FRED Entertainment

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

There’s been a long break since the initial installment of my review of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, newly released as a trade paperback, while I have written reports on the 2004 Toy Fair and Cartoon Network “upfront” presentation for IGN FilmForce. But now this critic strikes again, continuing where I left off.

Book 2 of The Dark Knight Strikes Again opens with the cover for The Daily Planet Magazine (presumably the equivalent of a newspaper’s Sunday magazine supplement, like The New York Times Sunday Magazine, showcasing its cover story. “Superhero Chic,” with a picture of what, by coincidence, one friend years ago imagined as being the ideal Supergirl costume: a nude blonde woman with a strategically placed “S” emblem.

This serves to introduce the “Superchix,” seductive young women dressed in superhero-style costumes, calling themselves Batchick, Wonder Chick, and Black Canary (the latter is presumably not the super heroine of that name, who would be much older at this point on the Dark Knight timeline), who are celebrities, though for what reason is not immediately clear: we are told they have their own website (no big distinction, that) and eventually that they are some sort of pop music group.

So what is Miller trying to get at here? Initially, I linked the Superchix to the nude newscaster and other sleazy media types who appeared in Book 1. Are the Superchix Miller’s comment on the ever more sexually explicit trends in pop culture? In a world where superheroes are real, would Britney Spears and company dress up (or down) in superhero costumes?

Perhaps the Superchix are satiric comments on the “bad girl” characters so prevalent in comics in the ’90s, who might be regarded more as pin-ups for male fantasies than the liberated heroines they purported to be. (Take that trend to its nadir and you get the unfortunate Stan Lee’s Stripperella.) If, as we saw in Book 1, The Dark Knight Strikes Again has a subtext about restoring traditional values of the superhero genre, perhaps the Superchix are meant to represent the more disposable, hormone-driven superhero comics of the last decade. Note that Miller’s amusing parody of TV newsman Chris Matthews (or perhaps of Darrell Hammond’s impersonation of Matthews on Saturday Night Live) rants, “So now the President brings the hammer down on three bouncy tarts for making the long green for adolescent boys who’ve got testosterone coming out of their ears and grown men old enough to be their fathers!” Could the same description apply to a lot of comics readers during the notorious early 1990s comics boom? (The Dark Knight Strikes Again is indeed an example of how middle-aged creators can use the superhero genre to voice their own perspective, despite its traditionally young audience.)

And this in turn makes me think of Miller’s long involvement with the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which helps defendants in court cases that seek to outlaw the sale of “mature” comics. By having the government in DK2 outlaw the harmless Superchix, perhaps Miller is drawing a parallel to attempts to censor the comics industry, and hence to repress freedom of expression.

Miller makes clear in DK2 that the superhero is a symbol of individual liberty. Sexuality is also arguably a means of personal expression and freedom. It’s interesting that Miller links superheroes and sexuality in DK2 by making them both the objects of government repression. Indeed, in DK2 they are the targets of the right wing. In the media debate over the Superchix, which Miller populates with caricatures of familiar “talking heads,” the person most opposed to the Superchix is the conservative commentator George Will. A longstanding slur on comics readers is that guys give up comics when they discover girls. How ironic that Miller instead links the superhero concept and sexuality together.

Now, superheroes traditionally battle on behalf of the rest of the population: they are the champions of the public at large. Superman, raised in the values of the idealized Midwesterners who were his foster parents, stands for the American citizenry’s traditional morality: “truth, justice and the American way.” But what kind of general public does Miller portray in DK2? The men (and women) in the street types who pop up during Matthews’ Superchix debate are more grossly caricatured than the news media “talking heads” and just babble nonsense; no wonder Matthews yells at them to “Shut up!” It makes one wonder just how democratic the political stance of DK2 is.

There follow three double-page spreads showing Batman descending from the heavens (like a bat and like an avenging deity) along with his aircraft to burst into Lex Luthor’s headquarters. Through these three spreads Miller moves from the satire of the Superchix debate to giving DK2 an epic scale, aided by the beauty of the skyscapers that Lynn Varley colors.

Batman starts whaling the tar out of various Luthor allies: Miller even gives us an extreme close-up of teeth that have been knocked out of his victims’ mouths, accompanied by a spray of blood added by Varley. “Life doesn’t get any better than this,” thinks Batman. “God. I love my job.” (What was that about testosterone coming out of one’s ears?)

Remember the square-jawed, grinning Batman that Dick Sprang used to draw in the ’40s and ’50s, wisecracking with Robin as they clobbered thugs? This strikes me as Miller’s updated version of that. His Batman may look like a grim figure of retribution to his enemies, but Batman himself isn’t grim at all: he’s performing his life’s work, acting true to himself (unlike the depressed Bruce Wayne leading his empty life at the start of the original Dark Knight), and he’s having fun. He is following his bliss.

In the course of doing so, Batman beats up the (fictional) Secretary of State and (fictional) Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “So much treason to commit,” Batman muses; “So little time.”

And this sets me wondering. Making known criminals Luthor and Brainiac the secret heads of the government, responsible for a covert coup d’etat, gives Batman a moral rationale for attacking the U.S. government.

But here is Batman attacking a cabinet secretary and the head of the military. Are they Luthor’s knowing accomplices? Luthor, an American citizen, is a traitor for usurping control of the government. But here Batman calls himself a traitor. Is he merely making an ironic joke?

What I wonder here is whether making Luthor the secret power behind the throne is less a moral rationale in the story than an excuse. Is DK2 actually an anarchist work, opposed to the federal government no matter who is in charge, simply out of an ideological opposition to big government?

Batman then beats up Luthor and carves a “Z” on his face. Batman’s sidekick Carrie, now known as Catgirl, is bewildered by this last gesture, but this is Batman’s and Miller’s tip of the cowl to Zorro, one of the influences on the creation of Batman. (It was Miller who established that on the night that Bruce Wayne’s parents were murdered, they had taken Bruce to see the movie The Mark of Zorro.) Zorro is a supposedly idle rich man who adopts a costumed identity based on an animal (Zorro is “the Fox”) to combat a government that oppresses the people. In Batman: Year One, Miller made the young Batman’s principal opponent the alliance of government officials and organized crime bosses that dominated Gotham City; in DK2 the enemy is once again a government run by criminals.

“I’ll see you in hell,” Batman tells Luthor in parting: Luthor is damned, of course, and Batman’s remark suggests the idea that Batman is a kind of devil (hence the horns and links to creatures of the night) who battles on the side of good. Carrie exults (twice), “We scared the crap out of Lex Luthor.” Batman, satisfied with a good night’s work, observes, “Striking terror. Best part of the job.”

Well, whether or not Miller realizes this, I do not know, but, as people have long noted about terrorism, it backfires. Rather than scaring him off, Batman’s assault simply seems to spur Luthor on to further evildoing, resulting in the deaths of many innocent victims over the rest of this miniseries. Had Batman taken this opportunity to capture or even kill Luthor, he could have avoided all of that.

Best of all, since Luthor had covertly seized power behind the facade of an elected President who turns out merely to be a CGI image, couldn’t Batman have simply exposed Luthor’s schemes to the American public once he had captured him? But then again, according to Miller’s caricature of George Stephanopoulos, “Maybe the President doesn’t exist, but that hasn’t hurt him in the polls.” The majority of Americans in DK2 allegedly don’t care whether or not they are oppressed. Batman appears to be fighting Luthor and company because he and his superhero allies think they are wrong, not because Batman is acting according to the wishes of the general population.

And now Batman has referred to himself not just as a traitor but as a terrorist: “Striking terror. Best part of the job.” As noted, Miller has stated that when the September 11 attacks occurred, he found himself in the midst of working on a series that portrayed Batman as a “good terrorist.”

Well, as we know from Batman #1, Bruce Wayne adopted a bat costume to strike terror into the hearts of criminals, who are “a cowardly, superstitious lot.” So the actions of Batman in DK2 are an extension of that.

But having Batman call himself a “terrorist” may be misusing the word. As we commonly think of terrorists, they inflict death and injury on noncombatants to achieve their political goals by striking terror into the population at large. Batman isn’t doing that in DK2: he seeks to terrorize Luthor and his allies, but not the public, and he certainly will not harm the general population. The only people this Batman seeks to kill are Luthor and Brainiac.

The Batman of DK2 is really more of a commando leader, directing his troops in assaults on the enemy (Luthor) and what are effectively military targets: he’s like Nick Fury in a bat suit.

Still, it’s significant that Miller uses such a loaded word as “terrorist” to approvingly describe his version of Batman. It may be another indication of the anarchist, anti-government subtext of DK2. For better or worse, Miller’s success in involving his readers emotionally on Batman’s side also gives us a look into the terrorist’s point of view. This kind of wish to violently overthrow the government may not be such an alien sentiment, after all, if it can crop up in our own fantasy worlds.

Miller next brings in Ralph Dibny, the Elongated Man, who is doing a commercial in which he urges male viewers to “elongate your love life,” and thus a familiar gag about superheroes with stretching powers finally makes it into a mainstream comic. No wonder Ralph and Sue Dibny seemed to be such a happy couple.

Then Wonder Woman confronts Superman amid the ruins of the Silver Age version of his Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic. Having been soundly defeated by Batman at the end of the previous issue, Superman looks like a wreck himself: bruised, even somewhat bestial with his now distorted facial features and large, rough hands. The Fortress, a symbol of himself, and perhaps of Silver Age comics and their idealism, has been turned to debris by Luthor. “I’ve lost it. I’m finished. I had a good run,” he tells her. This bested, despairing Superman is reminiscent of Matt Murdock midway through Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again, whose own home had been blasted into rubble by his own bald nemesis, the Kingpin. In the way that Superman phrases that line ““ “I had a good run” ““ perhaps he is also alluding to the “run” of his comics series. Perhaps here Miller is evoking the attitude of some that traditional superheroes such as Superman are no longer relevant. (Miller himself disagrees with that attitude, as this series will show.)

We learn that Superman and Wonder Woman have a daughter, Lara (named after Superman’s mother), and here another theme appropriate to a generation of comics professionals in middle age becomes clearer. Like John Byrne in Generations, Miller too is concerned with the idea of the next generation of superheroes, symbolizing the next generation, the children of the Boomers. Carrie and the “Batboys” are Batman’s heirs, whom he has trained. Lara is the heir to Superman and Wonder Woman, but Superman has kept his distance from his daughter, serving as neither mentor nor father. Superman’s rationale is a protective one, perhaps overly so: he does not want Luthor and Brainiac to learn of her existence and make her “their slave.” One might speculate that Superman’s real motive is shame that he has become their “slave” himself: it is in this scene that he confesses to being a failure, having lost “our war for human freedom” to Luthor and Brainiac. Superman is in the position that Bruce Wayne was in at the beginning of the first Dark Knight: having been unable to prevent Jason Todd’s death, Wayne felt that continuing as Batman was pointless. In Superman’s case he also voices the guilt of a parent who feels he (and his generation?) has let his child (and her generation?) down by failing to live up to his ideals and to meet his goals. In protecting Lara, Superman is guarding his hope for the future, since he has given up on being able to achieve that goal himself. As I wrote in the last installment, The Dark Knight Strikes Back strikes me as being more about Superman’s character arc than Batman’s.

Superman’s real failure as a parent appears to be his neglect of Lara. Wonder Woman says Lara is “confused ““ about things only you could possibly explain.” She needs a mentor. Wonder Woman sees Superman’s attitude as overprotectiveness: “Her time will come. She will face the enemy in her own way. She will be wise. She will be brave.” In other words, each generation must take its turn on the world stage, and Lara will rise to virtues that her father perhaps thinks he has lost. It seems appropriate that Wonder Woman, not having perceptively aged, sides with the younger generation, whereas Superman, even if he is not physically old, looks the part of an exhausted, spent older generation with his bruises and depressed manner.

Attempting to provoke Superman out of his depression, Wonder Woman challenges him, “Where is the hero who threw me to the ground and took me as his rightful prize?” Now there is a disconcerting piece of dialogue for Wonder Woman: the archetypal feminist hero likes the idea of rape?

She is also confronting him with the duality of his nature: “Where is the god whose passion shattered a mountaintop? Where is that man? Where is that Superman?” Superman is both man and god, and godhood here is not just a word but has an epic dimension, as the mountaintop’s fate shows. (The first Dark Knight dabbled in this idea: Superman’s first “appearance” in it is as a mighty wind as he moves, unseen, at superhuman speed: it as if he is a force of nature.) Superman should not be the victim of such destruction as the mortal Luthor wreaked, but the creator of destruction on a grander scale.

There follows a sequence of dramatic (but not sexually explicit) full page shots representing Superman and Wonder Woman’s lovemaking. This is Superman’s symbolic resurrection through love and sex: again, the idea of the superhuman is linked with sexuality. (A similar reenergizing encounter between the literally and figuratively impotent Nite Owl and Silk Spectre in Watchmen parallels this scene.) Superman reclaims his godlike aspect, as Miller shows us reports of the hurricanes and earthquakes the lovemaking caused. This enables him to make a joke as a payoff (“Clark. The Earth moved.”) which perhaps distracts the reader from raising annoying questions. (I know that Wonder Woman is no “Woman of Kleenex,” to use Larry Niven’s phrase, but could she really withstand earthquake-level force? And was anyone killed in that hurricane and quake?)

Wonder Woman now somehow knows she is pregnant again, though nothing more is said about this in the series. (So, is Miller already laying the groundwork for another sequel?)

Luthor and Brainiac send an “alien robot” that resembles a gigantic frog to combat Superman; actually it appears to be the computer intelligence Brainiac himself, in a new form. Why a frog? Maybe the giant green animal image is supposed to evoke the giant monsters that menace cities in Godzilla and other Japanese movies, or the dragons that are the traditional adversaries of monster-slaying heroes. Members of the public who witness the battle are amazed to see Superman, saying they were told he was “dead” or not real. It would make sense that a repressive government would try to convince the populace that a symbol of individual freedom and power was dead or perhaps never existed. (Could this also be an allusion to the “Death of Superman” story line of the 1990s?)

But now a new subplot is introduced. The original Joker killed himself in the first Dark Knight, but here’s a new Joker, dressed, without explanation, as Cosmic Boy of the Legion of Super-Heroes, who murders a hero created by Jack Kirby, the Guardian. What’s going on here? Alan Moore’s Watchmen is said to have had a major influence on the last issue of Miller’s original Dark Night. Watchmen had a mysterious “cape killer,” who murdered the Comedian, a costumed hero; now DK2 has a serial killer of superheroes.

In a speech to Superman, Brainiac links the superheroes reemerging into action to the “wannabe superheroes popping up,” by which he presumably means characters like the Superchix. This suggests that the strength of the superhero concept is resurging, through a combination of the revitalization of the old characters (and an older generation) and a younger generation who are striving to imitate them, without yet realizing the symbolic power and meanings of the concept. (Again, there may be a subtext here about the actual comics industry.)

So, in a sort of war of public relations imagery, Brainiac and Luthor intend to “nip this little fad in the bud” by humiliating, defeating and destroying the leading superhero, Superman, before the eyes of the world. Brainiac calls Superman’s approaching demise “a big, splashy spectacle. A deterrent. A show-stopper, if you will.” Right from the start of the original series, Miller’s Dark Knight has concerned itself with how the media portray the heroes’ exploits. Now even the villains speak in terms if media imagery and spin. One might recall Mel Brooks’ lines from The Producers musical: “All you got to know is/Everything is show biz.”

Again, Brainiac holds the threat of destroying Kandor over Superman’s head: if he flees, Kandor lives, but if he fights, Kandor dies. Superman chooses a middle path, neither fleeing nor fighting but withstanding the attack. This may seem the route of moral compromise, that could very well end in his own death and solve nothing, though Miller pictures Superman heroically here, in apparent praise of his decision.

On the other hand, Batman doesn’t seem impressed by this, and is still explicitly rejecting the idea of “compromise” (though, as we shall see, he does not know about the Kandorian hostages).

The generational theme reemerges as the Flash condemns Batman for “dragging kids into your holy war,” a variation on the old theme that the old send the young to die in war. Batman, though, defends this: “Wars are always fought by children! And there are always innocent casualties!” Sounds to me as if this is Batman’s own moral compromise, even if he doesn’t acknowledge it as such: people must die to achieve the greater good of overthrowing tyranny. And Carrie and the Batboys seem younger than typical soldiers. (It’s another sign of Batman’s and the book’s middle-aged perspective that soldiers in their late teens and twenties are termed “children.”)

Following the new Joker’s murder of the Creeper, a hero created by Steve Ditko, there follows another Watchmen parallel involving Ditko’s the Question. In the first issue of Watchmen, Rorschach, a character inspired by the Question, approached various retired superheroes, issuing a Campbellian call to adventure, to aid in finding the Comedian’s killer. So here the Question meets with a retired, virtually powerless Martian Manhunter, who suffers from the same sense of defeat that Superman had. Interestingly, the Manhunter does not speak like the unworldly alien being familiar from, say, the Justice League TV series: he looks and talks like a green version of Ben Grimm, the Thing from The Fantastic Four, as if a disheartened Ben had gone back to where he grew up on New York’s fictional Yancy Street.

Superman had been convinced it was useless to contend against his enemies; Wonder Woman persuaded him to fight back. The discussion between the Question and the Martian Manhunter puts the issue in explicitly philosophical terms. “A new dawn ““ a new age of heroes can be ours,” the Question claims, “if we seize this moment and make it happen!” This also seems to be yet another reference to what I have dubbed the Neo-Silver movement in comics, the effort to recapture the heroic spirit of the comics of the Silver Age in contemporary terms.

Claiming precognitive powers, the Manhunter says that he knew he would see the Question tonight and knows he will die tonight by fire.

The Question retorts that the Manhunter has “free will” and can create his own fate. “Determinism is a coward’s refuge. The future is ours to create!”

This scene is interrupted as the story briefly returns to Superman’s battle, with the initial, ominous appearance of Lara as a somber, silhouetted figure with glowing red eyes. Here is one of the most striking visual images in the whole miniseries: the two-page spread of Wonder Woman astride a winged horse, wielding Zeus’s thunderbolt, a picture that, in its power and its explicit references to Greek mythology, conveys the epic, godlike dimension Miller seeks to draw from the superhero concept.

Now the new Joker, this time costumed as the Legion’s Element Lad, carries out the Martian Manhunter’s prophecy and kills him. One might argue, though, that thematically it was because the Manhunter had given up fighting against his perceived fate that he succumbed to it; significantly, in contrast the Question, who refuses to give in, is rescued by Green Arrow, another such rebel.

But the debate between the Question and Martian Manhunter segues from them to different characters. Emerging into the light and plain view, Lara, appears first wrapped as if in a sheet, and then, as if claiming her heritage and role in the world, in a variant of Superman’s costume: she is the new Supergirl (as Brainiac soon names her) and Superman’s heir and future successor. She begins by soliloquizing against not only her father’s sense of helpless resignation, but also his attitude towards humanity: “Father. You are wrong. This time is ours. This world is ours.” Her words unite with her actions, as he smashes through Brainiac’s immense frog-like robotic form and blows it up with her heat vision. (Miller seems to use heat vision, and the recurring image of glowing red eyes, as a sign of Superman and Lara’s superhuman natures.)

Next Miller introduces us to the son and daughter of Hawkman and Hawkgirl, the superheroes from the planet Thanagar, who had taken refuge in a rain forest only to be killed when it was annihilated by Luthor and Brainiac. Their deaths are captured in a touching sequence, in which the silhouetted figures of Hawkman and Hawkgirl kiss, knowing there is no escape, as Varley’s bright red fire entraps them. Their son sums up: “Lovers, they died.” Alex Ross and Paul Dini’s JLA: Liberty and Justice also emphasized Hawkman and Hawkgirl as a loving couple; married love (as opposed to the usual endless unrequited loves or endless courtships of many traditional superhero comics) seems to be a theme of the Neo-Silver school.

Hawkman’s son carries on the Question’s argument in different terms: “Thanagarians do not believe in fate. We do not believe that anything is beyond the power of mind and bone and muscle and will.” This pleases Batman, who says that Hawkman’s son will “get what I never got. Retribution.” Here the generational theme recurs: Batman sees the younger generation as capable of succeeding where he fell short. (Who Miller thinks was the killer of Bruce Wayne’s parents and what became of him goes unstated.)

(I suppose it’s also a bit odd to find Batman on the same side as a hero named the Question. Batman seems to represent certainty about the difference between good and evil. It is therefore not so surprising that one of his most notorious adversaries calls himself the Riddler, alias E. Nigma, and uses a question mark as his symbol.)

Brainiac may be a computer, but his personality in DK2 is quite human: he not only tells Lara (whose name he has unaccountably learned) he intends to enslave her but addresses her in sexual terms (“Lara. How lovely.”), even calling her “sugar” and “babe.” Perhaps, as in series with such feminist heroes as Wonder Woman and Buffy, the heroine is opposed to violent, oppressive forces that are characterized as male. (Considering that Brainiac appears only as a disembodied head in this scene, perhaps he represents a macho lust for power that arises from sexual impotence.)

“I’ll be the death of you, monster,” Lara tells Brainiac, and, as we shall see, she will! This is a prophecy that will come true, as did Martian Manhunter’s. But whereas the Manhunter passively allowed fate ““ and his enemy ““ to strike him down, Lara proclaims her own fate and will take action to bring it about, dooming her enemy.

Brainiac does not believe that this new Supergirl will kill him (though he is not technically alive, if one thinks about it) because she wears “the family crest,” or, in other words, presumably subscribes to Superman’s code against killing, rooted in his Middle American morality.

But Lara significantly declares, “I’m not from Kansas,” implying her rejection of that moral code, and instead proclaims herself an “Amazon,” evoking a pre-Christian system of morality, which does not preclude killing.

Superman then addresses Lara, finally establishing contact with her, and finally adopting the role of her mentor, advising her on the control of heat vision. Then he asks, “Lara, what sort of world have I given you?”, a question that indicates not only his concern for the next generation’s future but his guilt over his failure in making the world a better place.

Brainiac reiterates the public relations theme in his next talk with Luthor, who compares the upcoming Superchix concert to “the Boston Tea Party.” Batman and his allies are leading a revolution, one which is being compared to the American Revolution: so superheroes are fighting for “the American Way” even if the current government does not represent it.

In effect the Superman and Batman of DK2 each has a daughter: Superman literally has a daughter by blood, and Batman has a surrogate daughter and heir, Carrie Kelly. Unlike Superman at this point, Batman welcomes the new ideas that Carrie, a member of a new generation, brings. Speaking of her strategy for their next move, Batman admits, “I never could have conceived it. Not in a million years.”

At the concert the Flash defeats the guards by stripping them at super-speed, and one should recall that the Flash and Atom, when they were prisoners in Book 1, had also been reduced to nudity, deprived of the costumes/uniforms that signified their identities and status: so now the Flash is turning the tables.

What to make of Green Arrow’s sudden infatuation with the “Superchick” dressed as his former lover Black Canary, I do not know.

Batman’s abrupt appearance on a double-page spread as a silhouette against a Batsignal against a light show of red and green is another Lynn Varley tour de force. Batman, who has always recruited “children” into his mission ““ the various Robins ““ now bids the young people at the concert, who have a superficial interest in the trappings of the superhero image, to join him in his political movement, his revolt against an unjust government. Usually superhero costumes are referred to as tights as a form of disparagement. In declaiming, “Children, pull on your tights and give them hell,” Batman is treating the tights, the wannabe superhero costumes, as uniforms for his army of rebellion, though they indicate more individuality for the wearer than a military uniform does.

Batman explains that “Carrie’s plan was to grab hold of a fad ““ a fleeting fashion trend ““ and turn it into a revolution.” Batman and Carrie want the kids to turn their enthusiasm for a symbol of individual liberty and self-empowerment into a genuine movement for freedom. Again, if this series has a subtext about comics, this may be a rallying cry for the newer readership to demand and seek greater substance, and a similar passion for freedom, in the superhero genre.

If on an initial reading, DK2 might seem merely a tumultuous series of battle scenes, on closer reading it proves to be a work of unsuspected complexity and depth, even disturbingly so. And there is yet more to come, in the third and final part of DK2, to be examined in another column.

THE SECRET AUDIENCE

There is a somewhat controversial artist, J. Seward Johnson, Jr., who creates life-size (or larger) sculptures based on Impressionist paintings, thereby presenting the people and settings of the paintings in three dimensions. Visiting Toy Fair 2004 in February gave me opportunities to think about translating cartoon art into three dimensions as well.

So many collectible figures based on film and TV properties are small sculptures of real people playing celebrated characters, like Buffy or Scully or Aragorn or James Bond; others, like the Marvel figures, are three-dimensional versions of relatively realistically drawn characters from comics. I found myself judging all of these on how much the figure looks like a real human being, or, if it is based on an actor, on the specific person in question. Cinemaquettes goes to all the trouble of doing a “digital scan” of the actor’s face to ensure an accurate portrayal.

But accurately duplicating a person’s features, however amazing as a matter of craft, isn’t very interesting artistically. What I found more intriguing were figures based on stylized cartoon art. The simple stylization of the character designs for Warner Animation’s Justice League and Batman animated series made the action figures based on them more appealing than so many of the more “realistic”-looking figures. With the animation designs the sculptors also don’t have to worry about capturing myriad naturalistic details; apart from Cinemaquettes’ work, the “realistic” sculptures so often fall short of their presumed goal. One of my favorite displays in the entire show was Toynami’s group of Herculoids figures: the clear, simple, but distinctly individual animation designs by Alex Toth came across wonderfully in three dimensions.

The Muppets always come over well as three-dimensional sculpted figures or dolls, not surprisingly, considering that puppets of this sort are designed for three dimensions in the first place. I postulate that puppet design is to cartooning as sculpture is to drawing: a puppet is a cartoon figure that works in three-dimensional reality.

At the very start of my four-day trek through Toy Fair, I was told again and again by Mattel representatives that the collectible figures and toys they were showing me were meant for “the kids.” At the very end, a lady at Palisades was telling me that toys aren’t for kids anymore, they are for adults, and that they might as well admit it. That was something of an overstatement: walking through the exhibit floor at the Javits Convention Center, I saw plenty of toys that were genuinely for small children. But at the booths and showrooms I was assigned to visit, I was primarily looking at collectibles, mostly figures of celebrated movie and TV characters or detailed replicas of movie props, that were intended for adult collectors with money, in some cases a great deal, to spend.

Seeing a lot if this was a satisfying experience. In the comics industry one continually confronts the sentiment that old stories and art styles and past continuity (and writers and artists) should be ignored because the newer, younger readers (and writers and artists) don’t care about them, or because they are dated, or because there is Something Wrong with older readers who still care about this stuff. The attitude at Toy Fair is entirely different. Here is a world in which classics of the fantasy”“ adventure genre and the cartoon medium are recognized, and, it seems, intelligent enthusiasts who care about them are seen as valued potential customers, not objects of condescension. Indeed, in this world detailed knowledge and appreciation of these fictional mythos is treated respectfully.

At the Master Replicas booth I was unable to detect the differences between the inexpensive and expensive recreations of Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, and the well-dressed lady showing me around seemed disapproving: “Well, you’re not a real Star Wars fan,” she said.

I used to work on the Marvel Star Wars comic, but never mind: it was refreshing to be in an environment where such detailed knowledge of a major body of American pop culture was considered a mark of good taste.

One of my biggest surprises at the Fair was to find a set of DC Direct figures of Batman supporting characters from around 1960: the original Batwoman and Batgirl (Betty Kane, not Barbara Gordon), Bat-Mite and even Bat-Hound! These characters have not regularly appeared in comics for over forty years, and yet there is a big enough audience for these characters for DC Direct to make figures of them available. This is worth keeping in mind the next time we are told that characters and stories from comics ten, twenty, or forty years ago have no lasting merit.

Or, for that matter, if we are told this about classic animated cartoons. I’ve now seen Sam Register, Cartoon Network’s head of program development, speak before two audiences of adults, one at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con and the other at last month’s Cartoon Network “upfront” presentation for advertisers and thew news media. The basic difference between these two adult audiences is that the audience at Comic-Con actually likes and watches animation. On the other hand, the impression Cartoon Network sought to convey to the advertisers was that their audience consisted of small children (when the big kids were at school) and “tweens” (9- to 14-year-olds) until as late as 11 PM. At that point “Adult Swim” starts, but those shows are mainly aimed at teenagers and twentysomethings. (So, not all that adult.)

But what about those of us who attended Cartoon Network’s panels in San Diego? There are enough of us so that Cartoon Network holds the panels, no doubt hoping we will spread the word about what we see across the country via the Internet. But Cartoon Network doesn’t want to let the advertisers or news media know we exist. We are the Secret Audience of Cartoon Network. And it’s paying less and less heed to us.

My taste has hardly frozen in time: I like some of Cartoon Network’s original series (like Samurai Jack and The Powerpuff Girls), as do much of the Secret Audience. But when Cartoon Network first appeared, it was a treasure trove of great animation from the past: Looney Tunes, and the Tex Avery MGM shorts, and MGM’s Tom and Jerry shorts, and the Max Fleischer Popeye cartoons. (Notice that I’m not including the network’s Hanna-Barbera television animation, most of which is dreck, though the animation designs and voice acting on the early, pre-Scooby-Doo shows, remain a joy.) Even as Cartoon Network prospered and was able to create new animation (the best of which appeals across a wide age range), it continued to showcase its library of classics. I can recall past newspaper articles about the network in which its representatives even boasted about their sizable adult audience. The network had numerous shows aimed at the discerning older audience, which were also, of course, completely accessible to children: Toon Heads (with its historical and thematic mini-retrospectives), Acme Hour (showing classic Hollywood cartoons from various studios), Bugs and Daffy, The Chuck Jones Show, The Tex Avery Show, The Bob Clampett Show (the latter three celebrating important animation directors), Popeye, Bullwinkle reruns (which the network seemed proud of), and even shows for true aficionados like Late Night Black & White (cartoons from the 1930s) and O Canada (animated shorts from the National Film Board of Canada).

Much of this has disappeared altogether from Cartoon Network or been consigned to the dead of night between midnight and dawn a few days a week.

It’s a trend, I suppose: the Disney Channel originally showcased its Walt-era animated shorts in Mouseterpiece Theatre, hosted by the late George Plimpton, but by the time it went from being a premium to a basic cable channel, was aimed directly at tweens (kids 9-14). The classic Walt-era material was now shown after midnight under the Vault Disney umbrella, but now that’s gone, too. Not even the Toon Disney channel showcases the classics in prime time.

Presumably the Disney Channel’s and Cartoon Network’s own prosperity has changed what they show. The classics dominated in the channel’s early years when they needed existing material to fill time slots. Their executives have apparently now decided that it’s the new cartoons, aimed at tweens and teens, that make the big bucks. There’s no equivalent of TV Land or Nick at Nite on non-digital cable for animation buffs. The Secret Audience isn’t big enough for them (even if it does have enough money to buy, say, expensive toys). (It’s an old story: I remember when A&E and Bravo were genuine arts networks before they started chasing bigger bucks and mass audiences.)

Well, the classic cartoons are classics because they don’t date. Most of the Hollywood studio-era Warners and MGM cartoons (and all of the Fleischers) were already decades old when I watched them as a child: I and millions of other kids loved them anyway. Each generation seems to adopt them as their own. One might think that since the Time-Warner empire owns these cartoons, and makes licensing and merchandising money off them, it would behoove them to make sure new generations of kids get to know these characters. The classic Looney Tunes have finally begun to appear on DVD, but kids aren’t going to ask their parents to buy them DVDs of the old cartoons if they don’t see them regularly on TV in the first place.One might have thought that the continuing success of The Simpsons proves that there is now a considerable adult audience for animation. When the feature film Looney Tunes: Back in Action came out last year, I marveled at how many reviews I read that hailed the original Looney Tunes as a great body of American film comedy. Those reviewers who disliked the movie whom I read invariably claimed it did not match the heights of the classic cartoons. It proved how much artistic respectability the best of the cartoons of the 1930s through the 1960s had achieved. Too often classic works of pop culture achieve critical appreciation once they lose their mass audience. I hope that’s not what is happening here.

On a more positive note, though, was the triumph of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King at the Academy Awards, clearly being honored for the entire trilogy. Its director, Peter Jackson, said onstage, “I’m so honored, touched and relieved that the members of the Academy have supported us, that they’ve seen past the trolls, wizards and hobbits [by] recognizing fantasy this year. Fantasy is an F-word that hopefully the five-second delay won’t do anything with.”

Fantasy-adventure, whether it takes the form of the supernatural (as in Rings and Harry Potter) or science-fiction (as in Star Wars and Matrix) or superheroes (as in Spider-Man or even Buffy) has become a dominant narrative genre of our time, embraced by Baby Boomers and subsequent generations, as a study of the list of top grossing films of the last quarter century will show. Except for such relatively minor honors as special effects awards, the Motion Picture Academy has long ignored the fantasy-adventure genre, as it has other pop culture genres (Westerns, musicals, film noir) in their heyday. Perhaps the critical and movie industry recognition given the Lord of the Rings films represents a watershed moment in opinion makers’ attitude towards the genre.

–Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

BATMAN AND BOOMERS

After the Sci-Fi Channel announced it was canceling Dark Shadows (and in the middle of a story arc!), I turned for what has become my weekday serial drama fix to Bravo’s reruns of The West Wing. (True, the Sci-Fi Channel had been running Dark Shadows for most of the last ten years, and arguably it was time for a change. But I still suspect it will regret its decision if the WB Network picks up the projected pilot for a new Dark Shadows series, executive produced by Shadows creator Dan Curtis and, of all people, John Wells of The West Wing. It’s true: everything connects.) The West Wing strikes me as having particular appeal for Boomers who grew up in the 1960s: it presents what is in effect a Kennedy Administration transplanted into and updated for the early 21st century. The series is driven by a 1960s liberal view of government as a positive force for helping to solve the nation’s social and economic problems.

So how would I, a West Wing aficionado, react to a story in which Batman is a self-styled terrorist and traitor leading an attack on the United States government?

This is the premise of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, also known as DK2, originally published by DC as a miniseries in 2001 and 2002; the paperback collected edition was published last month. DK2 is the sequel to Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, one of the greatest and most groundbreaking works in the superhero genre in the 1980s. What might the sequel have to say about the direction that comics will take in this new century?

FIRST KNIGHT

The original Dark Knight had a powerful influence on treatments of Batman that followed in the comics, movies and television, and, indeed, on mainstream American comics in general. However, many of Miller’s imitators seem not to have wholly understood Dark Knight or his intentions. Dark Knight thus helped spawn the “grim and gritty” school of comics, picturing gloomy, violent, flawed heroes in a bleak, depressing world.

In fact, from the 1960s onward, the superhero genre has repeatedly been revitalized (as the average readership grows older) by taking a more serious, realistic, and darker approach. The obvious example is Stan Lee’s Marvel revolution of the 1960s, but it has also happened several times with Batman. Editor Julius Schwartz’s “New Look” Batman circa 1964 was more realistic in look and writing than the cartoonier Batman stories of the early 1960s; at the end of the decade, in a reaction against the “camp” TV Batman, Schwartz went further, returning Batman to an updated version of his original dark avenger persona of the 1930s. Each step also entailed making the world around Batman seem more contemporary.

Miller’s original Dark Knight upped the ante to a startling degree: Batman became considerably more massively muscular, and more driven and severe in personality. The criminals in Gotham City were no longer the traditional thugs of previous decades, but violent street gangs that evoked the rampant urban crime of the 1970s and 1980s. Instead using newspaper reporters (who even play a major role in the 1989 “Batman” movie, Miller depicted a Gotham in the age of electronic media, with continual commentary on events via talking heads on TV screens. In the early 1940s Commissioner Gordon publicly deputized Batman, and ever since Batman had been portrayed as working openly with the police. Miller took Batman’s vigilante status more seriously and showed a post-Gordon police administration hunting him down.

The Dark Knight Returns was thought to be set in the future, since it portrayed a fifty-something Batman. There were those who believed that the original Dark Knight was part of DC’s main continuity and that it represented Batman’s destined future. That never made sense: Miller’s vision of Gotham City and the United States in Dark Knight was clearly his take on 1980s America: he even depicted Ronald Reagan as President.

I found it more helpful to think of The Dark Knight Returns as being about a Batman who had aged in real time since the point at which Miller and other Boomers had started reading about him in the 1960s. That suggests what I regard as a subtext of The Dark Knight Returns. How does a mature, adult creator of superhero comics, who read them as a child, make them relevant to himself and to other older readers today?

So it is that in The Dark Knight Returns, Batman himself had grown older. In his interview for the notoriously little seen documentary on which I worked, Sex, Lies and Superheroes, Miller explained that he felt obliged to make Batman older because he saw him as a “father figure.” Hence, Batman had to be older than Miller himself, and than readers who are Miller’s contemporaries.

At the start of The Dark Knight Returns, Bruce Wayne had retired from his role of Batman many years before, apparently after the second Robin, Jason Todd, died in action. As a result Wayne had sunk into an empty existence, with hints of alcoholism and a death wish (through his dangerous hobby of auto racing). The fiftyish Wayne had gone beyond midlife crisis into a form of clinical depression. Wayne could be interpreted as being a hollow shell: Batman was his true self. He comes to realize this, when he is effectively reborn as Batman. Through his memories, Wayne relives the traumatic experience that spurred him to become Batman: the death of his parents. Then the giant bat from his origin story, which originally inspired him to take the identity of a bat himself, reappears. Miller treats this bat as an omen of destiny, a herald out of Joseph Campbell, pointing the way to the quest that Wayne had been denying himself.

Resuming his Batman identity, he then has to reestablish himself in this new, darker and more contemporary Gotham. Through Batman’s success, Miller demonstrates how Batman remains an effective character in this more “adult” vision of the world. Times have changed, and childhood fantasies must become more sophisticated to satisfy older readers, yet Batman remains relevant.

To cope with enemies more savage and dangerous than the bank robbers of yore, Batman himself becomes more ruthless. But Miller does not turn him into a character like the Punisher or even Wolverine. A major dramatic point in the first Dark Knight series comes when Batman refuses to kill the Joker: there was a line he would not cross. And so Batman retains his importance as a moral exemplar.

MIller also revamps the concept of Robin, casting a young girl, Carrie Kelly, in the role. In devising the slang in which Carrie and the gang members speak, Miller underlines the fact that they represent a younger generation than Batman’s, not simply in terms of years but in their cultural differences. Right from the introduction of the first Robin, Dick Grayson, in 1940, Batman has been presented as a mentor and teacher, and Miller clearly sees this as important. Batman is, as he said, a “father figure,” and in Dark Knight Returns he became a mentor to Carrie and even to the gang youths he defeated, teaching them to carry on his mission. (Of course, Batman also “teaches” his view of morality to his readers.)

It has been said that between the third and fourth issues of The Dark Knight Returns, Miller read the initial issues of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and that had a considerable effect on his own series. Miller had already shown that Batman was considered an outlaw by the Gotham City government. Moreover, Miller was already introducing elements of satire through his media parodies in the first three issues and bits like his mockery of what he regarded as the ineffectual liberalism of Carrie’s parents. With issue four Miller’s stage expands from Gotham City to the nation as a whole, and Batman finds himself hunted by the federal government. Its champion is Superman, presented by Miller as a smug sell-out, a blindly loyal defender of the status quo. In the fourth issue Miller’s flair for political satire fully emerges; it would reemerge in later works like Elektra: Assassin and the Martha Washington series.

Having read Watchmen, Miller introduces other superheroes into Dark Knight, including the liberal Green Arrow, who aligns himself with Batman against the government that is trying to stop him. Whereas in issue one it seemed that Batman had retired entirely for personal reasons, now it appeared as if the government, as in Watchmen, had outlawed all superheroes (these metaphors for individual freedom), except those, like Superman, who were willing to work hand in glove with the feds.

Amazingly, Batman finds a way to best Superman in combat. But ultimately the opposition to Batman was too great, and Batman faked his own death. But he actually stages his own figurative death and resurrection. After Wayne’s funeral, Miller shows us that Batman lives on, deep underground in the Batcave (as if in the unconscious mind), teaching Carrie and the ex-gang members, the new generation who will succeed him.

In other words, the series ends on a very positive note: Batman put up a tremendous fight against overwhelming odds, besting even Superman, beat the system by escaping it, even survived apparent death, and founded a new movement that would perpetuate his vision into the future.

Subsequently, Miller revamped canonical Batman continuity with his Batman: Year One story line, illustrated by David Mazzucchelli. In this saga of the first year of Batman’s costumed career, Miller returned to a political interpretation, showing Batman opposing the corrupt government officials who controlled Gotham. It was Miller who established that on the night that Bruce Wayne’s parents were murdered, they had taken Bruce to see The Mark of Zorro. In real life, the silent movie version was an influence on the creation of Batman, and Zorro’s main opponent was an government that oppressed the citizenry. Miller was reminding us that Batman was a latter-day version of Zorro.

In both the original Dark Knight and Batman: Year One, there is an important secondary lead character: James Gordon, who seems to represent Miller’s ideal of the good “ordinary” man, who does not operate on the mythic heights of Batman, but demonstrates his own heroism by maintaining his integrity in a fallen world. (Yes, Catholicism is a subtext in Miller’s work, too, and is explicit in his Daredevil stories.)

In the 1980s Gary Groth of The Comics Journal accused the original Dark Knight series of being fascistic. The Nazi brand of fascist philosophy found roots in Nietzsche’s concept of the ubermensch, the dark side of the superman concept.

I thought Groth’s charge of fascism was an overstatement, though I could see what he was getting at. In the original Dark Knight Batman was depicted as a superior individual who could be trusted to carry out his war on crime responsibly, and yet the Gotham City police and government could not allow such a potentially dangerous man to take the law into his own hands. Miller seemed aware of the moral ambiguities of Batman’s role with regard to society. Therefore, the series’ ending seemed right: Batman accomplished his goals, but at the price of the end of his career of vigilantism. However necessary his work, he could not be permitted to remain part of the society he had helped save from crime. It’s like John Wayne’s character at the end of John Ford’s The Searchers: he accomplished an important task for the community, but remains outside it.

But is Groth’s accusation more relevant to DK2? Wait and see.

STRIKING A MATCH

Fifteen years after the first Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Strikes Again is not what I expected, or, probably most people. Most of the audience probably expects a sequel to be very much a continuation of the original, not just in story but in look and tone and themes. But fifteen years is a long time, and creative people evolve and move on. One might come to dread too long a gap between the original and the sequel, since the creator may in the intervening time have lost touch with whatever it was that made the original work so great, without even being aware of it. (For example, consider the new Star Wars trilogy.) This suggests that after so many years, a creator needs to reimagine and reinvent a work rather than simply trying to continue it just as he had done before.

That’s the course that Miller has taken with The Dark Knight Strikes Back. In so many ways it is unlike The Dark Knight Returns, although, as we shall see, it takes various themes of the original in new directions.

For one thing, there’s the look of the new series. The heroes and various other important characters are drawn in a comparatively realistic style reminiscent of the earlier Dark Knight. Heroes when bruised and battered, though, intentionally turn grotesque, going further than even some of the distorted figures from the original.

The new series is much more broadly satiric than the original, and Miller does an assortment of caricatures of real life media and political figures, many of whom are listed above. They don’t match the style in which characters like Batman and Carrie are drawn, but they are admirably amusing on their own terms.

As the series progresses, there are more and more peripheral characters, usually turning up as interviewees or talking heads on TV screens, drawn in an intentionally crude, underground cartoony style that simply does not work for me.

Whereas the city was a continual, major presence, visually and thematically, in The Dark Knight Returns, it is visually absent for much of DK2. Backgrounds are often missing or minimal. It’s as if the surroundings were abstracted. But Gotham City, or the contemporary cities it represents, is not a subject of DK2. As with Book 4 of the original, the stage is the nation, or even the world. There are indeed memorable shots in DK2 of Superman in space, with the planet Earth behind him. More importantly, the visual focus of DK2 is on the characters, not their environment. As we shall see later, there is a major exception to this rule.

Also, the original Dark Knight looked very cinematic, with pages usually broken into multiple panels of the same size, like a sequence of frames in a film; the dialogue, as divided among these panels, read very much like a tightly edited screenplay, with all unnecessary verbiage cut out. The look of DK2 is much less rigidly structured, and much more loose, perhaps contributing to the sense that anything can happen in this story.

Miller seems much more attentive here to creating memorable, even iconic single images. There are numerous shots, each often taking up an entire page or a double-page spread, that show the pairing of Miller as illustrator and Lynn Varley as colorist at heights far beyond any of their work in the first Dark Knight. There’s the montage of full page images of Superman and Wonder Woman’s lovemaking in Book 2. There’s Book 3’s image of the new Supergirl floating ethereally above a begrimed, mournful Superman, who stands amid ruins, that was in the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art show that I reviewed months ago. There’s the amazing light show that Green Lantern and Varley stage above Earth in Book 3, and the extraordinary image of Wonder Woman, astride the mythological winged horse Pegasus, wielding a thunderbolt like Zeus.

PERSONAL TIME

Like the original, which imagined Batman’s future and yet was set in the present (then the 1980s), The Dark Knight Strikes Again plays with time. It declares itself to be set three years after the end of the first Dark Knight series. But it clearly takes place not at the end of the 1980s but in the early 21st century. Miller caricatures various contemporary personages from the news media: Chris Matthews, George Stephanopoulos, George Will, Cokie Roberts, Margaret Carlson, Don Imus, Robert Novak (I think). Donald Rumsfeld is pictured as Secretary of Defense and a caricatured John Ashcroft as Attorney General. Miller’s President Rick Rickard looks something like George W. Bush. There are references to the importance of the Internet, which played no role in the supposedly futuristic original Dark Knight.

Miller plays with time in another way that should be becoming familiar to this column’s readers. Like some other major comics creators, he has devised his own variation on continuity in which the superheroes of the Silver Age are still active. Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, is still alive. So is the Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordan. Like Alex Ross and Paul Dini in their “JLA” books, Miller has Captain Marvel and Plastic Man work alongside the 1960s heroes. Like Ross and Dini too, Miller uses the bearded, politicized version of Green Arrow as Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams reworked the character at the time of transition from the Silver Age to whatever we may call the period that followed. (O’Neil and Adams made Green Arrow into a 1960s liberal activist; in DK2 Miller pushes Green Arrow to a leftist extreme, making him a Communist. Well, Green Arrow is supposed to be a modern-day Robin Hood, so that arguably would make him interested in the redistribution of wealth.) Surprisingly, Miller even uses the Silver Age version of Kandor, the shrunken city within a bottle, which in the 1960s was populated by Kryptonians. (So here is another example of a major comics creator who finds use for a discarded element of the pre-Crisis Superman mythos.)

Miller also uses the Question, whom Steve Ditko created for Charlton comics. Ditko’s treatment of the Question was founded in his enthusiasm for Ayn Rand’s brand of conservative political philosophy. When DC acquired the Charlton heroes in the 1980s, the Question was recast as a liberal; I recall one “Question” letter column in which the editor argues that by that point DC had done more “Question” stories than Ditko, so their interpretation was by now correct. This seems a prime case of a character being radically altered from his creator’s intentions. Commendably, Miller returns the Question to his philosophical roots. Actually, Miller takes him further than Ditko did. The Question was the basis for the more fanatical Rorschach in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, a book known to have influenced Miller, and Rorschach, in his moral views and manner of speaking, seems to have inspired Miller’s Question.

A NEW AGE?

In this column I’ve already examined contemporary takes on Marvel and DC’s Silver Age characters by Alex Ross and Paul Dini (their JLA tabloids), John Byrne (Generations 2), and Neil Gaiman (1602), and there will be more to come: I intend to deal with Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier, which depicts the Silver Age DC heroes in the 1950s, and perhaps more of Alan Moore’s ABC line. I hereby dub this creative movement the Neo-Silver Age school. These are creators who are reviving Silver Age versions of superheroes, or in the case of writers like Moore and Kurt Busiek, creating new heroes in the style of earlier decades. The “Neo-Silver” school attempts to recapture the positive, genuinely heroic, iconic aspect of the 1960s characters while making them relevant to contemporary readers.

Look at the following excerpt from the interview with Alex Ross that ran in the Feb. 5-11, 2004 issue of The Onion‘s “A-V Section.”

ONION: Looking at your work, Bruce Timm’s animated series, Alan Moore’s America’s Best Comics line, and, to a certain extent, Grant Morrison’s turn on JLA, there seem to have been efforts to return to a Silver Age approach. Even Superman’s dog Krypto is back.

ALEX ROSS:… We grew up with this stuff thinking of it a certain way, and we’re rejecting what was kind of knocked around on us in the last few years. Basically, what still is going on. . . especially at DC Comics, is a rejection of everything they did in the 1990s to compete with the then-hip-and-happening changes coming from . . .what Marvel and then Image did. We’re sort of in a repairing stage. Those of us who are kind of these Silver Age purists who think you don’t need to fix what isn’t broken, we’re getting our way because more of us are in control at the moment.

There are other writers who try to reinvent the classic superheroes for new audiences by turning them into deeply flawed antiheroes. But this is not what the “Neo-Silver” school intends to do. In a December 2002 interview for Comic Book Resources, Darwyn Cooke criticizes the reworking of the Avengers in Marvel’s The Ultimates series. “The problem I have is the way they’re taking iconic characters and destroying parts of what they are. . . What is it about us as people that want to bring these icons down to this level?. . .Is it because we can’t even believe in the notion of people better than us who aren’t so weak?. . . I think that’s a horrible way to think.” He wonders aloud, “if maybe everybody needs a blazing story with some decent people wielding the power and if maybe that won’t be seen as refreshing after all this time.”

But Neo-Silver creators may still differ sharply on just how to adapt that positive spirit to contemporary times, and Miller’s method hardly constitutes a return to childhood innocence. “Just like old times, hm?” the Atom asks Batman in issue one. Batman replies, “No, Not like old times. It’s a whole new ballgame.”

BOOK ONE

Although the first words of issue one of DK2 are Batman’s, he himself does not arrive onstage until its final pages. The whole first issue builds to his arrival; Miller knows how to give his lead actor a grand entrance.

My overall reaction when I first read this first issue is that Miller is a master storyteller in a sense that is widely absent in today’s comics. People act as if Marvel’s great revolution in the 1960s was almost wholly in its more complex characterizations, its greater sense of realism, and especially the heroes’ flaws and the unhappier aspects of their lives. But Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and company were also master entertainers, who could seize the audience’s attention and, in this static medium, frozen in panels on paper, take them on a roller coaster ride of thrills and excitement. They knew how to stage stories and action sequences entertainingly, and so does Miller. Grim and gritty, hah! After reading the first issue, I wondered why other comics writers and artists can’t seem to create as much sheer fun as I had in reading this.

The initial pages set up the basic premise. president Rick Rickard, who looks and speaks something like George W. Bush, addresses the nation over one of Miller’s ubiquitous video screens, proclaiming that the United States has become a virtual utopia. Rickard places especial emphasis on the country’s prosperity. Obviously, Miller started this project before the boom went bust, but seems not to have been taken in by those who glorified it as the start of a new and better age.

A middle-aged Jimmy Olsen, on his own video screen, meanwhile accuses Rickard of “repealing the Bill of Rights” and turning the country into “a police state,” which is way more than one could expect could ever happen in the real United States. Eventually Rickard proves to be only a CGI image, like Max Headroom, I suppose. Even considering the large degree of suspension of disbelief required of readers of DC Universe titles, this story device in itself signals that this story is not meant to be taken realistically. As we watch this year’s primaries on television, it should be clear that no one could become President without coming in personal contact with many thousands of citizens. To a far larger extent than the original Dark Knight, this new series is a satire. Whereas, say, Ross and Dini take pains to place their superheroes in a realistic world, Miller takes the opposite tack: since superheroes are fantasy figures, he feels free to use unrealistic exaggerations of political reality to make his satiric points. One of my favorite lines in the new series comes when a blindly loyal citizen asks, “Who cares if the President doesn’t exist? He’s a great American!”

Sometimes, though, Miller’s efforts at satire seem more heavyhanded than witty: he refers to “National Security Enforcement director Bill Prick.” That’s a little too obvious for my taste, though in the same tradition as the name that Steve Gerber gave a corrupt businessman in his 1970s Man-Thing stories, F.A. Schist.

Jimmy asks if people just think of superheroes as “costumed clowns” and declares that they were actually “men and women. . .with unbridled courage ““ who battled tyranny and defeated it at every turn! What happened to them? Where are they? Where are our heroes?”

So, like the start of the original Dark Knight, or, for that matter, Watchmen, this is a world that no longer has (active) superheroes and needs them. Beyond the literal level of the plot, through Jimmy, the now middle-aged superhero fan, Miller is again raising the question of how one makes the superhero myth relevant for older audiences. Through Jimmy’s reference to “costumed clowns,” perhaps Miller is pointing to our culture’s widespread dismissal of the superhero genre as juvenile trash. Later in the issue a woman named Attorney General Snark (before Miller replaces her in Book 3 with the real life John Ashcroft) says, “There’s been quite enough talk about these so-called superheroes. Isn’t it time we all grew up?”

But Jimmy and Miller are insisting that the courage and moral passion that the superheroes represent is something that society needs. One can also read Jimmy’s speech as an evocation of the more positive, hopeful comics of Miller’s youth, the ones that portrayed the superheroes as such positive forces, and asking whatever happened to them. Terry Gilliam, who once intended to direct a movie version of Watchmen, described the retired superheroes of that series as symbolic of 1960s political activists ““ of the same decade as the Silver Age ““ who regain their fervor for bringing about change. In Olsen’s evocation evoking the lost superheroes, Miller also seems to be asking for a revival of the spirit to stand against political wrongdoing.

This time Miller characterizes the news media as show biz, often of a sleazy kind. It’s not all exaggeration, either: Miller’s News in the Nude is surely based on the actual Naked News from Canada, available on the Internet or cable television. The luridly sexual commercial for “Uforia Investments” on page 3 seems another satiric jab at the mindset during the late ’90s boom. Miller emphasizes tawdry sexuality on television so much that it begins to seem puritanical. But his attitude seems to be more complex by the time he gets to the Superchix in Book 2.

Miller shifts to a handsomely illustrated sequence that turns out to be portraying the Atom as a sort of naked, primal warrior battling a monster in a watery realm. It turns out that he has been deprived of the costume that enables him to change size and was trapped, in shrunken firm, in a petri dish. But this also seems to be Miller’s tribute to Gil Kane’s Sword of the Atom series, which recast the Atom as a swordsman hero in a miniature world.

The Atom is rescued by Miller’s new Robin, Carrie Kelly, who has changed her identity to Catgirl, in a nod to Catwoman but also a declaration that, at 16, she has outgrown the identity of an apprentice like Robin. There follows one of Miller’s entertaining action sequences, as Carrie and the Atom try to escape the bad guys’ headquarters. Seeing Carrie reminds me that Miller was a pioneer of the now familiar figure of the woman ““ even the young girl ““ as action hero. Perhaps Carrie’s Robin in the 1980s was another influence on comics aficionado Joss Whedon’s creation of Buffy. (Carrie says her full name is “Caroline Keene Kelly.” Is this a joke on “Carolyn Keene,” the pen name of the “Nancy Drew” authors, as an ironic indication of how much teenage heroines in pop culture have changed?)

DC’s 1960s The Atom series, edited by Julius Schwartz, written by Gardner Fox, and drawn by Gil Kane, continually came up with memorable, iconic visual images, featured on covers, that took inspiration from the Atom’s tiny size: for example, the Atom trapped in a lightbulb, or stuck to a spinning tire. Miller is just as inventive, and with a sense of humor. The Atom, who could shrink down and ride electrical impulses through telephone lines in the 1960s, in this series can do the same trick with wireless cellphones and over the Internet. Later the Atom succeeds in helping defeat Superman by shrinking enough to enter his inner ear and play havoc with his sense of balance. The Atom even hides in Carrie’s mouth and accidentally gets swallowed!

After President Rickard is exposed as a CGI image, Miller reveals who is really the power behind the throne: Lex Luthor. Together with Superman’s other classic archenemy, the alien artificial intelligence Brainiac, he controls the United States government, and by extension, it seems, the world.

Now this provides an interesting parallel to the official DC continuity, in which Luthor, despite his public record of nefariousness, somehow got elected President of the United States, and the superheroes just stand by. (In real life, of course, even lying about having “sexual relations with that woman” can nearly get one disqualified from the Presidency.) Did Miller develop this idea independently, or is this his criticism of current Superman continuity?

Miller’s take on Luthor is very different from the other familiar versions. Usually Luthor has not been portrayed as seeking to rule the world. Traditionally he has been portrayed as a scientific genius, a man who is cerebral and intellectual by nature. As revamped by John Byrne and Marv Wolfman, Luthor became a corporate colossus, masking his criminality behind a facade of social respectability. (Actually, in this they seem to have been following Miller’s lead in his revamp of the Kingpin for Daredevil, the forebear of all the corporate villains in comics who followed.) Much as he wants to eliminate Superman, the comics versions of Luthor are not into committing mass murder. As we shall see, Miller’s Luthor is willing to massacre millions, even billions of people to achieve his ends. (Can it be that Miller is drawing on the otherwise ludicrous movie version of Luthor, who was willing to destroy California to increase the value of his real estate holdings?)

Though Miller calls DK2‘s Luthor a genius, he does not seem particularly brilliant. He actually comes off as a low-rent version of the Kingpin, fat, grotesque, speaking in vulgar threats, physically beating up a captive Batman in Book 3. He seems apelike both in stance and manner. There is no complexity to the personality of this version of Luthor. Like the inhuman machine Brainiac, he is pure evil; he is more like a symbol of political oppression than a multidimensional character.

The Question, when he appears, reiterates Miller’s theme about the lulling effect of prosperity: “The people are so intoxicated by luxury that they have forgotten everything that makes us more than house pets,” including “freedom.” The puritanical streak turns up in the sexual imagery that the Question uses: “Evil has seduced mankind. And mankind has shown all the chastity of a three-dollar whore.” The Question, though, will not compromise his own ideals: “Yet I will not yield. I will not bend. I will not accept the corrupt new way of things.” He intends to “document” all the wrongdoing he opposes, calling it “My challenge to any free mind that may find it.” Hey, that’d be like writing The Dark Knight Strikes Again, wouldn’t it?

The Question also touches on another of Miller’s themes when he says, “The mind of man must be reclaimed ““ if not by this generation, or by the next, then some day.” With the aging of the Boomer generation of comics creators who were originally inspired by the comics of the 1960s, the question (so to speak) arises as to how they can make the superhero genre, so long considered to be for children, relevant as a form of personal expression by the middle-aged. (Keep in mind that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were themselves middle-aged when they revolutionized the genre in the 1960s. It’s a question that one sees rock musicians facing as well as they grow older.) One method seems to be the theme of one generation mentoring the next, showing them the way. In DK2 Batman is doing just this, with Carrie, with the former gang members she calls the “Batboys.” who soon make their entrance in DK2, and in the next issue, other members of a new generation who have embraced the trappings of superheroes as a “fad.”

Miller’s version of the Question, like Rorschach, comes off as a fanatic in love with the sound of his own preachments, and his grasp of reality may not be entirely firm: he is soon raving that “computers can’t be trusted.” But he also makes points that Miller appears to approve of. In fact., when Batman’s voice reenters the first issue (only a page after the Question’s scene), he reiterates the Question’s attitude about moral commitment. “No more compromises,” Batman states. “No more deals. . .Not one more lie. Damn the consequences. The war begins.” Perhaps Miller’s Batman has become something of a Ditko/Rand-style hero himself.

In the course of what a newsman terms Catgirl and the Batboys’ “terrorist attack” on a power complex, one of the boys, Spike, “crosses the line,” in Batman’s words, and kills a guard. Later, Carrie criticizes Spike for doing so, and he protests that “they were the enemy.” She counters, “They were the enemy’s slaves. We don’t kill slaves.” But the attentive reader will note that Carrie is speaking on Batman’s behalf, and Batman is not ruling out killing in all cases, as will become clearer in later issues. This is a big change: Greg Rucka in “Batman: The Ten Cent Adventure,” reviewed in an earlier column, emphasizes the traditional interpretation of Batman as refusing to kill.

The Atom and Catgirl, after witnessing some astonishing Varley color effects (like the gigantic fingerprint-like pattern on page 44 and especially the explosion on page 46), find Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, who has literally been enslaved by Luthor’s government, forced to run in a kind of wheel “like somebody’s pet hamster” to generate electricity. (Like Luthor’s other captive, the Atom, Allen was kept naked. Miller is using the superhero costume as a symbol of power, identity, and personal freedom.)

Interestingly, Carrie presents Barry with a new, black version of his costume, saying the old design “was really. . .old” The Flash responds, “Kids, these days. Can’t tell the difference between just plain old and classic.” Only three pages later one of Miller’s sleazy female newscasters announces the return of the Silver Age Flash: “If you don’t know who this hunk is ““ ask your Dad!” And Miller then repeats the Flash’s line about “old and classic.” It looks to me that once again Miller is dealing in a neo-Silver subtext, telling young readers that this isn’t an “old” (and by implication, dated) version of the Flash but a “classic” one, who still has worth and vitality today.

Miller reminds us in the Flash scene of Barry’s marriage to his Silver Age leading lady, Iris West. In last week’s column I noted the emphasis that Ross and Dini placed on Barry and Iris’s marriage. Perhaps this is another sign of the Neo-Silver Age: older writers and artists praise marriage and the family, in contrast to the traditional superhero’s single life. (And it was Lee and Kirby who pioneered the concept of marriage and the family in superhero comics through the wedding of Reed and Sue Richards and the birth of their son.)

The scene shifts to Superman, who is not the smug, clueless, self-satisfied government flunkie that he was in the first “Dark Knight.” This time round Miller treats him both more harshly and more sympathetically. In his initial scene in DK2 Superman is infuriated by Batman’s war on the government. Superman too addresses the theme of moral commitment, but he takes the opposite position from Batman and the Question. “Never an inch of compromise for Bruce Wayne,” Superman fumes. Superman sees the world not divided into moral absolutes of black and white, but into grays (which is considered a more mature approach, though not in this series). “We who live in the world of men have to consider the greater good ““ and come to terms with the way things are.” Miller has Superman repeat that last phrase, separating it into individual words: “The. Way. Things. Are.”

Miller pegs this as Superman’s excuse for not rebelling against the system. I can see his point: I’ve had conversations about negative aspects of the comics industry at present with friends who say, rather bleakly, that one just has to resign oneself to The Way Things Are.

Superman and Batman’s contrasting points of view on this issue are one aspect of a larger issue that Miller raises in the later issues of DK2, that of determinism versus free will. Can individuals alter “the way things are” or are they helpless to defy what seems to be the workings of fate?

Remember Superman’s phrase, “We who live in the world of men.” As we shall see in Book 3, Miller does not regard this as Superman’s proper place.

Next Miller introduces us to Green Lantern impostor Wilfredo Mendoza and praises the Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, who has “vanished.” Can this be a comment on DC’s replacement of Hal with current GL Kyle Rayner?

Then former Police Commissioner James Gordon, a major figure in the first “Dark Knight,” makes his only appearance in the new one: it is no more than a cameo, but a powerful one. Furious at the state of the country, Gordon defiantly takes pleasure in the superheroes’ return. Yet another nude newscaster tells us that Gordion is the author of “Triumph of the Pygmies: Why We Killed Bruce Wayne.” Wayne, as noted, feigned his own death at the end of the first Dark Knight: the first issue of DK2 depicts his figurative resurrection. Study the title of Gordon’s book carefully: he is proclaiming that Batman is a far superior man to the rest of us, “we,” “the pygmies.” This theme, with regard to Batman and Superman, too, will also continue through the rest of the series, with some disturbing implications.

Superman meets with Wonder Woman, who hasn’t aged, and Captain Marvel, who has, aboard the Justice League’s satellite. With his tufts of white hair, Captain Marvel now looks amusingly reminiscent of another character from his mythos, Uncle Marvel.

As Miller turns his “camera” on Superman from back to front over three panels, he depicts the Man of Steel as utterly sunken in depression. In other words, Superman in Book 1 of DK2 finds himself in a similar mental state as did Bruce Wayne at the beginning of the original “Dark Knight.” (Or, for that matter, Matt Murdock midway through Miller’s “Daredevil: Born Again” story line.)

Miller gives Superman an understandable reason for supporting a morally corrupt government: Luthor and Brainiac are holding the population of Kandor, all ten million, as hostages. Similarly, they are keeping Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel in check by threatening to kill people they care about. The image of Luthor’s face hovering outside the satellite, spying on the heroes, evokes Orwell’s all-seeing Big Brother.

Showman that he is, Miller succeeds in topping the battle between Batman and Superman in the first Dark Knight with the colossal combat between the two heroes here. Batman first softens up his opponent with attacks by other heroes, a fake tyrannosaur (presumably the one from the Batcave trophy area), and even a robot that looks and talks like the 1960s version of Bizarro (yet another Silver Age reference). Then, at last, in the last three pages of the first issue, Batman makes his grand entrance to deliver the knockout punches: the final page shows Batman standing triumphant, his “resurrection” complete.

As subsequent issues will show, Batman’s beating of Superman is actually the first step in knocking some sense into him (from Batman’s point of view, anyway), much like Miller’s character Stick thrashing his student Matt Murdock. Those readers who came to DK2 expecting to see an exploration of Batman’s psychology are looking in the wrong place.

In The Dark Knight Strikes Again, there is no real character evolution for Batman: he is steadfast from start to finish in knowing and pursuing what he wants. The major character arc here is that of Superman. This series may be named after Batman, but as the next two issues will show, this may actually be more Superman’s story than his own.

As so often happens, I’ve got much more to say about a topic than will fit into a single installment of this column. But you’ll have to wait two weeks for the rest of our Dark Knight discussion. From time to time I will be acting as a reporter for IGN FilmForce on events relating to pop culture. So next week you’ll be seeing my report on Toy Fair, and then I will strike again at The Dark Knight Strikes Again the week after that.

–Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

Though this may at first seem to have nothing to do with comics, I ask you for a moment to consider the plight of the classical music critic of The New Yorker. He surely must feel he has reached the pinnacle of his profession. Yet if he conducts a Google search on his name, he will surely wonder just how famous he is. You seem, this New Yorker critic is named Alex Ross, and a Web search on his name will turn up pages and pages devoted to this other guy who works in funny books. I wonder what the classical Mr. Ross feels about this. (Then there’re the Scots playwright John Byrne, Karate Kid actor Ralph Macchio, High Noon villain Frank Miller, and Steve Martin’s role in Bringing Down the House, named Peter Sanderson ““ all with their comics doppelgangers.)

The comics version of Alex Ross has grown even more celebrated of late, even getting profiled in the October 30, 2003 edition of The New York Times. Presumably the interview was arranged to promote Ross’s recent coffee table book, Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross, published by Pantheon. Now, the Times‘s piece on Ross was not in the art or books section, but in the Sunday House section (“At Home with Alex Ross”). Hence, the profile was less interested in Ross’s artwork (described, perhaps condescendingly, as “earnest photorealism”) as in his house full of action figures and other collectibles and his Halloween party full of adult guests dressed as superheroes. In short, the article is about adults happily playing like kids (not that there’s anything wrong with that) rather than about comics art being taken seriously.

Still, this article is in one respect better than the piece that New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell wrote about Jack Kirby in the Aug. 27, 2003 issue of the Arts section of the paper. Mitchell praised Kirby’s work and hailed his influence on contemporary movies (and not just those directly adapting his co-creations, like Hulk and X2) in this article marking the tenth anniversary of his passing. That’s right: the Times honors Kirby ten years too late for him to have seen it. It’s commendable that in 2003 the Times ran a number of articles about important figures in comics. This is a good start, but they would be well advised to do pieces on surviving members of Kirby’s generation while they are still with us.
Alas, I didn’t receive a review copy of Mythology, but I have procured copies of Ross’s two new tabloid-sized books about the Justice League of America that were published in 2003: JLA: Secret Origins and JLA: Liberty and Justice, co-plotted by Alex Ross and Paul Dini, with painted art by Ross and scripting by Dini.

What first impresses me about these two books is that, like John Byrne, Frank Miller, and Darwyn Cooke (as will be seen in a future column) in recent projects, Ross and Dini have chosen to ignore contemporary canonical DC Universe continuity and devise their own, centering on the DC heroes of the Silver Age (roughly 1956-1970).

JLA: Liberty and Justice is set in the present, and it presents what is essentially the Justice League of America of the Silver Age. Though both were killed off long ago in DC’s current canonical continuity, Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, and Hal Jordan, the Silver Age Green Lantern, are alive and active in Ross and Dini’s JLA books. Aquaman appears in his original costume and has not lost one of his hands. (How did the recent Captain Hook version of Aquaman manage to swim with that thing?) All the other JLAers depicted in these two books were either members of the League during the Silver Age, or (like Zatanna, Adam Strange, Metamorpho, and Elongated Man) were allies of the League during that period and in some cases joined in the 1970s. The two exceptions are Captain Marvel and Plastic Man, who did not join the League in stories published before Barry Allen’s demise in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Yet both are classic characters who originated in the Golden Age of Comics of the 1940s and are still prominent today, so they fit into Dini and Ross’s vision of the Justice League. It is this set of characters whom Ross and Dini profile in their Secret Origins book.

Interviews with Ross and Dini in the back of JLA: Secret Origins proved enlightening about their intentions in devising this contemporary extension of the Silver Age. Ross explains, “Essentially, the JLA is so much an invention of the Silver Age, and the characters featured are the primary icons of that era. The Silver Age Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and all the subsequent versions of older, long-running characters like Superman, Batman, Aquaman ““ all of them come through the filter of the new Silver Age that [came about] under the editorial influence of Julius Schwartz and the creative writing of Gardner Fox. Particularly as an editor-writer combination, these two put the most thought into recrafting DC’s super heroes and ultimately creating the legends that would stand for years to come.” There are others who deserve credit, too, particularly John Broome, as principal writer of the Silver Age Flash, Green Lantern and 1960s “New Look” Batman, and Denny O’Neil, for revamping Batman and Green Arrow at the close of the Silver Age. But basically Ross is right: Schwartz’s editorship reshaped and revitalized virtually all of the classic heroes in Ross and Dini’s JLA.

Speaking of the Silver Age versions of these DC heroes, Ross says, “Well, they are the most legendary, well-known forms of those characters, the ones that have lasted the longest. For the case of, say, heroes like the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman ““ these are versions that have lasted for, like, forty years before there were any revisions made to either their looks or their identities.”

But wouldn’t the Golden Age versions of these concepts ““ those that were around in the 1940s ““ like Jay Garrick as the Flash and Alan Scott as Green Lantern ““ be preferable since they were the original versions? “To my mind,” Ross answers, “it’s a division between what the Golden Age gave us in terms of an idea, versus what was refined ten or so years later. I believe that, to their credit, guys like Julius Schwartz and Gardner Fox took these earlier designs and reworked them in a way that made them stronger.”

Then DC editor Charles Kochman asks if contemporary readers would feel that the current Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner, is the superior version. Ross agrees, and says, “Basically, this is an opportunity for Paul and myself to do the versions of the characters that we appreciate the most.” Ross was actually born right after the Silver Age ended, but he and Dini grew up reading those versions of the characters, as they continued to appear in comics before 1986’s Crisis on Infinite Earths. Obviously, they have also gone back and read the Silver Age comics, too. In their interviews Ross and Dini both admit that they used these versions of the characters because these are the versions they grew up with.

But is their preference for the Silver Age versions really just based on nostalgia? Ross argues that the Silver Age versions of Flash, Green Lantern and Hawkman are genuinely superior as artistic creations to their Golden Age counterparts; I agree. I also wonder if Kyle Rayner and Wally West, say, as the current Green Lantern and Flash, and the series built around them, really are characters as memorable and iconic as their Silver Age predecessors. “Even though a big part of our fan base was not even alive when this version of the Justice League was around, it is still the version we feel a lot of people remember,” Dini says in his interview. “Those versions of the characters are very archetypal.”

Will younger readers have the same strong attachment to West and Rayner decades hence as older readers retain for Allen and Jordan? Ultimately, only time will tell. But still, the recent resurgence of interest in DC’s Silver Age characters by comics creators, not just by Boomers like John Byrne and Frank Miller, but by members of a younger generation like Ross and Darwyn Cooke, suggests that a shift may be in progress. In longrunning comics series, as I have observed before, important concepts and characters that are cast aside in one period will inevitably return as times and tastes change once more.

The resurgence seems to be yet more evidence that DC was wrong to kill off Silver Age versions of characters in Crisis on Infinite Earths and the subsequent period of radical revamps. Important writers and artists still want to use them and are introducing them to a new generation of readers.

SUPERHERO HISTORY PAINTING

Frank DeCaro, who wrote the Times profile of Ross, observes, “But everyone seems to agree that his real accomplishment is making superheroes more real than anyone has ever before ““ filmmakers included.” That’s true. Way back when I recall first admiring Gene Colan’s Marvel artwork because his style, closer to magazine illustration than other Marvel artists’, made not only “normal” characters like Tony Stark but the superhuman figures like Iron Man look so convincingly real; Neal Adams’ work on Batman and other series had a similar effect. But Alex Ross’s work has gone even further in capturing a photographic sense of realism.

DeCaro is also quite right to state that Ross makes superheroes look more realistic than filmmakers, who actually shoot film of real human beings, do. Now, how can that be? It is conventional wisdom that in real life people in superhero costumes look silly: just ask the makers of the X-Men movies, who contend that audiences wouldn’t accept costumes and who substituted dull black uniforms instead. Or the makers of TV’s Smallville. (But Spider-Man’s costume didn’t prevent his movie from attracting an even bigger audience.)

Part of the solution is that the wearers of the costumes must have the appropriate heroic build. (Adam West does not strike me as having been particularly physically imposing as the title character on the Batman TV show, though, come to think of it, Julie Newmar was as Catwoman.) Ross famously has live models pose for his art; I continue to be astonished that he actually knows so many people who look like that!

Another factor may be the stylization of the reality within which the superhero operates on film. Some, like Christopher Reeve’s Superman and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man, who have relatively simple costumes, look fine against normal backgrounds. But in the Tim Burton Batman movies, Batman’s costume works because the production design around him is so stylized. Another reason why Batman seems ludicrous on the ’60s TV show is that he is operating in such a mundane-looking world; the low-budget Columbia Batman movie serials are even worse in this regard.

But Ross does not deal in obviously stylized settings. His superhero characters look like real people, wearing real fabrics, within a recognizably everyday world. DeCaro states, “Mr. Ross… gives the same kind of earnest photorealism to portraits of well-known superheroes that Norman Rockwell gave the faces of doctors, letter carriers and firefighters.” Ross himself has repeatedly credited Rockwell, the most celebrated magazine illustrator of the last century, as a major influence.

Through most of the twentieth century, with the triumph of abstraction, the fine art world has tended to look down on drawing and painting that tries to recapture the exact look of reality, which has been ceded to the world of photography and film. In recent years, however, figurative art has made a comeback, and Rockwell’s work has received serious appreciation in critical and academic circles, as demonstrated by a touring retrospective that ended up at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum in 2001.

However, I think it’s a mistake simply to regard Ross as a latter-day Rockwell who paints superheroes. True, Rockwell and Ross each specialize in creating iconic images, transforming people into archetypal figures. Both artists seek to depict representations of classic American values.

But Rockwell’s perennial subject is the American everyman (and woman and child). He idealizes and celebrates small-town Americans and their lives. The people he depicts are prettified, and viewed through a glow of nostalgic affection, but they are meant to be the folks next door.

In contrast, Ross’s specialty is depicting and celebrating the superheroic. His style persuades the observer that he or she is seeing superheroes depicted as real people in a real world. But in fact his art style heightens reality, making not just the superheroes but even their ordinary settings seem grander and handsomer than they would in real life. Going through the JLA books, I am struck by how even the “normal” supporting characters and bystanders look larger than life. Perhaps in part Ross’s costumed superheroes so real because the “real,” noncostumed people in his books look so idealized. The two groups are not so far apart: the fireman on page 4 of Secret Origins looks nearly as heroic as one of the superheroes.

I can only begin to analyze the methods by which Ross heightens reality: the cover for JLA: Secret Origins demonstrates some of them.

The perfect human figures are obvious. The main figures are arranged in a wedge-like formation that projects towards the reader, with Superman, the most monumental of the figures, in the foreground. There’s also the theatrical play of light and shadow on the figures. As in a John Ford western, Ross continually uses up shots in the book and on the cover, as well: the reader looks up at the heroes, who tower above us. Ross takes the effect further by creating two tiers of heroes, one rising (flying, in fact), above the others, so we have literally two sets of heroes rising above us.

In Ross’s interview, editor Joey Cavalieri refers to the Silver Age JLAers as “the archetypes,” and I wonder if Marvel Silver Age heroes would prove equally suitable to this kind of treatment by Ross. Perhaps they wouldn’t, since the classic Marvel heroes’ human personalities tend to be more important than their mythic powers and images. Peter Parker’s personality is more important than his spider-powers.

Most of JLA: Secret Origins is comprised of two-page spreads depicting the origins of each major Justice League member. In his interview Ross says that they were inspired by the original two-page origin sequences that Siegel and Shuster and Bob Kane did for Superman and Batman circa 1938-1940. Ross notes that the images used in these sequences made them “iconic.” Explaining why each of his origin sequences is mostly monochromatic, Ross explains, “I meant to invoke a sense of how this is a bygone age. That this is the past, this is a story that’s legendary.”

In other words, this book deals in the history and mythology of superheroes. This made me see a connection, however unintentional, between Ross’s work and the “history painting” of the 18th and 19th centuries. “History painting” was the depiction of scenes from mythology or actual history, portraying noble figures with heroic builds enacting great events. In fact, during this period, the art world considered history painting to be the highest form of painting, superior to portraiture, landscapes and such. (Since history painting presented narratives, the connection with comics is clear. Moreover, as noted, history painting could also depict scenes from classical mythology. Remember the title of Ross’s coffee table book?)

One example at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is said to be its most popular painting with tourists: Emanuel Leutze’s enormous “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Probably many of you have seen this painting reproduced and can envision Washington’s noble stance: Ross speaks in his interview about his “glory shots” of superheroes, and the term could apply to Leutze’s positioning of Washington, too.

Another of the Metropolitan’s history paintings that has a considerably higher reputation among art historians is David’s “The Death of Socrates,” whose central figure not only radiates nobility but seems to have been working out more than one might expect from an elderly philosopher. But the heroically proportioned human body has been a prime subject of Western art from ancient times up to the twentieth century, when, as noted, figurative art fell from favor in the art world.

But subjects of such longstanding popularity as the portrayal of the idealized human form and the depiction of mythic events (real or fictional) must obviously have innate appeal to the human psyche. So if the art establishment suppresses these subjects, they will inevitably pop up again somewhere else, perhaps in a popular form of art that the establishment overlooks: in this case, in Alex Ross’s work.

Each of the Ross-Dini origin sequences follows the same format, and it behooves the reader to pay attention to the variations at certain points in this standard format. Each sequence is primarily monochromatic: which color does Ross choose? What do Dini and Ross choose to picture in the introductory panel, which ranges all the way across two pages. Each sequence closes with an image in full color; what do Dini and Ross decide to spotlight in this fashion?

The dominant color of the Superman sequence is what Ross calls a “very brown, earthy tone meant to invoke his very earthy origins. Despite the fact that he’s from another planet, he’s really this guy from the Midwestern United States.”

Ross also states that he tries to depict the origins in what Cavalieri calls an “inclusive” manner, so that each is true both to the original version and to any later revamped version. Hence, as Ross points out, the “exact configuration” of the vehicle taking the baby Kal-El to Earth is obscured by speed lines, so it could just as well be Joe Shuster’s 1938 rocket or John Byrne’s 1986 spacecraft. So Ross is depicting the essence of the origin tales, rather than the details of specific versions. I note too that Ross does not specify a time period through the clothing in this sequence: the overalls Clark wears in one panel could belong to the 1930s or today. In demonstrating Superman’s emerging powers, Dini and Ross adhere to the classic catchphrases: leaping tall buildings with a single bound, faster than a locomotive. Superman is not shown as flying, presumably since, in 1938, he had not yet been given that power.

The Superman origin sequence emphasizes the character’s childhood, and despite the destruction of his native world, Ross shows it as idyllic. There is the baby Kal-El smiling up at his adoptive parents; in the next panel, despite the shadows obscuring much of the boy Clark’s face, it is still clear from his body language that he is smiling. This is a happy childhood that produced the most optimistic and altruistic of heroes. Dini’s text emphasizes that Clark/Kal-El is an immigrant who has happily embraced his adoptive world.

In the panel in which Clark describes becoming a reporter, the bespectacled Kent has turned away from the viewer. Ross regularly portrays Clark Kent as hiding his face. Perhaps this is simply a recognition that, with Ross’s realistic style, the convention that Clark is unrecognizable as Superman becomes even less credible. But it also makes a good psychological point: that Superman, as Clark, retreats from the spotlight, concealing his true self from the world.

The final picture, which bursts into full color, is an iconic shot of Superman pulling open Clark’s shirt to reveal the Superman insignia beneath. This is the sequence’s only shot of Superman in costume. The implication is that the emergence of Superman is the end result of the all the events depicted from Clark’s childhood: the sacrifice of his parents, his Rockwellian upbringing and education in Midwestern American moral values, and so forth.

The very next origin sequence, Batman’s, presents a sharp contrast. The color now is not Superman’s warm reddish brown, but a dark, chilly blue, perhaps even evoking “blue” emotions. (So, this is Alex’s Blue Period?) The opening panel is a Gotham cityscape, contrasting with Clark’s open, Midwestern plains. Batman appears in silhouette, his head outlined by the moon: he is a creature of the moon and night, as opposed to Superman, who literally derives his power from the sun. The “creature” aspect is heightened by the flying bats in the sky, and the parallel Ross draws between the Batman and the gargoyle on which he kneels, both serving as guardian figures meant to frighten off intruders.

Superman did not appear in costume until the end of his sequence, but Batman in costume is in the first two panels of his. Perhaps this implies that Clark is Superman’s true self, but Batman is the reality within Bruce Wayne. As if to reinforce that point, we are never shown a clear view of the adult Bruce Wayne’s face.

Whereas the Superman sequence was a celebration of family life, the Batman sequence centers on the destruction of the idealized family. The killer of Bruce Wayne’s parents, whether it is Joe Chill (in old comics continuity), Jack Napier (in the movie) or some unknown party (since the Zero Hour continuity revision), is a Jungian shadow figure almost entirely covered by literal shadow: at one anonymous and an embodiment of dark forces. The shot of young Bruce with his parents’ corpses is a nod to artist David Mazzucchelli’s iconic image from Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One.

The final panel here shows as full color image of the young, brooding Bruce Wayne kneeling, hands clasped, as if in prayer, taking his oath to war on all crime. It is our first direct look into his eyes, as they radiate the vengefulness that will drive his whole life. He stares eerily at the reader, as if wondering if the reader is a potential target, as the shadow of Batman looms above him. It is as if a kind of monster has been born within this child. The final image in color signals that within the adult Batman this vengeful, emotionally wounded child still exists.

Wonder Woman’s sequence is brown, but without the reddish tone of the Superman origin: here the brown perhaps indicates the archaic nature of Amazon history, or perhaps the clay from which she was formed. (“I created a living daughter out of the Earth itself,” Amazon queen Hippolyta says here about Wonder Woman’s variation on virgin birth.) The opening panel pictures the war between the Amazons and male warriors led by Hercules, here a silhouetted figure whose traditional lion skin makes him seem more beast than man: this establishes the background for Wonder Woman’s mission against male warfare and oppression of women. There is again an emphasis ion childhood: the literal molding of the child Diana, and the sight of the grown Diana peering around a pillar at her royal mother, like a shy girl at once awed by her parent and wishing she could equal her achievements. In the end Diana surpassed her mother, who stands downcast as Diana emerges into full color in the costume of Wonder Woman. (I like Ross’s kangaroos in this sequence, too. In fact, my favorite part of his Shazam book was his portrait of Mr. Tawky Tawny, making him look like an actual tiger.)

The Flash sequence is in red, matching the Scarlet Speedster’s costume. There’s something of the feel of a horror movie here, with scientist Barry Allen sitting in deep shadow as the lightning that will give him his powers crashes outside with godlike power. Here the concluding color image shows the Flash, in costume but unmasked, kissing his wife Iris. Though the Silver Age DC superhero series have been castigated as adolescent fantasies, Ross and Dini celebrate the Flash from a mature perspective, showing him as one of a pair of young married lovers.
No surprise here: the Green Lantern origin is in green. The top panel, the only one showing Hal Jordan in costume, depicts a large number of Green Lanterns in flight together like a flock of birds. In this sequence Dini and Ross are emphasizing not an individual Green Lantern so much as the entire Green Lantern Corps, its origin and history. The concluding color image here is that of the alien Green Lantern Abin Sur passing his ring to his successor Hal Jordan: the focus is on the continuity of the Green Lantern tradition, more than the individual.

The Aquaman sequence is in the blue-green color of the sea. Babyhood is a motif again, but notice that, while the infant Clark was shown smiling at his foster parents, the similar shot of the baby Aquaman conceals his face: this throws the emphasis on his parents, and, amusingly, the father has Popeye’s hat and corncob pipe.
This also fits into this sequence’s focus on marital as well as parental love. The shot of Aquaman’s father rescuing his mother is the stuff of romance. Another panel is devoted to the wedding of the adult Aquaman to Mera. (Unlike Superman and Martian Manhunter, Aquaman returns to his native realm.) The final color panel echoes the shot of the infant Aquaman with his parents: now it is Aquaman and Mera holding their child. With the Flash, Ross and Dini celebrated young married love; with Aquaman they celebrate the next phase, parenthood.
The Martian Manhunter’s sequence is the dull reddish color of the Martian landscape. That terrain is the subject of the first panel: desolate, devastated, “as barren as it is lonely.” In both JLA books Dini makes the point that unlike Superman, only an infant when Krypton was destroyed (or, in Byrne’s version, not yet born), J’onn J’onzz remembers the destruction of his civilization; hence, while Superman, who could easily fit into the human population, has a sunny, optimistic disposition, J’onn is lonely and gloomy. Dini here calls J’onn an “immigrant” who “found a way to assimilate,” but the panel shows him, in human guise, as faceless: he has not truly fit in. Ross cleverly depicts J’onn’s emergence on Earth, making it unclear whether his true form is humanoid (as in the original continuity) or inhuman (as in the recent revision). I am very pleased with Ross’s rendition of J’onn’s benefactor Dr. Erdel, making this 1950s cartoony caricature look credibly real. The final image shows the Manhunter soaring into space, alone, apart from Earth.
The Green Arrow sequence is green, too, naturally, and Dini’s text emphasizes that he is a modern “urban Robin Hood.” Green Arrow, like Robin Hood, is a form of the mythic “green man” archetype, the man of nature. But here only the opening image of Oliver Queen as a kind of latter-day Robinson Crusoe, learning to survive on a deserted island, has a mythic feel.
With the Hawkman origin Ross and Dini are very specifically doing the Silver Age version, and not those that preceded or followed. The final shot here makes Hawkman and Hawkgirl look eerily birdlike, thanks in part to the lighting effects. It is significant that Ross and Dini show both the Hawks in this panel: this is another celebration of love, in this case, of a couple who are partners in action as well as in private life.

The Atom’s sequence is in blue, but a lighter, warmer one than Batman’s, perhaps to emphasize how the Atom figuratively draws his powers from the night: literally from a meteor from a white dwarf star that fell at night. I’m pleased and amused by the shot of the Atom running atop molecules drawn like science class models of the 1960s.

The gray of the Captain Marvel sequence suggests the archaic ““ the ancient idols of the “Seven Deadly Enemies of Man,” Shazam’s resemblance to an Old Testament prophet, and the bleakness of orphan Billy Batson’s life in Depression-era New York. Here the color image signifies life and vitality appearing amidst age and dreariness. Both Billy and Captain Marvel are in color, putting the focus on the joyous ascension of orphaned child to powerful adult.

The only false step in these origin sequences lies in Plastic Man’s: deleting the monk from the story weakens the theme of Plas’s spiritual rebirth. It’s impressive indeed how Ross can make Plas’s cartoony stretching (especially the shot of him pulling on his face) look so real: as I said in a previous column, making Plastic Man and his world look real makes his stretching funnier. For once Plas even looks believable disguised as a table.
There follow portraits of other JLAers from the Silver Age, including one of my favorite shots of Zatanna ever. The “story” ends with a very impressive two page shot of the major League members standing imposingly together. And here one can see another of Ross’s virtues: unlike so many comics artists, he gives his heroes distinctive faces from each other, and even gives them varying heights.

In short, then, this is a magnificent showcase of comics art. Should any one wish to make a case for the mythic grandeur of the superhero concept, JLA: Secret Origins should be Exhibit One.

TAKING LIBERTIES FOR JUSTICE

While JLA: Secret Origins deals with the Justice Leaguers’ legendary pasts, Ross and Dini’s JLA: Liberty and Justice is a new story set in the present, and, intentionally or not, it raises some intriguing questions not just about the figure of the superhero but about today’s international politics.

The Pentagon asks the Justice League to stop the spread of an unusual, lethal virus, which has appeared in a wartorn region of Africa. Hoping to avoid worldwide panic, the Pentagon also wants to prevent news of the outbreak from spreading.

Inevitably in the information age, the JLA has much more success in controlling the virus than in keeping its existence quiet. Early on, the Flash wonders aloud if they have the “right to intervene,” but it is decided they must to save lives. Nonetheless, in the course of their mission, the JLA find themselves obliged to combat various foreign military forces. This inspires suspicion and mistrust of the Justice League, both in America and in other countries, as voiced in various television reports we are shown. One speaks of “the Justice League’s largely secretive response to the situation”; elsewhere on that page we are told that “the President has remained unavailable for comment.” Another talking head, noting the crisis posed by the virus, asks, “How does that mitigate Superman and the others acting without the approval of the U.N. or any African government?” Superman gloomily reflects that “Power always seems to intimidate, no matter how familiar the face or altruistic the intentions,” and that “Our biggest battle may be against public perception.”

Like 1602‘s invasion of Latveria, the story of JLA: Liberty and Justice seems to reflect the course taken by the United States after September 11, 2001; whether the parallel was consciously intended by Dini and Ross, I do not know. But the fact that the JLA are working with the Pentagon, and that the story links the JLA’s secretiveness to the American President’s, makes the connection clear. In the real world, the only remaining “superpower,” the United States, has asserted a right to intervene unilaterally in other nations to combat threats to its security, as it has in Afghanistan and Iraq. As in Liberty and Justice, America’s interventions, whether justified or not, have resulted in hostility, fear and criticism from other countries, and there are those who accuse the United States of being the real threat to the world.

In the Justice League’s case, couldn’t the American government have done anything to forestall the criticism? Couldn’t the United States at least have informed the United Nations that the Justice League was being sent to deal with this emergency? Once the news of the virus got out, couldn’t the government have explained the situation to the worldwide public, instead of retreating into secrecy?

For that matter, couldn’t the JLA themselves have been less secretive? Certainly, they had their hands full coping with the virus. But later in the book, when disorder breaks out across the country, the active Leaguers send out a call to their “associate members” to come help out. Well, couldn’t the JLA have earlier assigned an associate member to be a liaison with the news media or send explanatory messages to the U.N.? (Hey, Dini and Ross could have put old-time JLA mascot Snapper Carr into the story and had him do it!) I very much like the way that Dini and Ross have Green Lantern use his power ring to perform analyses and research and to speak its findings to him, as it did in the Silver Age: it’s as if Silver Age GL editor Julius Schwartz and writer John Broome had anticipated the portable personal computer. Well, why couldn’t Green Lantern have used the ring to send off a few messages about what the JLA was doing to the U.N. and several news sources?

Actually, if the JLA existed in reality, they probably would have to have a support staff, including a press secretary. One of the odd aspects of superhero comics is the fact that writers will give the heroes vast, impressive headquarters and provide no more than, say, an middle-aged butler like Alfred or Jarvis to do everything from maintaining the high-tech equipment to making beds and sweeping up. (Mark Gruenwald tried to treat the situation more realistically by creating the “Avengers Crew,” that team’s support staff, but later editors and writers didn’t get the point and dropped it.)

In a variation of this assumption that the heroes don’t need outside help, Liberty and Justice purports that Batman, who is not a physician or trained biologist; the Atom, who is a physicist; and the Flash, who is a forensic scientist (Yes, the Silver Age Flash verged into C.S. I. territory four decades early) are capable of concocting a cure for the mystery virus. Well, sure, the Atom’s ability to shrink to the size of the virus, and the Flash’s ability to work at superhuman speed give them advantages that normal researchers do not, but wouldn’t it seem more credible if the JLA had actually called in real medical doctors and biologists as advisors?

Dini and Ross’s treatment of the world’s attitudes towards the Justice League differ sharply from Kurt Busiek and George Perez’s take on the same subject in the recent “JLA/Avengers” mini-series. Busiek and Perez made the point that on DC’s Earth, its leading superheroes are respected, trusted and beloved, whereas on Marvel-Earth, superheroes are regarded with suspicion. Certainly this was true during the Silver Age, but Marvel’s 1960s revolution of the superhero genre influenced new generations of writers who worked on DC’s characters as well. It’s no surprise, then, that Dini and Ross show that the world can easily fall into resentment and fear of the Justice League. Still, I like the distinction that Busiek and Perez drew between the public attitudes towards superheroes in the Marvel and DC Universes, and I think it’s a good thing if the Big Two companies take such different approaches to the subject. It makes more sense, too: the JLAers have publicly performed so many good works up to and including saving the world repeatedly that one might think most people would give them the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, one can easily observe in real life how the natural tendency of most of the American public is to rally round the flag and support the President in times of crisis, to trust him and the presiding administration in times of emergency. Surely there’s be a sizable proportion of the public who would have the same faith in the JLA.

It’s not just that the JLA are just doing their work and just suffer from having their good intentions misinterpreted. How about the sequence in which Aquaman, realizing that a frightened Russian submarine captain is holding a gun, confirms the poor man’s worst fears: Aquaman summons whales to attack the sub and throws a temper tantrum, raging, “Am I making myself understood?” Well, no, considering Aquaman is speaking to them in English, despite the fact that he had earlier demonstrated his fluency in Russian.

Panic within the United States leads to crime sprees and rioting. The JLAers find themselves using force to restore order: “In the span of one day, humanity’s benevolent guardians had become its hostile wardens,” Dini writes, describing the heroes as “diving upon them like vengeful gods.”

I wish that this sequence didn’t make it seem as if virtually everyone in the country was running wild. In depicting superheroes, one should be careful to avoid conveying the idea that the powerful elite have to keep the irresponsible common people in their place.

The thematic turning point follows the traditional mythic motif of figurative death and resurrection: a despairing young woman leaps off a bridge but is rescued by the JLA’s central figure, Superman. From then on, the story takes a more positive turn: Flash and Green Lantern perform what is significantly called a “miracle” to rid Earth of the virus, and Superman, perhaps motivated by the suicide attempt, tells the other Leaguers that it “still has much to heal.”

This leads to the JLA’s appearance before the United Nations at the story’s end: Superman addresses the General Assembly to tell them it was not the JLA’s intention to “provide misinformation, or hide the truth,” and then can’t go through with “this deception”: “Superman” shapeshifts into the Martian Manhunter, who explains that Superman is busy elsewhere. (Actually, that seems to be Superman, as Clark Kent, in the audience on the next page.) So what was that all about? Even in an address to the United Nations and the world, the JLA intended to lie! Even after J’onn J’onzz admits the deception, would that inspire confidence and trust? Even people who supported the JLA’s actions would wonder why the Leaguers even considered perpetrating such a deception and what else they might have lied about. This reminds me of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Back, in which the President turns out to be merely a CGI image, manipulated by Lex Luthor, the country’s real and secret ruler.

Still, this penultimate scene in the United Nations does play a necessary part in making this entire story work. By appearing before the United Nations to explain their actions, the Justice League is acknowledging its authority and that of the nations of the world. J’onn J’onzz, speaking for the League, states that because of unusual circumstances ““ “a global threat” in which they “had very little time to act” ““ the League took “extraordinary measures” in order “to safeguard lives and property.” Though he never actually says so, J’onn J’onzz’s implication is that with the emergency over, the League no longer seeks to place itself above ordinary humanity. “Our greatest power,” he says, “comes from your belief in us, as your allies and friends.”

The key to J’onn J’onzz’s speech lies in his declaration that the JLAers, despite their powers, are not the people’s superiors but their equals, and, indeed, members of the people themselves. “Yet in our hearts we are no different from most people,” he says. “We are part of the work force that makes up society, each of us having the same goals for a happy life, free from worry. No one in our company has ever aspired to world conqueror… We cherish your trust, and hope you will always find is worthy of it.” That is an act of submission to the public will: the JLA have declared themselves to be not the public’s masters but their servants.

This is what distinguishes and redeems the American superhero from the potentially fascist concept of the Nietzchean ubermensch from which it derives: the emphasis on the superhero’s humanity and service to his or her fellow men and women. J’onn J’onzz refers to the “delicate balance” between freedom and order; there is likewise a delicate balance that must be achieved in the depiction of superheroes between the image of aggressive power and compassionate humanity.

Whether J’onn J’onzz’s speech is really as reassuring as Dini and Ross presumably intend is questionable. The JLA does not pledge never to act without legal authority again; they simply ask for the world’s trust that they will do what is right. But remember a series that Ross greatly admires, Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme, which is inspired by the Silver Age Justice League, in which a superhero team assumes control of the United States after a devastating war in order to rebuild it into a utopia. Gruenwald made the argument in the series that the road to hell is paved with the best intentions, that even the altruistic Squadron members ended up violating human liberties, and that even benevolent dictators are still dictators who must be overthrown.

In the course of telling its tale, JLA: Liberty and Justice is full of wonderful touches. Those readers who think that Barry Allen and Hal Jordan lack the personality of their successors should study Ross’s portraits of their unmasked faces: Barry is a crewcutted Midwesterner who has a look of innocence to him, while Hal looks very much the slightly roguish young leading man. Dini does a wonderful job in a page consisting of a conversation between Flash and Green Lantern: one can see the chemistry that made these two disparate personalities into friends. Wonder Woman displays an ethereal beauty (and, I repeat, Ross seems to actually know people who look like this!). Dini’s dialogue for the Martian Manhunter reminds me of what Marvel’s Silver Surfer used to be: J’onn, the alien outsider, wonders why humans cannot appreciate the beauty of their planet as much as he does. In a montage of scenes from classic Justice League stories, I am especially taken with the shot of Kanjar Ro, shadows disguising his cartoony appearance, imperiously commanding his Slave Ship of Space. Batman is not present onstage when the JLA appear before the U. N., presumably to maintain the idea that most people on DC’s Earth consider Batman to be an urban legend. (But is that Bruce Wayne smirking in the audience, the light on his face mimicking the shape of Batman’s cowl?) My favorite shot of Batman in the book has him wedged within a panel at the Pentagon, spookily spying on his fellow Leaguers from hiding. There’s the extraordinary double-page first shot of Green Lantern soaring in space against the background of a blue Earth swathed in white clouds, or the shot of Aquaman, lit by strong sunlight, standing astride a whale charging towards the readers. And there’s a nighttime depiction of Hawkgirl and Hawkman, lit from below standing atop a ledge, even more impressive than the Secret Origins shot.

And in the end JLA: Liberty and Justice reaffirms the moral idealism of DC’s Silver Age superheroes. Having ventured too far into dominating mankind rather than serving them, the JLA effectively apologize by recognizing their common humanity (even shared by the alien members) with the people they protect.

I wonder if all this new attention to the Silver Age isn’t a sign that the audience may be growing for just this sort of approach. A significant number of major comics creators are trying to make the Silver Age characters work in the more sophisticated writing styles of the present and for an older audience. (And that Spider-Man movie was pretty positive and true to the Silver Age stories on which it was based, and look how much money it made.) True, the antiheroic school of comics writing still predominates. But perhaps the pendulum is at last beginning to swing back.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

In the famous opening line of the great modernist author Franz Kafka’s 1915 short story The Metamorphosis, its protagonist, Gregor Samsa, awakens from sleep to find himself transformed into a cockroach. It sounds like a joke, but it is a horrifically absurdist piece of irony. Samsa’s transformed state becomes a metaphor for his psychological and emotional alienation from the rest of humanity and normality.

Reading the story in the past, I had always imagined the transformed Samsa looking exactly like a cockroach, albeit an enormously oversized one. Now writer/artist Peter Kuper, who has done previous adaptations of Kafka, has turned The Metamorphosis into a graphic novel (issued last year by Crown Publishers). In it Kuper anthropomorphizes the insect, giving him a cartoonish humanoid head and face. At first I thought this weakened the impact of the adaptation, but I soon saw that it was essential to a visualization of the story. In the story Kafka verbalizes Samsa’s thoughts, showing his anguish and despair; through giving the bug human-like expressions, Kuper can convey his emotions visually. The cartooniness also fits well into the overall style art Kuper uses for the story. Though born in Prague, Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis in German, and Kuper’s art style here evokes the distorted visuals of German expressionism. Indeed, Kuper’s adaptation demonstrates the similarity between cartooning and expressionism’s treatment of figurative drawing. In reading the story, Samsa seems to be the one unrealistic element in a naturalistically described world, but Kuper’s visual exaggerations and distortions turn Samsa’s world into the nightmare he feels it to be.

Reading through Kuper’s adaptation, seeing the story’s events visualized, brought home aspects of the tale I had not realized before. Samsa’s fate can in part be viewed as a metaphor for clinical depression: his world seemingly shifts into a nightmare state without cause, he has trouble even getting out of bed, he feels isolated from the world and unfit to be part of it, and the change in him seems inexplicable to others. Likewise the story serves as a metaphor for the gulf in understanding that can separate oneself from others. Samsa literally cannot make himself understood by his family, and they, seeing only the horrific outer symptoms, come to regard him as a monster, failing to see the tormented human within.

Most remarkable is Kuper’s visualization of Samsa’s physical decay, culminating in the shot of his death, as the sun rises out the widow, shining its brilliance into the darkened chamber of death. Has Samsa spirit escaped? Or is this part of the final irony of the story, along with the concluding vignette of Gregor’s family, happy now that he is gone. In a parody of sacrificial death and resurrection motifs, Gregor’s sister “blossoms” into womanhood, as if the end of Gregor’s existence somehow released fertility into the world.

Kuper’s The Metamorphosis, then, is an extraordinary adaptation, proof of the heights that comics can reach in interpreting literary works.

THE UNCANNY EGGS-MEN

This may surprise my regular readers, but the comics industry has tended to pigeonhole what I can do, thinking of me as merely a Marvel trivia expert, or, worse, as a part-time proofreader (as if this is the career for which my three Ivy League degrees qualify me), and recurringly as an X-Men x-pert. So perhaps it’s just as well that I have almost entirely steered clear of Marvel’s mutants for the first half year of this column. But here is an anniversary issue, New X-Men #150, written by Grant Morrison, and it seemed a good opportunity to check in with the series.

I admire much of what Grant Morrison has done with the X-Men. His most revolutionary stroke was the “outing” of Professor Xavier and his students as mutants. It’s a trend now in superhero comics to get rid of secret identities, as seen lately in Daredevil and Iron Man and ordinarily I think this is a mistake. The dual identity is not only part of the appeal of the superhero genre (the appealing idea that a Superman lurks within the Clark Kent-like everyman) but also the basis for one of its major psychological themes: the divided self, with different identities expressing different aspects of a character’s personality.

In the X-Men’s case, though, I think that Morrison may have hit upon the right way to remodel the series for the 21st century. The superhero genre in comics was created by the progeny of immigrants, and the secret identity motif may relate to the way that immigrants and their families sought to assimilate within American society and culture. Like someone who changes his name to make it seem less ethnic, so Superman conceals his Kryptonian descent by taking the Waspish name of Clark Kent and blending in with a community of people wearing business suits and working at 9-to-5 jobs.

Similarly, the original X-Men, when in costume, made no secret of being mutants, but, unmasked and in “civilian” clothing, would “pass” as “normal” humans when they hung out at night in a Greenwich village coffee house listening to Bernard the Poet recite verse. Over the decades, Marvel writers seemed to care less about the X-Men’s secret identities. When the Angel publicly revealed his true identity and founded the Champions, the most incompetent of newsmen should have been able to figure out that Xavier’s school was the cover for the X-Men. When the “new” X-men came along, some of them, like Storm and Phoenix, did not even bother with masks.

Still, the X-Men remained a secret community within “normal” human society. The insistence on concealment went too far in the original concept for the first X-Factor series, which had the original X-Men, in their everyday identities, posing publicly as mutant hunters. In actuality, the X-Factor team would then help teach the mutants they located in mastering their powers and in passing as “normal.” As readers, and eventually the original X-Men themselves realized, X-Factor’s public stance worsened the public bigotry against mutants by treating them as menaces, and by teaching mutants to pose as “normal,” implied that mutanthood was something to be ashamed of.

The criticism of the early X-Factor issues was a symptom of an evolving change in American culture: minority groups were increasingly asserting pride in their ethnic or gender identity rather than attempting to disguise it to blend in more fully with a homogenized mainstream society.

By exposing Xavier and his school, Morrison recognized this change in the culture. Now that the X-Men had gone public, they could openly serve to promote the cause of mutant rights. If Xavier’s dream of peaceful coexistence between mutants and “normal” humans were truly to be implemented, mutants could no longer hide from the society at large, but had to assert their place within it.

Much of the power of the X-Men concept lies in the fact that the mutants served as metaphors for any minority group that was excluded from the mainstream or the victim of prejudice; “mutanthood” could even stand for an individual who felt alienated from the larger community. I also liked it when Morrison raised the possibility that the growing numbers of mutants might indeed someday supplant “normal” humanity in the course of evolution. Thus, “mutants” could even serve as a metaphor for the younger generation, which inevitably will replace the older generation. The strange powers of the young mutants could stand for the new modes of thinking and behaving that sets every new generation apart from its elders, many of whom do not welcome the new ways they do not comprehend.

So, Morrison gave X-Men the conceptual push it needed to revitalize it for a new century. Yet while I admire Morrison’s concepts for X-Men, I can’t say that I have any affection for it. Another of X-Men‘s strength has been the success with which its best and most important writers ““ Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, and for most years since 1975, Chris Claremont ““ have created characterizations that readers could care about. The X-Men are a community of outsiders; the “outsiders” part is the basis of the series’ theme of minority rights, but the fact that they are a “community,” an extended surrogate family, is nearly as important. Morrison’s X-Men stories lack the emotional warmth that Lee’s, Thomas’s, and Claremont’s all have.

Morrison’s achievement: superheroes secret identities linked to theme of assimilation for immigrants of past generation ““ having to blend in and disguise their true selves ““ so mutants pass for human ““ worst in X-Factor ““ now, however, trend for pride in one’s ethnicity or gender ““ reflected in X-Men going public, becoming public force working for mutant rights. Morrison gave the series a needed kick into a new phase.

New X-Men #150 presents the conclusion of the Planet X story line, and I am hereby issuing a spoiler warning for those who do not want to know the ending.

Usually mysteries in superhero comics are easily penetrable. So I am impressed that Morrison’s character Xorn the mutant healer turned out to be the disguised Magneto: I had even mentioned Xorn as a prominent new character in my recent updated edition of DK’s Ultimate Guide to the X-Men.

I am less happy that what seemed another of Morrison’s changes, enabling Professor Xavier to walk, proved to be temporary. Chris Claremont had restored Xavier’s ability to walk years ago, but editor Bob Harras had Xavier crippled once more. I heard Harras explain that he did so to restore the “poetry” of the character. I see what he meant ““ the idea of the world’s most powerful mind in a physically crippled body ““ and I suppose that Xavier works better thematically this way: Xavier’s disability makes him an outsider in yet another way. Still, for those of us who have read X-Men for years, it seems a cheat to cure Xavier and then cripple him again not once but twice. I suppose, though, that since present day Marvel has so little sense of its own history, no one working on New X-Men may have even known they were recycling the past.

Though Mark Millar in Ultimate X-Men has done masterful work in portraying a genuinely sinister, even genocidal Magneto, Morrison’s version of the character is a letdown. Though Magneto in New X-Men #150 is powerful enough to endanger the Earth by tilting its axis, he is astonishingly ineffectual in combating individual X-Men. Towards the end Xavier berates Magneto for being an “old man” who is out of touch with the new generation of mutants. Oh, really? In the post-9/11 world we are all too aware of older, ideological fanatics followed by a younger generation of terrorists, whose sense of exclusion and humiliation drives them to murderous hatred. It seems to me that Magneto, as a symbol for such leaders, is very relevant indeed in the early 21st century.

At the end of the issue Magneto, uncharacteristically suicidal, demands to be given a martyr’s death, Wolverine lashes out, and we see Xorn’s helmet bounce along the floor. So was Magneto beheaded? That would sure be a hard death scene to undo, and yet it would be foolish to (truly) kill off a character who is such an important part of the series.

And, oh, yes, Jean Grey, who has regained command of the Phoenix Force, dies in front of Cyclops yet again. Considering how often we are informed that new comics readers don’t care about stories that are decades old, it is amazing how Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s “Dark Phoenix Saga” of 1980 continues to influence today’s comics. Of course, it has been available in reprints for years; current comics fans must be reading them. So here is Morrison rerunning Jean’s death scene, but with only a small fraction of the passion and tragic grandeur of Claremont and Byrne’s original. Byrne and Claremont did not want to kill Jean off; editor in chief Jim Shooter made them do it. After all, the romance of Jean and Scott is the emotional heart of the series, as their wedding (after her resurrection) in New X-Men #25 demonstrated. But the editors and writers working with Scott and Jean over the last several years seem to have found their relationship tiresome. If Marvel’s current powers that be really do intend to keep her dead, that’s a big mistake.

There would have been a time when I would have been outraged, saddened, or both by seeing Jean and Magneto killed off. But now I find it hard to care, in part because I’m depressed by the quality of the story, and in part because I am well aware that someone sooner or later will find a way to revive them both. One friend observed that for Jean death has become “a revolving door.” I suspect that one reason Jean was killed off (again) is because she was (apparently) killed off at the end of the X2 movie, in a clear setup for doing the “Dark Phoenix Saga” in X3. (Comic book executives keep imagining that hordes of people who saw superhero movies will start reading the comics and get confused if the comics don’t match the movie continuity. On the contrary, what I’ve been told is that such large crossover audiences usually don’t happen.) If so, then if Jean comes back in X3, she’ll be back in the comics. I haven’t yet read any X-Men issues after this one, so far all I know her resurrection may already be in the works. “All I ever did was die on you, Scott,” are Jean’s dying words in New X-Men #150: she’s become the X-Men’s equivalent of the ever-dying Kenny on South Park.

Oh, yes, on the final page, the “Phoenix Egg” is found on the moon. it must be the very egg that this story laid.

MONEY AND McDUCK

Thanks to Ken Plume, I’ve no finally gotten to see a copy of the first film appearance by Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge, the 1967 Disney featurette Scrooge McDuck and Money, directed by Disney animation veteran Hamilton Luske, and referenced in my Christmas column. As I expected, this is one of the short animated films that the Disney studio did in the 1960s that was educational in purpose, like Donald in Mathmagic Land and Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom. Like them, it is not dry and didactic but genuinely entertaining. What surprised me was that it is a musical, with songs (one sung by Scrooge himself) and even rhyming dialogue. The subject is the history of money; with its celebratory tone, I kept thinking that this is the kind of movie that Scrooge himself would produce.

The film gets Barks’s character exactly right. We first see him playing in the mounds of coins and paper currency in his vault, although it does not seem as colossal as Barks’s iconic money bin. The film turns Scrooge into a collector of examples of forms of currency from other times and civilizations; as far as I know, something Barks did not think of, but it is right for the character. The film’s serious educational intent does mean modifying one of Barks’s concepts. In the comics Scrooge is the ultimate hoarder of wealth, but in the film, Scrooge lectures Huey, Dewey and Louie on the importance of investing money rather than just sitting on it and letting it collect dust. (Scrooge amusingly refers to the vault full of money as merely “petty cash” he keeps on hand.)

A nice surprise came towards the end when Scrooge, having spent the film lecturing to Huey, Dewey and Louie about money and the importance of investing it wisely, charges them three cents as a consultant’s fee. The grandnephews hand over the pennies, and Scrooge takes on an evil, greedy look as he accepts the coins; yep, this seems right for the character, too.

The featurette is visually inventive: to explain how much a billion dollars is, Scrooge pictures a stack of bills reaching up into outer space. It also betrays the prejudices of the conventional wisdom of its time, portraying husbands as having careers and wives having none.

I’m not altogether happy with the voice work. Huey, Dewey and Louie speak in voices clearly done by women impersonating young boys, rather than Clarence Nash’s quacking voice; presumably this is to make the trio more comprehensible, but they sound wrong. More weirdly, the copy Ken sent me seems to be from the Wonderful World of Disney TV show, since it is introduced by the show’s recurring animated host, Professor Ludwig Von Drake, but whoever did his voice sounds nothing like the distinctive, humorous Viennese voice that voice actor Paul Frees created for the character. On the other hand, another voice acting legend, Bill Thompson, gives Scrooge a warmly appealing Scots accent, not very different at all than the voice that his successor on the character, Alan Young, would give Scrooge.

Here’s an example of Thinking Too Deeply about Things: So, Donald Duck has one uncle from Scotland, Scrooge McDuck, and another from Vienna, Ludwig Von Drake, so Donald must be of mixed Scots/Austrian descent. (Has anyone ever done a family tree that works this out? As far as I know, Carl Barks ignored Von Drake, so he never dealt with the matter.) Moreover, Donald has a cousin, Gladstone Gander, whose name indicates he is a goose, suggesting there is interspecies romance in Donald’s family tree.

THE AMERICANIZATION OF BALOO

I also recently caught up with Disney’s 2003 animated feature The Jungle Book 2, directed by Steve Trenbirth, on the Starz cable network. The previous animated Jungle Book was the last animated feature that Walt Disney oversaw before his death, and as has been repeatedly reported, Disney instructed people working on the film not to pay much attention to the books by Rudyard Kipling on which it was based.

Time and again I’ve read statements by filmmakers and movie critics to the effect that a movie is a separate creative entity from a book on which it is based and therefore need not be faithful to it. In fact, many reviewers of the Harry Potter movies seem aghast that they are faithful to J. K. Rowling’s books and seem to feel it is the filmmakers’ duty to diverge from her work, apparently simply for divergence’s sake. I have yet to read any review of the Potter movies that explains just how the films should differ from the books. I also notice that the movie reviewers I read praise The Lord of the Rings movies for their great fidelity to Tolkien’s novels. This suggests to me that the difference is that the film critics in question grew up reading Tolkien but are, of course, too old to have grown up reading Rowling. (I also observe that Rowling’s fictional universe is so intricately constructed that to alter elements of one book might upset the workings of a later one.)

To my mind, though, why adapt the work of a writer, especially one whose work has proved to be an enduring classic, if you are going to violate his or her characterizations and themes? This is also a phenomenon in the world of comics, where it sometimes seems as if in revamping classic characters and series, all that survives from the original version may be the names. (For example, there’s Marvel’s recent revamp of Jack Kirby’s Eternals, about which you will read more in a future column.)

The original Disney animated Jungle Book is a delightful entertainment, though in it one can see the seeds of the sharp decline in Disney animated features after Walt’s death: there are lots of showpieces for character animation, but the narrative is really a series of vignettes rather than a well-constructed overall story. But apart from the names of the characters and the basic idea of a boy being raised by animals in the jungles of India, it has nothing to do with Kipling.

This is odd for a number of reasons. The Disney studio had done previous adaptations of classic children’s literature ““ Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, and, of course, A, A, Milne’s original Winnie the Pooh stories ““ that did not wholly capture the moods and themes of the source material, but served as interesting blends of the original author’s works and the style of the Disney animation studio. Recently watching Alice again (on the big screen at a Museum of Modern Art showing), I reflected that, true, the vaudevillian slapstick did not reflect Lewis Carroll’s approach to humor, but much of Carroll came through quite clearly: the absurdities and even tyrannies of the adult world, the adults’ condescension towards children, and, especially, Alice’s intrepid, common sensical character.

In Kipling’s two Jungle Books, the jungle is a place that is exotic yet austere, filled with wonder but also with danger everywhere. The human orphan Mowgli is adopted by wolves over the opposition of the man-eating tiger Shere Khan. The animals not only have their own language, but they even have their own government: chaos is held at bay by the strict adherence to the Laws of the Jungle, which all species must obey. Mowgli’s growth to maturity within the jungle is Kipling’s primal metaphor for learning how to function within a harsh human society. One must obey the laws. One must form bonds within one’s community and cope with rivalries, as Mowgli dies within the wolf pack. One must seek guidance from mentors, as Mowgli does from the wise bear Baloo and his protector, the black panther Bagheera, and make peace with potential adversaries like the cobra Kaa. Mowgli ultimately proves his maturity by slaying his nemesis, Shere Khan, and leading the pack in their war against the wild dogs, the Dhole.

It’s easy to understand that Walt Disney might have been put off by the harshness of Kipling’s vision. In Disney’s Jungle Book movies, the jungle instead represents a nearly idyllic world of childhood without responsibility. Baloo is not a mentor but an older playmate. It has been reported that Walt Disney insisted on casting Phil Harris as the voice of Baloo over others’ understandable objections. Harris’s public persona, ranging from his stint on Jack Benny’s radio show in the 1930s into his guest appearances on Dean Martin’s TV show in the 1960s, was that of a likable rogue with a fondness for drink, a musician whose style of hipness was becoming dated in the ’60s. Walt Disney saw correctly that Harris’s persona could be domesticated into that of the cool dad, a father figure that a growing kid would enjoy hanging out with. So the animated Baloo is not a surrogate father as teacher, preparing Mowgli for adult responsibility, but an ursine Falstaff, entertaining Mowgli until the latter can no longer put off entering the adult world.

In keeping with the movie’s vision of the jungle as playground, Bagheera is less formidable than the butt of Baloo’s jests, the dangerously irrational monkeys become King Louie’s jazz ensemble, the regal elephant Hathi becomes a Colonel Blimp-like parody of British military officers, and the eerily powerful Kaa, though still a threat, is foolish and easily thwarted. The only real danger is presented by Shere Khan, who, in the original film, is simultaneously a witty caricature of the late actor George Sanders, who provided the voice, and, in the animation, a palpable, sinister threat.

In the first film, Shere Khan’s climactic attack on Mowgli is the sign that the boy’s life of hedonistic irresponsibility has ended. So has Baloo’s: he nearly loses his life in combating the tiger, leading to the archetypal Disney symbolic death and resurrection scene (see too Snow White, Pinocchio, Tinker Bell, Trusty in Lady and the Tramp, etc.). As in the end of Kipling’s book, Mowgli finally must leave to take his place in human society, In the Disney film, the impetus is Mowgli’s attraction to a young Indian girl: he grows up when he discovers girls.

I find it particularly strange that the Disney Jungle Book ignores Kipling so much since other Disney animated films come closer to the spirit of Kipling’s book. During Walt Disney’s lifetime there was Bambi, another tale of growing up in what proves to be a dangerous wilderness. In recent years there has been The Lion King, and especially the Disney Tarzan. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and Kipling’s Mowgli are basically variations on the same archetype: a man raised in the jungle by animals.

Watching the animated sequel, I was struck by how Disney so thoroughly Americanized Kipling’s India. Shere Khan and Hathi have British accents, and a quartet of moptopped vultures have Liverpudlian accents, as the early 1960s Disney studio’s uncomprehending nod to the Beatles. The other characters sound American, and Baloo/Harris’s hipster dialogue and King Louie’s singing thrust American culture right into the viewer’s face. It seems like a sort of unconscious American cultural imperialism: the whole world is presented as American. (This got worse in Disney animated films. Take Robin Hood, in which the royalty and nobility sound British, but the Sheriff of Nottingham and his aides have American Southern accents!) My favorite example of this sort of thing is the original Planet of the Apes. Why is Charlton Heston’s character so surprised that he’s on Earth when the apes have spoken English all through the film? I suppose because it does not automatically occur to naive Americans that members of alien cultures wouldn’t necessarily speak English.

The Jungle Book 2 corrects this problem somewhat: the girl from the end of the first movie plays a large part, as do her father and brother, all of whom are decidedly Indian. In this, Jungle Book 2 continues a welcome trend in the recent era of Disney animated films. In Walt Disney’s lifetime the films tended to draw on European fairy tales and presented Caucasian casts. With the renaissance of Disney animation that began with The Little Mermaid, the body of films has become multiethnic: there have been Arabs (Aladdin), Native Americans (Pocahontas, Brother Bear), Chinese (Mulan) and native Hawaiians (Lilo & Stitch), along with the African influences in The Lion King. (In the film, The Lion King‘s characters are animals, voiced by white and black actors, but in the stage version most of the cast is black, wearing costumes influenced by African culture.)

In the new movie, John Goodman takes over as the voice of Baloo. This is interesting since Goodman’s voice, though close, does not sound like Phil Harris. It’s more usual to cast voice actors who can mimic the originals. British actor Tony Jay does an astonishingly good job of recreating George Sanders’ voice for Shere Khan, and the animators likewise recapture the tiger’s sinister stalking movements from the original. Expectedly, Jim Cummings, who duplicates the late Sterling Holloway’s voice for Winnie the Pooh, does Holloway wonderfully here too as Kaa. Goodman may not sound exactly like Harris, but he conveys the same personality that Harris did as Baloo, and that proves entirely satisfactory.

The movie, though, is not. The story basically serves to duplicate bits from the original: so once again, Shere Khan nearly strangles Kaa, and Baloo reprises his song “The Bare Necessities” over and over. The issues of responsibility and of the necessity of choosing between the jungle and human society are dropped. The end of the film, with Mowgli and the girl sneaking off to join Baloo in the jungle, is ambiguous, probably unintentionally so. Are they just visiting him, or running away from home?

HONG KONG PHOOEY

I had hopes for the 2003 graphic novel Batman: Hong Kong, inasmuch as it was written by Doug Moench, the most prolific Marvel writer of the 1970s, responsible for years of remarkably fine stories in Master of Kung Fu, and with considerable experience writing Batman. This new graphic novel begins well, with a computer hacker witnessing a murder on a secret webcast. But Batman: Hong Kong was a disappointment, with lots of furious action to no real point. As I keep finding in various projects, characterizations are too slim to warrant my interest or caring about the people involved. At the center of this story is a family feud, but the participates win no empathy, and the villain is just a ranting, raging cardboard figure. The dust jacket pronounces artist Tony Wong to be “the Comic King of Hong Kong,” but his work here just seems to demonstrate that anime and manga-influenced storytelling cliches are now international in scope.

THE HALFWAY POINT

At last year’s San Diego Con Neil Gaiman said that in creating 1602 for Marvel he was trying to avoid writing about the post-9/11 era, and yet found himself writing about heroes invading another country that holds weapons of mass destruction. He was talking about issue six, in which heroes invade Latveria, the kingdom of Doctor Doom, here known as Otto von Doom. The Angel thinks, “We go to release prisoners. We go to reclaim a stolen weapon, “We go to fight a just war.” Like JLA: Liberty and Justice (as we shall see in a coming column), this is a book that reflects America’s position in the world in a new century of terrorist threats and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The series so far has portrayed the familiar Marvel heroes of the Silver Age transposed into Renaissance England in the year 1602. As promised, issue six begins to explain what has happened, courtesy of another creation by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Uatu the Watcher, the alien being who observes life on Earth but is sworn not to intervene.

Gaiman finds wonderful new notes to sound in his handling of the Watcher. In his hands, Uatu is so dedicated to nonintervention that he will not simply offer Dr. Strange an explanation of events; he instead insists that Dr. Strange ask him specific questions, thereby to enable him to make specific answers. There’s an air of myth and fairy tale about this, as if Strange must solve a riddle before this oracle can speak.

According to Uatu, the temporal anomaly that threatens to destroy the universe of 1602 is the result of a “something,” “almost certainly a human being,” having been sent to that year from four centuries in the future (our present) by an unusual means of time travel. Uatu calls this being “the Forerunner,” and says that its appearance triggered the creation of the Marvel heroes four centuries earlier than they were destined to appear.

Uatu speculates “that the universe fights to save itself” by prematurely creating the “heroes and Marvels” in response to the threat triggered by the Forerunner. So, it would seem, the universe is sentient. Is this a reference to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s character Eternity, the living embodiment of the cosmos? Can it even be a reference to God? You and I may disagree as to whether the real universe, in which we live, is an accident of fate or designed by a higher power. But 1602 indicates that the Marvel Universe is governed by a principle of order, perhaps by a controlling intelligence.

Who is this “Forerunner”? I will guess that it would be the first Marvel superhero, meaning either the original Human Torch or the Sub-Mariner, both of whom debuted in 1939. But what would they be doing experimenting with time travel? (And where is Iron Man, the most obvious Missing Person in the cast so far?)

Uatu says that the Watchers decided to intervene in this case since the Forerunner has brought about a threat to all of reality. So Uatu tells Strange about the menace, but then forbids him to act on the knowledge he gives him. So what was the point of telling him?

Gaiman isn’t being consistent in giving the dialogue in 1602 an Elizabethan flavor. Did people in Elizabethan England really use phrases like “draw your attention to the matter at hand” or discuss their “options”? Then again, I like the way that Gaiman transforms Ben Grimm’s familiar New Yorkese into period British slang. Reading Matthew’s dialogue makes me realize that though Gaiman has evoked Frank Miller’s handling of Daredevil, he is also drawing upon Stan Lee and Gene Colan’s Silver Age interpretation of the character: the verbal wit and the astonishing, daring acrobatics. I also like the handling of Reed’s dialogue: this is a genius who can’t stop thinking and talking about science, to whom new ideas are continually occurring. One of the best strokes is Jean’s maxim, “From those who have much to give, much is demanded,” a variant on Stan Lee’s familiar line, “With great power must come great responsibility,” if not quite as felicitously phrased.

I am very pleased to see that my most recent speculations about the identities of Donal and the Templars’ treasure proved to be correct. Gaiman did not make his great reputation in comics through action-adventure stories, yet he superbly stages the battle with Doom and the escapes of the heroes he held prisoner. When origins for characters in 1602 seemed incomplete, I wondered if Gaiman planned to finish them: it seems he does, for in this issue Doom’s face suffers its inevitable scarring. Doom’s trap for the Thing was clever and very credible, not requiring any super-science at all. I even like Iceman’s point that he cannot fully utilize his powers without there being more moisture in the air to freeze, a scientific fact usually ignored in the X-books.

1602 is the only comic book I have been reviewing in this column issue by issue, and that is because each issue is such a pleasure to read, and offers so much to discuss. 1602 does not have great thematic depth, but is essentially a well told superhero genre story. Gaiman makes crafting such a tale look so easy, and yet, if it were, then why are stories of this level of excellence so rare in contemporary comics?

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

You might think that Kyle Baker’s Undercover Genie: The Irreverent Conjurings of an Illustrative Aladdin (from DC/Vertigo, edited by the redoubtable Steve Bunche) is another of his series of graphic novels. Instead, it’s a wonderfully witty and artistically dazzling anthology of caricatures, satiric illustrations, one-page strips, and even some short character-driven short stories, many originally published in venues where one is unused to finding the work of mainstream comic book artists: New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Esquire, and even The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

In his introduction Baker notes that comic book professionals claim that his work is “uncommercial.” He points out that he did most of the work in Undercover Genie in the 1990s, which other comics pros think of as “a ‘Golden Era,’ when books were selling in the millions and everyone was getting rich.” (Well, not everyone, as I know from personal experience, and the gravy train came to a sudden halt in the mid-1990s.)

“Throughout this ‘Golden Era’ I couldn’t get much work in comic books,” Baker recalls; unwilling to do “McFarlane ripoffs,” Baker says, “I couldn’t get a comic book published, except for a couple books I did for free. . . .” (I know what only being offered work for free is like, too.)

So, instead Baker did cartoons for markets other than the comic book industry: for advertising, magazines, and more, and “had to content myself with huge paychecks and an audience of millions.”

Well, I can certainly understand that, after having his work dismissed by the comic book industry, Baker gives in to the temptation to gloat. Considering the continuing high unemployment figures and the recent devastation in the comic book business, though, boasting about one’s wealth does seem a wee bit tasteless, though.

Baker attributes his success to doing what he says animation does, “continually updating styles and imitating the most successful current hits and trends,” whereas he claims comic books have remained “more or less stylistically unchanged for over a century.” Well, comic book art styles certainly change, and more quickly than ever (see the review of the Kurt Schaffenberger book below).

I think comparing Baker’s work to the typical contemporary superhero artist’s is really a proverbial case of apples and oranges. Baker is on target when he points out that “the primary subject matter” of comic books remains super heroes (in America, anyway). Unlike him, I don’t think the genre itself is dated; it has evolved with the times. But what I think really makes Baker stand out in American comic books is that he is working in an area that most other comic book artists and writers ignore: humor.

The more I think about that, the stranger it seems: how can there be so few funny works being produced in the “funny book” medium? While the comic strip narrowed its scope in recent decades, so that the field is dominated by humor strips and there are relatively few adventure or dramatic strips, the opposite happened in American comic books, so that there are few humor books and the vast majority of books, either “mainstream” or alternative, deal in adventure or other forms of dramatic narrative. And yet the American public has always seemed to prefer humorous material in the cartoon form. How different would the American comic business be if it had produced a far greater range of comedy material over the years than just MAD and various ripoffs thereof? (A brief digression: I was delighted to see a recent issue of MAD with parody superheroes designed by such notables as Frank Miller and John Byrne.)

So Undercover Genie is a wonderful compendium of the kind of things that Baker does well and most other comic book artists can’t do: caricatures of celebrities and comedic styles of cartooning.

Most importantly, Baker is an insightful satirical writer, who in this collection addresses a range of subjects with a subtlety and sense of irony that proves more intelligently penetrating than the broad, obvious approach of MAD-style humor comics. Baker deals perceptively with self-delusion in romance, whether born of sexual insecurity or macho arrogance; superficial notions of coolness that turn out to be no more than shallow, conformist group-think; and self-destructive, even suicidal modes of thought.

Baker also observes how two people can talk to ““ and past ““ one another, neither quite able to see the other person’s viewpoint. My favorite story in the collection is his account of his last conversation with the late Jack Abel, longtime comics inker whom I knew slightly myself. Baker sympathetically tries to cheer Abel up by telling him how well he’s recovered from a stroke; Abel in response tries to convey his anger over actually having gone through such a horrific experience and still suffering ill effects. Neither can bring the other over to his point of view, yet each still reaches out to the other as a friend. This story demonstrates that Baker is a satirist but no cynic: he can be touching, as well.

But as much as I liked Undercover Genie, Baker’s work on DC’s new Plastic Man #1 didn’t work for me at all. Then again, I don’t think anyone’s gotten Plastic Man right since DC acquired the rights to the character. In fact, DC’s recent Plastic Man 80-Page Giant #1, which reprints Plastic Man stories from the 1940s into the 1970s, demonstrates exactly that point, as well as what seems the nearly ubiquitous difficulties that superhero writers and artists seem to have in doing comedy.

I think the problem lies in violating some basic principles of comedy. First there’s the method of pairing the comedian with a straight man (using the latter term in a non-sexual sense, I suppose I should add). In Federico Fellini’s movie The Clowns he divides clowns into the “white clowns,” who officiously and pompously embody authority, and the prankster clowns who rebel against propriety and undercut their seriousness. Then there’s a rule that one often hears or reads in interviews with directors and actors: don’t play comedy as if your character knows that he or she is funny; just perform the part as if you believe in the seriousness of what you’re doing, and the dialogue and situations will come off as funny.

In Baker’s Plastic Man #1 virtually everyone is drawn in a heavily caricatured manner all the time; it is a relief when, at moments, Plastic Man resembles a real human being. There’s no sense of reality or seriousness for the humor to react against.

The artwork for the 1960s and 1970s stories in the Plastic Man Giant achieves more of an even balance between realism and comedic exaggeration: the Gil Kane artwork for the 1966 story is especially handsome. But the problem is that everyone in these stories acts silly, from Plastic Man himself to absurd villains like “Dr. Dome.” (One might think that Dr. Dome would be written and drawn as a parody of Marvel’s Dr. Doom, but no. Moreover, Dr. Dome has an ally named “Professor X,” and yet there are no X-Men jokes! In contrast, E. Nelson Bridwell’s wonderful 1960s comedy series The Inferior Five did not shy away from satirizing those new upstart superheroes at Marvel.) Not one of the characters in these two stories has a personality with any recognizable reality to it.

Now, the original Plastic Man stories of the Golden Age, written and drawn by the late Jack Cole, are now acknowledged classics. DC has published Archive editions collecting Cole Plastic Man stories, and Art Spiegelman wrote an essay on the subject for The New Yorker that he later expanded into a book, Jack Cole and Plastic Man, published by Chronicle Books. (Yes, DC thinks highly of Cole’s work now, but the part of Spiegelman’s article that most struck me was his account of how Cole went to DC looking for work in the 1950s and was shown the door. As noted elsewhere in this column, this sort of thing happens over and over and over.) How did Cole make the Plastic Man concept work when so many other people attempting to follow in his footsteps haven’t?

The Plastic Man giant reprints the 1940s stories in which Cole introduced Plastic Man and his sidekick, Woozy Winks, and they both get the balance between seriousness and comedy right. In Cole’s origin for Plastic Man (from Police Comics #1 in 1941), the hero starts out as a hardened criminal named Eel O’Brian. During a robbery at a chemical works, O’Brian is shot and acid from a vat gets into his wound. (Seems something like the Joker’s origin,. doesn’t it?) O’Bria n is abandoned by his criminal partners, all fair-weather friends, staggers into the countryside, and collapses. His symbolic death is followed by a symbolic resurrection: he awakes in the sunlit mountain retreat of a community of monks.

Significantly, O’Brian initially thinks he is in heaven. O’Brian is astonished, grateful and moved that the monks have saved his life: he makes it clear that he had turned to crime because he had lost faith in mankind since he was orphaned as a child. (As we have seen, even his criminal cohorts betrayed him.) Discovering that the acid has somehow transformed him, giving him stretching powers, O’Brian decides to use them to atone for his past by fighting crime.

Now, since Cole had to fit his entire origin story into merely six pages, O’Brian’s change of heart seems to happen absurdly quickly by today’s storytelling standards. Indeed, Baker pokes some fun at it in his retelling. A 1980s Plastic Man revival ignored the monks and instead had O’Brian amorally flip a coin to decide whether or not to turn hero (a gimmick borrowed from Woozy Winks’ origin). However, Cole’s origin has a strong, recognizable emotional reality to it, giving O’Brian a credible personality.

As Plastic Man, O’Brian then goes after his former criminal partners, employing an array of surreal stretching and shapechanging stunts. But Plastic Man is serious about capturing these crooks, and the crooks are not fools but genuinely dangerous menaces. It makes it all the funnier and more rewarding to see serious adversaries being tripped up by Plastic Man’s tricks. (DC’s Silver Age character, the Elongated Man, was clearly inspired by Plastic Man. Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino’s Elongated Man backup series in Detective Comics was a serious detective series with touches of whimsy, whereas Cole’s Plastic Man tales are comedies. But Fox and Infantino clearly understood the dynamic of having their stretchable sleuth using his powers in amusing ways against serious criminals who did not “get” the joke.)

In Cole’s first Woozy Winks story (from Police Comics #13 in 1942), he draws Woozy with considerable comedic exaggeration. (The other people in the story are drawn relatively realistically.) But though Woozy looks like a clown, he does not act like one. His facial expression rarely changes, and when it does so, only minimally. He takes most things in stride, and even seems only mildly surprised on discovering he has magically acquired virtual invulnerability. It is Woozy who Cole has flip the coin to decide whether he will use his powers for good or bad, and this moral indifference seems to fit Woozy’s blase attitude towards life. (Woozy picks crime, though he never forfeits audience sympathy by actually harming anyone.) In this story Woozy reminds me of Tex Avery’s Droopy: in both characters’ cases, humor arises from the disparity between the unusual, extreme events of the story and the character’s understated reactions to them. Woozy causes giant hailstones to fall, squashing Plastic Man accordion-style, like Wile E. Coyote hit by a boulder. But despite the absurdity of this, Plastic Man and Woozy react to it seriously: Plastic Man, unhurt, is astonished, and Woozy, taking everything in stride, walks off whistling. Actually, Woozy also resembles Buster Keaton in his nearly imperturbable acceptance of whatever strange situation occurs. There’s a “serious” criminal in the story, too: a crime boss who tries to have a black panther kill Plastic Man. There is a comedic denouement, in which Plastic Man finally breaks down Woozy’s unemotional facade by reminding him of his mother: this is funny, but it also humanizes Woozy. And I like Plastic Man’s quiet amusement when he realizes that he and Woozy are going to be partners in crimefighting.

In these two stories Plastic Man and Woozy have distinctive, appealing personalities, and while they do funny things, they never come off as foolish or silly. As a result, there’s genuine comedy here, and these stories remain funny sixty years after they first saw print.

WHEN ELSEWORLDS COLLIDE

Two of DC’s recent Elseworlds books have come my way: Superman: Last Stand on Krypton, written by Steve Gerber, one of the great comics writers of the 1970s generation, and illustrated by Doug Wheatley, and the first issue of JLA: Age of Wonder, written by Adisakde Tantimede (a new name to me), with breakdowns by P. Craig Russell (another important figure who came to comics in the ‘ 70s) and finishes by Galen Showman. Elseworlds reinvent familiar DC characters in different times, places and continuities. Ideally, in thus reconceptualizing these characters, the Elseworlds stories can illuminate aspects of the “mainstream” versions of these archetypal figures. Each of these two Elseworlds, by the way, deal with the Golden and Silver Age versions of the DC characters: indeed, the Superman book describes his powers as being as limited as they were circa 1938.
Superman: Last Stand on Krypton has a very good concept at its heart: a clash between the traditional Silver Age depiction of Krypton (a lush paradise and utopian society, whose destruction was tragic) and John Byrne’s radical revision of Krypton in his 1980s Man of Steel mini-series (as a sterile world with an utterly sexually repressed populace, a world, as Wendy Pini once put it, that deserved to die). In Gerber’s story Jor-El and Lara have recreated the idyllic Krypton that Byrne established existed in centuries past, but it takes the form of Krypton as it was depicted in the 1960s, even complete with “thought-beasts”; I’m surprised that Gerber didn’t include the Fire-Falls while he was at it. Jor-El has even cast aside the Byrne “bio-suit” to wear his traditional 1950s-1970s costume. Jor-El’s own father and other Kryptonian elders seek to put a stop to the Silver age Krypton he is recreating.

However, I found much of the execution of the story confusing. It seems that the Superman of this story is actually an Earthman who was rocketed to Krypton and somehow prevented its destruction. Now that would be interesting to see, but you won’t find it here. There are continuing references to an extensive backstory, necessary to understand what is going on, but which I wish I had seen dramatized in comics form. Moreover, characterization doesn’t go beyond either pure nobility (Superman, Jor-El, Lois, Lara) and insane villainy (Luthor). There was a good idea here, but I was still disappointed.

JLA: Age of Wonder also has an interesting idea at its core. In the 20th century (and, indeed, as Alan Moore shows us in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the 19th as well), the marvels of science supplanted magic in the popular imagination. The superhuman abilities of the American super hero are rooted in science fiction; hence, the superhero is a mythic figure of the age of technology. So, in Age of Wonder, Superman and other familiar heroes arise in the 1870s, the time of Thomas Edison and the Industrial Revolution.

But the creators of this book haven’t found an interesting means of creating dramatic situations out of this concept. The villain is Lex Luthor, combining the traditional concept linking Luthor to the misuse of advanced science with the 1980s revision of Luthor into the embodiment of malevolent corporate power. So in Age of Wonder Luthor builds weapons and treats his employees like dirt, and it comes off as a simple left-wing attack on big business. It is amusing to see Luthor turning into a double for Daddy Warbucks from Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, though.

A DIME’S WORTH OF DIFFERENCE

Prowling through Manhattan’s better comic book shops (like Jim Hanley’s Universe, Cosmic Comics and St. Mark’s Comics, to plug three), looking for potential review subjects, I will sometimes come across interesting items that have actually been out for a while, but are still on sale there. Mind you, sometimes I get a case of sticker shock: I recently paid nearly ten dollars for merely two comics! But one such item of interest was Batman: The 10 Cent Adventure; can’t argue with the price here. This one-shot, written by Greg Rucka, drawn by Rick Burchett, and inked by Klaus Janson, came out in 2002 as a prelude to the “Bruce Wayne, Murderer” story arc that is now long over.

Still, I found this one-shot still had much to offer. I especially liked the artwork on the cover and throughout the book, which superbly combined a contemporary feel with the look of the original Batman stories of the late 1930s: the shot of the early Batman on p. 4, recreating the pose and (to a large extent) costume from his first Detective cover was an especial treat.

I was also very pleased with Rucka’s take on Batman’s character. It is an important comics tradition to retell the key stories of a character’s mythos, notably the origins, as touchstones for the series through the decades. (Ideally, this should be done without unnecessary revisions.) Here Rucka emphasizes that Batman’s persona and mission were born out of tragedy, and in retracing the familiar steps of his origin (through evocations of Bill Finger, Bob Kane, and Frank Miller), dramatically conveys a sense of Batman’s sense of purpose.

The story is titled “The Fool’s Errand,” and Rucka puts his individual stamp on the retelling by pointing out that Batman can never truly succeed in his mission to wipe out crime, and that some might call him a “fool” for trying. Instead Rucka states that Batman knows he can never achieve utopia and makes him seem more heroic for continuing to strive towards his impossible goal. Most of the rest of the issue shows Batman in action during a typical night in Gotham, coming across, through his dealings in saving individuals, as a protector who is both stern and kind. This may have only cost a dime, but it proved far more satisfying than most of the three buck comics I come across.

OLD YELLOW

Having reviewed Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s Hulk: Gray #1 a while back, I also picked up the first issue of their earlier Daredevil: Yellow (titled after the color of Daredevil’s original costume). Like their Hulk series, Daredevil: Yellow is a retelling of the title character’s origin story, whose initial version was written by Stan Lee. I applaud the fact that in both series Loeb and Sale so effectively capture the spirit of the original Silver Age stories they are adapting.

Still, I had misgivings about Loeb’s rewriting scenes from Incredible Hulk #1: true, Loeb has a more sophisticated writing style than Stan Lee’s, but it didn’t seem right to replace Lee’s dialogue, as if there was nothing of merit in the original author’s “voice.” I liked Daredevil: Yellow #1 much better, since it manages to retell the familiar tale of Daredevil’s origin primarily through presenting new moments within established scenes, or entirely new scenes (like Matt and Foggy talking in their dorm room). I have no problem with devising new dialogue in these cases.

(I suppose the argument could be made that newer artists shouldn’t redraw the stories that were originally illustrated by giants like Hulk‘s Jack Kirby and Daredevil‘s Bill Everett, either. But this doesn’t bother me: there’s been a long tradition in comics of one artist drawing retellings of classic past stories or scenes. What would bother me in these cases would be outright swipes of the earlier artist’s work or changes to his character designs.)

Moreover, Daredevil: Yellow #1 actually undoes previous damage to Silver Age continuity. However well written and drawn it was, Frank Miller and John Romita, Jr.’s previous retelling of Daredevil’s origin, in their Daredevil: The Man Without Fear miniseries, substantially revised the plot of Lee and Bill Everett’s original version. In the original, Matt Murdock takes on the costumed identity of Daredevil in order to avenge his father’s death; in Miller’s reworking, Matt merely disguises himself in Dad’s old clothes (as if he were a ghost) to hunt down his father’s killer, and doesn’t concoct the Daredevil identity until months later. The Lee and Everett version has more primal power, tying the Daredevil identity directly to Matt’s loss of his father and his resulting need for justice. I am still surprised that Miller’s version was permitted back in the 1980s when Marvel was much more strict about maintaining continuity than it is in today’s more careless times. Loeb and Sale reestablished the Lee-Everett origin, and that is to their considerable credit.

EMOCLEW, ANNATAZ!

Another comic that has been out for a while, but which I only just found out about, is DC/Vertigo’s Zatanna: Everyday Magic. Written by Paul Dini and illustrated by Rick Mays, this one-shot stars the young sorceress who has become familiar to Vertigo readers in recent years from Books of Magic and other series, but who debuted in DC Comics four decades ago.

Zatanna’s roots actually go all the way back to Action Comics #1, which, along with the debut of Superman, also featured a less well known character, Zatara the Magician, created by Fred Guardineer. A crimefighting magician in top hat and tails, Zatara was obviously inspired by Lee Falk’s comic strip hero Mandrake the Magician. As Feiffer points out in his book, all of Guardineer’s magician characters, including Zatara, cast magic spells by speaking backwards. (Could Guardineer have been thinking of the way Leonardo da Vinci wrote in backwards handwriting?)

In the 1960s writer Gardner Fox and editor Julius Schwartz introduced Zatara’s daughter Zatanna, who also spoke magic spells backwards and wore a sexy variation on her father’s costume, substituting net stockings and high heels. Zatanna traveled from one Schwartz-edited series to another, searching for her missing father, and finally being happily reunited with him. (Little did she know that Alan Moore would subsequently kill Zatara off for no good reason in Swamp Thing in the 1980s.)

Zatanna was a favorite of various comics fans-turned-pros (myself included), and it was no surprise that writers after Fox used her. But, for years there was this attitude at DC that Zatanna would be a good, workable character if only (a) they got rid of the top hat, tails and fishnets and gave her a superhero-style costume, and (b) they got rid of all that backwards talk. Unfortunately, these were the very factors that made Zatanna appealing. It wasn’t simply a matter of a specific costume and verbal gimmick, but what they implied about the character: a sexiness, a sense of whimsy, a showman’s sense of style, and a willingness to follow her father’s path into what traditionally used to be the male realm of action.

Luckily, oftentimes in comics if one waits long enough (decades, sometimes), a character who has drifted away from the source of his or her appeal will revert to true form. Paul Dini has long been not only a Zatanna fan but one who understood what made the character work, and he introduced her, with the correct costume (without the fishnets, though: too hard to animate) and personality, into a memorable episode of the Batman animated series. He has long wanted to work with Zatanna in the comics as well, and Zatanna: Everyday Magic finally came out in 2003.

In Zatanna what would be fun to believe about real life magicians is actually true in her case: Zatanna is a stage magician who really does have magical powers. (One wonders what those DC stage magicians without real magic powers who live in the DC Universe think about this.) In his “On the Ledge” piece in Vertigo comics the month this book came out, Dini likens her to actors he knows: in his view Zatanna is first and foremost a performer, and that is the key to her personality. I suppose it’s as if, back in Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-Man had succeeded in staying in show business while being a costumed crimefighter on the side.

Rick Mayes’ artwork is pleasantly attuned to the light tone of the story, and Brian Bolland’s cover art is expectedly and very satisfactorily striking. But what is a post-1960s Zatanna story without quibbling over her outfit: I’m not pleased with the substitution of knee-high boots for high heels, leading Mayes to give her a literal bigfoot look. (My favorite Zatanna artwork is Carmine Infantino’s in her 1960s Elongated Man appearance in Detective Comics and Alex Ross’s in last year’s JLA: Secret Origins. A man of consummate good taste, Ross gets the costume exactly right.)

As if to remind us this is a Vertigo book, there’s gratuitous rough language (in which our heroine participates) and bare butts (not that of our heroine, who keeps her dignity). One of the bareassed cast members is Hellblazer antihero John Constantine, who Alan Moore established long ago in Swamp Thing as having been Zatanna’s former lover. I thought this reflected badly on her taste in men; on the Batman animated show, Zatanna was Bruce Wayne’s ex-girlfriend, which made more sense to me. But Constantine’s presence in this story works for me since he’s played as a comedic figure, whom a somewhat exasperated Zatanna has to bail out of trouble.

There’s a villain, naturally, and there are moments of serious combat and inner conflict. But Zatanna is not meant for grim and gritty stories, and this one-shot story is, in overall tone, a comedy (in the sense, not of a farce, but a story with plenty of wit and a happy denouement). I had not associated comedy with the usual ominous supernatural gloom of Vertigo, but now there are the comedic elements of Bill Willingham’s Fables and the sunniness of the humor of this Zatanna book. There is now more light to balance Vertigo’s dark, and that’s a welcome development indeed.

ARTIST GETS BOOK!

In its ongoing and commendable work in chronicling the achievements of important comic book creators of the past, TwoMorrows Publishing recently released Hero Gets Girl! The Life and Art of Kurt Schaffenberger by Mark Voger. Who is Kurt Schaffenberger? It seems he is not well enough known even by some people who should know. In the book Voger writes, “Kurt once visited the National Cartoonist Society’s museum, then in Connecticut, and found original Captain Marvel artwork on exhibit labeled ‘by C.C. Beck.’ ‘I looked at it,’ Kurt told me, ‘and it was my own stuff!'” How interesting. Voger is referring to the Museum of Cartoon Art, which I visited many times before it moved to Florida, and I noticed the mislabeling, too, and even pointed it out to a member of the curatorial staff. I even explained how it was easy to distinguish Beck’s flat figures from Schaffenberger’s, which were more rounded and three-dimensional, with a clear sense of volume. Other comics pros who were with me backed me up. And nothing was done about it. It must be odd for an artist to have his achievements honored in a museum and then credited to someone else. (It must be somewhat like my reaction when seeing the first documentary I worked on ““ no, not Sex, Lies and Superheroes ““ and discovering that my name had been misspelled in the credits!)

In fact, Kurt Schaffenberger was one of the most distinctive and memorable artists of DC’s Silver Age. I doubt there are many Baby Boomers who were comics fans in their youth who do not have fond memories of Schaffenberger’s work on the Superman books, most of all Lois Lane’s own regular comic book. There were no credits in most DC books back then, but Schaffenberger’s style was unmistakable: the beauty of his women and the handsomeness of his men; the three-dimensional realism he gave the figures he drew; his range and sensitivity in depicting emotions, so appropriate to Lois’s comics. Lois’s stories were often ludicrous by today’s standards, but Schaffenberger grounded them in pictorial and emotional reality. He wasn’t on the same level of achievement as the Silver Age artists that Arlen Schumer deals with in his new book (reviewed in last week’s column), but Schaffenberger was still one of DC’s leading artistic craftsmen. Schumer devotes a spread to showing how Neal Adams depicts various emotions, and I found it a disappointment; Voger devotes a page to Schaffenberger’s subtle and varied depictions of the many moods of Lois Lane, successfully demonstrating Schaffenberger’s prowess at characterization.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Schaffenberger had worked on Fawcett’s Captain Marvel titles. DC started publishing new Captain Marvel stories under the title Shazam! in the 1970s, and after the character’s co-creator C.C. Beck left the series in a huff, Schaffenberger took over as its artist. Unlike Beck’s work, which still had a nostalgic charm even for readers too young to have been around in the 1940s, Schaffenberger’s art style had evolved with the times. His work on DC’s Shazam was appropriately good-humored, handsome as always (with my favorite depictions of Mary Marvel), better than Beck in handling the action sequences, and combined a nostalgic feel with a look that was just modern enough.

Recently, I had the pleasure of seeing, in person, the original art for a Schaffenberger cover, depicting a typically silly Lois Lane plot, but with the simplicity, clarity and attractiveness so characteristic of his work. Voger’s book is filled with reproductions of Schaffenberger’s work, showcasing these and more of his artistic virtues.

Unfortunately, as Voger’s book also shows, comics are a business as well as an artform, and as trends and fashions in pop culture change, even important artists can get left behind. Twice we get the story of how, once DC decided to have John Byrne and others reboot Superman in the mid-1980s, longtime Superman artists Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger and various others who worked on the Superman series, were called into the DC offices and told they wouldn’t be working on the character anymore. They were all promised they would get other work to do, but in actuality they did not get much. So, Schaffenberger and Swan, after decades of being two of DC’s leading artists, were abruptly (curtly?) out of favor. Their decades of loyalty and achievement ultimately counted for nothing. This is a familiar story that unfortunately happens over and over. (You will see it again in my forthcoming columns about Looney Tunes: The Golden Collection and the paperback collections of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World series.)

In large part the fall of Schaffenberger and Swan was due to changing times, a changing audience, and changing tastes. As Alex Ross says in the book, Schaffenberger “was the stylistic holdover from a simpler, more carefree, child-driven era of comics into a very adult era of comics.” The children who had loved Captain Marvel in the 1940s and 1950s and the girls who read Lois Lane in the 1950s and 1960s had been supplanted by an older, mostly male comics readership. The new audience wanted to see the more dynamic, propulsive kind of action that Jack Kirby and others drew at Marvel. Swan and Schaffenberger could each handle darkness and even tragedy in their work: think of Swan’s “The Death of Superman” and Schaffenberger’s “The Three Wives of Superman,” both from the Silver Age. But their styles were basically sunny and optimistic, less suited for the angst-ridden heroes of a new generation. And, indeed, if the audience had not grown older and more sophisticated, the American comic book would not have made the progress as an artistic medium that it has achieved over the last four decades. It’s sad to see in a few interviews with older comics professionals in this book that they just cannot see anything good about contemporary comics. Understandably dismayed that art and storytelling styles to which they devoted their careers have fallen from favor, they’re as blind to the virtues of today’s comics as many younger people in the business would be to the virtues of the comics of earlier generations. This is a potential peril for anyone in a creative field: to allow one’s taste to freeze and become unable to appreciate what is good about new developments in one’s field.

But it’s just as bad for younger people in a creative field not to develop an appreciation of the classic work in their medium’s past. What I also find sad is that the tastes and the demographics of the comics-buying audience are nonetheless so narrow. If only there still were plenty of comics for pre-teens and early teens. If only there were more young girls’ comics like the Lois Lane and Supergirl books of the 1950s through the 1970s, albeit more enlightened on women’s role in society. The best Captain Marvel stories of the Golden Age are imaginative enterainments for children with a knowing, clever whimsy that adults can appreciate; in short, they were like the intelligent children’s comics I reviewed in the Little Lit collection. If only there was a sufficient audience in the comics marketplace for books like the best of Captain Marvel. (Come to think of it, I could easily imagine Dini and Schaffenberger m collaborating on a Zatanna book, were the artist still with us.)

In other words, I wish that there was so much variety in American comics and in the audience for comics, that someone like Schaffenberger would never have been lacking for work. I wish there had always been plenty of children’s adventure comics and romance comics and just plain humor comics that would have suited his talents. But at least we now have the new Hero Gets Girl! book to provide him the recognition and honor he deserves.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson