PERSONA-TO-PERSONA CALLINGS

 In ONCE AND FUTURE STATURE (AND CHARISMA), published on 7-27-22 I made the following inexact statement: 

Lee had Foswell return to crime as an ally to the newly minted Kingpin-- only to be killed by the Kingpin's thugs for trying to protect Jameson. This might be deemed a demi-crossover of the charismatic kind, since Foswell had some escalation-charisma even as a support-figure, and the Kingpin had none until he appeared often enough to become a familiar figure.

I added a note to the blogpost to the effect that I would trash this opinion in another essay, and this is it.

The problem with my previous formulation is related to my ongoing theory of personas, given its final form in 2012's DIAL D FOR DEMIHERO PART 1. I feel as if I've implied, though never stated outright, this necessary rule:

"When dealing with icons who originate within the cosmos of a given series, there can be no charisma-crossovers except between icons belonging to the same persona."

An example: within the Batman series, Commissioner Gordon and the Joker have existed almost the same number of years, and have frequently appeared in the same stories. Both characters are Subordinate Icons to Batman, but there's no charisma-crossover between the two Subs as there is when the Joker appears in a story alongside another villain, such as the Penguin or Two-Face.

 

To return to the Spider-Man cosmos once more, Fred Foswell may have started out as a super-villain, but he spends the majority of his career as a demihero in the Lee-Ditko stories, wherein he's reformed and become a crusading reporter, generally being of aid to Spider-Man or the police but only with the limited actions of a demihero. Lee and Romita change him back to a villain who conspires with the Kingpin, probably because neither creator cared anything about Foswell and simply wanted to be rid of him. Nevertheless, Foswell's gratitude toward J. Jonah Jameson causes him to betray the Kingpin to save Jameson, which means that his brief conversion back to villainy was less than consequential in summing up his character arc. So Foswell dies, according to my system, a demihero.

So by my newly stated rule, Foswell might in theory interact with another demihero in the SPIDER-MAN cosmos, and that might be a charisma-crossover. Nevertheless, such a crossover would have to have something unusual about it, rather than just Fred Foswell bumping into Betty Brant or Jonah Jameson in the news room. For that matter, Foswell bumping into any of Peter Parker's college-chums-- which I don't believe ever happened-- would also prove inadequate to sustain any charisma. Now, if Stan Lee had written a bizarre story in which Fred Foswell was revealed to be the real father of Flash Thompson, then THAT might be a charisma-crossover, but even then it would be largely because the two characters had spent a long time in the Spider-cosmos acting independently of one another. 

In some of my earliest writings on crossovers, I distinguished between "static crossovers" and "dynamic crossovers." I won't repeat those particular observations, but the salient aspect of that theory was that the static crossovers were those that were fairly regularized, like Donald Duck appearing in Uncle Scrooge's feature, while dynamic crossovers were those that spotlighted a more unusual meeting, say, of Spider-Man and Daredevil. I would now tend to state that, in contrast to the crossovers of the other three persona-types-- of heroes, villains, or monsters-- demiheroes only sustain crossovers of a dynamic kind, because most of them function as support-characters. Returning to the Batman cosmos, a story in which Alfred simply met police detective Harvey Bullock would not be a dynamic crossover. But if the two of them joined forces to accomplish some mission, as the characters did in an episode of "Gotham," I would consider that a charisma-crossover. This principle builds on what I said here about viewing the meeting of two URUSEI YATSURA support-types as a charisma-crossover, because they immediately challenge one another.

Now crossovers of demiheroes from different universes are a different matter, since those are dynamic by definition. On my blog OUROBOROS DREAMS I devoted a post to a multi-demihero crossover, a TV-cartoon entitled POPEYE MEETS THE MAN WHO HATED LAUGHTER. Although the humorous hero Popeye is the star of the show, he's conned into bringing together a few dozen characters from funny comic strips, all under the aegis of King Features Syndicate, and including both famous types like Blondie and Dagwood and near-forgotten types like Snuffy Smith. Some "serious" heroes are mixed in as well, but almost all of the crossover-characters are of the demiheroic persona.

Similarly, there's no problem crossing over demiheroes with other persona who originate in separate conceptual universes. When DC Comics finally brought back their late sixties character Brother Power, who belongs to the "monster" persona, they did so in 1989's SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5. But the Brother didn't cross paths with the monster-protagonist of the feature, but with two of Swamp Thing's support-characters, Abby Arcane and Chester Williams. A crossover with Swamp Thing would have been a stature-crossover, but Brother Power meeting Swamp Thing's friends only works on the level of cosmic charisma.

 

MYTHCOMICS: "A THING IS BORN" ( BROTHER POWER #1-2, 1968)

What a difference an issue makes.

Back in February, I devoted two essays-- here and here-- to stories in which DC raconteurs revived Joe Simon's 1968 character "Brother Power the Geek." I preceded these formal analyses with the essay SIMON SESSION, which provided an informal overview of Simon's post-Kirby career. I stated that I'd only read the first of BROTHER POWER's two issues, and that, though I found "a few interesting mythopoeic touches" in the first issue, I didn't think I was missing much in not having read the second one.

However, I recently acquired the second and last issue of BROTHER POWER, and upon giving both issues a more intensive reading, I've decided that, inconclusive though the story is, it sustains enough complication to rank as a mythically satisfying story-arc. In a similar vein, I rated Wally Wood's THE KING OF THE WORLD as a mythcomic, even though the second part of Wood's serial didn't provide the same quality.

Nothing can be said about Simon's "Geek-out" project without stating that it was one of various attempts by DC Comics to court the so-called "youth culture" of the late Silver Age. Earlier I summed up these attempts by saying, 'I did not read BROTHER POWER back in the day, and what little I initially heard about it made it sound like another misguided attempt by way-over-30 comics-makers to appeal to young readers by trying to sound “hip.”'

There's no question that Joe Simon was a middle-aged man at the time he created Brother Power, and moreover, since he identified himself as a Republican, it might seem incongruous for him to attempt a heartfelt evocation of the hippie ethos. Indeed, the cover-copy for issue #1 tries to suggest that the story will give the readers a titillating look at the "dangers in hippie-land." This ballyhoo was an outright lie, but it sort of fits the serial's often carnivalesque mood. Though I've never read any of the issues of SICK that Simon edited during the 1960s, I'd hypothesize that by 1968 he'd already touched on counterculture topics in his "magazine of sick humor," and that in BROTHER POWER he was trying to meld his taste for such humor with the requirements of a superhero title.  At the same time, BROTHER POWER labored under a lot of restrictions, for the Comics Code couldn't allow depictions of the sex and drugs associated with the hippie movement. Yet it seems unlikely that Simon would have taken advantage of the freedom of the "underground comics movement" had he been given it. Indeed, whereas most DC raconteurs merely pasted a few "hip" phrases or motifs over completely traditional stories, Simon's GEEK is interesting in that he understood at least a few aspects of the counterculture, but chose, for the most part, to subvert that ethos with his own conservative outlook.

Here's a bullet-point breakdown of events in the two issues, which I've conflated under the first chapter-heading in issue 1, "A Thing is Born:"

(1) In 1968 San Francisco, a small community of "peace and love" hippies find themselves continually bullied by a gang of nasty bikers. (Cops, who probably persecuted hippies far more than bikers, are at most an incidental threat in "Thing.") The battered longhairs retreat to an abandoned tailor shop-- specifically abandoned because of the hippies' "unkempt" presence-- and try to clean their blood-soiled garments. One hippie, Brother Max. has soaked his clothes so much that he's afraid they'll shrink, so he puts them on a life-size tailor's dummy. Then, for the next three seasons, all of the hippies apparently forget about both the clothes and the dummy, which just sits in the tailor shop, soaking up various substances-- blood, dust, rain and machine oil. (This bit of forgetfulness, as well as some of the other things the youths do, might suggest that there was indeed some drug-consumption going on, and that Simon just didn't show it.) Once three seasons have gone by, a providential lightning bolt strikes the dummy, and brings it to life. 

Moments later, the bikers conveniently decide-- a whole nine months later-- to take over the hippies' "pad." Brother Power, converted by the lightning into a super-strong golem (my term), routs the mean motorcyclists. The hippies, who call one another "brother" (no sisters are around at the time), dub the living dummy "Brother Power." One of the less generous youths also calls him a "geek," though this was probably meant to follow from an earlier line in which a biker calls the dummy a "freak." But the connection was lost when editors forbade Simon from using the term "freak" for his protagonist, forcing the less logical substitution of "geek."

(2) Brother Power, initially mute, learns to talk, and though he's not very attractive at the start, the hippies accept him as one of their own. However, the Geek's presence amid the hippies attracts the attention of a group of evil circus-people, who run "the Psychedelic Circus."

The Circus-People kidnap Power so that they can exhibit him in a full-fledged freakshow. The addled hippies want Power back, but somehow get sidetracked when they decide that their enemies, the bikers, must be the real culprits behind the kidnapping. This inspires one of the daffier scenes in the story, in which the hippies dress up in superhero costumes and confront the bikers with a "comic book hero happening." Of course the bikers again beat up the hippies, after which they protest that they're innocent of this particular crime. Only by pure chance do two hippies stumble across the current location of the Psychedelic Circus. Then, by dint of uncharacteristic bravery, they save Brother Power from a freakshow that looks strongly influenced by the artwork of "Big Daddy' Roth.

(3) Cindy, the first hippie-girl with an actual name-- as well as the only female character of consequence--  stitches the somewhat damaged dummy together, and also pretties him up a little. This inspires romantic inclinations in Power. However, instead of trying for some of that "free love," Brother Power seeks to impress his lady-love the old-fashioned way: by Getting Ahead in Life. With some support from his fellow freaks, Power runs for president, on a platform of "love, peace... flower power." Unfortunately, the only thing the campaign accomplishes is that it makes the Circus-People aware of Power's whereabouts. The poor losers trump up charges against Power and set the cops on his tail. The distressed dummy goes on the run, and then does a "King Kong" off the Golden Gate Bridge, disappearing into the bay-- for the time being.

(4) Issue #2 picks up with Power, temporarily "dead" from his immersion, being fished from the bay and set up in what seems a patently Christ-like posture. Power's rescuers are a bunch of "urchins" called "the Clinkers," who look somewhat like a gang from a 1950s "jay-dee" film. The Clinkers, like the hippies before them, are oppressed by another group of goofballs: "the Berlin Airplanes," young guys who dress like World War One fighter-pilots and even pilot their own glider. During an Airplane-attack, Power comes back to life and trounces the intruders with a none-too-peaceful outburst of violence. However, despite being made part of the Clinker community, the dummy doesn't care for their do-nothing ways any more than he did for the hippies' inactivity. Power seeks employment at a grocery store, sounding like a character out of Horatio Alger when he states that he doesn't "mind starting at the bottom." Predictably, he doesn't remain in the position of a simple grocery stock-boy for long. 

(5) Diligence at the grocery-store leads Power to a new job at a plant that makes missiles for space exploration, but, as will later be established, has no connection with munitions. At the same time that the Geek goes to work on the factory's assembly-line, the owners are worried that they may soon go bankrupt if they don't solve their current production problems. They've opted to bring in a supposed mathematical genius, Lord Sliderule, who dresses in Renaissance clothes and is accompanied by tumbling dwarfs (!)  Sliderule only accepts the job so that he can eventually sell the factory's secrets to foreign powers, but before he can even make a phony pronouncement, Brother Power figures out a solution to the problem. Power is promoted to plant foreman but he naively allows the dethroned Sliderule and his flunkies to remain employed on the assembly-line.

(6) Though he's forbidden from using sex or drugs, Simon does manage to work in a hippie-protest. Power's old longhaired chums show up, under the impression that the factory is making missiles for wartime use. (This is as close as the stories dare come to a countercultural take on the conflict in Vietnam.) Power soon sets them straight, and even gets them to give up their lotus-eater lives and become productive citizens.

However, vengeful Sliderule sabotages a test-missile and makes it look like the Geek done it. It comes out that Power is still wanted from last issue, so the Governor of California-- an unnamed but very recognizable Ronald Reagan-- calls for Power's arrest. Again the misunderstood mannequin flees, this time hiding in one of the factory's missiles. Sliderule sets off the missile, and Brother Power is sent into orbit. The villains are arrested, and the story ends as the hippies wonder if they'll ever see their Geek again.

It's probably just as well that Simon never let the completed third issue be seen, for the two-issue arc, though very episodic, probably represents everything Simon had to say about the counterculture. I don't for a moment think that he was as personally fascinated with the subject as he claims in a promotional text-piece. I believe he saw, as much as any artist of the time could, that the counterculture represented a potential shift in values. As a professional creator, he wanted to see if he could make a living from his take on it-- even though, as I said, he frequently undercuts most of the most cherished images of the ethos. His hippies are good-hearted but generally foolish, and even their rejection of what Simon calls the "grey flannel, split-level world" is cast aside when their charismatic leader convinces them of the value of good hard work. Brother Power talks a lot about peace, but both of his stories display roughly the same amount of fighting as a Captain America tale. Only in one area does Simon hold something in common with the hippie ethos. A lot of male hippies were accused of being no less chauvinistic than the majority culture, and in the short-lived world of Brother Power, females exist only as sources of "romantic inspiration"-- making quite a marked contrast to the gynocentric bias of Rachel Pollak's above-mentioned GEEK reboot.

In closing I should address Simon's claim to sole authorship. He receives sole credit on the title-pages of both issues, but it was eventually revealed that the pencils were actually provided by Al Bare, a Golden Age comics-artist who had worked with Simon at SICK MAGAZINE. However, since Simon made assorted claims about having stage-managed many of the artists with whom he worked-- including Jack Kirby-- it doesn't seem unlikely that Bare may have worked from breakdowns or even just thumbnails provided by Simon, so that in essence Bare may have been drawing things exactly as Simon wanted them, even right down to the "Big Daddy" Roth visual quote. Originally I didn't care for Bare's mix of frivolity and sombre freakishness. However, now I find that at times the art communicates a lyrical charm, one not entirely at odds with the counterculture's emphasis on visual intensity. 

MYTHCOMICS: THE GEEK #1 ("CORRUPTION OF THE INNOCENT," 1993)

Two notes to start. First, I’ve used the cover-title “Corruption of the Innocent”to denote the story of GEEK #1, because the title on the credits-page inside, “Homelands of the Dolls” is markedly inferior and not representative of the mythcomic’s theme. Second, when speaking of authorship I choose to  emphasize Rachel Pollack since the narrative seems more typical of her creative tendencies than those of artist Michael Allred—though of course I have no personal knowledge as to who contributed what precise elements.

Neither the original BROTHER POWER comic nor Neil Gaiman’s mini-revival of the character were that notable, mythically or otherwise. Thus it’s a small miracle that “Corruption”—apparently never intended to be anything but a one-shot—is as good as it is. And given that Pollack emphasized transgender concerns in her DOOM PATROL work, I think it likely that she originated the core symbolism of this work.

As noted in my review of SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5, writer Neil Gaiman simply tosses out the notion of “doll elementals” without any elaborations. In essence, he was reinventing Joe Simon’s Brother Power along the same lines that Alan Moore reinvented the Wein-Wrightson Swamp Thing: giving a character with a minimal origin-story a connection to deeper mystical forces. In the case of Swamp Thing, these forces became a part of the firmament of the DC Universe. It’s probably just as well that the “doll world” of Gaiman never became a regular feature of that universe, but it works quite well as a one-off concept, sort of DC’s version of the “Isle of Misfit Toys.”

Here as in certain other reviews in this series, the plot proves secondary to a series of symbolic encounters between the main character and his opponents. In this case, the naive living dummy Brother Power endures a series of ordeals by his chief enemy, Doctor Abuse. Brother Power, as in his earlier appearances, possesses a set of bizarre powers but has no aggressive will and usually seeks to flee rather than fight. In a manner analogous to the way Power’s old hippie-friends sought to run the dummy for president, Doctor Abuse stage-manages the dummy to become (a) a literal carnival-geek, (b) a corrupt businessman versed in junk bonds and insider trading, and (c) a modern member of the American Nazi Party. Invariably someone addresses Power as a “geek,” which enrages him, though not enough to incite him to real violence. In most of these situations, Simon’s original epithet  “freak” might have been more appropriate, though there’s something to be said for seeing a DC Comics character enact the traditional act of the carnival-geek: that of biting off a chicken’s head.

Though Brother Power has the general appearance of a man, only Doctor Abuse possesses the will to aggression so dominantly associated with the male of the species. In fact, good and evil here are fairly well divided in terms of gender, for on the opposing side battling for Power’s soul is his sole female friend, Cindy. Though she was an idealistic hippie twenty years previous, in the intervening years Cindy became a prostitute, wise in the ways of exploitative males. At the same time, she participates in a women’s goddess-worship ritual designed to sanctify her femininity, with a group that goes by the ironic name “PMS” (for “Pack Menstrual Savages.”) She’s also aware that Doctor Abuse has been stalking her for some time, though when the villain’s plot is revealed, it appears that he’s been keeping watch on her purely for the purpose of using her against Brother Power—which isn’t possible until the Geek returns to Earth.

Pollack expands on Gaiman’s sketch of a “doll elemental world” by picturing a cosmos in which various manikin-like beings exist, most of which look like commercial creations: a Barbie, an action-figure, a trio of chocolate animals. In one panel, however, Pollack and Allred include what looks like a shamanistic painting, which by itself suggests a deeper symbolism: that of seeing dolls as magical representations of human beings.

Pollack’s scenario never comes back to the shaman, but she includes a fascinating leitmotif throughout the narrative: that of dolls being hung from trees and set on fire. Pollack does not explain the motif but it may be a reference to European “poppet magic,” in which witches cast spells upon dolls meant to be represent human subjects, and then completed the magic by hanging the poppets from tree-branches and setting the dolls on fire. It’s a motif in no way beholden to anything in either Gaiman’s “Brother Power” revival or in the companion tale “Shaggy God Stories,” though Gaiman does make reference to two famous figures, Odin and Christ, who hung aloft, respectively on a tree and on a tree-like structure.

Another possible influence is that Pollack, in addition to emulating the general scheme of the Alan Moore Parliament-of-Trees Project, may have borrowed the Eden-myth of "two trees" from Gaiman's "Shaggy God Stories," though with substantial alterations if so. The narratives asserts the “doll world” is centered upon a “tree of innocence.” In some long-gone era the tree “fell asleep” and inadvertently spawned a shadow-version of itself, a “tree of corruption.” This setup resembles a number of archaic myths that pair up a spirit of goodness with a dark sibling. But the idea that the “tree of innocence” creates dolls as vessels of purity and innocence is as close to being original as any mythic idea can be. In any case, once this cosmic scenario has been spun, the reader finally learns the villain’s plot. Doctor Abuse has been flinging temptations into Brother Power’s path in order to use him for an act of sympathetic magic, aimed at destroying the Tree of Innocence.

Despite the dummy’s general passivity, he does manage a good trick in the end, hoaxing the evildoer and calling upon the power of femininity to overthrow an evil that seems dominantly masculine. The story ends with a happy if quixotic ending. After Abuse has been deceived and perhaps defeated, Cindy is finally re-united with her life-size doll-man. The story ends with the image of her embracing the limp Brother Power as she exclaims, “I’m your friend forever!” There’s a minor mythic motif here as well, in that even today little girls are better known than little boys for bonding with dolls. It might be argued that Pollack’s Cindy embracing a world of “innocence” that shields her from the “corruption” implicit in adult sexuality. Happily, Pollack does not overplay the allegorical possibilities of the story, and so the short saga of Brother Power the Geek comes to an emotionally satisfying conclusion, which as of this writing no later writers have mucked up.

ONE NULL, ONE NEAR: SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5 (1989)

            

Since Neil Gaiman was never the regular writer on the SWAMP THING title, it may be that his stories for 1989’s SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5 were just fill-in works, or possibly audition-tales. Though I’ve labeled one story a “null-myth” and the other a “near myth,” both languish under the long shadow of Alan Moore’s tenure on the feature.

“Brothers” is the null-myth here: a good idea that never quite works, despite Neil Gaiman’s considerable talents. The living dummy known as Brother Power the Geek has remained out in space for roughly twenty years, only to suddenly crash to Earth. Brother Power not only survives, he has no understanding that any time has passed, and still speaks in hippie-talk. He has apparently gained a new power, though, in that he can now assemble new bodies for himself out of random junk, and expand said bodies to giant-size, so that he becomes an unwitting peril to the citizens of Tampa, Florida.

The “monster-menacing-city” structure of the story is strongly indebted to a two-part Alan Moore story in SWAMP THING #52-53, and Gaiman more or less admits the indebtedness by having two of Swamp Thing’s support-characters called in to consult on the matter of "The Flower-Child That Time Forgot." Swamp Thing himself is not present in either of the annual’s stories, due to events in the regular title. Still, Gaiman picks up on the character’s basic concept—at least as it was re-imagined by Moore, that of making the muck-monster into a plant-elemental—and declares that Brother Power was created by a process analogous to the one that created Swamp Thing. Abby Arcane, the Swamp Thing’s wife, receives an oracle that says Brother Power is “a doll god—a puppet elemental—like others before it.”

Gaiman does not choose to say more than this, however, and so the idea of what a “puppet elemental” might be is dropped. (Was Pinocchio one of the “Parliament of Puppets?”) Eventually the problem is solved when the other support-character, belated hippie Chester, gets Brother Power’s attention, talks with him a little, and then sends him on his way. Given that most of Gaiman’s observations on the generation of the Flower People are trite, it may be that the story’s main point was to bring Joe Simon’s most peculiar creation out of mothballs—though Gaiman does a decent job with his characterizations of Chester and Abby.

“Shaggy God Stories” might sound like a myth-nerd’s dream, though the tale fails to be more than the sum of its parts. The story focuses upon a character whom Moore adapted early in his run: Jason Woodrue, a super-villain so obsessed with plants that he mutated himself into a plant-human hybrid. Woodrue, more than a little crazy, wanders into the domain of the Parliament of Trees, the largely immobile plant-elementals who preceded Swamp Thing. For most of the tale, Woodrue meditates on the many ways in which trees and other plants have been intertwined with the lives of holy men and deities. He seeks out the Parliament, rambling about gods and trees, and finally reveals that, “I want to be a god too.” The representative of the Parliament gives Woodrue no satisfaction, though he gives the former super-villain a warning about a future danger. The deranged plant-man pays no attention and wanders away, and the story ends on the suggestion of a future menace, which eventually manifests in the Doug Wheeler SWAMP THING run.

Still, limited as the story’s scope is, it does toss out a few good myth-kernels, particularly at the opening, when Woodrue mediates on the “two trees” of the Bible’s Eden narrative. I find it particularly interesting that Gaiman has Woodrue harp on the existence of the “two trees” at the story’s  opening, because “two trees” also figure in the next and last major appearance (as of this writing) of Brother Power, the Geek.   

ADDENDA: On this forum a poster shared a part of a Gaiman interview from an online source that no longer seems extant. In the spirit of knowledge I share Gaiman's statement on the Annual here:

"I was going to bring [Woodrue] back as a villain. He was getting back to being Woodrue, the Rue of the Wood, and probably on a much bigger scale, a much nastier scale. It would have been fun, but again it didn't happen.
I probably would have brought back Black Orchid in there. I don't know, because as I said, it never got that far. Rick still had a few issues. I talked to Rick, we sort of co-plotted Rick's last few episodes, which never saw print."

SIMON SESSION

     

As I’m going to be devoting some essays to a Joe Simon creation—though not in a review per se—I decided to devote some space to Simon's career.

In this essay I argued that it’s hard to assess the authorship of anything Jack Kirby “wrote” in his two long-term collaborations with, respectively, Joe Simon and Stan Lee. But at least with Kirby, he was solely responsible for both art and script on a assortment of later works, and a critic can examine said works to garner some idea of Kirby’s creative tendencies. And though Lee never drew any of his comics-work, one can also gain some idea of his creative propensities from those works in which the artists largely followed his scripts without much personal input.

Following the dissolution of Joe Simon’s partnership with Kirby, though, almost nothing Simon authored has accrued a fan-base. I’ve argued that he may have provided “quality control” for Jack Kirby, whose wild creativity sometimes resulted in incoherent narratives. However, very little of the material Simon authored without Kirby shows even modest creativity.

I confess that I’ve no personal acquaintance with Simon’s work on SICK MAGAZINE in the 1960s—and I’ve the impression that few fans from the period paid close attention to what seemed like just another MAD imitator. The most one can say is that it must have had something going for it to have lasted as long as it did.

Considerably less successful was the superhero line Simon engineered for Harvey Comics in the mid-1960s. Most if not all of the features edited, and sometimes written, by Simon have a tedious, gimmicky quality to them. Some fans have speculated that the line only came out because someone at Harvey knew about ABC-TV’s impending adaptation of the Batman franchise. Most of the Harvey superheroes have a constipated 1950s look to them, and even the most formulaic of Jack Kirby’s DC work, during the actual 1950s, looks good by comparison.

Discounting the last collaboration of Simon and Kirby on DC’s 1970s SANDMAN title—which indirectly gave birth to the franchise associated with Neil Gaiman—only the two-issue wonder BROTHER POWER—THE GEEK seems to have earned a modest following in fandom.

I did not read BROTHER POWER back in the day, and what little I initially heard about it made it sound like another misguided attempt by way-over-30 comics-makers to appeal to young readers by trying to sound “hip.” Moreover, the covers of the two issues were both unusually dark and suggestive of horrific interiors. In actuality, the interior art, drawn by Simon’s SICK collaborator Al Bare, reflected more in the way of antic humor than of ghastly grue.

To this date, I have not read the second BROTHER POWER issue, and don’t have the first one close to hand. I recall a few interesting mythopoeic touches in the first issue, though. One is the protagonist’s origin. He—or rather, it-- starts out as a tailor’s dummy. A bolt of lightning brings the dummy to life in the tradition of the cinematic creation of the Frankenstein Monster, and upon gaining sentience the dummy acts much like the movie-monster: perpetually baffled by the customs and contrivances of humankind. The now-living dummy is adopted by a handful of lovably goofy hippies, who give him clothes and face-painting to make him one of them.

They also give him a name with a certain mythic resonance: Brother Power. Simon was certainly exposed to the catchphrase most often associated with hippie culture: that of “flower power.” The idea was slightly oxymoronic in that the hippies knew that flowers had no power as such: that they could only seduce people away from the paths of militancy and violence by inculcating a love of beauty and fellowship. Simon may have concocted the name “Brother Power” out of a partial understanding of this ideal, for the hippie-hero—never a superhero in the accepted sense of the word—tended to use his ill-defined powers mostly in a defensive manner.

Finally, in his initial outing Brother Power is called a “geek” by someone or other; hence the additional name in the comic book’s title. Originally Simon had wanted the character to be addressed as a “freak,” because he apparently realized that this was an early instance of insult-reclamation. Squares called hippies “freaks,” and the hippies reclaimed the epithet to connote their ingroup’s specialness, as seen in Gilbert Shelton’s FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS. The story goes that DC was afraid that the word “freak” would suggest the drug-culture to readers, even though drugs are not even referenced in the initial issue. Thus Simon was obliged to substitute the sound-alike “geek,” simply because it too could be used as a term of opprobrium. 

Simon completed a third issue of the comic book before the DC hierarchy shut the magazine down, but that issue remains inaccessible to most fans. The second issue ended with Brother Power being trapped inside a space-rocket and launched away from Earth by Ronald Reagan himself, who at the time had become a conservative icon during his stint as the governor of California.  

 And that is the point from which Neil Gaiman started, when he briefly brought the Geek back into the hallowed halls of DC.