marvel universe, where I made my nest,” he writes, “there were very few interesting girls young enough for a twelve year old to crush on.” (Gosh, why didn’t he fall in love with Jean like the rest of us? Then again, my friends and I first read about Jean in 1960s comics, when she was presented as a teenager.) “But it was deeply slim pickin’s,” Whedon continues, “Until Kitty Pryde. She was such a figure of both affection and identification, I even forgave her inability to think of a decent name for herself.” This explains the White Queen’s disparaging remarks this issue about Kitty’s past superhero names.

“If she could be in the X-Men,” Whedon concludes, “then there was no reason a short, skinny, not-overly-hygienic New Yorker whose mutant power seemed to be the ability to whine amusingly couldn’t join up too.”

There’s the key. Kitty is the everyman/woman, the reader’s identification figure. Not only is she the kid who gets to hang out with the adults, but she is our representative: through her we get to hang out with the X-Men. After all, that has always been the basic purpose of the “kid sidekick” in superhero comics. It’s not that the adult superhero is looking for an underage homoerotic sexual partner, as Dr. Wertham famously claimed. The “kid sidekick” was meant as an identification figure for the reader, so he could vicariously participate in the superhero’s adventures. This is why Whedon characterizes her as not basically a fighter, since neither are we, the readers, and she is standing in for us. Since Whedon is having Kitty go into action, but downplaying her role as a fighter, she finds herself standing in yet another middle ground. On one side there are costumed teen combatants like Robin or Bucky on one side, and on the other such noncombatants as Rick Jones in Hulk and Captain Marvel or Snapper Carr in the Julie Schwartz-era Justice League.

Contradicting Logan, Scott tells Kitty, “But you’re not a fighter. Your power isn’t aggressive, it’s protective.” That actually makes her seem like a throwback to pre-Claremont superheroines like the Invisible Girl, who didn’t actually hit people the way that, say, Buffy would. (In Kitty’s case, she can turn intangible.) “That’s good to show,” Scott goes on. “And people like you.”

That’s the point. Scott is designating her as a good public face for mutantkind. In that respect she is the best choice among the five X-Men Whedon seems to be working with in this series. (Presumably the large roster of X-Men is being divided among the various books and their current writers.) Scott points out that Hank looks like a Beast, “Emma’s a former villain” (Do people say “villain” in real life?), and “Logan’s a thug.” Logan immediately agrees, “Born and bred.”: like Spike, he takes pride, at once ironic and defiant, in his outlaw image.

As for himself, Cyclops points out that “I haven’t looked anybody in the eye since I was fifteen.” And while that is not technically true (What about that celebrated sex scene on the mesa in Uncanny #132, in which Phoenix stops his eyes from emitting the deadly power beams?), it’s too good a line to object to, too fine a summing up of Scott’s usual situation in life, and another example of the understated irony with which Whedon has him speak.

Looking somewhat annoyed, Kitty asks, “So I’m what ““ a P. R. stunt?” Maybe she’s right to object. Scott’s intentions are good, but the X-Men will not succeed in gaining tolerance for mutants until “normal” humans can accept mutants who look like the Beast, as well. (I really doubt that anyone connected with Astonishing would make this connection, but Scott has fallen afoul of badly conceived public relations before, in the original X-Factor series.)

Finally, Emma inserts herself into the discussion to take the opportunity to insult Kitty. We’ve already seen she dislikes Kitty, and perhaps now Frost feels provoked by Scott’s praise of Kitty for not being a “villain” like herself.

At long last Scott is exasperated with Frost, too, and tells her to “shut up”: Frost looks surprised and possibly hurt by this sign of anger, while Kitty looks warily at him, perhaps sensing his seriousness, and Logan continues to face forward, taking it in stride.

Looking grim, Scott tells the group that each of them may have “perfectly good reasons” for not wanting to act as superheroes. “But you’re the team I chose. So think about it.” Not only is Scott acting as a strong leader, but as one determined to get his way. He’s not insisting that they participate, but he seems to be implying that the fact that he chose them to be in his superhero team outweighs any qualms they may have about it. Maybe it’s not so much Kitty who’s like Buffy as Scott is: Scott seems more like the Buffy of the final seasons: the hard-edged leader (in a bad sexual relationship!).

The scene shifts to another example of public relations at work, as people insist on putting makeup on a woman who turns out to be geneticist Dr. Ravita Rao before she addresses the press. “Doc,” says one, “you’re about to change the world, you gotta look glam.” Dr. Rao and the X-Men are about to compete in the creation of public images for mutants.

I didn’t realize this until my second time reading the issue, but Dr. Rao is the same doctor from page two of this issue. This is my fault: when she addresses a girl as “Tildie,” I should have remembered that this was the girl from the opening pages. Then again, whereas in a movie or TV show, the viewer will probably recognize a character on his or her return later in the story, the faces of characters in comics tend not to be so individually distinctive.

This glimpse of Dr. Rao being introduced to the press begins a sequence of cinematic intercutting among various characters and settings that persists to the end of the issue.

From Dr. Rao we go to a brief scene between Kitty and Logan that serves as a reminder of the bond they’ve had in the past, ever since Claremont began pairing them together. In the context of Whedon’s work, it reminds me of the friendship between Spike and Dawn on Buffy. Here Logan appears to be referring to his mourning over Jean; that is certainly in character for him, and also happens to parallel Spike’s feelings towards Buffy when she was (temporarily) dead at the start of Season 6.

Dr. Rao begins her speech, “What is a mutant?” From the start of this quiet discourse by an academic we shift to a scene of violence and chaos, with masked gunmen taking hostages.

Back to Dr. Rao, whose talk at first may seem to fit right in with Charles Xavier’s vision of mutants. “They’ve been called angels and devils,” she notes, as if recognizing religious counterparts to the mythic figures of good and evil mutants in the X-Men series.

But Rao’s speech begins to vary from Xavier’s ideas in so subtle a fashion it didn’t register on me at first. She says, “They’ve committed atrocities, and been victims of atrocities themselves.” Is she differentiating here between the terrorist mutants like Magneto and those mutants who are victims of persecution? Or does she mean “they” to refer to all mutants? “They’ve been labeled monsters, and not without reason.” That implies that all mutants are indeed monsters.

“But I will tell you what mutants are,” Dr. Rao says, returning to her theme of defining mutants. At that point Cassaday and Whedon shift to the gunmen’s leader, telling his captives that he plans to rob them, to take (and presumably rape) their daughters, and to “roast” the hostages’ flesh (perhaps for eating?). Cassaday shows us the leader from the back, and then shows him from the front. The leader has green skin: is he a mutant?

Is he defining through his actions what he thinks mutants should be? (And is he the shadowy figure who was watching Tildie in the opening pages?)

Then we shift back to Dr. Rao, seen from the back, addressing the press, in a shot which ominously parallels the gunmen’s leader addressing the hostages. Perhaps Dr. Rao was right to disdain being made to look “glam,” but now we see she wears her hair in a rather prim, old-fashioned bun at the back of her head. A hint of her personality? (Is she playing a destructive superego in contrast to the gunmen’s leader’s rampaging id?)

Finally giving the answer to the question with which she began, Dr. Rao concludes, “Mutants are people. No better or worse by nature than anybody else. Just people.” That seems fine: just the point that Xavier and the X-Men series have always sought to make.

And then comes the well-timed kicker, in a single balloon: mutants are “People with a disease.”

Immediately afterwards we see glimpses of the X-Men changing into costumes, about to appear before the public themselves. These are the people who Dr. Rao claims are diseased.

There follows an impressive double-page spread with the X-Men striding out in costume. Of course, this is designed to show off their new costumes for the benefit of those readers, who, like the Beast, are particularly interested in such things. I find myself more interested in the design of the spread. Most of the space is given over to the wall and floor. Only Kitty and the Beast’s arm and legs make it onto the left hand page.: the X-Men are situated almost entirely in the lower half of the right hand page. Most artists would have had the X-Men figures virtually fill the entire spread. But the use of all the empty space gives an epic feel to the scene, as the X-Men emerge from a brightly lit rectangle, striding out onto this larger stage.

This brings the story to its final page, with rapid intercutting among the three sets of characters ““ X-Men (taking off in their jet), the gunmen and their hostages, and Dr. Rao addressing the press ““ as Rao’s words flow through and unite the series of shots.

Dr. Rao tells her audience, “Mutants are not the next step in humankind,” thereby dismissing Magneto’s rationale for proclaiming the racial superiority of mutants. But one could also use that idea to assert that humanity is naturally evolving into mutants, that it is humanity’s destiny; she is rejecting this idea, too. She also dismisses the fears of the usual mutant-haters in the history of this series, such as the Sentinels’ inventor, Dr. Bolivar Trask: “They are not the end of humankind.”

Instead, she contends, “The mutant gene is nothing more than a disease. A corruption of healthy cellular activity.”

Apropos of this, the June 21, 2004 issue of Time has an article titled “Surviving Cancer,” which contains a section titled, “Identifying Mutations.” The article states that “A tumor is essentially an accumulation of mutations. It grows uncontrollably because its DNA, laboring under the weight of layer upon layer of genetic errors, has become unstable and unable to repair itself. By studying those mutations, scientists can learn quite a bit about how a particular cancer cell became malignant and the molecular pathways it uses to get the nutrients it needs to fuel growth.”

In other words, cancer is a form of mutation. Perhaps this is the basis for Rao’s theory about super-powered mutants. Perhaps Whedon got the idea from reading an earlier, similar article.

But this isn’t a new idea with regard to the X-Men. A few nights ago I watched the X2 movie again and was struck by a scene between Xavier and Stryker, who had wanted Xavier to cure his mutant son Jason. “But mutation is not a disease,” protests Xavier.

This issue concludes with Rao’s declaration that “And now at last we have found a cure.”

Though this is an unusual approach to mutation in the world of X-Men, it too is not unique. I have read one review that asserts that the “cure” idea turned up a short time ago in Marvel’s X-Statix series. More importantly, a few years back Alan Davis did a story line in X-Men wherein the Marvel Universe’s master genetic engineer, the High Evolutionary, “cured” all mutants on Earth.

But the High Evolutionary was motivated by his godlike overview of the course evolution should take. I expect that Whedon is approaching Rao’s movement to “cure” mutants as a new facade for racial intolerance.

Consider that in this issue Whedon shows both Dr. Rao and the X-Men seeking ways to present a point of view to the public. Both sides are dealing in public relations, in image management, and in what politicians call spin. Cyclops wants to “astonish” the public, casting the X-Men as colorfully costumed champions of the whole human race. He wants to make Kitty their “poster child,” as Frost cynically puts it. The face of mutants is a pretty and friendly teenage girl, who lacks “aggressive” powers and who looks conventionally human. As noted, this is something of a distortion of the truth.

But it’s not as bad as Dr. Rao’s image of mutants as, in effect, cancer victims. How clever this is. Dr. Rao is not claiming that mutants are evil, but that they are people, no better or worse than other people, but who are afflicted by a disease. It is the disease that must be destroyed, not the mutants.

Compare this with the Church’s attitude towards mutants in Neil Gaiman’s 1602. The chief clergyman in issue 7 appears to regard those mutants (“Witchbreed”) who are not human in appearance as “monsters.” The clergyman is about to burn the 1602 Magneto, revealed as not only a mutant but as a Jew, at the stake. But the clergyman treats 1602‘s Magneto not as a “monster” but as a “heretic” who rejected “God’s mercy.” In other words, he differentiates between the sinner and the sin, suggesting the possibility that had Magneto been loyal to the Church, he need not have be executed.

Earlier this week I passed by some demonstrators in an Indian section of the city, who had a sign “Islam is the Only Way to End Homosexuality!” I’m aware of Christians who claim to “love” gays but to “hate” their “sins.” Here is the idea of religion as a “cure” for behavior of which other people disapprove.

These are means of demonizing an opponent’s behavior but not the opponent himself. Similarly, Dr. Rao is demonizing the mutation, but not the person affected by the mutation.

But these are false dichotomies. Being a mutant is an essential part of each X-Man’s identity. Being a mutant is each X-Man’s racial identity, just as being black is Dr. Rao’s (It is surely no accident that Whedon and Cassaday “cast” her this way.), or being female is part of her identity.

In each case, that of he 1602 Inquisition or Dr. Rao, differences from the cultural norm are being labeled as disease, heresy, or abnormality, not as an acceptable alternative to the majority lifestyle. It’s like the way King James in 1602 defined any political opposition to him as treason.

Consider the title of this issue of Astonishing X-Men: “Gifted.” Each X-Man’s mutant super-power can be regarded as a metaphor for whatever talents any individual in real life has: whatever makes him or her unique, and enables him or her to contribute something to the world that perhaps no one else can. By the issue’s end Dr. Rao is attempting to redefine “gifted” as “diseased.”

No wonder Kitty looks so somber in our last sight of her in this issue, perhaps sensing that the X-Men are traveling into big trouble.

So, yes, I’m astonished by this first issue and hooked. After such an auspicious start I’m very much looking forward to the rest of Joss Whedon’s twelve-issue run on this title. And who knows? He did it for Buffy: maybe he’ll be motivated to write X-Men: The Musical.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

Long, long ago, in other words, a few years ago back in the 20th century, it was relatively easy to break into writing for comics. There was a continual demand for fill-in stories or for short stories for books like Marvel Comics Presents. High school students who got intern jobs at Marvel, if they did well, might get jobs as assistant editors, and once you were “in,” you had the opportunity to pitch stories. Actually, every friend I had who wanted to get into comics eventually did. (Mind you, I have a talented group of friends.) People would ask me why I didn’t write comics stories. I would explain that my talents lie in a different area: I don’t write comics stories, I write about them. They would have none of this: you’re here, you should be writing stories!

After becoming established in comics, some writers tried to move on to careers in writing television or movies, In his article in Back Issue #2 concerning the “DC Implosion” of 1978, Mike W. Barr states that “Virtually all the freelancers ““ and most of the DC staffers ““ claimed that comics were a way station in their careers.” (Considering how little comics paid back then, that was understandable.) Barr recalls having a conversation with writers Len Wein and Marv Wolfman: “‘Oh, we’re not going to be in comics much longer,’ Len replied. ‘No, we’re going to move to Hollywood and write The Love Boat,’ said Marvin.” (As you may know, Chris Claremont first got to write X-Men when Wein, who co-created the “new” X-Men team in Giant-Size X-Men #1, found his schedule was too full, and turned the assignment over to his fellow staffer, who proved to have a revolutionary new vision for the superhero genre.)

But comics writers who went to Hollywood met with radically different degrees of success. As Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon mention in their recent biography of Stan Lee (see Comics in Context #15 and #16), even Stan himself tried to break into screenwriting without success. There have been some success stories more recently, like those of Mark Verheiden and Jeph Loeb, who work on Smallville, a comics-inspired television series.

And Loeb has worked with the man who is this week’s subject, Joss Whedon, creator of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly and co-creator of Angel. (They collaborated on a proposed Buffy the Animated Series, and just what is wrong with the Cartoon Network and various other networks that none of them were interested in picking it up? Whedon has been a subject of this column before, in the 2003 San Diego Con report in Comics in Context #9).

Lately Whedon has started writing comics himself, the latest being Marvel’s Astonishing X-Men #1, the start of a new X-Men series. It is so good that you might wonder why Whedon didn’t start writing comics years ago.

But now we’re in the 21st century, and the onset of Bizarro World rules in the comics industry. I was recently informed that an editor at a major comics company told a friend of mine who had submitted a series proposal that the company was only interested in projects by Somebody Famous.

So here’s the path that Whedon took to get to Marvel: he helped write screenplays for blockbuster films (Speed, Toy Story), and then created three TV shows, one of which, Buffy, has become a cultural icon, and even wrote a revision of the screenplay for the first X-Men movie, which is not used. (Although, reading Astonishing X-Men #1, I again wonder why. It’s got better dialogue than anything in the first film.) And now he’s starting to direct his first feature film, Serenity, based on his Firefly series. Only now, after Whedon reaches this extraordinary pinnacle of success, does he get to write an X-Men comic book! Isn’t this doing it all backwards?

But maybe in this case I should just sit back and enjoy this new phenomenon. Here I am arguing every week in this column that the best comics should be taken seriously as literature. Wein and Wolfman used to say that writers should work their way up to scripting a top title like Spider-Man, although they were talking about writing fill-ins and lower tier comics first. So I should take pleasure in the idea that the X-Men are such a great concept, such a monument in American popular culture, that even someone as successful in other media as Joss Whedon could still aspire to write these characters.

In a news article in The Hollywood Reporter some months ago Whedon explained that he did indeed aspire to writing the X-Men.

“‘There are three reasons why I’m doing this,’ Whedon said. ‘One, I get to write The X-Men, a comic I grew up reading. It’s probably the biggest influence on my work there is. Two, I want to personalize things and figure who these characters are to me now. And three, the character Kitty Pryde. She was not a small influence on Buffy. I get to use her, and that sealed the deal.'”

In doing my characteristic close reading of Astonishing X-Men #1, I will time and again be showing how Whedon’s work with the X-Men reminds me of characters, situations and themes from his past work. This is not meant as an accusation that he is repeating himself. Rather, I am showing how indeed The X-Men influenced Buffy and other Whedon work, and demonstrating a thematic continuity between his “Buffyverse” work and his new X-Men story. Moreover, comparing the Buffyverse and X-Men characters provides some surprising insights into how some of them are founded on the same archetypes.

Astonishing #1 opens with an eerie sequence of a person being menaced by a monster, superbly illustrated by Astonishing artist John Cassaday, who, presumably following Whedon’s staging directions, creates a ghastly mood through understated means: the spattered blood, the creature’s large, inhuman teeth, and the human image somehow reflected in them. It’s a reminder that Whedon is best known for working in the horror genre; this is the sort of sequence one would not expect from traditional superhero writers.

It’s also a reminder that Whedon not only writes for the movie and television screen, but directs for it as well. This is a cinematic montage of extreme close-ups. This and the next page also comprise a teaser for the main story: were this a TV series, it would appear before the opening credit sequence.

And then there are the words of the narrator, who appears to be a child, who finds her mother’s screams “yummy.” The juxtaposition of horror and ironic humor is a Whedon trademark. But I also find myself wondering if this may be a subtle bit of homage to longtime X-Men writer Chris Claremont, who also likes to use the word “yummy” or just “yum” in contexts ranging from a villain’s macabre lusts to a hero’s expression of sexual attraction.

On the second page a child, Tildie, wakes up screaming. The first page sequence was apparently her dream. Or was it her memory? Or was it actually happening before the lights turned on? Just who is this enshadowed figure watching through presumably one-way glass?

And who was the “monster”? Is it possible that it is the child herself? Is she a shapeshifting mutant?

This scene has a primal resonance: perhaps all our terrors are extensions of a child’s fear of monsters in the dark.

It also ties in with a scene at the end of this issue, although I didn’t pick up on that until my second reading of the story.

Following the title, “Gifted” (an allusion to the previous name of the X-Men’s home base, “Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters,” i.e., young super-powered mutants), the main narrative opens with a close-up on Kitty Pryde, whom Whedon singled out in the Hollywood Reporter piece as a particularly important character to him.

She is returning to Xavier’s school, where she first learned to use her mutant powers, after a sojourn in college in Illinois (as seen in Chris Claremont’s recent Mechanix limited series). Apparently Astonishing #1 takes place before Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men #444, which came out weeks before, and in which Kitty and Wolverine had already returned to the Xavier Institute.

Kitty’s return to her old school, where she spent her high school years, may remind readers of Buffy’s return to Sunnydale High in Season 7 of her television series. Like Sunnydale High, Xavier’s school was also destroyed and recently rebuilt. Each of them thus returned to a place, a school, at which defining events in their lives took place. For that matter, Season 1 began with Buffy arriving at a new high school, and Season 4 with her arrival at college. And Kitty’s return to Xavier’s, bearing luggage, recalls the very first time she arrived at the mansion, back in Uncanny X-Men #138 (October, 1980).

And, one might add, Whedon, who grew up reading X-Men and identifies it as a defining influence on his work, is likewise returning to Xavier’s school. It’s the place where he too spent his formative years.

Kitty’s first words are “Nothing has changed.” There’s that Thomas Wolfe quotation about not being able to go home again. Still, I’ve had times when I’ve revisited places from my childhood and adolescence and am taken back to see that outwardly, at least, they appear to be the same, as if caught in a time warp: it seems at once reassuring and strange. I have changed; why haven’t they?

Now, over the decades many writers, readers and comics executives have insisted that characters and situations in comics change. How often have they tried to sell new issues by claiming that “This issue will change the Marvel Universe” ““ or a specific character in it ““ “forever!”

But there’s a contrary point of view: Stan Lee himself spoke of the “illusion of change,” whereby surface aspects of a series may alter, but the essence of the characters and the series remain unaltered.

Whedon may be siding with Stan Lee’s side of the issue here. By “Nothing has changed,” perhaps he is asserting that there is a consistency to the X-Men series, and that it really hasn’t changed since he himself was a fan reading it.

Kitty continues, “The place was destroyed and now it looks like nothing happened. No time has passed.” On a literal level of meaning, Kitty is referring to the fact that the mansion was demolished towards the end of Grant Morrison’s tenure on New X-Men; following the departures of previous X-Men creative teams, the mansion was rebuilt as if overnight. (The short time it took is even less credible when one considers how slowly “Marvel-time” elapses compared to real time.) Yet the school is an essential element of the series, and Xavier’s mansion an important visual icon. Why the editors let the mansion be destroyed when they must have known or should have foreseen that the next writers would want it back is beyond me. The rapid rebuilding not only weakens credibility but even in retrospect undercuts the dramatic impact of the demolition.

Kitty now experiences memories of her life in the mansion, which take the form of ghostly images enacting scenes from her past. This reminds me of the final scene of Upstairs, Downstairs, with Rose the maid wandering through the mansion, hearing snatches of conversations from past episodes; the ghostly images here make the device work in a visual medium with no sound track. The “ghost” motif has psychological resonance: our past is long gone, “dead,” and yet continues to haunt us. (The issue in which Kitty first joined the X-Men, Uncanny #138, was itself a “memory” issue filled with flashbacks to past X-Men stories.)

“Of course the Professor would have it rebuilt this way. Give everyone a sense of stability, continuity,” Kitty tells herself. “Continuity” has a double meaning in the context of comics: it’s also a reference to the history of the X-Men and the consistency with which they and their world are portrayed. Whedon’s own goal may be to create “a sense of stability,” to adhere to the traditions of the series and recapture its traditional essence. In writing the X-Men, perhaps he seeks to return to a fictional world that he will find reassuringly familiar, as will other longtime readers. This may be his version of what John Byrne calls his own “”Back to the Basics” method when taking over a longrunning series.
The next “ghost” Kitty sees is of her own younger self, shouting, “Professor Xavier is a Jerk!” from the story of the same title (Uncanny X-Men #168, cover-dated April, 1983). Cassaday even recaptures the look of artist Paul Smith in this image.

This is also Whedon’s tribute to the X-Men’s past. Here I’m aware of a slight generational shift. I’m so used to seeing pros do homages to the comics of the 1960s, and the work of creators like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, that they loved as kids. But here Joss Whedon, from the tail end of the Baby Boom, is paying tribute to the X-Men comics that he read as a kid, the ones that Chris Claremont wrote in the 1980s. Indeed, Kitty is the creation of John Byrne and Claremont, who further defined her as a character after Byrne left the series. (And, of course, Claremont is still very much active, writing two other X-Books, dealing with the same milieu and some of the same characters that Whedon is now handling. See Comics in Context #37 and #39.)

Kitty tells us that “Nothing has changed. Not even me,” as she passes through a wall: this is a clever, surprising way of establishing her mutant power for Buffy fans who may have followed Whedon to the X-Men without prior knowledge of the series.

By saying she hasn’t changed, Kitty means, as she goes on to say, “I’m a kid again, out of my depth, completely overwhelmed by everything here. . . .” Kitty’s following the Joseph Campbell scenario, starting this new hero’s journey from a lowly position.

Of course, all of us change as we grow older, and Kitty has, too: as we shall see, she is returning not as a student or as an inexperienced X-Man in training, but to be a teacher and a full-fledged member of the team.

Perhaps, though, Whedon is signaling that he’s going to treat Kitty as younger than other writers might, in contrast with, say, Warren Ellis, who, when he was writing the original Excalibur series would have had us believe Kitty was having an affair with an adult, Peter Wisdom (not a good choice). Whedon’s Kitty, though older than the other current students at Xavier’s, is still probably a teen.

Here I want to commend John Cassaday for the marvelous way he depicts the mansion’s interior in this sequence. It would seem such an obvious thing to do, but very few comics artists bother to give the interior of Xavier’s mansion a distinctive look. In contrast, Cassaday gives us a real sense of place: the rug with its distinctive pattern, the fine wood paneling, the specific location of the staircase with regard to the front door, the feel of a grand Victorian home (even if it has been demolished and rebuilt umpteen times).

Kitty tells us that what “overwhelms” and surrounds her are “the smaller pieces. The shards of me.” The “shards” are her memories of her past self. The “ghosts” are also like reflections of herself in a mirror. The word “shards” suggests that she feels her self has been shattered, although Kitty seems untroubled for the rest of the issue. Presumably her effort to live on her own, in college, did not work out (Mechanix did not continue). Perhaps she has returned to her home and surrogate family of the past in order to rediscover a sense of self. Whedon said that he wants to “figure” what the X-Men mean to him now. Perhaps Kitty wants to do the same. Perhaps this even suggests that the superhero genre is rich enough to be able to assist a reader’s different psychological needs at different stages of his or her life.

Now Kitty sees another familiar Claremont scene: the “ghost” of her younger self holding mistletoe over the teammate she then loved, Colossus. Whedon does not tell us this, but many readers will know that Colossus is now dead. The camera shifts to a close-up of Kitty, who smiles at the memory. But it is a quiet, understated smile. It’s not the big, childlike grin that artists John Byrne and Terry Austin gave her when she first arrived at Xavier’s doorstep in Uncanny X-Men #138.

So Kitty has changed, and there’s a certain melancholy about her mood. There’s an interesting duality about Whedon’s depiction of Kitty. In the nearly twenty-five years since her debut, she has aged very little in Marvel-time: she is presumably still a teenager, still a “kid.” But she’s also lived through a quarter century of X-Men stories, people she cared for have died (like Colossus), and she herself has been through horrific events (see, for example, Claremont’s Kitty Pryde and Wolverine limited series). Here she is somberly reminiscing about a past that seems long gone, as a middle-aged adult (like Whedon) might, or a fan (also like Whedon) looking back on his favorite comics stories from his youth. Kitty is simultaneously young and old beyond her years.

The sequence ends with the silent panels of Kitty’s face in extreme close-up, looking contentedly at the “ghosts,” and then walking across the rug. So many writers today give us dialogue-heavy talking heads books. Whedon, a director, does it right; he’s sparing of dialogue when he can communicate his idea and mood visually, and he and Cassaday bring this sequence to a close that is both dramatic and cinematic.

On the following page, with Kitty’s entrance into the school meeting, we move from nostalgic evocations of Claremont’s work to full-out Whedon. The mood abruptly shifts from the private and wistful to the public and comedic. Emma Frost, the White Queen, who stands at the podium, immediately chooses to berate Kitty for her lateness in front of the students. Considering the fact that Kitty is to be one of their teachers, this is particularly nasty. Kitty’s retort to Emma is an example of pointed, deadpan irony, a Whedonian trademark; you wouldn’t find this in most other superhero writers’ work.

Kitty’s rejoinder (“I’m sorry. I was busy remembering to put on all my clothes.”) also points to the absurdity of the White Queen’s costume. Even considering that so many superheroes wear skin-tight costumes, just what is Frost thinking when she appears before her young students in another of her Victoria’s Secret-style ensembles?

Again, Cassaday provides a good sense of place: what the school auditorium looks like, with several senior X-Men on the platform: Scott Summers (Cyclops), the Beast, Kitty and Frost. I expect that over the next year I’ll gain a much clearer sense of what the Xavier mansion is like from Cassaday’s work than I ever had before.

Frost announces that Kitty will be teaching computer science (Hey, so did Willow after Jenny Calendar’s death on Buffy!) and will act as a liaison to the administrative staff and as a student advisor (And that was Buffy’s job at Sunnydale High in Season 7!).

In contrast to her frosty welcome from Emma, Kitty, Scott, and the Beast immediately engage in friendly banter. The warm rapport among them is clear. It’s like when one reunites with an old friend he hasn’t seen in years, and the two of them pick up from where they left off as if no time has passed.

“Did I miss the Sorting Hat?” asks Kitty. That’s a reference to the opening day of school at Hogwarts in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, in which the teachers likewise sit up on a platform facing the students in the meeting hall. Whedon here may well be pointing to the similarity between X-Men and Harry Potter, both of which are founded on the same concept of a school where super-powered young people are trained to use their abilities. And, of course, Buffy is based in this archetype, too: not only her own training by Giles, but the seventh season School for Slayers, in which Buffy, fellow Slayer Faith, and her friends start teaching new recruits themselves.

The Beast’s traditional, rather intellectual wit proves a good fit for Whedon. But then consider Whedon’s treatment of Scott, who, in other hands (like, say, the makers of the X-Men movies) often seems dull and wooden. The Beast alludes to this when he makes a dryly ironic reference to “Scott’s scintillating introductory speech.” But then Scott surprisingly comments, “Even I was bored. . . .”.

In other words, this Scott is no longer truly a stiff. There’s a parallel in Giles, who likewise has a certain with a certain ironic self-awareness about his own tendency to be stuffy and bookish. And we shall see still further changes in the depiction of Scott as this story proceeds.

Has nothing truly changed at Xavier’s school? Well. consider this: traditionally, the characters X-Men focuses on have been Xavier’s students. But now Xavier is absent (off on the island of Genosha in Excalibur), and (following the lead of the X-Men movies), the X-Men are now the teachers. The students in this issue are anonymous, presented as a mass, not as individuals. The characters we follow and are to identify with are the teachers.

I recall, back in the day, when Marvel editors argued that Peter Parker should remain a student (albeit a graduate student, which you can be forever, as well I know) because the kids who make up the bulk of the readership won’t identify with a teacher. They’d see a teacher as One of Them, not One of Us. But now Peter Parker is a teacher in the Spider-Man titles that follow classic continuity, and the X-Men are teachers as well. The identification figures for the readers are all decidedly adults. (Perhaps demonstrating a certain schizoid attitude on the subject, Spidey and the X-Men are still students in the continuity of Marvel’s Ultimate line, or, as I will start calling it, Marvel-Earth-2.)

What does this mean? After I reviewed Claremont’s Excalibur #1 I worried afterwards whether I made it sound as if it wouldn’t appeal to the young (though I think it will), since it’s about a middle-aged man. But Astonishing X-Men is likewise about adults. These books aren’t about coming of age; their heroes have already gotten there. Does this mean that the bulk of the comics readership really is now made up of adults, not children and teenagers? Or are today’s comics editors and writers miscalculating who their audience really is?

So here the parallel is less with the early seasons of Buffy, in which the identification characters were students, than with the final season, in which Buffy has fully taken on the role of authority figure.

The fact that Kitty, Scott, and the Beast are chatting away while Frost speaks signals a certain lack of respect for her; the feeling is mutual, as we shall see later.

Notice Whedon and Cassaday’s cinematic technique in slowly shifting from the bantering X-Men to Frost, as she addresses the students. Frost takes up more of each succeeding panel, moving closer to the center. Finally, the page concludes with another extreme close-up as she utters a single line: “Violence of any kind will never be tolerated.” Notice how Whedon paces his dialogue in comics, sometimes emphasizing a particular line by devoting an entire panel to it, and giving the speaker a close-up.

Sentinels, the gigantic mutant-hunting robots, break in, causing confusion and tumult among both the terrified student body and the senior X-Men: Emma has finally gotten her colleagues’ attention. And these are the Jack Kirby/Neal Adams-style Sentinels, not the inferior versions designed by other artists; hence, this is another tribute to the past, this time to a period of X-Men before the Claremont era began.

It turns out this is just a simulation: holograms created by the X-Men’s “Danger Room” technology. (It is said that Whedon pushed to have the Danger Room in the first X-Men movie, but it was dropped for budgetary reasons.)

Now, one reason for the Sentinel simulation is a practical one on Whedon’s part: so that there will be an action scene, however brief, in an issue that primarily deals in scenes of character interaction. (Indeed, it was Claremont’s character-driven X-Men that showed how a superhero book can hold a reader’s attention in an issue without real action scenes.)

Another reason is that Frost was seeking to make a point to the students. And she did it, characteristically, in a cruel, insensitive way, by gratuitously frightening them. Scott looks grimly at her, and the Beast and Kitty look downright angry. They don’t like being manipulated and tricked by a colleague. But there’s an even more important reason for them to be pissed off at Emma.

Frost tells the students, “We have learned the first lesson. They will always hate us. We will never live in a world of peace.” Frost is thus attacking “Xavier’s dream,” the vision of the X-Men’s absent founder, the father figure to Scott, Beast and Kitty, his hope that someday “baseline” humans and mutants will live together in peace and harmony.

Frost is undercutting their mission: she is teaching the students not Xavier’s dream, but her own cynical agenda. “We must give the ordinary humans respect, compliance and understanding,” she tells them. “And we must never mistake that for trust.”

This is a very interesting stance to take: preaching outward subservience to the humans while resenting and distrusting them. Imagine how people would react if a black civil rights leader advocated that as the way African-Americans should behave towards whites.

Later, alone with her, Scott confronts Frost over her little stunt, but these two are currently lovers, and she easily manipulates him into a change of subject. And by the end of that page, we see Emma and Scott in bed together. Yes, indeed, Marvel’s concept of who the audience is for comics has certainly changed. (Then again, so has the world. I was struck by the end of an article in the June 9 New York Times about Sex and the City. It quotes a passionate fan of the show, who turns out to be only fourteen.)

Of course, as a longtime reader, I am aghast at this sight for a different reason. Don’t the Powers That Be at Marvel realize that the love between Scott and his series-long amour, Jean Grey, is the heart of the book? What were people at Marvel thinking when they killed off Jean (yet again! See Comics in Context #28) and paired up Scott, the book’s traditional heroic lead, with former villainess Emma Frost?

And then comes perhaps the best moment in this entire issue. Scott looks up from the bed to see Wolverine perched accusingly at its end, staring ominously, accusingly at him. He says simply, with grim, deadpan irony, “Which stage of grieving is this?” Amazingly, Whedon and Cassaday can convey the tone of characters’ delivery without spoken dialogue! And Whedon can do timing in a static medium, as the next moment shows. As if in the equivalent of a pause in a Harold Pinter play, Whedon waits for the next panel, focusing on Scott’s scowling reaction, for Wolverine to follow up with a cutting punch line: “Denial?”

And Scott blasts Wolverine with one of his optic beams, as if reacting to a punch to the gut. And that’s just what Wolverine’s two lines were like. Wolverine ““ and Whedon ““ may be exactly right about Scott’s motivation for his otherwise inexplicable affair with Frost.

This brings us to the halfway point in this issue, and also in our discussion. I’ve got to send this column in early. So, in the grand tradition of serial fiction:

“To be continued.”

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

Comics and cartoon art can turn up when and where one least expects it. This week I was at Manhattan’s Film Forum, watching a marathon screening (over five hours!) of director Ingmar Bergman’s complete six-part 1973 series, Scenes from a Marriage. And twice there were brief glimpses of Disney comic books: one seemed to have Donald Duck on the cover, and the other definitely had Uncle Scrooge. (The comics seemed to belong to the protagonists’ children, though at one point an adult leafs through one of them.) I had not expected ever to see a Carl Barks-Ingmar Bergman connection, but there it is.

Later in the series, the male protagonist, a middle-aged academic who is being passed over by his superiors, observes, “I’m supposed to be in my prime, brimming with experience.” And that reminded me of the current state of the American comics industry. According to its Bizarro World logic, experience, even working on top selling books, and the wisdom accumulated over time count for little. (The corollary is that executives who come from outside the industry, ignorant of comics as an artform, business or culture, feel free to make decisions that wreak havoc, as the last dozen years have demonstrated.)

Another odd aspect of the American comics business is that even though superhero stories deal in mythic, archetypal characters and themes, comics professionals, in general, don’t look beneath the surface meaning of their work. (It strikes me that this might be the comic book writers’ equivalent of a similar phenomenon among comic book artists: the latter will cite past comics artists, and sometimes illustrators, as influences, but I rarely see an interview in which a contemporary comic book artist talks about studying past masters in the fine art world.) There are some individual writers who occasionally give indications that they’ve delved into the mythic underpinnings of their work: for example, I recall an Astro City letter column in which Kurt Busiek correctly described Spider-Man as an “urban trickster.” The San Diego Comic Con will set up panels on which comics pros discuss and debate certain themes in the genres in which they work, as if in perhaps unconscious imitation of an academic conference. But trust me: I’ve been in the comics business for two decades, and I have never yet overheard comics pros talk among themselves about What It All Means. As far as most of them seem to think, It’s Just Comics, right? My several Ivy League degrees in literature, dealing in this sort of critical analysis, have never impressed people in authority in the comics business. (Actually, to judge from my ongoing job search, Ivy League literature degrees don’t impress anybody. It’s the Bizarro World.) A friend of mine, who used to work in comics, told me that he felt that one particular editor never felt comfortable with him after learning he had a graduate school education in literature. Considering that I keep reading about growing academic interest in studying comics (I will soon be teaching a university course on the subject myself, if all goes well, and am contributing to a forthcoming academic book on comics), you may find this all rather strange.

All of this brings me to the subject of my longtime colleague Danny Fingeroth and his new book, Superman on the Couch, released this spring by the Continuum Publishing Group. Its catchy title might mislead the potential reader into thinking that it is about superhero psychology, or perhaps Superman’s sex life (a prequel to Larry Niven’s Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex?), his shopping sprees at IKEA, or his leisure time spent as a couch potato. Instead, this book is, as its subtitle states, about “What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society.”

Fingeroth is a Baby Boomer who’s been in the comics business longer than I have, writing and editing comics, rising to the position of editor of Marvel’s Spider-Man titles during some of their peak years of commercial success, and later heading a comics line for Byron Preiss. Despite his considerable credits, he, like many other talented comics veterans of his generation, finds himself out of favor in the current comics industry.

So, demonstrating an entrepreneurial drive that I envy, Fingeroth has found new outlets for employing his experience in comics. He teaches a course in comics writing at New York University. He has also created and edits Write Now, a magazine for TwoMorrows Publishing that deals with the craft of writing professionally for comics, science fiction, television and movies. (Full disclosure: I’ve contributed to Write Now, interviewing the aforementioned Mr. Busiek.) And now Fingeroth has written this book, Superman on the Couch.

Moreover, though Fingeroth had always struck me as a comics pro who knew the craft of writing but had no interest in delving into the deeper meanings of the genre, in working on this book he has clearly done a remarkable job of educating himself about literary analyses of the superhero genre. He’s read and absorbed ideas from some of the all too few landmark academic books on the subject, including John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett’s The Myth of the American Superhero and Richard Reynolds’ Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. He cites Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Bruno Bettelheim, whose analyses of myths and fairy tales can and should be applied with equal relevance to the now vast sixty-years-plus body of superhero stories. In his own book, Fingeroth presents ideas he has gleaned from these academic sources in clear, accessible, often humorous and vivid prose, free from the complications of scholarly jargon. (I may have already made the point in my own book, Marvel Universe, that Spider-Man was revolutionary in making a teenage superhero its central figure, but I didn’t come up with Fingeroth’s witty way of phrasing it, “Spider-Man is the Bar Mitzvah of the superhero.”)

More importantly, Fingeroth has successfully learned to think along similar lines himself. He offers up his own ideas and theories to the reader, based not only on his own reading of scholars’ works but on his own examination of what the superhero genre has meant to him through his lifelong career of editing and writing such tales. As he tells us in his concluding chapter, “As I wrote about the heroes and their appeal, I was forced to analyze the phenomenon of the superhero through my own experiences.”

In short, Fingeroth is doing a commendable job of repositioning his career. If the comics business at present does not sufficiently value the wisdom of experience, then he will find new outlets as a teacher and scholar. Some of the rest of us are attempting to pursue a similar path. Denny O’Neil is another example of a longtime comics writer and editor who in time discovered that his comics stories had mythic depths and set out to study their archetypal meanings; when and if O’Neil writes his own book on the subject of superhero mythology, I expect it will become a classic of comics scholarship. There are Trina Robbins’ several books on women in comics, both on the page and behind the scenes. Tom DeFalco has done a book of interviews with fellow Spider-Man writers, soon to be released. And, of course, there’s me, writing this weekly column of exhaustively detailed literary analyses of comics past and present. (And someday perhaps I’ll find someone willing to publish them as a book! Is anyone out there interested?) I also have another book proposal in the works, but I can say no more as yet.

Unlike me, Fingeroth does not deal in the analysis of specific stories in his book. Instead, his interest lies in determining how and why the major characters in the genre ““ Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, et al. ““ work. Along the way he concisely describes the roots of the modern superhero in ancient mythological figures such as Gilgamesh and Beowulf and in prose and pulp proto-superheroes such as the Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro. He likewise summarizes the origins of the comic book medium itself, in newspaper comic strips and in early 20th century pulp magazines like The Shadow and Doc Savage.

Fingeroth explores many basic concepts of the genre: the appeal of the secret identity, why so many heroes are orphans, Superman as immigrant and Clark Kent as an example of cultural assimilation, the “dark” hero (like Batman, Hulk, and Wolverine) as vicarious expressions of the readers’ anger, the roots of masks in tribal ritual, the superhero team as surrogate family. Much of this will be familiar to scholars like myself. I think I can best show you what I like about Fingeroth’s book by singling out some of his own ideas and observations and commenting upon them.

Early on Fingeroth makes the incisive observation that readers can fantasize being the villains as well as the heroes. This makes sense, and some comics writers may consciously or unconsciously recognize this. A number of classic Julius Schwartz Flash stories made members of the character’s great Rogues Gallery virtual protagonists, following their thoughts and deeds as they sought to concoct a new means of ridding themselves of the Flash. Schwartz went even further in the Black Hand tales in Green Lantern, narrated by the villain himself, breaking the fourth wall and directly addressing the readers. A good current example is Paul Dini and Bruce Timm’s Harley and Ivy mini-series, an entertaining buddy comedy turning two of Batman’s nemeses into the protagonists. Through many super-villains, whether they are colorfully comedic like Harley Quinn or noble, even tragic figures like Doctor Doom, the reader has a vicarious outlet for his own id, and can safely exercise his own dark side before his superego, in the form of the story’s superhero, locks the villain and the antisocial impulses he embodies back up where they belong.

Fingeroth does good work in comparing the superhero story to another American heroic adventure genre, the Western. He makes the very good point that thought the Western, like the spy adventure and other action-adventure subgenres, may outwardly seem more realistic than superhero tales, they likewise involve a considerable degree of fantasy. How is it, Fingeroth asks more than once, that so often the good guy in a Western is untouched by the hails of bullets fired at him? With a talent for grounding his arguments in the reader’s personal experience, Fingeroth asks the reader to imagine himself in a fistfight and then to wonder about those fictional heroes, not just in superhero stories but in other action genres, who endure battle after battle without lasting injury. Fingeroth therefore rightly postulates that characters like Dirty Harry, James Bond, Rambo, and Charlie’s Angels (and he could have gone a lot further ““ how about a lot of John Wayne’s roles?) actually inhabit a “middle world” between explicit superheroes and reality. Hence, a great deal of popular entertainment partakes more of the superhero archetype than is commonly recognized.

Fingeroth also makes the valuable point that perhaps one reason why superheroes were created was because the 20th century produced real life super-villains: the likes of Hitler and Stalin. This makes sense, too: the creation of the first superheroes paralleled the events leading to World War II. Think of the cover of Captain America Comics #1, with Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America punching out Hitler. Simon and Kirby had created an imagined demigod to oppose a real life devil.

Fingeroth notes that usually in a story, the protagonist undergoes a character change or evolution. In contrast, he points out, not only do comics superheroes not age, or age extremely slowly, but that they do not evolve as personalities. Even seemingly major changes. like the weddings of Clark Kent to Lois Lane and Peter Parker to Mary Jane Watson, he asserts, do not substantially change the characters. (Instead, he pointedly observes, the marriages handicap writers by doing away with the romance subplots!)

Reading this section, I immediately thought of former Marvel editor in chief Jim Shooter, with his insistence that in each story the hero must change in some way as a character. Considering how many stories Spider-Man appeared in every month of every year, and how many writers dealt with him, this always struck me as an impossible task. Fingeroth is arguing that in fact it is an irrelevant goal in this genre, which eternally fixes a superhero at a particular age and outlook on life. Fingeroth could have gone farther with this argument, exploring the nature of story arcs in the superhero genre if the hero himself cannot evolve. (I think of one of Steve Englehart’s great Batman stories, in which Batman is imprisoned for the entire issue, and the tale instead explores the actions of all its other characters, and it is the villain, Professor Hugo Strange ““ who impersonates Batman and becomes the real protagonist ““ who undergoes startling character evolution.)

Fingeroth demonstrates the benefits of studying the underpinnings of the genre when he voices caution about the recent tendency in comics to play down or get rid of the traditional device of the secret identity. He concedes that the secret identity is increasingly viewed as unrealistic. In fact, it’s not just Clark Kent’s glasses that seem a weak excuse at disguise; Fingeroth brilliantly points out just how ineffective even most masked superheroes’ disguises would be in the real world. But Fingeroth makes the important argument that in seeking to make the superhero genre more realistic, writers should not cast aside important fantasy elements like the secret identity that have a primal appeal to the audience. Whereas it is familiar to see attacks on movie and TV versions of superhero series for getting things wrong, here and elsewhere Fingeroth rightly points out that often recent TV and movie depictions of the heroes value important elements of the characters that jaded contemporary comics pros dismiss. So, yes, in the Spider-Man and Daredevil movies the title heroes have genuinely secret identities. Over the years at Marvel, editors and writers have gradually aged Peter Parker from a fifteen-year-old high school student to a man well into adulthood, despite the protests of traditionalists such as John Byrne and Roger Stern, who perhaps even regret that Stan Lee had Peter graduate into college. Fingeroth points out that the makers of the Spider-Man movie recognized that, among other things, the story of Spider-Man is a coming-of-age saga, and rightly portrayed Peter as a teenager.

I’ve long thought that Wonder Woman, even if she is the archetypal superheroine, does not seem as conceptually strong as her peers, Superman and Batman. Fingeroth thinks so, too, and makes the intriguing argument that this is because while Superman and Batman were created by young men from impoverished backgrounds as expressions of their own heroic ideals, Wonder Woman was created by a financially and professionally successful middle-aged psychologist, Dr. William Moulton Marston, as a role model for young girls. Of course, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were middle-aged when they created so many classic Marvel characters. But, as we know, in the early 1960s Lee had decided to start writing the kind of superhero stories he himself would want to read; hence, I would argue, Spider-Man and the rest were expressions of his (and his collaborators’) dreams, fears and ideals. Fingeroth’s contention that Wonder Woman lacks that passionate core to her being because she was created as an adult’s idea of what is good for kids makes sense to me. (I wonder how Trina Robbins might respond to Fingeroth’s argument)

Elsewhere in his discussion of Wonder Woman, Fingeroth insightfully spots her “virgin birth,” sensibly compares her to another World War II icon, Rosie the Riveter (a woman doing a “man’s” role in wartime), and figures out that Xena is a more recent version of the Wonder Woman archetype. (I’d add that Red Sonja is the transitional figure between the two.) I suspect that Chris Claremont and Frank Miller would be startled by Fingeroth’s contention that Dark Phoenix and Elektra perpetuate negative stereotypes that powerful women must be evil. Claremont has been the most important figure between Marston and Joss Whedon in the creation of the positive feminist superheroine. Claremont’s “Dark Phoenix Saga” and Whedon’s “Dark Willow” arc on Buffy, obviously inspired by Claremont’s, hardly sums up either man’s image of women. Still, Fingeroth’s interpretation of the “Dark Phoenix Saga” and “Elektra Saga” is certainly arguable, and admirers of either Claremont or Miller’s work must deal with it.

Fingeroth also persuasively argues that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the first great superheroine created since Wonder Woman, and one who is much more conceptually sound. (I expect that Joss Whedon created Buffy to be his own concept of a hero, not just one for kids.) Fingeroth correctly links the X-Men, Buffy (with her “Scooby Gang”), and Harry Potter (with his schoolmates) series together as examples of surrogate families in the superhero genre. (I think that Harry is not truly a superhero series, but is heavily influenced by the genre. And, of course, I’d go further and point out that all three series are variations on an archetype of a school for superhumans.)

Fingeroth does make occasional mistakes about superhero continuity, though none that affect the theories and arguments he makes. Considering the vast number of comics that have been and are being published, how expensive our hobby has grown, and the fact that folks like Fingeroth are no longer on the major companies’ freebie lists, a few mistakes here and there are understandable and excusable. (Of course there should be someone at each of the Big Two keeping track of continuity and making the information available to inquiring comics pros, but as I well know, the Big Two don’t see the point.)

Drawing on Reynolds’ work, Fingeroth makes the intriguing claim that superheroes are really defenders of the status quo, whereas the “reformers,” the people seeking to change society, are super-villains: think of Magneto. Fingeroth notes that stories in which superheroes try to change society will lead to disaster, as in Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme. This is an interesting idea, but I there are counter-examples. Though rare, there are important stories about the superhero as revolutionary, seeking to overturn a corrupt establishment, such as Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, and even his Batman: Year One, and Claremont and John Byrne’s “Days of Future Past.” In 1602 Neil Gaiman pictures Captain America as a rebel leader against a totalitarian American presidency. Such tales turn the superhero into a modern day Robin Hood. I suppose that Denny O’Neil’s version of Green Arrow also fits this mold. This is a valid way of portraying super heroes, so perhaps the real question is why it is not done more often.

I like Fingeroth’s contrast between Batman as a figure taking revenge for his parents’ death on the world, and Spider-Man as taking revenge for his uncle’s murder on himself. I also quite like Fingeroth’s observation that readers don’t just identify with the persecuted X-Men out of their own sense of alienation. “Especially in adolescence,” he dryly observes from the standpoint of mature adulthood, “the romantic notion of belonging to a persecuted minority ““ whether or not one really is ““ has great appeal.”

Fingeroth goes on to make the familiar observation that comics fans may also see themselves as a misunderstood minority group, but intriguingly goes further by arguing that “The decrease in comics sales, ironically. . .coincidental with heightened profit-generating public awareness of, and affection for, super-heroes via movies and TV series, only makes fans feel more ‘persecuted’ and more avant-garde for their specialized tastes in pop culture.” I can see why they’d think that way: however popular and financially successful recent comics-based movies may be, comics themselves, the source material, have only made tantalizingly slow progress in achieving cultural respectability.

In fact, the decline of comics as a mass medium is a recurring undercurrent in Fingeroth’s book. He observes that a kid today might come to know and like Spider-Man from the movie and the video games without ever reading a Spider-Man comic. Gloomily (as we shall further see), Fingeroth offers only slim hope that the comics will survive.

But even if the comics die, Fingeroth asserts, the superheroes will live on through other media. To him, the “superhero is forever”; having been created in its familiar form in the 20th century, it is here to stay.

But I’d add that this may not be the entire story. Yes, there have always been superhuman heroes, going back in Western literature to the very beginnings, with Gilgamesh. But what we think of as the superhero did not start until the 1930s. It is a new form that Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces took in the 20th century in response to the mindset of Americans of that time. As Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen shows, 19th century literature is full of forebears to today’s superheroes and super-villains. But could the writers of the 19th century have foreseen the American superhero of the 1930s (even though some of its forebears’ creators, like H. G. Wells and Conan Doyle, lived long enough to see it)? Even the figure of the Great Detective, which seems another eternal archetype to us, really did not exist in literature before the 19th century and men such as Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe.

So, I wonder if at some point in the 21st century, a new form of larger-than-life hero will evolve, as relevant to its time as Superman was to the 1930s and Spider-Man was to the 1960s. Perhaps we will live long enough to see this new kind of superhuman hero, but perhaps few if any of us can imagine what it will be like from out standpoint in 2004. Oh, I expect that Superman and Batman may survive as cultural icons into the 22nd century. But there’ll be some other kind of hero by then, one we cannot envision as yet.

At points it seems as if Fingeroth is declaring that superhero stories are for kids, not for adults. Explaining why Spider-Man’s eternal youthfulness is essential to the character, and why he is best portrayed as a teenager, Fingeroth states that “what a teenager brings to the table is knowledge and experience without cynicism and bitterness.” He continues, “Hope fills Spider-Man’s world, the hope that only a teenager can have. . .It’s the hope that our efforts will probably be for naught, but, by golly, just might succeed. . . .It’s hope despite the fact that our hopes are dashed on a daily basis. Because sometimes, the hope becomes reality. And that ““ that one time in a hundred ““ is enough to keep the adolescent going, to keep him or her coming back day after day.”

In middle age, it seems, Danny Fingeroth has entered his own Grim and Gritty phase: hope, he seems to be saying, is for heroic, idealistic kids, and not for us bitter, cynical middle-aged adults, beaten down by life’s defeats. Hope, it would seem, is for the blissfully naive and immature.

I beg to disagree. Hope is part of religious faith. Hope is part of the American spirit (as I see Joe Klein noted in passing in his column in the new, June 7, 2004 issue of Time). I also note Brent Staples’ “Editorial Observer” piece in The New York Times (Sat., May 29, 2004) about adolescents obsessed with the Internet. Staples asserts that on the Net, “everyone has a pseudonym, telling a story makes it true, and adolescents create older, cooler, more socially powerful selves any time they wish. The ability to slip easily into a new, false self is tailor-made for emotionally fragile adolescents, who can consider a bout of acne or a few excess pounds an unbearable tragedy.”

What Staples says could be applied to the appeal of secret identities in comics, as well. But when Peter Parker takes on the guise of Spider-Man, he is not just escaping into a more powerful self but taking on serious responsibility. To accept that “with great power must come great responsibility” is a sign of maturity. Spider-Man is not a “false self,” but in some ways, a truer self.

Moreover, it seems to me that bitterness and cynicism are not the sole property of adults, and that to become mired in them might well be a sign of immaturity. Staples’ argument that to blow one’s problems out of proportion is a true sign of adolescent behavior (in its negative connotations) makes sense to me.

To my mind, hope is a sign of a mature attitude; instead of mourning one’s defeats, one keeps on striving, hoping things will improve. It’s why those of us cast aside by the present economy keep searching for new jobs; pessimism won’t benefit our quests. It’s part of why I keep doing this column, casting my bread upon the water. Eventually someone will notice and it will lead to bigger things career-wise. (It already has in a few minor ways). If I, and others like me, keep on writing serious appreciations of comics as an artform. it will slowly but surely gain further respect in American culture. (We have already come further than we could have imagined in the 1960s.) I’m hopeful I can reposition myself as well as Danny Fingeroth has, as a teacher, scholar and authority on comics. As the female protagonist of Scenes from a Marriage says towards the very end, after she has aged from confused depressed youth into hopeful, wiser middle age (it’s a long five hours!), “I persevere. I enjoy myself. . . .I am content with my direction.”

And I suspect that deep down, Danny isn’t as pessimistic as his book sometimes implies. Despite the appeal superheroes have for kids, Fingeroth notes that “the superhero genre is rich with metaphors and parallels that help us recognize and make sense of much of what goes on in our lives.” He admits that “I have deep and complex feelings about the medium and the characters it has spawned.” We may first get to know superheroes when we are children, but as Danny states, “We each have to be our own superhero. It’s the work of a lifetime.”

Superman on the Couch is a good, solid, entertainingly written basic textbook on the superhero genre. But it is merely an introduction to a vast subject on which so much more needs to be written. What Danny Fingeroth says in this book should set readers thinking more deeply about superheroes in comics, movies and TV, and encourage them to range still further in investigating this fascinating but still underrated area of American popular culture. I plan to recommend this book to my students this fall; I’m recommending it to you now.

HOMELESS

Some weeks ago I went to see Home on the Range well aware that it is the last hand-drawn animated film from Disney for the foreseeable future. Since Shrek and the Pixar movies (Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo), all computer animated, have been so wildly successful while most of their traditional hand-drawn animated films have been commercial disappointments, Disney and DreamWorks have decided that audiences only want to see CGI animated films from now on.

Keeping this in mind, now consider the plot of Home on the Range. A ranch run by a kindly, elderly woman is in danger of going bankrupt, whereupon all the cattle on the ranch will be sold off. Could this have been an intentional metaphor, at least in the minds of some of Disney Animation’s people, for what they must have feared was the approaching doom of traditional animation ““ and hence, their jobs?

In the movie the ranch is ultimately saved, but in real life doom came to the animators. In recent months, I’ve been reading articles at JimHillMedia.com, a website for Disney aficionados, about the closing of the Disney animation studio in Orlando, where Home on the Range was done. (For that matter, so were Mulan and Lilo & Stitch, the latter being a hand-drawn animated film that was indeed a major success, proving, one might have thought, that audiences do still like traditional animation as long as they find the story and characters appealing.) Hill ran messages from downsized members of the Florida studio, pointing out that while the topmost people will find new work elsewhere in animation, many others will not: says one, “If you weren’t an A-Lister (at Disney Feature Animation), you will get left behind..” Animation people tell Hill that people had come from around the world to Orlando to fulfill a life’s dream by working in Disney animation, that many had mortgages to pay and families to support, that many had put down “roots” in Orlando and did not want to leave, that a happy creative community was being dispersed. Hill comments that “if I had happen to me what just happened to these 200 dedicated, extremely talented artists and technicians at Feature Animation-Florida ““ that a job I loved, a job that I was really good at, just taken away from me for no good reason ““ I’d still be in a fetal ball somewhere, weeping softly.”

This all reminds me of the similar upheavals in the comics industry over recent years. ‘Nuff said.

The metaphor in Home could have been even more biting (which, come to think of it, is an appropriate choice of words, as you will soon see). Hill also reports that people at Disney Animation had wanted to make it clear that if the ranch were sold, the cows (including the three talking cows who are the lead characters) would be sold to a slaughterhouse. It seems the movie, as it now stands, does not make the doom that awaits the cows clear inasmuch as Disney had hoped to get a Happy Meals promotional deal with McDonald’s, which, of course, makes hamburgers from slaughtered cows.

As it turned out, Disney didn’t get the Happy Meals deal anyway, though perhaps that was a blessing in disguise now that the new documentary Super Size Me has focused attention on the decidedly unhealthy aspects of McDonald’s fast food. (I may love hamburgers, but I never eat at McDonald’s unless I’m stuck at an airport with no other alternatives.)

Hill also reports the speculation that Disney underpromoted Home on the Range, which did indeed vanish quickly from theaters, in order to guarantee that its forthcoming computer-animated movie, Chicken Little, will look financially successful by comparison. Well, that’s credible. But if indeed Disney decided not to promote Home as much as it could have, perhaps it’s because the movie really isn’t as good as, say, Lilo was (to give the Florida studio credit for one of its successes).

Part of the reason is, as the Times critic Elvis Mitchell noted in one of his last reviews there, the efforts at humor often seem frenetic rather than funny. I’d add that the characters do not seem distinctive or memorable enough; it’s hard for me to imagine any of them spinning off into their own TV series, say, as Aladdin and the Little Mermaid and even The Lion King‘s Timon and Pumbaa did. Indeed, the latter two have proved to have not only so much appeal but so much depth as characters, that the new The Lion King 1/2 sequel on DVD is really about them; how often is a cast of characters so richly conceived that supporting players can carry their own movie?

Oh, the leading characters, three cows on a quest to save their ranch, and some of their allies are likable; I had a pleasant time watching this film, but no more than that. The lack of depth to the characters betrays the main problem: the lead characters’ story arcs lack the psychological and emotional resonance that Disney feature film heroes’ quests should have. Sure, the three cows are trying to save their home. But do they psychologically change in any important way? Does their quest have metaphorical import beyond its surface meaning? Disney took a gamble here. This is not a coming-of-age story, as so many Disney animated features are. Nor is there a love story at its heart, which may be a major factor that made Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and even Lion King so successful. The three cow heroines are mature adults: one of them is downright matronly. I’d like to think that Disney could do an animated feature about adult characters and make it dramatically involving for both children and adults. Come to think of it, the heroes of the Pixar/Disney films – Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc. and the father in Finding Nemo, plus two title characters in the forthcoming The Invincibles ““ ARE adults!If you want examples of the kind of multidimensional story lines I’m looking for, consult my analyses of Disney’s Brother Bear (see Comics in Context #19) and Pixar/Disney’s Finding Nemo (Comics in Context #40). It’s too bad that Home on the Range doesn’t come close to the mythic depth of either. I’d rather traditional Disney animation had gone out with the proverbial bang.

So, if Disney blames the disappointing box office performance of its recent (non-Pixar) animated features on the fact that they were hand-drawn, what excuse will Disney find if its future (non-Pixar) computer animated films bomb? Maybe there’s more to making the films work than the way they look.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

Regular readers of this column should look out for Back Issue #5, from TwoMorrows Publishing, now on sale, for which I interviewed Chris Claremont and John Byrne on the subject of Wolverine, who marks his thirtieth (!) anniversary this year. Mr. Byrne did the striking cover portrait of Wolverine, which should catch your eye as you scan the comic shop racks. This is my second piece for Back Issue, and there are many more to come!

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

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

EXTREME MAKEOVER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE PROPER DIRECTORIAL ATTITUDE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANALYZING NEMO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

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

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

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

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

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

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

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

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

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

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portia Prinz defies the anti-intellectualism in pop culture.

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

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

DILUTION AND DISSOLUTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOOK FOR THE SILVER LINING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE MINOR LEAGUERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DISTORTION AND DISAPPEARANCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIMINUTION AND DENOUEMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MARVEL-TIME MARCHES ON

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

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

How’s that again?

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

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

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

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

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

SPIDEY OFF BASE

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article concludes with this ominous exchange:

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

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

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

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

FINDING TRUE COMPANIONSHIP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

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

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

DARE TO BE DIFFERENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE PURPLE PREZ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GETHSEMENE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even his past achievements are morally tainted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fury smiles triumphantly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BETRAYAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE RESURRECTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BIRTH OF A NATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So who or what is formulating these stories?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

ONE AMONG FIVE

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

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

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

THE BACKSTORY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MEMORIAL DAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEYOND THE SHIRT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AN INTERRUPTED TOUR

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

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

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

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

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

ACHIEVING THE HEIGHTS

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

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

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

STANDING ROOM ONLY

Then came Jack C. Harris, a former writer and editor at DC, who now (like some other comics veterans, including myself) has turned to teaching about the comics medium. He posted his speech at the Ellison website on March 20, and you can find it here

Harris was the first of the speakers to acclaim Schwartz’s letter columns. As “a price to pay” for what he gave us, Harris said, “Julie demanded original, thought-provoking letters, missives that posed intriguing questions and offered informative critique.”

“I never saw anyone who didn’t like Julie Schwartz,” stated Harris, who quoted comics writer Len Wein’s description of him as “everyone’s favorite uncle.” Harris imagined that Julie was now the permanent guest of honor in a comics/science fiction convention held in the hereafter.

The high point of Harris’s speech came after he recalled standing alongside Schwartz at a comics convention, looking out at the enormous crowd of pros, fans and more. Harris told him, ‘You know, this is all your fault.” and Schwartz smiled and replied, “Yeah, I know.”

So now Harris conducted an “experiment”: he asked the members of the audience if any of them were in the comics industry today because of Julie Schwartz, “either indirectly or directly,” to stand up. By Harris’s estimation, about two thirds of the hundreds who were gathered there stood. “See, Julie?” said Harris; “It’s still your fault.”

(Afterwards I spoke with Jack, and we agreed that considering that the comics industry might not even exist today if not for Schwartz, everybody should have stood up.)

IN THE SOUP

Harris was followed by Ricia Mainhart, who observed that as a science fiction literary agent, she was following a career that Julie Schwartz had created. She was another of Schwartz’s regular lunchtime companions, and the centerpiece of her speech was an amusing tale of how “catastrophe” struck when the restaurant near DC’s old offices where he had his beloved navy bean soup closed: unable to find another restaurant with the good sense to put it on their menu, she ended up learning to make it herself, with him editing her efforts all along the way.

DC editor Bob Greenberger read a message sent by longtime comics writer Len Wein. In their first meeting, Wein recalled that an angry Schwartz saw him and seized him by the shirt collar, telling him. “You’re writing The Flash. I don’t know who you are but you couldn’t do a worse job than the expletive deleted I just fired!” (Playing Schwartz’s part, Greenberger affected a comically gruff voice that didn’t really sound like him but got the requisite laughs. Perhaps Julie should have played J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man movie, or maybe Bob.)

A year later, Wein found himself at the DC offices just watching Schwartz intently working at his desk, as if studying how editing is done. Schwartz looked up and (in Greenberger’s performance) barked, “What the hell do you want?” In his reminiscences Wein admitted he could not explain why he said what he did (was he demonically possessed?), but he replied that he “just thought I’d stand here for a while watching you go senile.” (!) Schwartz stared, then started laughing, so convulsively he actually fell out of his chair. “Now that was funny,” Julie told him; “Why aren’t you that funny in your scripts?” (And the audience laughs in surprise and delight.) And that is how Wein and Schwartz became friends.

Yet more comedy came from the next speaker, Mike Carlin, one of Schwartz’s successors as Superman editor. I had thought that Mike had begun his comics career at Marvel, but he informed us that thirty years ago around this time of year he was a high school intern at DC. Carlin said he didn’t meet Schwartz back then, but he saw him, at work, drinking his lunchtime soup. “Soup is a very big theme here,” Mike observed, as if engaging in literary analysis. “Julie was Soup-erman.”

The audience groaned in agony, like a massive wail of pain from the pits of hell. But Schwartz loved puns, including bad puns, and Mike was simply honoring the Schwartz tradition here.

Though they became friends later, once Mike became an editor at DC, Carlin said he understood why Schwartz never talked to him when he was an intern: he didn’t have to, “I wasn’t part of his day.” But “He actually taught me a lot. I don’t talk to interns now,” Carlin told an amused audience.

OLD TIMES ON OLYMPUS

Now Neil Gaiman stepped onto the stage, but he told us, he was there to deliver not his own speech but one sent by Alan Moore! For 1602 readers, this state of affairs causes me to imagine if there had been a memorial held by English playwrights in the early 17th century. Ben Jonson gets up to speak, and the audience stirs expectantly: it’s Jonson, the best writer here, this is going to be good, o rare Ben Jonson and all that. And instead Jonson says he’s there to read something his friend Will sent down from his retirement home in Stratford, and the audience’s collective jaw drops!

Moore’s speech was utterly extraordinary, and you can find it in the March 18 post on Gaiman’s blog (a website that people of taste should visit from time to time, anyway).

As a writer, rereading Moore’s tribute, I am astounded at how much vivid imagery, insightful characterization, sharp observation and sense of time and place (even a throwaway bit like a reference to “the migraine-yellow dot-toned hallways” of the old DC offices; it’s true!) he packed into such a short piece, while still allowing the piece to flow smoothly, whether it is read silently or aloud. Gaiman reveals in his blog that he was asked to read Moore’s message when he arrived at the memorial; hence he had no time to rehearse. Gaiman says he tried “to pace and pitch it as Alan would have done.” Neil’s reading struck me not as an imitation of Moore, but as a performance by a skilled actor of his own writings, turning the same talent to an interpretation of a fellow author’s work.

You should all go read it for yourselves. In the time-honored tradition of reporters and reviewers I will merely mention a few of the best bits. Like some other speakers, Moore drew our attention to how young most of us were when we first encountered Schwartz’s work: he was “our childhood’s god, the intergalactic cabby who wouldn’t shut up, the curator of the Space Museum” (clever references to two of Schwartz’s comics science fiction series). Moore and Gaiman drew their second biggest laugh with Moore’s reminiscences of Schwartz showing him his scrapbook filled with photos of the great writers he had known: Moore wrote that he “could not have possibly been more impressed if he’d said, ‘See that old guy in the toga, standing by Ed Hamilton? That’s Zeus.”

But the biggest laugh came unexpectedly, after Moore and Gaiman abruptly seemed to shift the tone away from amusing anecdotes. “And now we hear that Julie has been discontinued. Cancelled.” Gaiman paused significantly, and then continued, “But they said the same about Green Lantern and the Flash ““” And there was a massive detonation of appreciative laughter, the loudest and most fervent of the entire morning.

Towards the end Moore noted that Schwartz had “ruined my reputation as a gentle pacifist” through his anecdote (found in his memoir and elsewhere) that Moore had (playfully, I trust) seized him by the throat to persuade him to let him write his final Superman story. Asking how he could possibly contradict Julie, Moore confessed that it was true.

Or was it? I recall filmmaker John Ford’s classic line at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to the effect that when the legend is superior to the truth, “print the legend.” Did the mock-strangulation actually take place? Well, it’s a good story. If it didn’t happen, it should have. And since the two participants claim that it did, it effectively has. (In W. S. Gilbert’s The Mikado, Ko-Ko reasons that if the Mikado sentences someone to death, that person is as good as dead, and to all intents and purposes is already dead, so why bother with the trouble of physically carrying out the execution?)

SEEING SPARKS

And now, finally and appropriately, a blonde woman steps up to speak about Julie: Karen Berger, head of DC’s Vertigo line. She began by remarking that the comics industry, “particularly DC,” has a “sense of family.” (Well, perhaps this is still true of DC.) Pursuing the metaphor, she characterized Schwartz as the “cranky but lovable uncle or grandfather.” She also observed that he kept his personal life separate from his off, and that he thus had “two families”: it would appear that his funeral, held weeks earlier, was her and other DC editors’ first real encounter with his “other” family.

Unlike so many of the other speakers, Berger was not a comics fan when she was growing up, and hence did not read Schwartz’s comics as a child. But she said her memories of when she started working at DC, nearly twenty-five years ago, and sat in a cubicle outside Schwartz’s office (I remember that cubicle: it’s where she sat the day I first met her), were something “pure” which she likened to “childhood memories.” She recalled seeing his leading artists “coming and going,” and also his conferences with writers, where they “sat nervously as Julie plotted with them.” She said “You could see the spark in his eye” as he worked with them, and that he would “get them to take bigger chances, to be more original.”

So there, intentionally or not, was another reference to Schwartz’s “Be Original” nickname. This also made me realize that Karen was learning how to be an editor by observing Schwartz from her privileged vantage point: so, inadvertently, Julie Schwartz also had a major influence on the Vertigo line as well.

Referring to Schwartz as the “ubereditor,” Berger reiterated one of the day’s leitmotifs: “Comics today really wouldn’t exist as it does if not for him.”

Next, DC veteran Anthony Tollin recalled attending “PulpCon” with Schwartz, where he saw Schwartz’s “fan” side emerge: the pulp magazines of the ’20s and ’30s were what he loved growing up. Tollin pointed out that the “important thing” about Schwartz as an editor was that “he remembered what it was like to be a fan,” and “identified with fans,” and knew what sort of things they would want to see.

Tollin was followed by Nick Barucci, of Dynamic Forces, dealer of comics-related collectibles, who, alluding to the hereafter, said that Schwartz was “now truly a man of two worlds, looking down” upon us.

THE WORLD OUTSIDE

Then came Maggie Thompson, editor of the Comic Buyer’s Guide and one of the leading figures of comics’ “first fandom.” Conveying Harlan Ellison’s apologies for his inability to be there, she proceeded to illuminate the origins of Schwartz’s Man of Two Worlds autobiography. It was, she said, a “conspiracy” devised by Ellison, who was concerned about Schwartz’s health, as a means “to keep him focused.” Ellison got in touch with Maggie, who then told Paul Levitz.

Maggie Thompson sounded a now familiar but essential theme about Schwartz once more and extended it: “The comic book industry would not be here without him,” and, further, science fiction would be different without him. And here she came to a major point indeed: “The world outside will never comprehend how important he was to us.”

That’s certainly true about the present day; one might hope for more enlightenment in years to come, if comics continues to gain respect as an artform. For example, The New York Times‘ obituary was respectful and accurate, but did not truly convey Schwartz’s enormous influence. It’s not just the direct influence on writers and artists who worked with him, or even the indirect, unintended effects I’ve pointed to his having on Marvel and Vertigo. How many writers of science fiction, fantasy, and heroic adventure in comics, prose, television and film grew up reading books he edited, or the works of writers (like Bradbury, et al) he promoted? Just how far does Schwartz’s influence extend through popular culture? Indeed, to return to one of Ellison’s points, how many millions of people over several generations had their sense of morality and social responsibility in part shaped by Schwartz’s stories? Are there even kids who were inspired by Schwartz’s science-oriented Silver Age comics and ended up pursuing careers in science as adults? Will the World Outside or any of us ever really know?

UNDER LOC AND KEY

Then came another message from an absent mourner, a surprising voice from the past. In the 1960s there was a small, prolific cadre of writers who regularly turned up in Julie Schwartz’s letter columns, the fan critics with the most incisive and stylishly written LOCs (Letters of Comment). The foremost of these writers, the dean of LOC correspondents, was the erudite and aristocratically named Guy H. Lillian III. I’ve never met him, and he was not there, but he had sent in a LOC, by e-mail, in keeping this new century, and it was read aloud at the memorial: a poem from a novel by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick,. including the lines, “I must be gone/There is a grave.”

Following this was another longtime fan, Ken Gale, who for eleven years has run a radio show about comics. Gale reinforced what Brian Thomsen had earlier remarked about Schwartz’s underlying modesty about his achievements. Gale said that it was impossible to get Schwartz to set a date to talk about himself on the radio, but he would eagerly go on to talk about people he had worked with.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

In his closing speech, Paul Levitz invoked the work of science fiction pioneer E. E. “Doc” Smith, whose Lensmen series was a major influence on Schwartz’s Silver Age Green Lantern. In that series, Levitz said, was a character like Schwartz, who was described as “one of the good aliens,” trying to make sure the humans got the help they needed, without taking credit.

His voice breaking twice in these closing comments, Levitz focused on Julius Schwartz as mentor. “Thank you, Julie,” he began, saying that he “began teaching me when I was six,” reading his first Schwartz-edited comic, The Atom #6. Though Paul “didn’t know your name,” he was “learning about heroism. . .modesty. . .courage,” through morals “soft-spoken in the back of stories,” not realizing he was being taught. Years later, when he was a DC staffer, Levitz “watched” as Schwartz “taught organizational skills,” “gravitas,” and more, “by example,” acting as the “model of what an editor should be.”

The very last speaker of the morning was Julie’s adult granddaughter, Andrea Hopkins, who told us it was “so overwhelmingly beautiful” to see how many people loved her grandfather. If we didn’t know about her and the rest of Julie’s family, it seems that they hadn’t known much about us until now, either. As she said, “he was very private.”

TAKING A STAND

The audience applauded Ms. Hopkins, the jazz recordings resumed, and the memorial had come to an end. It was 11:30, and for another half hour there was much communal milling about, both within the dark theater auditorium and in a well-lit room outside. People who hadn’t seen each other in a long time were talking, and perhaps the attendees did not really want the gathering to end so abruptly.

This was far from the last tribute to Julius Schwartz. There will surely be panels in his honor at comics conventions in the coming months. Moreover, in July and August, DC will publish eight tribute comics. Each one will have a cover, recreated by a present day artist, based on a Silver Age cover from a book that Schwartz edited. The cover images would often be devised first and then he and his writers constructed stories around those images. So, too, each of these tribute books will contain two eleven-page stories by leading comics writers and artists, based on Schwartz’s original cover imagery. The original cover will also be reprinted inside each book. (But shouldn’t each issue also contain a reprint of Schwartz’s original story, too, so that readers who don’t have collections of forty-year-old comics can witness the work of the master and see what all the fuss is about? Well, I can help remedy this: I have a future column in the works that critiques a number of classic Schwartz-edited stories. And probably I will review the tribute books later this year, as well.)

When it finally came time to leave the Clearview Cinema, we emerged into a greatly changed day: the clouds had appropriately lifted, it was brightly, beautifully sunny, the snow had all melted, and it was reasonably warm, as if spring had finally succeeded the long winter.

I was part of a group that decamped to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and ended up sitting across from, and meeting for the first time, Irene Vartanoff, another of the leading lights of the Silver Age Schwartz lettercols. As a fan, I greatly admired Irene’s work as I did Lillian’s and others, and was thrilled when Julie began printing my letters regularly, too, elevating me into this honorable circle: this was my first published work. Now, at the restaurant, I found myself contemplating the unexpected twists and turns that life takes: it is at once strange and very appropriate that I should finally meet Irene, finally put a face and voice to the name, at the memorial for the man we both wrote letters to decades ago. This is one of those incidents that seems to be evidence against the idea that life is merely a random series of accidents; is it being plotted?.

Irene made the point that Julie was our editor, too: that we knew we had to meet his high standards, to do our best work writing these reviews of his books, in order that he would print them in his letter columns. She’s right, and those letters were not just my first published work, but my first works of comics criticism. I went on to do more such work, in those oxymoronic entities, professional fanzines, which led in large part to my many years of work chronicling continuity for the Big Two, Marvel and DC, a satisfying way to make a living until recent years.

But the silver lining is that now I have returned to my Real Work: as a critic and historian of American comics and cartoon art, in this column, in my (unsigned) reviews for Publishers Weekly, in the course on comics as literature that I’ll be teaching at New York University this fall, and my work in books and documentaries (and I hope I do more of both). The “Comics in Context” column, my Abrams Marvel Universe book, and all of the rest of it are direct descendents of the letters I used to write to Julius Schwartz’s letters pages. As far as I’m concerned, among his many other contributions to comics and science fiction, he is also one of the fathers of comics criticism. This column exists because of Julius Schwartz. I write about comics as an artform because of him. When that moment came in Jack C. Harris’s speech, I stood up.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson