MYTHCOMICS: "ENDS OF THE EARTH" (ALL-STAR BATMAN #6-9, 2017)

 The stories that endure? The "demons" that win? They're the ones that speak to who we want to be. Not the ones that scare us into being who we don't. They're true because we want them to be badly enough that we MAKE them true. -- Batman to Ra's Al Ghul, ENDS OF THE EARTH FINALE.  

A tagline on the back of the TPB reads, "This is not a Batman story. It's a villain story." It's a reprise of a line Ra's Al Ghul speaks to Batman, albeit in his Bruce Wayne guise, as part of a climactic dialogue between the two enemies. Yet it's not true, and I suspect writer Scott Snyder knew it wasn't true when he wrote the line. For roughly the last fifty years-- the period in which fans became the dominant writers of superhero comics-- an identity between the Dark Knight and his gallery of grotesques and arabesques has been irregularly suggested. The "old pros" of BATMAN's first thirty years probably would have found this imputation of identity too metaphysical, whether one was addressing the creator of Poison Ivy (Robert Kanigher), Mister Freeze (Dave Wood), or the Mad Hatter (Bill Finger). Denny O'Neil, one of the first of the fans to turn pro, possibly understood the identity-dynamic when he created Ra's. Yet Bill Finger seems to be the driving-force behind the dynamic-- Finger, who tapped the power of psychological obsession for heroes and villains to an extent not seen in earlier media like pulps and serials. I commented on this common element in my 2020 essay, THE BAT-BACHELOR THREAD.

Plot-wise, ENDS OF THE EARTH is in many respects a standard Bat-villain team-up. Ra's is trying once again to wipe out much of the Earth's population. He suborns the talents of Mister Freeze and The Mad Hatter. Batman interferes, this time with some assistance from Poison Ivy. Snyder injects some elements that are probably original to his take on the Dark Knight-- an armored adult partner named Duke (whom I found tedious), and some new iteration of the Blackhawks. But Snyder surely knew he was selling his particular take on four of the celebrated rogues, by delving into their obsessions as the hero seeks to take them down.

Mister Freeze is one of Snyder's best conceits, with the writer framing Victor Fries' apocalyptic nihilism as springing from a childhood reading of Robert Frost's "fire and ice" poem-- and thus not purely a consequence of his quest to restore the health of his cryogenically preserved wife. In the service of Ra's Al Ghul, Freeze has perfected world-killing spores in his Arctic sanctum-- and even though Batman knows that a squadron of The New Blackhawks plans to firebomb the frigid fiend's laboratory, the Knight is compelled to get there first. Perhaps Batman feels he must be sure of ending the threat up close and personal. Perhaps he still pities the demented scientist, despite his murderous project. Or--

--Maybe Batman just wants to vanquish the cool, cruel villain with his nemesis, that of "heat." I frankly don't know what the propensity of real bats to generate high levels of body heat has to do with Batman using his own anti-virus to destroy Freeze's spores. But it does give the villain the chance to imagine his apocalyptic world of icy stillness ending in a cataclysm of fire.

The hero's triumph is mitigated in Part Two, in that some of the spores escape destruction, and so Batman must seek the help of another old foe. This time the Princess of Plants is off in some wasteland, conducting her biological experiments for the love of pure science. Knowing that Ivy's feeling for humanity is strained at best, Batman still seeks to prune knowledge from his enemy-- while additionally, for some vague reason, the Blackhawks menace Ivy as well. Ivy does help Batman after a fashion, though she makes him listen to a lecture about a supposed true ancestor to the legendary Tree of Life. If Freeze looked forward to a still, cold world of the future, Ivy is by comparison a being who seeks truth in the imponderable world of life's pre-human origins.

But Ivy's aid only slows the fatal influence of Freeze's spores. Batman uses his detective skills to track down a corporation that helped Freeze in some unspecified way and finds himself in the Carrol-esque domain of The Mad Hatter. Freeze and Ivy might not see themselves as aspects of Batman's own psyche, but the Hatter is an enthusiastic advocate of solipsism. But there's only one fantasy to which Bruce Wayne is beholden to, and that's "the window moment," the moment when he saw a bat come into his window and beheld the metaphor to which he dedicated his life.

And so, the Hatter, despite his love of fantasy, provides the real-world clue that leads Batman to confront Ra's Al Ghul in America's capital. The hero doesn't seem to make much of how he found several of the Blackhawk agents working with Hatter, and for all the reader knows, Batman learned nothing from them. He knows only that their confederates are holding Duke prisoner and planning to execute him at a particular time-- as if the threat of Ra's to exterminate half the world isn't sufficient to motivate the crusader. There's a confusing scene indicating that Batman gets Catwoman to masquerade as Batman to draw the villain's fire, and overall this segment doesn't show Ra's at his best. Still, the dialogue describing their conflicting visions-- one demon-haunted, the other haunted by a vision of perfectibility-- makes the more baffling details less worrisome.         

And so ends ENDS OF THE EARTH. Snyder packed in far too many extraneous details to make ENDS an outstanding Bat-story. (For instance, the last section reveals that the Blackhawks weren't working for Ra's after all-- so why were they working with Hatter?) But I can appreciate that Snyder and his five artist-collaborators went the extra mile to spin a new story of the hero and the villains who define him.    
        

MYTHCOMICS: THE INHUMANS SAGA, FANTASTIC FOUR #44-48 (1965-66)

 

The title of FF #44"-- "Lo, There Shall Come an Ending"-- is more appropriate than its creators knew, for it can be seen as the ending of the First Phase of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR. The first phase of the title was marked by a blend of both science-fiction explorations and regular crimefighting adventures, usually done-in-one-issue stories. The Second Phase plays up the FF's science-fiction milieus, and some storylines last four or more issues. Further, the later issues of the First Phase initiated the first shakeup to the super-group's status quo, for in FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #3-- cover-dated October 1965 and taking place in between the continuity of FF #43 and #44-- as Reed Richards makes an "honest woman" of Sue Storm. Most comics-critics would probably agree that the period in 1965 marked the greatest creative phase for the two collaborators. As specified before, Lee probably allowed Kirby to pursue more ambitious storylines than they'd been attempting earlier, a creative period I believe ended with issues #67. After that, the issues 68-102 comprised the Third and Final Phase, in which the creators largely returned to a new status quo, mostly repeating previously seen menaces.

Because Lee may not have been exercising as much editorial input as before, INHUMANS SAGA has a more disjointed structure than most of the previous storylines. For reasons I'll enlarge upon shortly, I believe Kirby didn't have a consistent narrative worked out for his Big Reveal of Medusa's true nature. But Lee and Kirby are entirely on the same page so far as realizing how the Thing and the Torch react to the increase in the domesticity factor at the Baxter Building. Ben Grimm becomes maudlin about the chances of his enjoying any wedded bliss with Alicia, and Johnny Storm seems manifestly uncomfortable with his sister's "Suzie Homemaker" routine. For the first time within a FANTASTIC FOUR story, the Torch alludes to Doris Evans, his girlfriend from his own solo strip. Her character appeared irregularly in the TORCH feature from 1963 to 1965, but Johnny didn't have any romantic arc in the FF magazine, just a few minor dates with characters who never appeared again. Ben Grimm would never get any fulfillment of his romance with Alicia during the Lee-Kirby years. However, INHUMANS SAGA was clearly meant to shake up the previous status quo with respect to the younger Storm sibling.

Just as the Torch decides to hit the road and seek out his girlfriend, Medusa decides to hide herself in Johnny Storm's car. She never admits that she was coming to seek aid from her former enemies, though this would seem to be the only logical reason for her to be lurking around the Baxter Building. She puts a gun to Johnny's head and forces him to drive out of the city to get away from some menace named "Gorgon," presaged by the sight of his cloven hoof creating a earthquake under Johnny's car. Johnny and Medusa get away, but Gorgon pursues by stealing a helicopter from the FF. At no point does either the superhero or his comely captor make reference to the way Johnny let Medusa go free in issue #43, so clearly Lee had decided to let that plot-thread unravel. But connubial matters seem to be on Johnny's mind, for he "coincidentally" takes Medusa to the grounds of the very university where Reed proposed to Johnny's sister. To be sure, Lee has the hero do this so that, by dumb luck, the two of them revive the android Dragon Man, plunged into a coma in FF #35.                             

Dragon Man, more or less a child in an artificial body, forms an attachment to Medusa, only to fight Gorgon when the latter arrives. Medusa tries to flee both of them, but the flying android seizes her and takes her-- back to the vicinity of the Baxter Building, for no plausible reason. The four heroes alternate between fighting the dragon-creature and the goatish-faced Gorgon, until Gorgon finally explains his purpose in seeking Medusa: to take her back to her people. But this brief convo is just an interlude to set up events in issue #45.

Gorgon escapes with Medusa, but the Invisible Wife is able to work her feminine charms so as to pacify the childlike android. The Torch gets some down-time, and readers soon learn that the only reason the script brought up Doris Evans was to dispense with her. Depressed that his steady wasn't waiting breathlessly for his call, Johnny goes for a walk and meets the first real love of his life, Crystal of the Inhumans. (Stan captures the youth's passion by having him think that Doris seems "like a boy" next to the redheaded enchantress.)

Crystal, seeing the Torch demonstrate his power, mistakes him for one of her people, The Inhumans, and she happily invites him to meet her family, which includes new faces Karnak and Triton in addition to Medusa and Gorgon. Lee doesn't tell us much about the relationships of these five characters-- six if one counts their teleporting dog Lockjaw, and seven with the absent Black Bolt, who shows up for the next installment. Again, the writer-editor might have been deferring to Jack Kirby to fill in some blanks, but neither of them bothers to account for why Medusa was afraid of Gorgon back in issue #44.

Johnny summons his partners to the conveniently deserted neighborhood, setting up a big donnybrook between the crusaders and the fugitives in issue #46. And now Kirby shifts the conflict to a new plane. The story is no longer "Medusa's afraid of being captured by Gorgon," it's "all of the Inhumans are afraid of being captured by an entity called The Seeker." It's quite possible that Kirby's original idea was that Gorgon would be working for the real villain of the story. Then he may have realized that he wanted Gorgon to be more sympathetic, so the artist changed horses in midstream and concocted the Seeker, a pretty colorless flunky armed only with super-weapons and some henchmen. When we meet the Seeker later in #45, he seems even less well-informed than Crystal as to who is and isn't an Inhuman, for he rather comically gets the idea in his head that the Dragon Man must be one of his people, based on nothing but news reports of the android's recent rampage. (I guess he would've made the same assumption had the rampager been anyone from the Hulk to the Living Totem.) Dragon Man never really coheres with the rest of the SAGA, and after one more big battle with the FF in the next issue he's summarily packed off to some installation. Kirby may have revived the monster just to give regular readers a touchstone in the midst of this panoply of new characters.

The FF-Inhumans battle wraps up when one of the Seeker's agents abducts Triton-- though the agent somehow misses the other five Inhumans (and super-pooch Lockjaw) engaged in a big fracas nearby. Crystal and Johnny are torn asunder amid many Romeo-and-Juliet histrionics. The heroes later track down the Seeker, and he finally provides the SAGA's big exposition moment, giving the good guys a brief history of the hidden race of genetically manipulated superhumans. The Seeker doesn't explain why he and his men, if they are Inhumans, don't have super-powers, nor does he cite any reason for wanting to take the six fugitives (and dog) back to the "Great Refuge." aside from stating that their return is the will of "Maximus the Magnificent." 

Reed allows the Seeker and his minions to leave with Triton but puts a tracer on their ship. The colloquy between Reed and Sue makes clear that despite Sue's contributions to the team, Reed wears the pants in the family. On a sidenote, some fans liked to believe that Lee alone was responsible for Reed's chauvinism, and that their idol Kirby would never be so toxic-- except that later in this issue, Sue displays a feminine flightiness that's clearly been concocted by Kirby.      

So where did the five Inhumans (plus dog, but minus Triton) go, when they teleported away from New York? Why-- they shunted their way to the Great Refuge, the very place they were supposedly attempting to stay away from, in order to live covertly among the humans. We meet Maximus, ruler of the Great Refuge, though it's quickly revealed that he's taken over from his brother Black Bolt, who was supposed to be the designated monarch of the Inhumans. What happened to exile Black Bolt and his fellows, whose relationships are far from pellucid (though Medusa calls Crystal her sister here)? Kirby hasn't allowed much space for exposition here, for suddenly Black Bolt re-assumes the Inhumans crown and the craven Maximus allows it to happen. The villain's only ace in the hole is that he has some sort of doomsday weapon, designed to eliminate the humans with whom Inhumans have been forced to share the planet.

Finally, when the story's close to being over, Lee and Kirby deliver the sociological moral: the Inhumans, like the Japanese before the advent of Admiral Perry, are wrong to isolate themselves from the rest of the world. Reed's utterly positive that the super-powered race has nothing to fear from humans, which strikes a false note given all the times Marvel heroes got hassled for "being different." But the argument becomes academic when Maximus triggers his human-killing weapon.     

                            

In the conclusion-- wrapped up in the first seven pages of issue #48-- there follows an unintended "WATCHMEN moment," for the heroes are unable to prevent the villain from triggering his doomsday device. What defeats Maximus is not heroism but his own hubris: his belief that his people are a race apart from human beings, despite their having arisen from a common stock. No one on Earth perishes from the device of Maximus. However, the "Good Inhumans" are spared the decision as to whether to embrace inclusiveness, for Maximus seals off the Great Refuge with his own version of an Iron Curtain. Cue more fiery bathos from Johnny Storm, though he doesn't get much time to grouse, for this issue also begins the first installment of the three-part GALACTUS TRILOGY.       

As most Marvel-fans know, the Inhumans did not remain isolated from the Fantastic Four but rather became the most regular supporting-cast members of the series during the feature's second and third phases.  Indeed, for a time Crystal even takes Sue's place as the group's female member. Whereas I think that Lee and Kirby probably worked together on deciding the nature of the Fantastic Four's members, Kirby probably conceived the Inhumans without input from Lee. It's rather hard to say what the King was going for, though. Unlike both the Silver Surfer and the Black Panther, who also emerged during the Second Phase, the Lee-Kirby Inhumans have just one dominant character-trait: dourness. They all feel like road-company spear-carriers from a Shakespeare historical play, and during the Lee-Kirby years they don't bounce off one another as do the members of other Marvel teams. Only Crystal shows a range of emotions, and that may be because Kirby had some idea of her functioning to "merge" the two families. Rather than just letting the Torch have a mundane girlfriend the way Ben Grimm had Alicia, I think Kirby wanted to tap into the pomp and circumstance of stories about royal families coming together-- though I can't say he was ever consistent in putting across this ideal. I commented elsewhere that I didn't think Stan Lee ever had much interest in the Inhumans, and that may be because Kirby didn't put that much thought into the characters' eccentricities. There are various mythic "bachelor threads" that don't coalesce very well, not least the apparent "runaway bride" thread dealing with Medusa. But the master thread, dealing with the Human Torch's struggles to chart his own romantic destiny through an exogamous marriage, proves strong enough to give INHUMANS SAGA high-mythicity.       

MYTHCOMICS: THE RECKONING WAR (FF: RECKONING WAR ALPHA, FF VOL. 6, #40-46)

 

Following the respective departures of first Jack Kirby and then Stan Lee from the FANTASTIC FOUR title, almost every later raconteur said something or other about how the starring characters needed special treatment because they were a "family," as opposed to super-groups that functioned like loose affiliations of super-policemen. But saying this doesn't mean anything if a creator doesn't have any insight into what sort of conflicts and tensions are unique to families. 

FANTASTIC FOUR certainly wasn't the first adventure-series organized around a familial matrix. In the Silver Age of Comics, there had been two notable predecessors, and both of them-- DC's TIME MASTER and SEA DEVILS-- came closer than the oft-mentioned CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN to the makeup of the FF: smart leader, strong sidekick, leader's girlfriend, girlfriend's kid brother. Stan Lee or Jack Kirby may have seen one or both DC-features and subconsciously imitated the template of the character-types. But they added elements one would never find in those strictly juvenile DC titles. Maybe their success stemmed, as some have argued, from combining Lee's penchant for soap-operatic drama with Kirby's passion for sci-fi tropes. But whatever "origin story" fans might choose to write about the creative success of FANTASTIC FOUR, Lee and Kirby arguably produced the first adventure-series built around a family where the female characters had some agency opposed to the will of the males. In fact, I see in the Lee-Kirby oeuvre a gender-dynamic reminiscent of what little we know about the sex-roles of primeval families, which coalesced around the female's need to "nest" and the male's need to "hunt."

In juvenile sci-fi comics, "hunting" doesn't connote tracking down savage beasts. Rather, it means that the heroes are always seeking the next adventure to please a dominantly male audience. When a familial ensemble included girls/women, the females' function was often to worry about how the group could possibly overcome the Peril of the Polka-Dot Gorilla. Alternately, the girl might be a tomboy who was as enthusiastic as the guys at seeking the next adventure and so didn't challenge the male priorities, like the girl-member of SEA DEVILS. Family conflicts showed up in crime melodramas or even in teen humor titles, but not appreciably in adventure-comics.

 Yet almost from the start, FANTASTIC FOUR showed the tense dynamic of a family cooped up in the same "nest," often depicting Reed and Sue playing "mommy and daddy" to a fractious couple of "siblings." Sue Storm, though, not only fretted when the Thing and Torch quarreled, but apparently considered at one point chucking the "den mother" gig for a seat on the throne of Atlantis.

I don't want to suggest that Stan and Jack were more than loosely aware of the molds they were breaking. Clearly, they were mostly flying by the seats of their respective pantalones. But over time, many of the latter-day raconteurs on the FANTASTIC FOUR gave such matters as "female vs. male" agency a lot of thought-- and that brings me to Dan Slott. In tandem with assorted collaborators, Slott's run on the FF title-- from issues #1-46 (2018-2022) -- has done the most to logically extend What Stan and Jack Wrought, at least in terms of gender-dynamics, culminating in the arc called "The Reckoning War."

There's a lot of backstory stuff Slott works into "War" that one has to track down in other features. An advance ad for the arc claimed that WAR was "fifteen years in the making." Well, what that really meant was that Dan Slott introduced the idea of the war back in a 2005 issue of his SHE-HULK run and then sat on the idea for fifteen years, possibly with the hope of being able to develop his concept in a plum series like FANTASTIC FOUR. I don't say this in disparagement. I like the fact that Slott's FF run culminates in the ambitious Reckoning project. (There's some romance-stuff between She-Hulk and Jack of Hearts that also comes from the SHE-HULK title, but I found it easy to roll with.) But Slott's main foundation for his new epic was in a 1964 story told by Stan Lee and Larry Leiber, the origin of The Watcher from TALES OF SUSPENSE #53.

                         

Of course this simple cautionary tale about the perils of arming rude savages had to get a more "cosmic" treatment by Slott, which is more or less what fans expect these days from FANTASTIC FOUR and similar Marvel titles. In the new narrative, the benighted Prosilicans don't just get atomic power, but some Watcher super-technology that dwarfs anything that even the most advanced Marvel-aliens can come up with. 

The Prosilicans launch a war of dominion, and when their opponents retaliate, nine-tenths of the then-known universe is destroyed. Only the power of the Watchers can preserve what's left, by sealing the corrupted parts of the universe into a veritable "outer darkness" called The Barrens. So in this iteration, the Watchers swear their oath of non-interference not because they harmed one world with their act of Promethean generosity, but because the entire universe was almost expunged. But millions of years later, the Watchers' original hubris will come back to bite the universe in the ass again.

       

One Prosilican, name of Lord Wrath, apparently survives all those millennia in the Barrens and finally decides to annihilate the protected one-tenth of the cosmos the Watchers saved. He rustles up three henchmen, similarly immortal Prosilicans who also sport super-powers and the euphonious names of Ruin, Rapture, and Reject. Together they are "the Reckoning," and they start disseminating Watcher-tech throughout the galaxies to foment in what might be called (after David Brin) "Negative Uplift."

Everywhere various alien empires go to war, and of course one group of aliens just has to hassle Earth, home of the Fantastic Four and that premiere alien-fighter, Reed Richards. First Reed gathers intelligence from She-Hulk, who informs him of her experiences with various time-guardians and the Reckoning prophecy. Then the FF stumbles across Nick Fury, who became an aide to Uatu the Watcher in a very involved subplot. Uatu is out of the picture for a bit, but Fury brings a gift to the party; a device with which super-genius Reed can perform a "Positive Uplift" on himself. Or maybe it's not so positive, according to worried Mrs. Richards (and anyone who ever saw FORBIDDEN PLANET).

On the plus side, with this intelligence-boost, Reed instantly figures out that all the galactic brush-wars are "smokescreens" for Lord Wrath's real purpose: to get hold of a handy reality-nexus with which to end reality. On the minus side, Super-Big Brain becomes so clinical that he disregards Johnny Storm's plea to cure his affliction (yet another earlier subplot) -- and that's just for starters. Both the Torch and the Invisible Woman pursue other avenues against Wrath, and so do independent actors like Doc Doom and The Silver Surfer. But following a foray against Wrath's henchmen, Reed does something to his old friend Ben that makes turning him into a rock-monster look like small potatoes.

  

Even Reed using a coma-gun to shut down his son's mind (way back in FF volume one, #141) can't equal this act of cold-blooded intellectual hubris. Reed deceives his best friend Ben Grimm into thinking that his wife and his kids have been destroyed, just to snap the big guy out of a tendency to get freaked out in combat with Rapture, For Reasons. The "fake death" sequence is not strictly necessary for the plot, so Slott may be saying that even a well-intentioned desire for boundless knowledge-- in other words, endless "hunting"-- holds peril for the "nest" of the family.    

 In other news, the Silver Surfer brings Galactus back from the dead (I didn't even know he was sick), and the Watcher tries to persuade his fellows to go to war against the Reckoning. The other Watchers respond by putting Uatu in a chair and making him read old WHAT IF comics. Not really, they're not that inhuman. Uatu is just forced to watch so many scenarios of alternate realities that they jumble his ability to know right from wrong. Fury and the Invisible Woman liberate Uatu, and for good measure, they all learn that the narrative about how the Barrens were created is not accurate, and that there was a Watcher-thumb on the scales.

The Richards and the Grimm kids don't get a whole lot to do in most issues, but they do manage to neutralize one of the henchmen. When Reed and Sue are finally reunited, Sue rightfully busts Reed's chops for his manipulations and secret-keeping, and in contrast to most of the Lee-Kirby oeuvre, the excuse of saving the universe doesn't quite suffice.

  

And now it's time for the big showdown: Thing vs. warrior-bitch Rapture, while everyone else piles on Wrath. And it's a big confession time for Reed too, as he admits that all the knowledge he's gained from the Watcher-uplift means nothing next to all the little things of their relationship. Then Reed faces off against Wrath with the Ultimate Nullifier, which should kill both of them.

 But after all this heavy stuff, it's time for a little eucatastrophe. Reed learns one thing he didn't know: using the Watcher-made Nullifier kills the Watcher who uses it, and that has the effect of removing the Watcher-boost from Reed's brain. The Surfer shows up with the revivified Galactus and they save the universe from destruction. And Uatu goes from being one of a race of godlike aliens to being the Only God in Town, able to repair all the problems and to change the Barrens into the Borderlands, "a canvas of infinite possibilities." (Uatu does miss the little detail of curing the Torch's flame-problems, but Slott had to leave something for #46, the wrap-up issue.) 

  The last Slott issue has nothing to do with the Reckoning War, but, but it does sum up the FF's family dynamic. In this finale, Mister Fantastic reaches out to a sister he never knew, as well as introducing her to two other half-siblings, all creations of their mutual and utterly irresponsible paternal unit. Yes, there's a minor kerfuffle with Psycho-Man. But this time the "nesting" takes precedence over the "hunting," and I have to tip my hat to Dan Slott for "reckoning" the best way to resolve the tensions between action-adventure and family drama.        

    

MYTHCOMICS: "THE GREAT OXYGEN THEFT" (THE MARVEL FAMILY #41, 1949)

 For a change, here's a Golden Age story in which the name of its artist is lost to time, but GCD attests that the writer was Otto Binder, known to Fawcett fans as having been responsible for a great quantity of stories about Captain Marvel and his kindred. "The Great Oxygen Theft" is not one of Binder's more celebrated stories, but it merits a little notoriety for rendering elementary-school environmental science into a decent cosmological myth.

  

THEFT wastes no time in setting up the action of this 10-page tale. A radio summons from the evil Doctor Sivana lures the Marvel Family to an unnamed, inhabited world in the star-system of Sirius. Sivana gives the heroes a story about his having reformed and directs their attention to the fact that the world's plant life is almost gone thanks to a plant-killing blight. The inhabitants haven't noticed this mass extinction, but they start paying attention when they start finding it hard to breathe, due to the lack of plants generating oxygen. Sivana then leaves the good guys to sort things out while he jets back to Earth, revealing that he created the blight just to keep the Marvels out of his non-existent hair.

   The Marvels' first task is to save the populace. Mary Marvel purifies the soil of Sivana's poison, Captain Marvel Jr disperses the excess carbon dioxide that has built up in the absence of plant life, and Captain Marvel brings in a glacier of frozen oxygen to give the air-breathers temporary relief.

The Marvels then play Johnny Appleseed, transporting Earth-plants to the Sirius-world. Naturally, Binder doesn't trouble with ALL the scientific niceties regarding the practicality of one world's vegetation adapting to a totally different environment. However, on one of the heroes' trips to Earth, they find that certain areas of their own world have been hit with the plant-blight. Before they even have to wonder if the blight might have travelled back to Earth on their boots or capes, Sivana announced that he's responsible, and that he wants supreme power to keep Earth's plants healthy.

  Since THEFT is as I said just a ten-page story, Binder needed a quick wrap-up, so he cheats a little. Captain Marvel gets the bright idea that just as miners had used canaries to test for bad air inside mines, he and the other Marvels can just pick up a random potted plant and use it to "detect" the presence of plant-poison in Sivana's ship. It would probably made just as much sense for the Marvels to race all around the world until they made a visual sighting of the ship-- which, after all, they all got a look at, back on the unnamed planet. But Binder also knew his audience would like a little ironic touch at the end, in which a villain who poisoned a world's plants gets defeated by the use of another plant. The unknown artist even shows, in the penultimate panel, Sivana "wearing" the potted plant atop his bald head, leading one to assume that some hero "crowned" him with it. THEFT probably violates as many scientific principles as those that it gets right, but the payoff at the end, with the Marvels expressing their appreciation for plants and the order of nature, is not diminished by said violations.    
  

MYTHCOMICS: "SUPERMAN IN EXCELSIS" (ALL STAR SUPERMAN #1/ 10-12, 2007-08)

 

Even before I saw and reviewed SUPERMAN LEGACY, I'd heard somewhere that James Gunn might have been influenced by Grant Morrison's 2007-08 limited Superman series, ALL-STAR SUPERMAN. I don't intend to research what Gunn might have publicly said about the Morrison work, though I assume he did make some statement or other. My reaction to the assertion was that I thought Gunn might have borrowed this or that storytelling trope, but I highly doubted that he would have any interest in Morrison's predominant themes of archetypal realities and creative evolution. But now that LEGACY is a box-office success, that leads me to examine ALL-STAR through the lens of myth-explication.

Previously I reviewed just one two-part story in ALL-STAR, the Bizarro sequence, without saying anything definitive about all twelve issues. I will now state that even though the ALL-STAR series is almost certainly the best Superman story of the 21st century (and may continue to do so if the comic continues until 2099), its diverse stories don't all sustain my concept of symbolic concrescence. Morrison made a studied effort to bring all his concepts under his chosen theme, the aforementioned ideal of creative evolution, but I don't think he was successful across the board. He formulated a sort of "frame-story" in which the villainous Luthor finally manages to doom Superman, and this frame starts with issue 1, becomes a leitmotif throughout issues 2 through 9, and culminates in issues 10-12. The stories in 2-9 are many times better than what usually passes for a good Superman story in this century, but their purpose is not predominantly to illustrate the main theme. The "in-the-frame" stories are Morrison's attempt to isolate all the quintessential tropes of the Superman series up to that point-- mostly the tropes of the 1955-70 Silver Age-- though he works in references to other eras (Steve Lombard of the 1970s, Doomsday of the 1990s). For me, the frame-story, for which I've used the title Morrison gave to the last installment, is the only segment that thoroughly fulfills the theme of creative evolution.

         

 

"Excelsis" begins with daredevil billionaire Leo Quintero (note the possibly coincidental resemblance of the name to "quintessential"). He and a crew of androids fly a spacecraft to the periphery of the sun, ostensibly to map the solar body, though there's also a reference to taking fire from the sun in some Promethean endeavor, in line with a couple of references to the Ray Bradbury short story "The Golden Apples of the Sun." However, Lex Luthor, who's apparently aware that Superman is watching over this scientific project, smuggles on board an android timed to blow up the ship. Superman bursts in and expels the android, but in so doing, he like Icarus (not a Morrison reference) flies close to the sun. Even though the sun is the source of most or all of Superman's fantastic powers, the hero's not able to simply barrel his way his way through the solar mass here, as he did in so many other comics-tales. The Kryptonian's system is poisoned by too much solar "information," and Quintero informs Superman that he's likely to die soon. As something of a measured boon, Quintero also states that if he can't save Superman with his science, he'll try to create "replacement supermen."

While anticipating his death, Superman seeks to arrange his affairs for that contingency, though he still has to deal with continuous menaces to Metropolis. One of his most vital decisions is to reveal to Lois Lane the truth of his double identity, as well as giving her a guided tour of his Fortress of Solitude. Among the many wonders he shows off is a "baby Sun-Eater," which is Morrison's only reference to the history of Superboy's involvement with the Silver Age Legion of Super-Heroes-- though the creature pops up later in a more essential role. Lois doesn't entirely believe the hero, and he isn't truthful about everything. Superman informs Lois that his recent visit to the sun "tripled my curiosity, my imagination, my creativity"-- which seems to be true in a general sense-- but the hero doesn't tell the girl reporter that too much sun has also killed him. (I wonder if there's a parallel to the psychotropic drugs that appear in many Morrison stories, though I don't know how often such substances result in death in his stories.)

   

Superman keeps busy despite the sword hanging over his head. As Clark Kent he interviews Luthor, who's been sentenced to execution, and the hero isn't entirely able to conceal his revulsion at the mad scientist's waste of his talents. He finds a new world for the Kandorians to inhabit. He visits the Kent farm, recollecting the circumstances of Pa Kent's passing, which in Morrison's world involves a meeting with "Supermen of the Future." And, to experiment with seeing how Earth would get along without him, he creates his own pocket-planet, "Earth-Q," which is essentially our own world (complete with an artist, implicitly Joe Shuster, creating the fictional Superman). Morrison presents this Superman as a modest god who constantly seeks the best for mortals, albeit a god with human limitations.   

   

Morrison's intra-frame stories are loosely united by a "twelve tasks of the hero" motif, but the final and most important feat is that Superman, unlike Captain Ahab, succeeds in "striking the sun itself." But this isn't the non-sentient solar orb that accidentally poisoned the hero. Rather, this surrogate sun is Solaris, a solar computer from the future, an entity who wants to usurp the position of the regular sun and become the object of Earth's veneration. Luthor's responsible for Solaris' presence as well, apparently because the villain didn't want Superman to go off and die in private. Instead, Solaris bombards Earth with red sun radiation, so that Luthor will be able to personally torment and execute a powerless Superman.      

However, in a moment of irony, Superman outthinks his enemy-- using "brain over brawn," a line which James Gunn more or less recycled for LEGACY. The hero uses a gravity gun that accelerates Luthor's metabolism, to burn out the super-powers the villain gave himself. And on top of that, Luthor is forced to see the universe through Superman's eyes: "this is how he sees all the time, every day. Like, it's all just us, in here, together. And we're all we've got." This is implicitly the vision of interconnectedness that makes Superman so devoted to helping others, and it may be the only thing about ALL-STAR to influence James Gunn, even though Gunn chose a totally different direction.      

So both Luthor and Solaris are defeated. But because Solaris poisoned the sun, Superman doesn't expire on mundane Earth, but ascends to the Heavens, becoming joined with the body that has slain him. Back on Earth Lois keeps the faith, telling Jimmy that the hero hasn't died, but is only seeking to heal the sun with a new "heart." Morrison suggests but does not affirm that this may be true, but clearly, in this sequence, the writer is using the trope of the hero's death to sum up, not simply his accomplishments, but all the creativity that gave him the status of a modern myth.    

Finally, the Latin phrase "in excelsis" translates to "in the highest," and appeared in a Christian hymn within the phrase "Glory to God in the highest." But within the context of the ALL-STAR stories, "in excelsis" connotes humanity's need to emulate its highest creative potential. This is underscored in issue 10, where Morrison and Quitely give the reader a glance at Earth-Q, where its version of the 15th-century philosopher Pico del Mirandola states the following.

“Let us not yield sovereignty even to them, the highest of the angelic hierarchies! Become instead like them in all their glory and dignity. Imitation is man’s nature, and if he but wills it, so shall he surpass even imagination’s greatest paragons.”

Morrison seems to be alone in drawing a connection between empathy for all beings and "imagination's greatest paragons," and that may be the thing that keeps ALL-STAR on a "higher plane" that most of what passes for "Superman mythology" in this era.