QUICKIE REVIEWS OF (FAIRLY) NEW STUFF

Probably because of my current fascination with crossovers, I've been seeking out whatever related items I could find in public libraries. None of my readings have been impressive enough for a full review, but I might as well set down a few impressions of 21st-century treatments of crossovers.

First, though, I'll note that prior to these investigations I reread all the WEST COAST AVENGERS issues written by Steve Englehart in the 1980s. I enjoyed these stories much more than the current offerings, for all that I don't have a ton of remarks on this mini-oeuvre. My main takeaway is that in the eighties, the ideal of Marvel continuity was still rigorous enough that a hardcore fan-writer like Englehart could bring together dozens of stories by himself and other raconteurs in order to forge the identity of the WCA super-group. Characters like Tigra, who had flourished neither in solo outings nor in the original, New York-based Avengers acquired much more substance as a result of Englehart's efforts. Not all his decisions were without flaw-- Moon Knight as Avenger was never a good fit-- but it's a solid series, regrettably torpedoed when fan-favorite John Byrne took over the title.

I can't pin down a particular diegetic event that made Marvel less unitary in its approach to continuity, though I imagine the two main factors in the twenty-first century were (a) the emphasis on "celebrity" arists and writers, who would often just do their take on a given character or series and not worry about being "in continuity," and (b) the fact that by the 2000s there was just too much continuity to keep track of. Thus in all of the books I explored, continuity is something of a "catch as catch can" game.

DOCTOR STRANGE DAMNATION-- One of the co-authors of this outing was Nick Spenser, who gained fame (or infamy) for the fake-out story in which Captain America was revealed to be a Hydra agent and thus a kissing cousin to Nazism. DAMNATION spins off a development in some other story, wherein all of Las Vegas is destroyed. The Master of the Mystic Arts arrives and brings the city and all its slain people back into existence (sort of a lesser version of the reveral of "the Thanos snap.") But before being destroyed the Nevada "sin city" went to hell, and now Mephisto controls the strings of the reborn metropolis. Strange then forms a team of mostly oddball choices to beat the devil. Biggest plus is that the concentration on the fate of one city proves more appealing than the usual universe-threat. Biggest minus is that none of Strange's allies play off one another in any interesting ways, so the crossover aspect is wasted.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY Volumes 1-3-- These were all Brian Michael Bendis stories, and as such they're very freeform, with minimal plotting. There are a few good fight-scenes, particularly the one between Gamora and Angela. (I'd never heard that Marvel bought the character off Neil Gaiman. Way to get rid of some dead weight, Gaiman.) But Bendis most reminds me of the dozens of TV writers who tried to write like Joss "BUFFY" Whedon. Those writers missed that each of Whedon's characters had individual voices, and so just gave everyone funny-sardonic lines. Bendis is like these writers, except he's never funny.

FEARLESS DEFENDERS-- Don't think I ever read Cullen Bunn before, though I'd heard his name. This six-issue tale, titled DOOM MAIDENS, teams up one actual Defender, The Valkyie, with a motley crew of unattached Marvel femmes: Misty Knight, the New Mutant once called Mirage, and "Warrior Woman," which is a new name for the Amazon Hippolyta. Oh, and there's a lesbian scientist who tries to get it on with Valkyrie, so that helped Bunn get a GLAAD nomination, but she's pretty forgettable. The "doom maidens" of the story are a bunch of dead Valkyries brought back to life to menace the world, but Bunn can't get the vibe of Norse mythology to save his life. After being routed by the undead warriors, these dim Defenders debate bringing in other superheroes, even some male ones. But for fuzzy reasons, the Bad Valkyries can only be repelled by female heroes, which allows Bunn to work in eleven other heroines. Though this sounds like a potential Great Moment in Comics Pulchritude, the fights in FEARLESS are poorly choreographed and all the heroines sound like one another.

DEADMAN-- This was one of Neal Adams's swan songs, as he returned to the DC character that brought him to fans' attention, This godawful series might prove that a lot of old-school artists lost their discipline in the 21st century, except that I think Adams' early successes were largely contingent on his collaborators. DEADMAN makes all the other offerings look coherent by comparison, as the Ghoulish Guardian once more tries to figure who really, really killed him way back in the sixties. At least Bendis made some efforts, however limited, to distinguish his characters from one another, but here you've got characters as different as Deadman, the Spectre and the Phantom Stranger all speaking in one voice: The Last Angry Spook. In the sixties Adams' heavy melodrama was a breath of fresh air compared to the overemphasis on exposition, Now it's a stone drag, man.

SUPERMAN: AMERICAN ALIEN-- Another revisionist retelling of Superman's origins, emphasizing his identity as Clark Kent of Kansas. I don't know writer Max Landry, but he has better control of melodrama than anyone else being reviewed here. His Kryptonian hero does seem to get drunk on Earth-booze pretty damn easily, though. ALIEN contains yet another contentious first meeting between Batman and the hero who's not yet Superman, and I don't care for Superman getting the idea of his costume from the Gotham Guardian. Nice fight with Lobo at the end. Not likely to become a dominant paradigm for Superman's early years.

HOWLING COMMANDOS OF SHIELD-- I'd seen reference to this "SHIELD Monster Squad" in some SPIDER-MAN cartoon, so I had to check this out. Apparently most of the monster-themed characters had appeared in other Marvel titles, though I was only familiar with Man-Thing, Orrgo (one of those giant Kirby Kreatures from the early sixties), the short-lived Manphibian (whom I actually don't remember, though I think I have his first appearance), and SHIELD agents Jasper Sitwell and Dum Dum Dugan. Or rather, simulacra of the two agents, since Sitwell is a nearly brain-dead zombie and Dugan is an artificial version of the deceased original "Howler." The oldies and the relative "newbies" don't play off one another's powers very well, and some, like Man-Thing, just don't belong in the "spy game." However, artist Brent Schoonover provides some appealing action and emotional scenes, and writer Frank Barbiere does the best job of any writer here at giving each character a particular voice. I don't think these "Creature Commandos" went on to further adventures in the comics, but at least their one series was diverting.

MYTHCOMICS: "WHO HAS BEEN LYING IN MY GRAVE?" (STRANGE ADVENTURES #206. 1967)

"[Jack} Miller said he had a book that was in trouble, and would I come up with some kind of a superhero. I was tuned in to what was happening around us at that time. One of the things was a movement of young people toward Asian philosophies, Asian rituals, etc. So here I was in the middle of a Zen-Buddhist movement and I thought, "Maybe I can use that for my main character," and I came up with this notion: the Deadman, who is able to enter other people's bodies. I introduced the idea that some power somewhere made it possible for him to do this. My intention was to get much more involved in that aspect of it and get some concept of what this power was like, and the structure of the machine that the power used around the world. What I had in mind was comparing two civilizations, our world, and that other world, and to indicate that I thought they were probably pretty much alike. There were baddies in heaven just as there were on earth. That was the way I wanted to go with it, but I never got a chance to. We had a disagreement. I was to have received a major page-rate increase, and the boss man reneged on that deal. So I walked away."-- Arnold Drake, SEQUENTIAL TART interview.


In one of my early essays on adult pulp, I cited a particular scene from Neal Adams' run on DC Comics' "Deadman" feature as a example of how even color comics began to push the envelope into the vein of hard-boiled violence. The entire 1960s "Deadman" series deserves to be analyzed in terms of its contribution of envelope-pushing, but here I'm only addressing the very first issue of the series. As noted in the interview-excerpt above, writer Arnold Drake asserted that he was the principal source of the concept. Initial artist Carmine Infantino may have had some creative input as well, but given that most DC comics-features were prepared from a full script, it seems likely that Drake largely formulated this unusual approach to a spectral superhero.

For most of DC Comics' history, the company had generally steered clear of such subgenres as hard-boiled crime and visceral horror. Thus, it was far beyond the company's "comfort zone" to feature a cover like this one.

Or a scene in which the main hero-- not a crimefighter, but a simple costume-garbed trapeze artist named Boston Brand-- dresses down a nasty cop and gets him to lay off the fortune-teller who works at Boston's circus.

Disrespect for the law was one of the verboten tropes in the Comics Code, as was any reference to illegal drugs. As if Drake wanted to combine two forbidden tropes in one, later in the story the nasty cop is seen dealing in drugs-- though it's suggested that he might be a phony cop, which was probably a concession to the dwindling influence of the Code. But even with that caveat, this scene alone depicted a world far beyond the safe juvenile havens of DC's regular superheroes.

Drake's first DEADMAN story is also unique in proposing a view of life that I find comparable to that of Martin Buber's conception of the "I-it" and "I-thou" relationships, which I last addressed here. In most DC Comics, the paradigm was the "cops and robbers" trope, in which the robber related to the greater community as an "it" to be exploited, while the cop existed in a "thou" relationship to said community, protecting it from various depredations.

From the beginning of the opening story, though-- whose title is a peculiar echo of a line from the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears"-- Drake creates a seedy sub-cosmos that anticipates the later transformations of Gotham City. The carnival-cosmos of Boston Brand, soon to become Deadman, is just a business that's just barely holding on: "Movies killed the circus, and TV buried it." Brand is the top dog at the circus-- of which he owns a percentage-- because he constantly risks his life doing a trapeze-act without a net. His dialogue with co-owner Lorna shows that he refuses her attempts to see heroism in him, and that he regards most of his circus-colleagues as "sick,dangerous children."

In contrast to traditional "cops and robbers" comics, the reader of this sequence is drawn in two different directions: perhaps wanting to believe that the lead character is a tough guy with a heart of gold, while also seeing that he demonstrates contempt not only for his colleagues, but also for his audience, telling Lorna that "the dumb johns pay their money to see one thing-- they're here to see me DIE!" This is patently his way of keeping any and affection at a distance, either from Lorna-- whose relationship to Brand seems more intense than that of a simple partner-- or from the simple-minded strongman Tiny. However, the diminutive Hindu mystic Vashnu asserts that his goddess Rama Kushna, who permeates the entire universe, intends to reward Brand with 'some special gift, waiting for you alone."

The gift is, to say the least, ambivalent: Brand, who has perhaps tempted fate by billing himself as "Deadman," is shot during his high-wire act by an unknown assailant. Deadman lives on as an impalpable ghost, but Rama Kushna herself intervenes to inform him of the gift she's given him, the power to possess other bodies.

There's a rich, implicit irony in this cosmic joke: the man who wanted to keep everyone at a distance, regardless of his true feelings for them, finds himself reduced to a spirit who can only have agency in the world by invading the bodies of others. In a sense he must use the bodies of the living in an "I-it" relationship, since he takes over their bodies without their consent. Yet he must relate to them in the "I-thou" constellation as well, since he puts them in danger by using them in his personal quest to find his killer. Indeed, in "Grave" he briefly considers ignoring the crimes of the drug-dealing cop and his circus-contact, since that crime has nothing to do with finding his killer. But he proves himself a hero, albeit a reluctant one, by taking down the two dealers before pursuing his own destiny.

Neal Adams took over the art-chores in STRANGE ADVENTURES #206, while Drake contributed his last Deadman script, the Biblically titled "Eye for an Eye," before severing relations with DC. It's inarguable that Adams' dynamic art made the feature popular with fans. Adams and his collaborators, notably editor Jack Miller, put forth their own conceptions of the Eastern mysticism underlying the first story. Readers will never know how Drake might have explored "the structure of the machine that the power used around the world," which I take to be the author's metaphor for the pantheistic presence of Rama Kushna. I feel safe in venturing, however, that in some way Drake would probably have explored the connectedness between all human beings in this melodramatic mystery-context. Perhaps the only answer to the titular question of "who's been lying in my grave" would be nothing less than--

Everyone.

ADDENDUM: It occurs to me that I may have oversold what Drake might have done with the series had he remained, so I read issue #207 for comparison's sake. Said story was a pretty routine story about Lorna's "bad biker-brother" showing up and making trouble for the circus, as well as becoming the first-- but not the last-- suspect in Boston Brand's murder.