MYTHCOMICS: "LIFE AND DEATH AND THE END OF TIME" (LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #50, 1988)

ENTROPY:
a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder-- Merriam Webster online.

From the POV of a Silver Age DC enthusiast, John Byrne would be the incarnation of entropy. DC continuity was constructed slowly and erratically during the Silver Age, and was then codified into a regularized cosmos during what I term the Bronze Age. But by 1986, DC continuity was deemed unwieldy in comparison to competitor Marvel Comics. Byrne, who insisted on revising the Superman continuity to exclude Superboy, was one of the key players who degraded the established continuity, though to be sure if he hadn't done it, someone else would have.

Of course, the re-ordering of post-1986 continuity had a drastic effect on the profitable feature LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, which was based on the idea that the 20th-century crusader Superboy periodically traveled to the 30th century to have adventures with a cadre of similarly teenaged heroes, the Legion. For the first few years, writer Paul Levitz compensated by inventing the idea of a "pocket universe" where the Legion's continuity was maintained. Yet, since the company didn't want, contra Byrne, any sort of Superboy flying around, that hero had to be killed-- killed by the same entity who created the pocket universe, the Time-Trapper.

This particular Legion villain had gone through some pre-1986 revisions himself. He was invented as a toss-off villain in the story "Menace of Dream Girl," wherein he prevented the heroes from traveling to the future (providing a contrast to the debuting heroine Dream Girl, who could at least intuit future occurrences). Hamilton's story implies that the Trapper is just another sci-fi mastermind, though a later Levitz story makes him into a member of a super-powerful race, the Controllers. By the time of this 1988 story, though, the Trapper becomes the embodiment of a cosmic principle:

They have called him by a thousand names. He is night. Death. Apocalypse. Eternity. Entropy. Time.

The opening pages of "End" show the solitary robed figure of the Time Trapper in a wasteland far removed from the Legion's era, while the captions inform the reader that "all things have ended here, even those that never began... If logic wars with faith over the nature of the beginning, so too it must over the ending. Logic decrees that all things begun, must end."

To say the least, this was not the typical language of a Levitz LEGION story. The elevated, philosophical tone comes closer to what Levitz sounds like in the 1978 tale "The Summoning." Clearly, whatever Levitz's personal opinion of DC's 1986 revisions, he determined that he could give his readers a good story extrapolated from the editorial mandate that "old guard" Superboy had to die. Levitz couldn't alter that policy, but he could create a situation in which the feature's incarnation of entropy was punished for his crime.

Having established the cosmic background of the villain, Levitz approaches the heroes of the Legion in more basic terms, That said, he interweaves two plotlines that are germane to the attempt of the Legionnaires-- spearheaded by their resident genius Brainiac 5-- to avenge Superboy, The first plotline involves a "friend of the Legion," Rond Vidar, who appears to have come back to life despite having been slain by his villainous father. The second thread relates to another character introduced in two earlier stories: Rugarth, a scientist accidentally transformed into another cosmic being known as "the Infinite Man." Rond's mystery is resolved later in the story, but the Infinite Man poses an interesting moral problem, since he's brain-dead and cannot agree or disagree with the role given him by Brainiac 5.

Both of these subplots, not coincidentally, involve persons who may be able to transcend death, thus setting up the suggestion that the degradation of entropy may not be the final answer to all things, as the prologue supposes.

To make the vengeance-drama more personalized, the entire Legion doesn't voyage into the entropic world to combat the Trapper. Only the four members who witnessed Superboy's death make the journey: Brainiac 5, Duo Damsel, Saturn Girl, and Mon-El (who, incidentally, was conceived as something of a Superboy knock-off). To say that the heroes are overmatched is an understatement. Duo Damsel, who lost one of her natural three bodies in an earlier adventure, loses her last extra body.

And Mon-El, the most powerful of the group, unleashes a lot of power but fails just as hard.

However, the Trapper is given some pause by Rond Vidar, whose mysterious return to life is explained by his mastery of a Green Lantern's power.

Yet in the end, Brainiac 5's plan depends on introducing the incarnation of entropy to his conceptual opposite, The green-skinned genius argues that the theory of entropy is countered by one arguing that "time itself is infinite, folding back on itself in endless cycles-- and each end may simply be a new beginning." The incarnation of this principle is, of course, the Infinity Man.

Naturally, the Legionnaires survive this cataclysm and go on to other adventures, just as the Trapper comes back in new incarnations. Levitz ends the story in circular fashion, repeating some, though not all, of the captions from the prologue, but suggesting that even the Trapper's kingdom of entropy has proven temporary.

This story, while consequential to LEGION fandom, didn't have a lot of impact on comics as a whole, certainly not as much as this week's "near-myth," "The End at Last."  Levitz and Giffen produced a better symbolic discourse in their "End of Time." But as I argued in this essay:

Though I define the quality of mythicity in narrative as that of symbolic complexity, not everyone uses the word "myth" this way. Often when the average person describes Superman or Batman as a "myth," they simply mean that they are extremely popular with many people, as some myths in the archaic world undoubtedly were. However, since not all archaic religious myths had widespread popularity-- some being confined to this or that isolated tribe of "fanboy" worshippers-- it follows that not all literary myths are going to be world-beaters either.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE SUMMONING" (IMAGINE #4, 1978)

The Lee-Ditko collaborations on DOCTOR STRANGE are justly celebrated as one of the comics-medium's best renditions of a "magician-hero." However, with the exception of the hero's origin, most of the stories are not complex enough to qualify as mythcomics. Aside from the creators' use of a few occult practices like that of astral travel and a few camouflaged deity-names ("Oshtur" in place of "Ishtar"), Lee and Ditko seem largely innocent of occult traditions.

Whatever the genesis of the Levitz-Ditko collaboration in IMAGINE #4, Ditko's "Doctor Strange" reputation surely contributed to the story's evolution. However, whereas the Marvel concept is principally an adventure-series with metaphysical content, "The Summoning" is right in a tradition I'll term "the metaphysical riddle." While the visuals of "Summoning" are as replete as the "Doctor Strange" feature with weird magical designs, Levitz's dialogue and captions reflect a transparent familiarity with the enigmatic language found in sections of the Old and New Testament.

The tale begins by focusing on a solitary male character in some abstract dimension. He stands within a room "that exists, or doesn't." The captions establish that he has a name, though within the scope of the story, that name is never divulged. I will style him as "the First," since one of Levitz's first lines states that "It is enough that he was the first, and will ever be the last," which seems to be the author's reworking of Revelation 22:13, in which Jesus says, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End." The First then leaves his room, having apparently received a summons, even though the captions are ambivalent about whether or not he can be summoned.

In contrast to the First's abstract cosmos, the remainder of the story takes place on an alien but "real" world. On that unnamed planet, three wizards descend to a lonely glade. None of these characters-- who also appear on Ditko's cover to IMAGINE #4-- are named, so I can only distinguish them by appearance: as "Old Male Wizard," "Young Male Wizard," and "Female Wizard."

The three have come to the planet-- their homeworld, now no more than a "desolate sphere"-- in order to summon the First. However, though they agree to pool their powers in summoning the First, each wizard has a different wish that he or she wishes the First to fulfill. Their dialogue establishes that they are all concerned with doing something to correct the status of their homeworld, which has fallen into chaos thanks to the magic used by the now-vanished populace to make "this world into our image" (presumably an act of hubris, given the phrase's resemblance to God's creation of man). Old Male Wizard wants the dead planet to be turned into a monument to the folly of its inhabitants. Young Male Wizard wants the First to rekindle life upon the world. Female Wizard does not want a race identical to her own to thrive once more, since her race destroyed itself, but she does want to make it possible for the "children of the stars," i.e., alien visitors, to colonize the world. Having stated their purposes and their disagreements, the wizards depart the glade to replenish their energies, leaving behind a solitary tree, somewhat scorched by their magical incantation.

The First shows up in their absence, and begins examining the world through his mystic senses. The Young Male Wizard shows up, and the First tells him that he plans to "see what gifts this world can bear." Beyond that, the First will not explain himself, or even reveal whether or not he was truly summoned by any of the fractious wizards. Young Male Wizard attacks the First with his magic, trying to compel the otherworldy being into obedience. The First easily repels the wizard's attack with a weapon that looks like a shepherd's crook, and then he disintegrates the wizard, whose "demolished cells" continue to drift about the glade like fairy-dust.

The Female Wizard appears, and again, the First will not disclose whether or not he will fulfill her desires, giving her more double-talk like, "All things are possible, and that is all that matters," The lady sorcerer immolates herself, and in so doing creates a beacon of light, though it's unclear as to whether she did so purposefully.

The Old Male Wizard then arrives, and confidently observes that since the First has not fulfilled the requests of the other two, the First must have manifested in order to fulfill the old man's desire for a planetary monument. The wizard considers the failure of the other two as proof that "I was indeed te mightiest of the triad." The wizard barely acknowledges the First's circumlocutive speech, but almost immediately changes himself into a huge escarpment of rock, in effect becoming the "monument" he desired.

The First then comments on the "presumption" of the three dead wizards, and reveals-- to the reader alone-- that he responded to another summons: that of the almost leafless tree in the glade. By indirectly causing the deaths of the three wizards, the First has annihilated the last of the world's human natives, and so the world is returned to the non-sentient flora and fauna. The First speculates that the three wizards' transformations may accomplish the goals they set for the world, but also says that he doubts that these possibilities will come to pass.

In conclusion, this is a fairly extreme look at the human sin of presumption, going much farther than any Judeo-Christian tradition. In effect, it's as if the First doesn't just "mark the sparrow's fall," but actively prefers the humble creature of nature-- a tree, rather than a bird-- over the vaulting ambitions of human beings.