COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 4

 The second appearance of Yuriko Oyama also does not bring her into direct alignment with the X-MEN cosmos, though in contrast to her DAREDEVIL appearance, this time she at least meets Wolverine face-to-face. But her dramatic arc is secondary to Wolverine's interaction with the character of Heather Hudson.

Once again, I don't choose to reread every story involving Heather or her husband James since Chris Claremont and John Byrne introduced them in the pages of X-MEN in the early 1980s, or the characters of the Canadian supergroup Alpha Flight, who were in essence a project brought into being by James Hudson. Byrne both wrote and drew the first 29 issues of ALPHA FLIGHT when they got their own title, and during that period James, who took up superheroing under the name Vindicator, was killed off. Heather took over theoretical command of the supergroup after James's death, but the next writer on the title, Bill Mantlo, determined that she should become the new Vindicator in order to join her fellow heroes in the field. But because she had no combat training, she sought out the man whom she and James had essentially fostered in his identity as Wolverine: the mystery man Logan. (And I'm sure Mantlo chose this story-path for much the same reason Wolverine was included in DAREDEVIL #196: to stoke a title's sales with the appearance of a popular character.)

I assume, without checking, that Mantlo mainly followed the broad outlines of what Claremont and Byrne had established in the backstory about James and Heather taking in the feral-seeming Logan, but it's my loose impression that Mantlo probably expanded on some details. For instance, Mantlo specifies that James and Heather were on their honeymoon at the time they found Logan, and that James actually leaves his blushing bride alone with the feral man to seek out help. Mantlo's not usually a very mythic writer, but I rather liked him having Heather think that her "Cinderella" story got turned into "Beauty and the Beast." This may also be the first time Wolverine himself witnesses how he was transformed by the Weapon X project, though the uniqueness of that experience was later overwritten by the events of WOLVERINE: ORIGIN.

As for Lady Deathstrike, she's brought in just to give Wolverine and the New Vindicator someone to fight. To this end, Mantlo quickly undoes O'Neil's happy ending for Yuriko Oyama, claiming that her lover Kira, shamed by the slaying of Dark Wind, committed suicide. This essentially caused Yuriko to do a 180-degree turn, so that in effect she became a copy of the father she had resented all her life. She considered that because Wolverine's adamantium skeleton had been created by Dark Wind's research-- even though it was the scientists of the Weapon X project who transformed the hero-- her dead father had a proprietary interest in said skeleton. This lousy motivation is matched by a rather desultory fight between the heroes and the villain's forces, after which the story kind of drops the training idea.

Lady Deathstrike quickly becomes fully aligned with the X-MEN cosmos in UNCANNY X-MEN #205, dated May 1986, which happens to be the same date allotted to the second part of the Mantlo ALPHA FLIGHT story. Given the quickness of the villainess's transformation, the editors may have flown Mantlo's idea of Lady Deathstrike before regular writer Chris Claremont, after which he, or other parties, arranged to remold the character. Thus, with the help of regular X-foe Spiral, Yuriko becomes a killer cyborg who now emulates Wolverine with her own claw-appendages. From then on, I would say that Deathstrike remains in the X-MEN cosmos no matter where else she may have appeared.

And just to bring things back to the cinematic tales, Deathstrike first makes her movie debut in X2, where she's said to be the creation of scientist William Stryker, who also assumes the role of transforming Logan into Wolverine in place of the head of the Weapon X project, one Doctor Thorton. Regrettably, Deathstrike isn't given even as much character in the movie as Mantlo gives her in the ALPHA FLIGHT tale, even though X2 remains the best of the X-films. But all this establishes in my mind that Lady Deathstrike is not in an iconic bond with Stryker or anyone else in the comics, and thus the film's use of Deathstrike and Stryker together makes that movie a charisma-crossover, even disregarding the presence of the script's other villains, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 3

 In the first COSMIC ALIGNMENT essay I cited a few exceptions to my general rule that every time a given Sub-icon appears within the cosmos of a particular Prime icon, that Sub is aligned with that Prime. The most relevant exception was this one:

... in comic books Thanos first appeared in an IRON MAN story, but he was never established, via escalated appearances, as an Iron Man villain. Instead, his creator Starlin aligned Thanos first with the third Captain Marvel and then with Warlock, and given the demise of the former, I would tend to think that he aligns most strongly with Warlock.

Probably as a result of seeing DEADPOOL VS WOLVERINE, I gave some thought to the way various X-MEN characters had been mixed and matched with respect to alignment in their media-history, and I settled on illustrating my thoughts with the example of Lady Deathstrike. All of the stories I study herein also count as near-myths in my system.

Strangely, Lady Deathstrike starts as a side-character in a five-part DAREDEVIL story by Denny O'Neil. She isn't even in the first part of that story, but Wolverine is. I haven't troubled to check exactly what the status was re: the origin of Wolverine's adamantium skeleton, but O'Neil's story came out in 1983, eight years before Barry Smith produced the "Weapon X" continuity. In DAREDEVIL #196, both Wolverine and Daredevil learn of a plot by Japanese criminals to ship the bedridden hitman Bullseye-- reduced to a paraplegic toward the end of Frank Miller's run on DAREDEVIL-- in order to restore the villain to health by duplicating aspects of the bone-reinforcement operation used on Wolverine. Now, O'Neil had the unenviable task of keeping up the sales of the DAREDEVIL title after Miller's departure, and plainly one of his strategies was to bring back Bullseye. O'Neil had no involvement in the X-titles, so patently he must have got editorial approval to forge a link in the "Wolverine's origin" chain. But though one might think in 1983 Wolverine would be extremely curious about Bullseye's benefactors-- or anyone who had any information on the process of making an adamantium skeleton-- the X-Man quickly loses interest in the case so that the Man Without Fear is free to journey to Japan alone. Incidentally, though O'Neil isn't very good with Wolverine's dialogue, he does seek to play the X-Man's disregard for "playing for keeps" against Daredevil's compunctions against killing.

In Japan Daredevil rescues a young woman, Yuriko Oyama, from her father, the man responsible for seeking to remake Bullseye into his own private assassin. Said father runs his own private island full of mercenaries, and he has assumed the sobriquet "Dark Wind" to indicate his passion for taking Japan back to its warlike past. As an indicator of his monomania, he has inflicted facial scars on all of his adult children, including Yuriko, because he himself suffered scarring in his war years. Yuriko helps Daredevil infiltrate Dark Wind's island, but the two of them are too late to prevent both the operation on Bullseye and his subsequent escape back to America. (Daredevil concludes the sequence by following him back for a confrontation in issue #200.) All the Japanese issues, then, deal with Daredevil getting involved in Yuriko's quarrel with her father. There's a frustrated romantic arc involved as well, just as there was in O'Neil's previous father-daughter meditation, the alliance of Ra's Al Ghul and Talia in Bronze Age BATMAN. Yuriko has fallen in love with one of Dark Wind's retainers, and she wants to free her lover Kira from her father's influence. Her part in the story concludes when she saves Daredevil by stabbing her evil dad from behind.

In all likelihood O'Neil deemed Yuriko a minor support character, and since he concluded issue #199 (poetically entitled "Daughter of a Dark Wind") by giving her a romantic reunion with her lover Kira, he probably would never have revived her in another story. Since Dark Wind scarred Yuriko's late brothers the same way he scarred her, one can't argue a straightforward Oedipal complex-- though it's still mildly significant that Yuriko has to kill her dad to get access to her young lover. Had Yuriko been left alone, she would have remained a subordinate icon with very minor charisma.

But she wasn't left alone, as I'll address in Part 4.

MYTHCOMICS: WOLVERINE: ORIGIN (2001-02)

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

 As a biographical aside, I was never aware of this six-issue series back in the day. I had become disenchanted with the various X-Men serials in the eighties and nineties, and so only followed the odd arc or single issue. I knew that bits and pieces of Wolverine's origin had been tossed out over the years, but I thought that the only in-depth treatment of the mutant hero's early years had been the 1991 series by Barry Windsor-Smith, WOLVERINE: WEAPON X, which was a good read but not an adequate origin for the relatively complex character.

ORIGIN, however, is a tale worthy of Marvel's most popular Bronze Age hero. Paul Jenkins plotted and scripted the epic, with plotting input from Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada, while Andy (son of Joe) Kubert provided the luscious linework. I have no idea whether or not the narrative is considered canonical these days, but I'm impressed by how many disparate bits of Wolverine-lore Jenkins et al managed to weave into this ambitious tale. 

WHAT'S IN A NAME DEPARTMENT: Now, in this review I can't very well speak of the main character as "Wolverine," since from start to finish he's many years from running around in a costume with the X-Men. And though in the early sections the character's true name of James Howlett is consistently utilized, for most of the story he goes under the assumed name of Logan. Thus I will speak of him in the first section as James, after which he'll be the only character designated as "Logan," since it's something of a transitional identity between the boy and the superhero he becomes.

Young James debuts as the only surviving son of a wealthy Canadian family, the offspring of John and Elizabeth Howlett. Having money doesn't necessarily make life OK for the Howletts: John is frequently chastised by his father "Old Man Howlett," Elizabeth lives in seclusion after having recovered from depression following the loss of her first child, and James himself is weak and sickly. The viewpoint character for the early section of ORIGIN is Rose, a young Irish orphan brought to the Howlett estate to tutor James, and it's through her eyes that  viewers meet the only two servants who become important to the doomed Howlett saga: groundskeeper Thomas Logan and his young son Dog. Astute readers will notice that the groundskeeper bears an unmistakable resemblance to the Logan of mature years, but Jenkins' script, while not denying the possibility that Thomas may be the real father of the Howlett heir, throws out just enough suggestions to let readers come to their own conclusions.

Since James-Logan, Dog and Rose are the only children on the estate, they bond for a time, though the alignments of class suggest that James and Rose leave young Dog on the outside looking in. But Dog's greatest problem is his father. Thomas is a mean drunk, forever carping about how the wealthy Howletts look down upon his kind, and beating his son for any presumed infraction, even after Dog saves James from drowning. 

Thomas's brooding resentments eventually bring about the first tragedy for James. Dog tries to get overly friendly with Rose. James tells his father, and John expels both of the Logans. Thomas and Dog come back armed at night, allegedly to rob the Howletts though vengeance is the more likely motive. In the ensuing confusion, Thomas shoots John dead, and in the struggle the anguished James manifests his mutant power as bone claws erupt from his hands. He claws Dog and kills his maybe-father Thomas. The half-mad Elizabeth takes her own life, but Rose becomes James's functional new mother, taking him to another Canadian province to keep clear of the law. 

It's in a dingy mining-camp in British Columbia that James becomes Logan-- initially, because Rose simply bestows that name on him to conceal his real heritage. While Rose assumes clerical duties at the office, Logan must push around heavy carts of ore, forcing his weakly frame to take on muscle. Logan and Rose pretend to be cousins to allay suspicions from the other workers, and their family nucleus is somewhat supplemented by rough foreman Smitty. Initially Smitty only signs Logan on to give the weakling the hardest grunt-work, but over time Smitty takes some loose paternal interest in the youth, and even defends him twice from the tender mercies of the camp's malicious cook. That Logan begins to have some reciprocal feelings toward the foreman is indicated by the fact that latter-day Logan picks up Smitty's habit of calling other individuals "bub."

But in a sense the true parent overseeing the tutelage of Logan is Mother Nature. Since the camp is near the omnipresent Canadian woods, Logan's savage instincts come to the fore, and he begins hunting game at night. He's forgotten that he even possesses retractable claws of bone, but he gets a vivid reminder when cornered by a pack of wolves out in the wild. He then begins to run with the wolf pack, a Tarzan prompted by mutation rather than being reared by animal parents. 

Smitty provides at least one other link in the Logan mystery, when he introduces the surly youth to the stories of Japanese samurai, whose legacy will also be imprinted on the future hero. But Rose, after living with Logan for years in the role of a functional "brother," has also grown during this time, and when she as a young woman turns to look for a mate, it's not toward Logan.

Logan-- nicknamed "Wolverine" by his camp-mates-- tries to hate Smitty and Rose, and fate seems to set him up for an Oedipal contest, when Smitty, desperate for money to marry Rosa, enters a cage-match with "Wolverine." Logan's inherent decency makes him not only spare Smitty's life but throw the fight as well. However, in place of the father-sacrifice, a sacrifice of mother/sister is set up when yet another sexual competitor for Rose, Logan's maybe-brother Dog, comes looking for vengeance.

I mentioned Tarzan earlier, and despite all the surface differences, this saga of the "wolverine-man" probably takes some inspiration from the narrative of the "ape-man." Logan is born with a savage nature symbolized by his mutant talons, but civilization saps his energies, making him rich and sickly. In his original setting, James Howlett is somewhat like William Clayton, the weak cousin of Lord Greystoke from RETURN OF TARZAN: a decent human being but not capable of coping with danger. Tarzan does not witness the horrors that end the lives of his parents, though to some extent the death of his ape-mother stands in for this trauma. Logan witnesses the murder of his father and (subliminally perhaps) the suicide of his mother, but he largely forgets the chaos in his new identity, with Rose taking on a roughly maternal role while Smitty becomes a new father-imago. Tarzan's only competition for Jane is his cousin, a brother-analogue, while Rose is pursued both by Logan's maybe-brother and by Logan's surrogate father.  It's interesting that while Logan may not actually be the child of two aristocrats, he patterns his ethical outlook on Father John, for during his maturation Rosa remarks that Logan is "a leader by example, much like his dear father." This may be an evocation of the "noblesse oblige" found in Tarzan, who, despite his savagery in combat, always has a firm moral grasp of his circumstances. Even if James Howlett was the by-blow of Thomas Logan, the man called Logan did not slide into degradation as did the self-pitying groundskeeper-- which might be a repudiation of the very "class conflict" suggested by the story's opening chapter.

A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 5

 Last and sort of least is the LOW CHARISMA crossover. 

I've already mentioned one example of this category in Part 3, that of Wolverine in his first interaction with the X-Men. Having been only a Sub, he had no stature, but he did have a degree of charisma simply from his having fought the Hulk in one story, With the exception of Cyclops, who possessed both stature and charisma by virtue of his long career with the hero-team, all of the other characters were new and only accrued charisma as the original story progressed. Some of the other established X-people appear in the tale as well, but their status is that of "guest stars" rather than functional members of the team-- a point underscored in the next installment, where all the old X's are given their walking papers for the time being. (To be sure, Jean "Marvel Girl"  Grey does get invited back rather quickly,)

NOTE: just after I wrote this, I remembered that Sunfire and Banshee, who were also in the New X-Men, had pretty much the same Sub-status as Wolverine, though the two of them had enjoyed perhaps three or four Sub-appearances apiece. Rather than rewrite the paragraph, take it as a given that what goes for new member Wolverine also goes for new members Sunfire and Banshee-- though Sunfire was quickly disposed of, ending his brush with Prime status almost as quickly as it began.

The same principle applies to the first crossover of the Joker and the Catwoman in BATMAN #2: neither had accrued much charisma at the time of that story, though obviously the writers meant to build up both characters as consequential to the Bat-mythos.

The subject of Subs being nurtured within a particular mythos is relevant to another species of crossover: the old-villain-meets-new-opponent crossover. As I also noted in Part 3, the tag-team villains Mister Hyde and the Cobra had been regular foes of Thor for a short period, and in DAREDEVIL #30, Stan Lee evidently felt that they would be a better fit for Daredevil. In the process of making the transfer, their villain-charisma had to start interacting with the very different charisma of Daredevil.

I should include a parallel to the discussion from Part 4 as to how former Primes might become Subs in another work, but could still enjoy high charisma, as with Dracula's appearance in a Billy the Kid movie. In cases of low charisma, one may have either new or established characters cross over with former Primes for the sake of brief bits of business rather than for major plot-functions. Examples include:

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? (in which the main characters are Roger and Eddie Valliant)

THE BOOKS OF MAGIC (in which the main character is Tim Hunter, and the vast panoply of the DC Universe exists as background to his decision)

A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 3

The second crossover-category corresponds to the basic pattern of the first one, except that at least one of the stature-bearing characters has been compromised in some manner, making at least one of the characters of LOW STATURE. The most frequent manifestations of the low-stature crossover are usually termed "guest starring roles" or "cameos."

"Guest stars" are often considered to be the same as regular crossovers, but not infrequently guest stars appear in some ancillary role. I mentioned the example of the Golden Age Human Torch-Sub-Mariner crossovers. These took the shape of one of the two heroes appearing in an issue of the other hero's magazine, but the narrative emphasis is clearly on their interaction.

In contrast, the appearance that I'm calling the "guest star" is only moderately important to the plot. One of my favorites of this type appears in the Silver Age DAREDEVIL #30. For some reason, the titular hero decides that he wants to take on Thor's sometime foes Mister Hyde and the Cobra-- which is the main plotline of the narrative. But author Stan Lee, wanting to play the idea to its most absurd lengths, first has DD masquerade as the Thunder God to lure the villains out-- to which deception the real Thor takes exception. What follows is a sublimely silly encounter between the two heroes, which is not strictly necessary to the plot, though it's certainly a lot of fun.

Cameos are even more "throwaway" in nature, usually lasting only a few diegetic "moments." One of the dippiest I've recently encountered was in a 1944 issue of Quality's FEATURE COMICS, in which the almost forgotten comical character "Blimpy" became reduced in (physical) stature and so rang up another Quality character, Doll Man, in order to get some advice about getting small. 

Turning to another manifestation of the low-stature category, I didn't discuss in the previous post the concept of "rotating team" franchises, though I established in this 2019 post my estimation that the characters in each of these temporary teams shared equal stature (although, just to be totally confusing, at that time I was using the term "charisma" in place of what I now call "stature.") However, I made a few exceptions, saying of Batman's co-stars in THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD:

Most of the time, the co-stars either had their own franchises, or had enjoyed such regular berths at some point in DC's history. However, on a few occasions the Bat teamed up with one of his famed enemies, and I would consider all of these to be subordinate rather than coordinate figures, because the villains had not previously enjoyed their own franchises.

 

Even then, I had to further admit that although this was true of two such co-stars, the Riddler and Ra's Al Ghul, but that one other co-star, the Joker, actually had enjoyed a series of nine issues, wherein he usually contended with other Bat-villains. I made the comment that the Joker's series had not done anything to dispel his dominant image as a subordinate character, or Sub, but now I would rephrase that to say that nine issues were not enough to endow the Clown Prince of Crime with the stature one should perceive in a Prime. 

Similarly, a featured hero who only enjoyed a piddling few Prime stories, either as a solo protagonist or as part of an ensemble, would also possess only a very low level of stature. Prior to the Blue Diamond's appearance in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE alongside the Thing, the Diamond could only boast a couple of Golden Age appearances and a couple in Roy Thomas's retcon team-title "The Liberty Legion"-- and so his Prime status is dubious. In fact, TWO-IN-ONE became something of a dumping-ground for short-lived Prime characters such as the Golem, the Living Mummy and Skull the Slayer, none of whom went on to rekindled fame after their TWO-IN-ONE outings. The same applies to the Sub character Jocasta, who got a brief shot at Prime status before returning to intermittent obscurity.

Some obscure characters, however, went on to respectable fame once they'd been inducted into regular teams. Magik had made a few minor Sub appearances before getting a four-issue mini-series. This series made the character a Prime, but had she never been inducted into a group-- be it the one she did join, the New Mutants, or some other team-- she probably would have returned to Sub status. An even more noteworthy example of a lowly Sub rising to superstar Prime status is Wolverine. At the time of the taloned terror's induction into the 1970s X-Men, he had only appeared in one adventure, as an opponent for the Hulk. Not only did Wolverine become a stellar member of the X-Men, he went on to enjoy a wide number of solo adventures. So Magik has only a little stature when she joins the New Mutants, and thus only her first alliance with that team can be called a Low-Stature Crossover at all. Wolverine's induction into the New X-Men does not qualify as a stature crossover, but would possibly qualify for a Low-Charisma type.

 

NULL-MYTHS: OLD MAN LOGAN (2008)

It was only after watching the 2017 film LOGAN that I learned that it had been based on a graphic novel-- actually a compilation of stories from Marvel's ongoing WOLVERINE title-- and that the writer was none other than one of the worst scripters currently in the business, Mark Millar. This is not entirely a fair opinion, since I've read few of Millar's works since my bad experience with the atrocious WANTED.

However, once I read the Millar GN, I was happily disabused of the idea that anything by Millar could have had quality in its original form. Like the 2008 movie WANTED, the 2017 LOGAN-- directed by James Mangold, who also helmed the respectable 2013 WOLVERINE-- just borrows dribs and drabs from the Millar continuity. In fact, the only things Mangold really takes away from Millar's GN are the ideas that (1) in some future setting, Wolverine has gotten very old and beat-down by coping with everyday life, which is a consequence of the fact that (2) most mutants and superheroes are out of the picture. 

Though LOGAN is far from being a game-changing movie, I can appreciate that Mangold uses some subtlety, refusing to dilute his story by telling the viewer what happened to the heroes. In contrast, Millar's OLD MAN is just Millar regurgitating the same brain-dead concept that informed the WANTED graphic novel: that all the super-villains get together and wipe out most of the heroes, sparing only a few like Hawkeye the Archer and (inevitably) Wolverine. 

As with WANTED, Millar's work is made visually bearable by his collaboration with a good if somewhat slick artist. Conceptually, though, it's just channeling the same old vibe that had begun to get tedious in Alan Moore's work in his "grim and gritty" period: What If the Superheroes, the Ones Who Always Win, Went Down to Dusky Death (and Degradation)? Incidentally, though I've scoffed at Alan Moore's claims that every writer in the business is guilty of ripping off his wonderfully ironic and deeply intellectual concepts, in the case of Millar Moore's ire would be fully justified.

 In OLD MAN Millar trades on the cumulative histories of the standard Marvel heroes for cheap shock-with-no-awe, showing no appreciation for said histories. For instance, Millar knows that Wolverine started out life as an opponent for the Incredible Hulk, so by the rules of fannish consistency, Logan as an old man must once again face the Hulk. But this is a Hulk who, for no stated reason, has become as much of a villain as the Red Skull. He's also become a gross hillbilly who rules his territory in the villain-conquered U.S, alongside a passel of green, gamma-mutated offspring. There had been other attempts to show the Hulk becoming a darker figure-- Peter David's "Maestro" iteration of the character, not to mention a few intimations of Hyde-like nastiness in the character's first appearances. But as far as I can tell, the only reason that Bruce Banner becomes a cannibalistic redneck is because he couldn't find any regular humans to have sex with. So he had sex with his first cousin, the She-Hulk, and-- presto, Instant Hillbilly!

About the only nice thing I can say about this worthless work is that I smiled a little when Hawkeye and Wolverine start tooling around in a rebuilt Spider-Mobile. But it was definitely a smile of short duration.

SAW BOTH WOLVERINE AND TREK

...And it's interesting that here we have two movies, both re-interpreting franchises that began in continuing-serial formats for the purpose of intermittent-serial films. where both original franchises were very continuity-intensive.

The approaches of the two new films are essentially opposite to one another. While the X-MEN film franchise never did follow closely the continuity of the X-comics, once the first film established its own take on the mutants, that take then became canon with the scope of the films. Thus WOLVERINE is a fill-in-the-blank tale that establishes what happened with the character before he debuted in the X-films. The results are modestly enjoyable but not particularly inspired: I'll be surprised if WOLVERINE makes very many "best superhero film" lists.

J.J. Abrams' STAR TREK, though, goes out of its way to acknowledge the canon created by the continuing TV-serials and the intermittent bigscreen movies, and then subverts that canon by creating a new "timeline" which effectively gets the "Abramsverse" out from under the huge weight of TREK continuity built up by pioneer Roddenberry and his crew, and then continued (some would say run into the ground) by Rick Berman and his crew.

My main qualm about the new Abrams franchise, though, is that I question whether Abrams can wrap his mind around a science-fictional theme that doesn't involve crashing planets and messed-up timelines. I had little love for the reliance on technobabble seen in the Bermanverse, but the Abramsverse goes to the other extreme, giving us what is basically a thriller with SF elements that garnish it, like those ALIAS episodes where Sydney had to chase around after some super-doohickey or other.

Of couse, Abrams may not stick with the franchise as a director, and so there may be wiggle room for someone to build on his ideas and incorporate more of the best Roddenberry motifs-- perhaps in the way Louis Letterier made a better HULK movie by building on what Ang Lee established, and then cross-pollinating elements from the comic and TV series.

I give both WOLVERINE and TREK both a rating of "fair."