CURIOSITIES: PRETENTIOUSNESS, THY NAME IS MARVEL!

 I've been re-reading a fair number of 1970s HULK comics lately, mostly written by Roy Thomas or Steve Englehart. There aren't any great breakthroughs except for (as I critiqued a long time back) the debut of Marvel's "Valkyrie" as a character independent of her creatrix The Enchantress. But I did find myself more attentive now than I was then to weird minutiae-- like the attempts of writers to associate their kids' comics with adult literature. 

In fact, the title of that 1971 Hulk-Valkyrie yarn, "They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?" is a good example of such pretentiousness. The story has nothing to do with either the 1935 Horace McCoy novel or the 1969 Sydney Pollak film, though author Roy Thomas certainly counted on readers to be somewhat aware of the Pollak movie of two years previous. Rather, "Hulks" is a play on a topic raised in a 1970 Tom Wolfe story, "Radical Chic," in which wealthy white people dabbled in "radical" causes in order to seem fashionable. The HULK tale involves similar superficial Richie Riches taking up the "cause" of the Green Goliath, which turns violent when the Enchantress projects the power of The Valkyrie into a young and somewhat obnoxious feminist. I don't know if in 1971 I learned about the Wolfe story in Marvel's own letters-page, but it seems likely. But the references both to Pollak and to Wolfe were all in good fun; I doubt anyone thought them overly pretentious-- unlike the following reference from the very next issue, HULK #143.

Back in 1971 I don't remember thinking anything of Thomas's VERY pretentious reference to William Faulkner for a very logical reason: I hadn't read the novel SANCTUARY then and did not do so until at least the 1990s. But now that I reread this throwaway "apology to Faulkner," my main thought was-- "Really, Roy? Did you want to impress readers who also had not read SANCTUARY all that badly?" Without driving the topic into the ground, there are no similarities between the two "Sanctuaries."   

It would have been far more appropriate to write, "With apologies to Victor Hugo." To the extent 20th-century readers ever thought about the Christian custom of persons seeking "sanctuary" in Catholic churches, most if not all probably would have recalled the expression of said custom in various movie adaptations of Victor Hugo's NOTRE DAME DE PARIS. Not that there's a huge likeness between that novel and the story in HULK #143. Bruce Banner, on the run from the military, accepts the "sanctuary" of diplomatic immunity extended to him by the ever affable Victor Von Doom. The "sanctuary" plays a very tiny role in the two-part story, which is mostly another tale in which a noxious supervillain seeks to co-opt the Jade Giant's power; no better or worse than a hundred like it. 

But still, Roy-- if you were going to make a pretentious literary quote, quote the right author! 

     

MOORE ON LOVECRAFT

 

Over the past few days I've been reading three intertwined Alan Moore comics he devoted to HP Lovecraft. Like the LEAGUE books different chapters occur in different eras. The first two, entitled THE COURTYARD and NEONOMICON, didn't strike me as very ambitious, being content to quote a lot of HPL names but not making much of a story out of them.

The third part, entitled PROVIDENCE, is much more venturesome, though at bottom I think it fails my acid test as far as incarnating its own literary myth. If one has read PROMETHEA, one will recognize Moore treating the mythology of Lovecraft as he treated Western occultism in the previous comic, trying to concoct a master narrative that unites a lot of different cultural/literary phenomena. In PROVIDENCE, he starts in 1919 with a Jewish author named Robert Blake (obviously named after for the protagonist of "Haunter in the Dark," who was in turn named for Robert Bloch). Moore has a theme much like PROMETHEA-- the nature of the real world's indebtedness to dreams and fictions-- only the fantasies of HPL, and a few fellow travelers, are the source of the breakdown between objective and subjective. Moore doesn't have Blake encounter the Usual Suspects like the Great Old Ones or the Innsmouth natives, but obscurities like The Terrible Old Man and The Thing on the Doorstep.

Is it good? Well, in the sense of holding my interest, yes. The art is very restrained, which sometimes works to enhance some of the ghastly horror-pieces. It's very talky, like PROMETHEA, but though I could see Moore's "voice" informing everything, I was interested to see how he handled both the mythology and its creator. I have seen Moore get rather smug and mannered when adapting characters he didn't like, as with James Bond in LEAGUE. However, he's generally fair to Lovecraft, who appears as a character in the story-- much fairer than the yutz who wrote LOVECRAFT COUNTRY. (That name pops up in the last couple issues of PROVIDENCE but I'm not sure Moore was referring to the bad novel or to some slang term that preceded the novel.) And since HPL played a lot of continuity games himself, Moore's extensions aren't objectionable on that level. But at times the daunting research Moore put into PROVIDENCE serves no purpose greater than spotting continuity-points, like some of Roy Thomas' more involved exercises. 

My verdict is that I can't give it my highest recommendation. But anyone who likes both HPL and Moore will probably like this.       

NEAR MYTHS: KNIGHTS IN BLACK SATIN

This week, before I get to my second mythcomic of the month, I have to precede it with a whole lotta near myths that went into its making, thanks to Marvel Comics' palimpsest approach to universe-building.

I begin with the five-issue BLACK KNIGHT comic, appearing in 1955, right on the cusp between Golden and Silver Ages. Through most of the Golden Age, the company then known as "Timely Comics" generally had a reputation of slapdash but energetic product, represented largely by the superheroes. That genre began fading in popularity in the late 1940s, and in 1951 publisher Martin Goodman re-branded his company as "Atlas." For the last six years of the Golden Age, the look of Atlas comics was arguably more streamlined than that of the best-selling Timely titles. Still, even editor Stan Lee didn't speak well of Atlas's general output, though he had nothing but praise for his sometime collaborator Joe Maneely. Lee collaborated on the first two BLACK KNIGHT stories and Maneely drew most of them, though Fred Kida and Syd Shores also contributed pencils. 

Despite the popularity of the PRINCE VALIANT comic strip, launched in 1937, my impression is that comic book publishers did little memorable work with the "knights in armor" adventure-genre. Hollywood by contrast, came with a smattering of knighthood-films in the forties and fifties, one of which, the 1954 BLACK KNIGHT, may have played some minor role in the genesis of the Atlas title. 

What Lee and Maneely produced was a medieval take on the Superman/Clark Kent trope. In the sixth century, King Arthur reigns over most of Britain, but there are conspiracies against him by his kinsman and nephew Modred (significantly called "Modred the Evil" on the first issue of BLACK KNIGHT). Merlin wants an agent to spy upon Arthur's enemies at court, so he convinces the noble aristocrat Percy of Scandia to pretend to be "Clark Kent," a contemptible weakling. Once Percy susses out the schemes of Modred, his wife Morgan Le Fay, or any other evildoer, the apparent wimp dons the armor and helmet of The Black Knight and thwarts the plot.

Barely any marvelous material appears in the five issues. Merlin has a crystal ball in which he sees visions of distant events, and on one occasion he obscures his movements with "powders" that create a concealing cloud. The other marvelous element is the weapon Merlin gives to Percy as the knight's primary weapon: a sword always called "The Black Blade." No origin is given for the weapon, and only once is it seen to perform an act beyond any commonplace blade, when the Knight uses the sword to chop his way through an iron door.

The stories are all decent though unexceptional formula. The only stories that come close to myth involve the relationship between the aristocracy and the commoners, as when Percy liberates a town from the onerous taxes of a local official. The standout aspect of the series is Maneely's refined art, and that of other raconteurs emulating his approach.

The medieval Black Knight was then forgotten, but in 1964 Stan Lee used the name for a Giant-Man opponent in TALES TO ASTONISH #52. This Knight used an assortment of gimmicks incorporated into medieval weapons and flew around with the help of a winged horse. Three years later, after the evil Knight had made only a handful of appearances, in AVENGERS #47, Roy Thomas introduced a heroic Black Knight: Dane Whitman, nephew of the deceased villain. There was no attempt to connect either costumed cavalier to Percy of Scandia until MARVEL SUPER HEROES #17 (1968).

In this story, delineated by Howard Purcell, writer Roy Thomas posited a conclusion to the story of the original Knight. At the fall of Camelot, Modred and his forces ambush Arthur and his men at Percy's castle. Percy for some reason is not as his own castle, but Merlin sends him, as the Black Knight, to succor the King. The rescue attempt is of no avail. Arthur is slain, and so is Percy, struck from behind by Modred, though the hero manages to slay his assailant as well. Thomas adds two major details: that the Black Blade was forged from a meteor with mysterious properties, and that Merlin forged another weapon with leftover meteor-material. Somehow Modred got hold of the weapon, which either was a dagger or was reworked into a knife (Thomas is confusing on the point). For centuries the Black Blade lies concealed in the castle of Sir Percy. Then Dane Whitman visits the castle, and the ghost of Percy informs them that they are not only distant relatives, the 20th-century Black Knight must now employ the magical sword against modern evil. Then the ghost of Modred, repeatedly called "Modred the Evil" by Thomas, provides Dane with his trial by fire. Modred enthralls a modern-day man, transforms him into a knight with a flying gargoyle for a steed and gives the pawn the deadly dagger. Dane, atop his own airborne mount, defeats the pawn, though the meteor-dagger is lost at story's end.

One interesting aspect of the Thomas story is that the author attempted to promote Modred as a supernatural opponent for Dane in case a series was greenlighted. No such series came about in the seventies, though the Knight had a couple of adventures with his enchanted blade. Then he was sidelined for a time so that in THE DEFENDERS the newly minted Valkyrie could assume both Dane's weapon and his mount for her exploits. 

Though medieval characters like Merlin were sometimes evoked in the early seventies, there had been no knighthood-serials since the 1955 BLACK KNIGHT. But monsters were on the rise in that period, and in a 1972 WEREWOLF BY NIGHT story, Gerry Conway alluded to a book of evil magic, the Darkhold, which was plainly Marvel Comics' version of Lovecraft's Necronomicon. The evil book was referenced a few more times, but in 1975 the tome received an explicit role in the story of Marvel's first "new" medieval character-- though he was more wizard than warrior.

The first two issues of MARVEL CHILLERS were devoted to "Modred the Mystic," a sorcerer from the Arthurian era, but one whose life was preserved until 1975, at which point two modern archaeologists revived him from a deathless sleep. Both of Modred's exploits are written by Bill Mantlo and drawn by two separate artists. Marv Wolfman is credited with having "inspired" the story of issue #1, which is edited by Len Wein, while the second issue has no additional writing-credits but Wolfman is credited as the editor of Modred's second and last appearance.

The two issues contain no creator-observations regarding Modred's provenance, nor are there any references to any version of any Black Knight. It is faintly conceivable that none of the three writers had read the 1968 Thomas story, though not likely. But it's impossible than none of them would have heard of the established role of Modred in Arthurian lore, where he was still the schemer who dooms Camelot, though he's more often Arthur's illegitimate son rather than the king's nephew. Morgan LeFay, usually a sorceress in most iterations, is not anything of the kind in the 1955 comic, and she's not mentioned by Thomas, though in Thomas Modred the Evil is made into a supernatural threat.  

The second Modred, though nominally a "hero," also partakes of one major horror-trope: that of a man possessed by a demon. Back in the Arthurian era, King Arthur commands that Young Mage Modred, apprentice to a wizard named Gervasse, must report to Camelot and become apprenticed to Merlin. Arthur and Merlin are not seen "on stage," but the tempestous Modred does not want to accept anyone's tutelage. He is so rebellious that, against his mentor's advice, the young man seeks out "The Tower of the Darkhold," the repository of the forbidden magical book, in order to empower himself. Through an involved set of circumstances, the power of the Darkhold possesses Modred and then propels him into an unaging sleep, until he's awakened to a new life in 1975. Once he has awakened, he soon finds that though he has the superlative magic power he coveted, the unnamed demons/spirits of the Darkhold expect him to serve them.

Not much happens in the first story except Modred's revival, his backstory, and his use of magic to free himself and his two support-cast members from being buried alive. The second story loosely implies that, had Modred's adventures continued, he would have faced a continuing struggle with the Darkhold. In line with this plan, Modred spends the rest of CHILLERS #2 fighting a demon called "The Other." After some very unimpressive pyrotechnics by artist Sonny Trinidad, the story closes with Modred telling his friends that he expects to suffer further attacks by the Darkhold's malefic influence.

The only time the Modred mini-saga comes close to the mythic is when Modred awakes from his sleep, a scene well rendered by Yong Montano. This trope was clearly a callback to stories in which King Arthur is unnaturally preserved so that he may rise to defend England from future threats-- though there's a weird irony about shifting that story-trope to the history of a character who shares the name of Arthur's greatest enemy.

Whereas the five issues of THE BLACK KNIGHT are efficient if simple formula work, MODRED THE MYSTIC is messy and rushed, lacking a strong concept that might given some depth to the narrative of a semi-possessed sorcerer from the sixth century. A few years later, Roger Stern made Modred a vital part of an extremely intricate AVENGERS continuity, sometimes known as "The Yesterday Quest," and some Marvel fans know him mostly as a puzzle-piece in that design.

But before Modred was initiated into that design, he had one more limited guest-starring role to play-- and that would link him to a modern superheroine. That heroine did have a sort of "knighthood" connection-- though, as my next essay will show, she was less likely to have known a "Sir Bors" than a "Sir Boar."  

MYTHCOMICS: ["THE SWORD AND THE SERPENT"] (ARAK #35-36, ARAK ANNUAL #1, 1984)

[This time, since none of the interior titles of this three-part tale provide me with a good umbrella-cognomen, I'm using the faux-title taken from the cover of ARAK SON OF THUNDER #36.]

In my breakdown of the overall series I noted that its star "Arak Red-Hand" was a full-grown Native American man with his own belief-system when he was tossed into the matrix of Dark Ages Europe. Thus he does not at any time subscribe to the pagan mythos of the Vikings he first encounters or to the Christian beliefs of the friends he makes in the court of Charlemagne. But in addition to making the main character non-committal about others' gods, author Roy Thomas usually avoids showing evidence of supernatural manifestations belonging to the so-called "Peoples of the Book," i.e., Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Arak certainly meets several members of each faith during his travels, but the only named character who suggests some miraculous nature is an old man named Josephus, who may be the legendary Wandering Jew. 

"Serpent," however, places the Arak character in a site where it is possible for him to correlate his own "Old Enemy," the Serpent-God of the Quontauka tribe, with the "serpent in the garden" common to Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions. The desire to provide such a correlation may be why Arak, accompanied by the satyr Satyricus and Syrian travelers Alsind and Sharizad, visit the city of Syrian Damascus, which was said to have built over the remnants of Eden itself. 

To be sure, there's a proximate plot-rationale for Alsind and his female cousin to guide Arak and his comic relief to that city. Alsind claims to be the son of a deposed emir, and thus the true heir of the rulership in that city. In exchange for his help, Alsind promises to help Arak secure a ship for his ongoing quest to find his people.

A further wrinkle is that Arak himself is a testimony to the existence of his own "pagan" religion, since he's revealed to be the literal offspring of the Quontauka thunder-god. This heritage means that he displays some roughly-defined shamanistic skills. One such attribute is demonstrated when he and his allies approach Damascus, and Arak sees a specter hanging over the city, one that no one else sees-- the image of a giant fiery sword.

Later that issue, Arak and friends get some backstory, in part from that recrudescent wanderer Josephus. According to legend, the angel Gabriel expelled Adam and Eve from Eden with a flaming sword, and this "Firesword" still exists somewhere in Damascus. Josephus fears that evil hands seek the sword's power to control all Peoples of the Book, and this fear is soon justified. While Arak and friends attend a welcoming feast at the home of Alsind's uncle, the guests are attacked by masked assassins-- who, when slain, turn out to be serpent-headed humanoids.

Arak employs his "shaman-sense" to guide his allies to a certain spot in Damascus, and Alsind informs them that the area once harbored the palace of the Ummayad line to which he belongs, a palace razed out of existence by the rival clan of the Abassi. The uncle's servants dig up the area, finding a skeleton. (Arak vaguely compares the skeleton to Adam, not remembering that Adam was supposed to have been driven out of Eden-- though Thomas may have been thinking of a legend that was spun out of Genesis 3:15, to the effect that Adam himself had "crushed the head of the serpent" at some point.) When the diggers flee the site, Arak takes over, and opens the way into a subterranean chamber defined by two visual aspects. First, the walls of the chamber are dominated by huge roots-- roots which Alsind's uncle compares to "the Holy Tree of Knowledge," though with no specific justification. Second, in the center of the chamber floats the Firesword, but this time the same size as an ordinary weapon. When Arak seizes the sword with his shaman-strength, a half-human, half-snake entity bursts through a wall and tries to wrest the sword from the hero. During the fight the snake-man confirms that the deity he worships is the same Old Enemy of Arak's thunder-father, but this only fires up Arak to slay the serpent with the sword. However, the snake-man is only the tool of a mortal servant of the serpent-god, the Lord of Serpents, and since he can't take the blade from Arak, the Lord uses his magic to spirit Alsing and Sharizad away, as ransom for the weapon.

Arak, hoping to rescue his friends without surrendering the great weapon, journeys with Satyricus into the desert-land adjoining Damascus, again using his shaman-sense to seek his enemy. A brief conversation establishes that Arak finds it difficult to control the Firesword, for its energies seem to want to return to Heaven. (Why they were held in place in the root-chamber, Thomas does not discuss.) A sandstorm separates the hero from his buddy, and for several pages, each of them experiences phantasias of the villain's creation. Satyricus finds himself in Hades, meeting his dead friend Khiron the Centaur again, and the satyr briefly fantasizes about gathering together all the denizens of the underworld to bring back the glories of Hellas to Greece. Arak is briefly seduced by a vision in which he rejoins his Quontauka people, but he soon discerns that it's an illusion. He dispels the vision and finds Satyricus, at which point they find themselves back in the desert.

The stone head of a serpent, the conduit to the magician's lair, pokes out of the sand. In the throneroom of the Lord, Arak gives up the sword to liberate Alsind and Sharizad, but then he assaults the evildoer, trying to regain control of the weapon. The warrior then uses his own skills to pull the flames off the physical sword in the hand of the magician, creating a separate sword of pure fire. With this fire-blade Arak stabs his foe, and then releases the power back to Heaven, so that only an ordinary metal blade remains on Earth. The serpent-lair conveniently collapses, but all four good guys escape. Though there's evidence that the mortal Lord also escaped despite his wound, he's never seen again as a primary antagonist. Thus, "Sword and the Serpent" is the first and last hurrah for both the Sword of Gabriel and the Lord of the Serpents.

ADDENDA: For the sake of exposition-clarity I left out one small point. Among the exploratory party is Dinar-Zad, sister of Alsind's uncle and mother to Alsind, though she's not seen her son in many years because of Alsind's exile. However, Dinar-Zad betrays both Alsind and Sharizad by pushing them into the clutches of the Lord. It turns out that at some point Dinar-Zad became the tool of the Serpent-God, having also helped the assassins gain egress to the palace. Thomas certainly chose the name Dinar-Zad because it's an alternate name for the ARABIAN NIGHTS name usually translated as "Dunyazad." In the NIGHTS Dunyazad is the loyal sister of Scheherezade. But Dinar-Zad's significance is not that of betraying her son and her niece, but that of being a woman who betrays humanity-- an even more obvious symbol-reference to that other deceptive female, Eve.

NEAR MYTHS: THE ARAK SAGA (1981-85)

There''s the germ of a really good sword-and-sorcery concept in the eighties DC series ARAK OF SON OF THUNDER, created by writer Roy Thomas and artist Ernie (RICHIE RICH) Colon. In the eighth century CE, a Native American man is shipwrecked off the coast of Norway and found by Vikings. The Scandinavians dub the strange red man "Eric," though he pronounces this new name "Arak." His memories of his past life are hazy so as to not get in the way of the first step in his heroic destiny, which begins with his seeking vengeance on an evil sorceress who kills his Viking friends. This mission, and many like it, propel Arak throughout many of the historical hotspots of 8th-century Europe and even parts of Asia. 

Given the peripatetic nature of the feature, there can't be any serious doubt that Roy Thomas sought to duplicate in ARAK his success with the Marvel feature CONAN. Thomas had not only encouraged the company to purchase adaptation rights to the Robert E. Howard barbarian, he wrote the rough-hewn hero's adventures for the better part of the seventies prior to leaving Marvel and accepting employment with DC. Like Conan, Arak is a barbaric fish out of water as he passes through domains of relatively greater sophistication. Like Conan, Arak never spends much time in any locale, always finding some reason to move on and sample the challenges of other lands, usually represented by more wizards, beasts, and demons.

In my view the "germ" of greater potential suggested by ARAK would be the fun of cultural contrasts, of having a barbaric hero, with all of his own cultural preferences, bouncing off the priorities of French knights-in-armor, Muslim traders, and the like. But Thomas does not do this. Despite the fact that his scripts (whether on his own or with collaborators) are among the wordiest he ever produced, there's never room for interesting meditations on deeper subjects. To some extent this was the way Thomas wrote his last five years of CONAN, so maybe he figured lightning would strike twice if he followed the same course. However, CONAN had two things ARAK never had. First, skilled workhouse John Buscema provided the visual look of the main title, and to some extent followed a visual template for other artists to follow-- whereas Arak was cursed with the less "cinematic" art-styles of Colon, Tony deZuniga and others. Second, whereas Conan was a rough fellow who was often unpredictable, Arak was a very dull upright heroic type. This resulted in most of the stories ranging from poor to merely average in their appeal. There's one good myth-sequence I'll analyze separately, but otherwise, in this essay I'll just touch on points of interest.

"The Devil Takes a Bride," #2-- Arak gets mixed up with a maiden named Corrina, who's confined to a castle because her mother had congress with a demon. Or--maybe she's her own mother--? The hero picks up the first of his long-running support-cast, the aged good magician Malagigi, who serves the court of Charlemagne.

"Sword of the Iron Maiden," #3-- Arak gets his second support-character, the female knight Valda, given the rather fey cognomen "the Iron Maiden," and who is the daughter of the legendary lady knight Bradamante. Valda becomes Arak's first romantic interest in the series. Issue #7 contains an amusing reversal of a similar scene in the first encounter of Conan and Red Sonja. In the earlier story, Red Sonja prompts Conan to go skinny-dipping with her in order to make him dumb with lust for her. Valda joins Arak in a mutual bath, but her purpose is clearly to get him to show interest in her so that she can shut him down, proving to herself that he wants her and to Arak that she ain't no easy lay.

"The Last Centaur," #10-12-- Arak ends up in Greece, where all the gods have apparently died, though this leads the warrior to a revelation about his own possibly divine paternity. He meets the last centaur, who dies, and the last satyr, one Satyricus, who pledges to go along with Arak on his various quests and provide comedy relief. In #12 Valda gets the first of a handful of backup strips about her early days.

"The Slayer from the Wine-Dark Sea," #15-- Despite the title's Homeric reference the main focus is medieval Byzantium, where the majority of the series' stories transpire. As seen on the cover, Arak gets a Mohawk for a while in response to having found he's half thunder-god, but the hairstyle won't last long. 

"At Last, Albracca," #21-- There wasn't been a lot of "sense of wonder" in the ARAK title up to this point, or much past it, precisely because Thomas kept his scripting at a very pedestrian level. But, after not having read this story in some thirty years, I was struck by one wonder: that of Arak and his allies traveling over a "sea of moving stones." At the end of this arc Valda and Malagigi decide they must return to France, while Arak and Satyricus undertake a new quest: that of finding a way to locate Arak's lost people in the Americas. But before Valda leaves, she and Arak finally do the deed.

"To Your Sky Born Father Go," #33-- After the end of a rambling arc involving the Golden Bough and Arak growing his hair out again, Arak "dies," ascends to commune with his thunder-god father, and then returns to life. It's at this point that Thomas belatedly decides to give Arak an overarching adversary, a "serpent-god" who's also the enemy of Arak's dad and all life on Earth. Arak and Satyricus pick up two new cast-members, a pair of Syrian cousins named Alsind and Sharizad, who will later be revealed to be cognates of the famed characters Sinbad and Scheherezade. This arc is followed by Arak's first meaningful battle against the serpent god, which as I said I'll consider separately.

"Once Upon a Unicorn," #37-- This stand-alone, Valda-centric story may not be mythic but it is, unlike all the other stories, fun. The issue features the only Colon art job that isn't trying to be John Buscema, and his fine, slightly cartoony linework is well suited to the story's humorous tone. When Valda returns to the court of Charlemagne, she finds that her king wants her to perform an unusual duty. She's expected to tame a unicorn with her virgin nature-- which she ain't got no more.

"Dragon Slayers for Hire," #48-- Though Arak has a few more encounters with serpent-creatures, Thomas does not really bring the snake-god back as such. The writer does bring Valda and Malagigi back to accompany Arak, Satyricus, and Alsind for the remainder of the issues from #38 on, though "Scheherezade" gets married off in an earlier issue. "Slayers" is a pretty lame story, though it sports the curious art-team of DeZuniga and Carmine Infantino, and it gets rid of the tiresome Alsind by pairing him up with a jeune fille. There's also some curiosity-value in that Thomas takes the trouble of taking his heroes all the way to China and introducing them to his version of Mulan, about thirteen years before the Disney movie made the legendary Chinese heroine famous the world over. And after all that, Mulan barely does anything! Still, she is given a certain amount of heroic charisma, which is more than I can say for "Sinbad," so in my book this is the only real "charisma-crossover" in the series.

"The Road to the Rising Sun," #50-- Arak and company end up in Japan, and after a battle with a nasty oni, Arak sets sail with Satyricus in search of the Americas, while Valda and Malagigi determine to hike back to France again. I suppose the "hero sailing into the sunset" is as good a way as any to conclude things, since the feature never found a strong voice anyway. In the letter columns Thomas talked about a VALDA mini-series that was to be drawn by Todd MacFarlane, which patently never came to pass. Thomas also mentioned the possibility doing another ARAK adventure as a book, which I suspect would not have found much demand even if DC had permitted it. To date there have been a couple of "in name only" iterations of the Arak character, but no actual continuations of the Arak Saga.

NEAR-MYTHS: "THE DAY OF THE SWORD" (KULL AND THE BARBARIANS #3, 1975)

As I noted at the end of my analysis of Red Sonja's first appearance in the CONAN comic, the heroine enjoyed about five stories, either solo or in tandem with Conan, that never explained her strange declaration that no man would ever enjoy her body unless he first conquered her "on the field of battle." Various comics readers found this less than salubrious, since it suggested that the heroine was daring the male sex as a whole to attempt raping her. This is not quite the tenor of the origin story, though one can see why that reading might occur to some readers.

"Day of the Sword" is plotted by Thomas but scripted by Doug Moench, while Howard Chaykin provided the art. And to be sure, rape is foregrounded in the story's first pages. While riding through a forest, Sonja comes across three highwaymen torturing a helpless man whom they've just robbed. The robbers threaten to despoil Sonja of her maidenhead, so the warrior woman kills all three. Then she turns to their trussed-up victim-- only to find that she knows him.

This cues a lengthy flashback, showing that five years ago she was a humble farm-girl in Hyrkania, living with her parents and brothers. The text stresses that she envied the boys for being given swordplay lessons by their father, but that being a girl she couldn't even lift a broadsword.

Then the father's past as a mercenary invades the quiet farm-life, as his old comrades track him down. Apparently the unnamed leader bears some unexplained grudge, for after Sonja's father declines to join the raiders on their next job, the commander gives the order to kill all of Sonja's family. As for Sonja, the commander satisfies his lust with her, and then burns down her house, expecting her to die as well.

Sonja escapes the house, at which point an unnamed deity appears to her. In contrast to some later retellings, the deity is not specified to be either a god or a goddess, but rather "shaped of neither man nor woman, yet embracing all the strength and beauty of both." The deity then makes a confusing declaration: that Sonja, by the act of saving her own life from the fire, has tapped into her hidden strength. The deity doesn't say that he/she is bestowing any special powers on the young woman, in contrast to the 1985 movie. In fact, the deity indulges in some confusing double-talk, suggesting that Sonja can, if she has the will, embrace the destiny of "a wanderer, the equal of any man or woman you meet"-- but only if Sonja vows to the deity that she will never allow herself to be "loved by another man, unless he has defeated you in fair battle-- something no man is like to do after this day!"

The origin, then, changes the implications of "The Song of Red Sonja" prose story. Therein, the heroine asserts that "no man" shall get busy with her unless he defeats her, not "another man." The original line implies that Sonja is an Atalanta who won't yield her favors to anyone but a superior male, and that she's implicitly a virgin. "Day" states outright that Sonja has had her virginity stolen by an unworthy man whose only advantage was biological strength. She can't change what has already happened to her, but she can become a new paradigm, that of a woman with unparalleled strength. After the deity disappears, Sonja gets the chance to test her new power, when a straggling mercenary happens across her, and she swiftly kills him.

But is it her strength, or something the deity gave her? Thomas and Moench play it both ways, having Sonja wonder at the ease with which she wields the sword and kills the raider: "A savage thrust-- learned by watching her father-- by long practice under darkness? Or was it, perhaps, a skill granted to her by a vision?" She even has a "Joe Chill" moment, swearing to find her rapist again someday. 

Then the flashback ends, and Sonja briefly exults that she's caught up with her rapist at last. But then she realizes that the man can't understand her, for the robbers' torture has unhinged his mind. (That was some really effective torture; one wouldn't expect someone to lose their mind from pain except from days and days of torment.) Sonja laughs at the cosmic comedy of it all, and then departs, leaving the still bound man to be slain by approaching wolves. I take the closing line about how the rapist's face is no longer "hideous" to her simply connotes that he no longer holds any capacity to haunt her dreams.

It's a strange story, particularly since the mysterious deity gives no reason for demanding that singular vow. (By contrast, the 1985 movie suggests that maybe Sonja comes up with the vow on her own, not through any supernatural inspiration.) But on balance I think Thomas, Moench and maybe even Chaykin meant it to be empowering. The seventies were the first time American culture as a whole seemed to accept the necessity for women to learn martial skills to protect themselves, and Sonja finding her own strength, with or without a deity's help, seems in tune with these sentiments. Other iterations on the origin may improve upon the sketchiness of "Day," but for my money, it's unlikely that anyone has done better, or will do better, than Frank Thorne. Following his much-celebrated tenure on the RED SONJA feature, he came up with a rewriting of the Thomas-Moench tale, in the superlative debut story of GHITA OF ALIZARR.

MYTHCOMICS: ["THE SONG OF RED SONJA"], CONAN THE BARBARIAN #23-24 (1973)

 Not only must I preface my remarks by saying that I'm using the title of one of two stories as an umbrella for both, but also that the two stories involved are part of a larger mosaic of CONAN stories by the celebrated team of Roy Thomas and Barry Smith. I don't know if anyone has coined a formal name for these interrelated stories, but since they're related to Conan's participation in a city under siege, one might call it "The Siege of Makkalet." It was an ambitious multi-part story, and yet another of Marvel Comics' experiments with longer continuities like the Lee-Kirby "Inhumans Saga" and Steranko's Yellow Claw continuity.

The most mythic stories within the greater mosaic are the two related to Thomas and Smith's introduction of the sword-maiden Red Sonja to Conan's Hyborian era. At some point in the Mythcomics Project, I stated that I wouldn't consider simple adaptations of stories from other media as "mythcomics." However, even though one of the two stories considered here derives from Robert E. Howard's prose tale  "The Shadow of the Vulture," Thomas and Smith ring in enough changes to the original tale that it's no longer a straight retelling. I've already included at least one derivative-yet-original mythcomic before this, when I analyzed George Perez's take on Hesiod's myth of Pandora.

Three previous stories established Conan's enlistment with the forces of Makkalet as a mercenary, defending the city against the invader Turan. Thus Conan becomes a loose parallel to Howard's Germanic hero Von Kalmbach, while Turan stands in for the real-world Ottoman Empire. The ruler of Turan has a slightly different reason for his enmity toward the Cimmerian, but his arc is the same as that of Suleiman I, sending the (fictional) assassin Mikhal Oglu, "The Vulture," to collect Conan's head. Original to the above exchange between Mikhal and his liege is Mikhal's remark that "no night is dark enough to hide [Conan] from me."

Conan is forced to flee the Vulture's forces to beseiged Makkalet, and it's there that the barbarian meets fellow mercenary Red Sonja, who is pretty close visually to Howard's description but lacks any backstory, least of all that of her having become a warrior because her sister became the harem-favorite of an Eastern ruler. The burly Cimmerian doesn't immediately show gratitude for his rescue by Sonja's forces, passing a sexist remark about "a wench who should be tending a hearth somewhere." Sonja doesn't hear the jibe, but he does belatedly attempt to render thanks, only to have the martial maiden reject his overtures. In the short story Howard writes a line meant to establish that his "Sonya" was purely a warrior who had no dalliances with other soldiers. Thomas rewrites this line, making Sonja more ambivalent: "She's all men's delight, and no man's love"-- which fits with some of Red Sonja's greater use of feminine wiles, if not actual selling of her services.

In the short story, Sonya shows some belated appreciation for Von Kalmbach's prowess, and that's the reason she's watching him when the hero's abducted by some of the Vulture's pawns. Thomas doesn't explain exactly how Sonja came to be watching Conan when he gets kidnapped, but her rescue makes it possible, as in the Howard story, to lure the Vulture into a trap where Conan uses his Cimmerian super-sight to gain a fighting-advantage. 

The second story, the one literally entitled "The Song of Red Sonja," is entirely original, and puts a new complexion on the heroine's attitude toward the barbarian. But first, Sonja is seen doing something that the all-business Red Sonya would never have done: dancing on a table for the applause of her fellow soldiers, including Conan. 

Sonja's dance foments a brawl at the tavern, but she remains in Conan's company as they depart to avoid being arrested by the city's guards. Surprisingly, given what we later learn about Sonja's motives, it's Conan who suggests that they should take a dip in some local pool. Sonja doffs her mail-shirt, and Conan takes that as a go-ahead signal. Then Sonja suddenly remembers that she has a task to perform that very night, and she uses her sexiness to lure the barbarian into helping her. 

To his credit, Conan soon figures out that the she-devil wants him for his Cimmerian climbing-skills, so that both of them can rob a local treasure-tower in Makkalet. He goes along with her plan, though, hoping to lure her into a sense of indebtedness, and therefore, into sex. However, Sonja has a secret mission. She hasn't come to Makkalet simply as a random mercenary, but has been charged with recovering a magical item from the treasure-house by another ruler, the humorously named "King Ghannif." (In Yiddish, a "goniff" is a dishonest or disreputable person.") 

The magic item, as it happens, conjures a magic serpent, allowing Conan and Sonja something to fight for the next five pages. Thomas throws in a reference to Howard's concept of a race of serpent-men, but the serpent has no independent mythic value, and once the heroes force the creature to retreat back into the bauble, the beast and its talisman are never referenced again in the Marvel CONAN series.

Once Sonja has what she wants, she decides to "burn her bridges," so to speak, with the somewhat gullible barbarian. It's at this point that Thomas has the sword-maiden utter her famous line--

"No man's lips shall ever touch mine, Cimmerian, save those of him who has defeated me on the field of battle!"

Nothing in "Song" sets up this unusual declaration, and the five Sonja stories that followed show no sign of following up on the statement. Not until Sonja got her own origin in the 1975 story in KULL AND THE BARBARIANS #3 did Thomas return to the subject, so it's difficult to say what he, or possibly Barry Smith, might have been thinking of when the line was coined. Thomas had dumped Original Sonya's motive of fighting the Ottomans because of her personal sense of affront (though strangely, not on behalf of her abducted sister). My best guess is that, although Thomas could not have known that comics fans would want to see more of the red-haired vixen, the writer knew that if he brought her back, he would eventually have to come up with a new backstory to explain why Red Sonja had rejected the traditional role of women in a barbaric world. Thomas could easily have borrowed the "no sex without physical conquest" from the Classic Greek tale of Atalanta, who would not marry any man except one who could best her in a foot-race. (The swain who does outrace her, BTW, does so by means of a trick.) The subsequent origin-story, however, would take the concept in an entirely new direction.

NULL-MYTHS: THE OZ-WONDERLAND WAR (1985)

 

By coincidence, this null-myth suffers from the same symbolic deficiency as the last one I reviewed here, WONDER WOMAN: WAR OF THE GODS.  Said deficiency might be called "the shoehorn problem," in which the creator becomes preoccupied (whether out of personal taste or from business considerations) with shoehorning so many disparate elements into the narrative that none of them possess any individual charm. But whereas as a multi-crossover work like WAR OF THE GODS had to tie into a dozen or more other DC comics features, the raconteurs behind this 1985 project-- plotter E. Nelson Bridwell, scripter Joey Cavalieri, and artist Carol Lay-- might have been able to trim away a lot of the extraneous elements in order to allow the strictly necessary characters some room to breathe. (To be sure, the project's editor was Roy Thomas, so based on his eighties writing, he too might have thought that "more is always better.")

Right off the bat, the project-- henceforth abbreviated to OZ-- has to work with a team of seven main characters, the members of "Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew." This group of anthropomorphic animal-superheroes debuted in 1982, written by Roy Thomas and penciled by Scott Shaw, and the OZ storyline was originally intended to appear in the regular magazine. The feature was cancelled, so the idea of the Zoo Crew countering a threat to both the fantasy-lands of L. Frank Baum's Oz and of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland became a stand-alone opus. The narrative consisted of three issues published in 1985, just one year before Captain Carrot's world of humanoid animals would be expunged (however temporarily) by the Crisis of Infinite Earths.

I should note here that I was not a fan of CAPTAIN CARROT at its best moments, for its creators tried to walk a tightrope between adventure and humor, and succeeded in neither arena. At most I experienced a mild liking for the design of the group's "Thing," a big porcine crusader named Pig Iron. But all the others were tedious in the extreme. If they weren't just blandly designed and poorly characterized-- Captain Carrot, Rubberduck, Fastback and Little Cheese-- they also had horribly punny names like Yankee Poodle and (ugh) Alley-Kat-Abra. So on top of finding deeds for all seven of these comical crusaders to accomplish in the narrative proper, Bridwell and Cavalieri-- possibly working to Thomas's specifications-- had to find a rationale for the beast-heroes to go adventuring in both Oz and Wonderland. Further, while the title seems to suggest a literal martial conflict between those two fantasy-domains, the truth is that there's just one evil overlord, the Oz-derived "Nome King," who's attempting to subjugate both realms.

I won't dilate upon the plot, which IMO is just a patchwork of episodes in which the Zoo Crew jaunts from one fantasy-realm to another for this or that forgettable errand. This extremely loose structure allows the writers to work in numerous characters from Baum and from Carroll, which might have worked out well if Bridwell or Cavalieri had shown any ability to continue the witty characterizations of such figures as the Mad Hatter or Dorothy Gale (who appears in OZ, though there's no accounting for Alice, the feminine muse for Wonderland). But the writers might as well have been attempting to emulate stock figures for a D&D game. As with the regular ZOO CREW comic, OZ is astoundingly unfunny and underwhelming in the adventure department.

Carol Lay's art is OZ's only saving grace, for her successful tightrope-act consists of rendering all the beast-heroes in typical bigfoot style, while the Carroll characters are all rendered along the lines of illustrator John Tenniel and the Oz characters follow the conceptualizations of illustrators Neill and Denslow. And there's one decent joke at the end of OZ, for after Captain Carrot has returned to his home from defeating the Nome King, the story ends with him getting yet more barely-welcome visitors: DC's klutz-heroes The Inferior Five. Their appearance is just a nod from Bridwell, since he wrote the Five's series, which I think is probably more fondly remembered than Captain Carrot even though the former didn't even rack up twenty issues. Frankly, since Bridwell seemed in my opinion more comfortable with writing the Five's baggy-pants comedy, a Five crossover with the Zoo Crew might have stood a slightly greater chance of being funny. 

I suppose that one other positive aspect of this project is that its concentration on Oz-mythology-- a necessary result of the multitude of Oz-books compared to the two canonical Carroll tomes-- might make some readers want to sample the Baum canon. 

STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 4

Continuing my ruminations from Part 3 re: centricity in "serial narratives focused on ensembles"...

In contrast to live-action television shows, comic books experience no special expense when they bring in new characters, whether as new members to an ensemble, or as recurring guest-stars, or as allies who simply don't belong to the ensemble-mix. Case in point: the 1960s continuity of Marvel's AVENGERS title, following the period when Stan Lee passed the title into the hands of scripter Roy Thomas.

As most readers of Silver Age Marvel know, Lee decided, for whatever reasons, to make the AVENGERS feature look less like DC's JUSTICE LEAGUE, with the result that founding members Thor, Iron Man, Gi(ant) Man and the Wasp decided to leave the team. The latter two returned to the ensemble a little later under Thomas, but the immediate replacements, led by the new addition of Captain America, were two former X-Men adversaries, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, and one former Iron Man opponent, Hawkeye. All three of them were forgiven for their earlier missteps and soon became sterling examples of reputable super-heroes.

Absent from the mix, though, was Black Widow, who had been an Iron Man foe prior to Hawkeye's appearance in that venue. Despite the fact that she had been retooled in the IRON MAN feature to make her into yet another costumed hero-type, Thomas did not bring Black Widow into the Avengers. In fact, the writer raised a certain amount of "sturm and drang" by having Giant-Man (rechristened Goliath) oppose the Widow's admission to the group, largely on the basis of her Communist past. (Later fan-writers might've added that the size-changing superhero had had more than a few bad encounters with Commie villains, though Thomas never went into that much depth.) Though the Widow was eventually inducted to the super-group in the 1970s, that was some time after Thomas's tenure, during which she was something of a hanger-on at best. Thus, in the terminology I've introduced, the Black Widow was a subordinate figure to the regular ensemble of coordinated centric heroes.

However, I should clarify that membership alone was not the only factor capable of making a character a coordinated member of an ensemble. Here I return to my definition of centricity as stemming from narrative emphasis. Thomas's Black Widow hung out with the Avengers and helped them from time to time, but she wasn't coordinated not because she wasn't a member, but because Thomas didn't tell stories that relied on her presence.

As contrast, there's the example of Marvel's Hercules. This character was introduced as a "friendly adversary" to Thor in various issues of the Asgardian's title. Then in AVENGERS #38, the Olympian strongman was used by a pawn against the mortal superheroes by their old enemy the Enchantress. By the end of that story Hercules managed to throw off the villainess's control, but Herc's heavenly father Zeus conveniently exiled the demigod to Earth. For the next six issues, Hercules was no more than a guest at Avengers Mansion. He became a full member of the group in AVENGERS #45-- but during the issues in which he was just a guest, was he also just a "guest star?"

Not so. Even the stories in which the Greek hero was not an official member, Thomas wrote all of the stories to emphasize the ways in which Hercules mixed and mingled with the rest of the ensemble: challenging Captain America to a fight, darting lusty looks at the Scarlet Witch, and so on. Even a casual reader of the time could've probably guessed that the Olympian was being groomed for permanent membership, probably as a replacement for the verboten God of Thunder. Hercules didn't remain a regular member all that long in the scheme of things, but he was indubitably part of the ongoing ensemble. To be sure, some later appearances were more in the nature of guest-starring shots, but these appearances bore this nature because of a *lack* of narrative emphasis.

An even more pertinent example-- even though it takes the argument away from the Thomas tenure-- is that of the character Mantis. She came to the super-group as part of a package-deal when they agreed to bring a rogue member, her boyfriend the Swordsman, back into the fold. However, in one of her earliest appearances, she denies any desire to join the group.

However, she became, to all intents and purposes, a regular ongoing member, fighting at the sides of the other heroes, and only at the end of her association with the group do all of her superheroic friends make her a member by acclimation. But from her introduction to her last appearance, Mantis was always a part of their coordinated ensemble.

MYTHCOMICS: EARTH-X (1999-2000)

EARTH-X is the first of three collected serials based on an “alternate history” version of the Marvel Universe. On all three, the story concept is credited to Alex Ross (whose fame had crested following his work on MARVELS and KINGDOM COME) and Jim Krueger. Ross’s hyper-realistic art, however, appears only on covers and in character sketches, with other artists tapped to perform the chores of visual storytelling, Jean Paul  Leon being credited with the entirety of EARTH-X. I have not yet re-read the two sequels, but my recollection is that neither felt as thematically unified as EARTH-X.

 To be sure, any unity in the Krueger-Leon series is rather akin to that of the Frankenstein Monster, being composed of many disparate parts. On one level—perhaps the most important in terms of marketing the series—is that EARTH X is, like MARVELS, a love letter to Silver Age Marvel. However, where MARVELS attempts to tell the story of the share continuity from the point of view of the common man, EARTH-X concerns itself with seeing the “gods” of the Marvelverse through a funhouse mirror, darkly.

This particular iteration-- which, for sake of conciseness, I’ll assign to Krueger, since he’s the one doing the heavy lifting—is most concerned with a particular aspect of Marvel: the grandiose apocalypse-scenarios given their fullest form by the team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. There had of course been earth-shattering events in comic books long before Lee and Kirby collaborated. However, features like FANTASTIC FOUR and THOR gave Kirby the imaginative canvasses on which he could unleash the full extent of his visual imagination, while Lee provided characterizational context for the contending forces. No other collaborations of the period—Fox/Sekowky, Thomas/Adams, or even Lee/Ditko—were as good at bringing the familiar world to the brink of chaos.

In any alternate-world story, the pleasurable distortion of the commonplace is one of the key appeals of the re-imagining.  Thus, EARTH-X posits a Marvel-world in which the boundaries between the human and the superhuman have been erased—or at least Krueger claims that they have. In practice, the reader doesn’t see that much of people who used to be rank-and-file humans. In keeping with works ranging from X-MEN’s “Days of Future Past” narrative to the aforementioned KINGDOM COME, EARTH-X is mostly about the weird, funhouse-mirror versions of Marvel’s heroes and villains. Some of the mutations have special resonance within the story, on in the context of Marvel’s storied history, while others seem to be the results of mere whimsy, along the line of Alex Ross saying, “I think I’ll make the new Captain America bald.”

Even though the title of EARTH-X sounds like a reference to Marvel’s inescapable mutant franchise, Krueger’s plot hinges on the Lee-Kirby backstory fot the Inhumans.  These FANTASTIC FOUR alumni were originally a race of genetically-advanced Earthpeople, though Lee and Kirby quickly retconned the characters into a experimental project by the alien Kree, a breeding-ground for super-warriors designed to serve the Kree’s martial endeavors. Without dwelling on assorted plot complications, the Inhumans’ capacity for self-mutation is at the root of the entire Earth’s big transformation—though this comes about as a response to yet other aspects of Marvelverse continuity.

I said earlier that Krueger’s opus was a love letter to Silver Age Marvel. The majority of the primary characters debuted in the 1960s: the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Thor, the Avengers, Captain America (technically a reboot of the Timely version), the Hulk, the Inhumans, the X-Men, and the Black Panther— and most are Lee-Kirby characters. Krueger finds some space for such non-Kirby characters as Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and Daredevil, though these are all relegated to lesser roles in what seems like a predominantly Kirbyesque catastrophe.  At the same time, EARTH-X is not “sixties retro” in the least, for the Inhumans-Kree core of the plot is folded into an even more cosmic scenario borrowed from the following decade: Jack Kirby’s 1970s ETERNALS series.  Kirby designed the short-lived series to stand apart from the regular Marvel universe, but a few years after the end of the series (and the end of Kirby’s contract with Marvel)  “continuity savant” Roy Thomas devoted several issues of THOR to blending “Eternals-Earth” with that of “mainstream Marvel.”

Certainly Kirby’s ETERNALS exceeded the Inhumans-Kree plotline in sheer scope. Mysterious extraterrestrial titans, the Celestials, arrive on Earth, standing as imperturbable sentinels that do not deign to interact with humankind. It soon comes out that the Celestials are responsible for engineering not only the human race, but two other races, the Eternals and the Deviants, whose special powers and weapons caused early humankind to regard the Eternals as gods and the Deviants as demons. Roy Thomas seemingly sweated blood, finding ways to make it possible co-existence between science-fiction gods like Kirby’s “Zuras” and the already established “magic-based god” known as Zeus. Since Krueger isn’t interested in the “magical gods” of Marvel—or for that matter, the mystical dimensions of Doctor Strange-- he simply explains away all of the Marvel gods as a race of metamorphic aliens. In Krueger’s cosmos, only science fiction can beat science fiction.

The transformation of Marvel-Earth is, in the long run, brought about to keep the Celestials from simply extinguishing Earth when they’re finished with it.  However, Krueger’s plot is far from linear, and the mystery of humanity’s transformation often takes a backseat to showing this or that Marvel character in a weird new situation. A few are “old favorites” in name only: Matt “Daredevil” Murdock is said to be dead, but a new Daredevil, who is “without fear” because he can’t be killed, has taken his place.  

Two-members of the Fantastic Four—the Invisible Woman and the Human Torch—have died, along with the super-group’s foremost enemy Doctor Doom; as a result, Mister Fantastic has become a recluse who lives in Doom’s castle, seeking for the solution to the transformation. 

In one of Alex Ross’s better re-conceptions, the Hulk, once a goliath with a tiny mind, has become separated into a truly mindless brute controlled by a juvenile version of Bruce Banner. If nothing else, this re-conception provides some nostalgia for a particular issue of the first INCREDIBLE HULK series, wherein young Rick Jones was temporarily able to control the mammoth man-monster. Children have become less common now that everyone has new powers, though oddly enough the aged-looking Captain America is forced to battle a new incarnation of the Red Skull: a mutant kid so young that he doesn’t even know who Hitler was.

Though there are some resonant moments regarding the various transformations of heroes and villains, Krueger is at his most philosophical when dealing with two onlookers, both of whom were Kirby creations. The older creation, co-authored by Stan Lee, is the alien Watcher, who provides a running commentary on Marvel’s history for the benefit of a less well-informed observer. This is Aaron Stack, a.k.a. Machine Man, whom Kirby solely created for a Marvel’s feature based on Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: a Space Odyssey.” (Amusingly, Aaron is brought into the Watcher’s abode amid imagery that strongly references the imagery of the Kubrick film—to say nothing of the film’s relevance in terms of  “alien experiments.”)

The Watcher, who has been stricken blind by an unknown assailant, wants to make living robot Aaron into a new Watcher.To do so, the Watcher must try to convert Aaron to a disinterested viewpoint of humanity’s struggle. Here’s the Watcher trying to go all Nietzsche on Aaron Stack, explaning why human beings resented their superhuman saviors:

…to be saved is to be weak. And to be weak, one must acknowledge that one exists in a constant state of need. Thar, in his normal state, man is found to be lacking.

No less Nietzschean is the Watcher’s statement on eternal warfare:

Mankind cannot live in peace with [sic] himself.  His nature denies this.

While these philosophical ruminations have some broad applicability to the theme of EARTH-X, Krueger doesn’t succeed in making the Watcher’s credo fit into his easy acceptance of the Celestials’ ruthless agenda. Aaron Stack, as defender of humanity, is also not quite able to refute the Watcher’s vow of non-interference by the jejune statement:  “To do nothing in the face of need—that’s evil.”

Like many of the Marvel-DC multi-character epics, EARTH-X loses perspective by dint of concentrating only on superhuman protagonists. Even the script for 2004's INCREDIBLES, whose author ostensibly did not intend to invoke Nietzsche, hones in on more of the conflict between savior and saved more profoundly than does Krueger’s opus. Still, there is enough of a symbolic discourse here to rate EARTH-X as an interesting mythcomic.