GRIEVANCE IS NOT DIVERSITY'S GOOD BUDDY

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall."-- Robert Frost.

“The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."-- Ibrem X Kendi.

Whenever creators of "woke" popular culture indulge in the practice of swapping the established ethnicities of characters formulated by earlier creators, they often defend their actions by pointing at American pop culture's long tradition of privileging Caucasian characters and of stigmatizing "people of color" when such characters were depicted at all. Because of this history-- which wokesters do not hesitate to dub "white supremacy"-- they assume that any alterations they make are beneficial to the culture as a whole, and that only unregenerate racists would object to their idea of diversity.

This radical definition of racism was not born along with the so-called modern Progressives, who became increasingly prominent in the 2010s, not least by reviving the term "woke" to describe a recommended state of liberal hyper-vigilance against any opposing conservative values. Like "woke," the term "institutional racism," aka "systemic racism," had an earlier genesis, appearing in the 1967 book BLACK POWER by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton. That decade saw the political articulation of the two dominant forms of Liberalism, meliorism and radicalism. The names say something about their ideological orientations. Meliorism stems from a Latin word for "better," and thus suggesting the overall betterment of persons influenced by the ideology. Radicalism arose from a Latin word for "root," and became associated with the ideal of theoretically hunting out the "root causes" of some conflict-- though with the added connotation of attacking whatever is alleged to be the root cause, often benefitting one group or ideology rather than society as a whole.      

Froom the 1960s on, American pop culture tended to favor meliorism. When, for example, Marvel Comics introduced Black characters to their universe, such as The Black Panther and the Falcon, the liberal writers involved wanted their readers to better understand the culture of Black Africans and Black Americans. This did not mean that the White readers were in any way expected to cease appreciating either American majority culture or any of the European, dominantly-Caucasian cultures from which America's majority citizenry had been derived.

In comics, this meliorist pattern reached its apogee in the creation of THE NEW X-MEN in 1975. GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1 sidelined four of the older, entirely Caucasian-American members of the 1960s team and devised an excuse for the two remaining members, Cyclops and Professor X, to go on an international scavenger-hunt for new mutant heroes. Seven crusaders obligingly sign on: one White Canadian, three White Europeans, one Native American, one Asian, and one apparent Black African (later revealed to be of African-American extraction). In the ensuing series, Cyclops still remains the only member from the sixties comic, with the other four from that period being written out (though a slightly later plotline brought back Marvel Girl within the space of an issue or two). Two other members left and stayed gone, ostensibly to reduce the number of characters readers had to keep track of. As it happened, they were both POC, with Native American Thunderbird dying in action and Asian Sunfire leaving just because he felt like being a dick.

The larger point to be taken from these meliorist examples is that there was no trace of a radical ideal that anyone of any race was "owed" representation. Writer Chris Claremont most probably eliminated Thunderbird and Sunfire because he didn't have anything to say about them, while he ostensibly kept Wolverine because he offered more story potential. Yet he also arguably gave more attention to Black African Storm than to Banshee and Colossus, two of the three White Europeans. Narratively speaking, Claremont had three "favorite children" in Storm, Nightcrawler and Wolverine. He concentrated on them so much that even the Caucasian-American Cyclops probably would not have got much attention had Claremont not brought back Jean Grey, who would eventually become entangled in a romantic arc with Wolverine.

So successful was the X-MEN franchise that nearly all other superhero team books, both from Marvel and from its main rival DC, emulated Claremont's melioristic liberal template, all the way through the 1980s and 1990s. That said, larger forces in popular entertainment would eventually shift that melioristic tendency, as grievance-based radicalism began to assume a greater cultural role in the 1990s, specifically through the mainstreaming of hip hop music and of the New Black Cinema, spearheaded by Spike Lee and John Singleton.

 In contrast, so-called mainstream comics, whether about hero-teams or not, didn't show much of a taste for radicalism. However, the same economic forces that birthed the direct-sales comics market made it possible for the industry to market concepts with a more radical agenda. Ironically, though Marvel Comics had provided most of the first "diverse" superheroes, their main competitor DC Comics invested far more heavily in imprints aimed at adults, principally Vertigo. Some of these "adventures in diversity" had a meliorist orientation. But arguably the more radical ongoing titles attracted more attention, setting the tune for the mainstreaming of "woke comics" in the 21st century. And although titles like SWAMP THING and SANDMAN had their "woke moments," none of the ongoing Vertigo titles were more grievance-heavy than Peter Milligan's SHADE THE CHANGING MAN. The first issue, for example, opens with a sequence in which a noble Black Man intercedes when his White girlfriend is menaced by a White slasher covered in the blood of his victims-- only for the Black Man to be shot dead by a Racist White Southern cop. Edgy, right?

I mention Milligan partly because he seems to be the first writer to taint Claremont's even-handed X-MEN with grievance-based radicalism. This rather short run-- only 22 issues, X-MEN #166-187, from 2005 to 2006-- makes him something of a precursor to the flood of woke comics from Marvel and DC in the 2010s, though not necessarily any direct influence. The proximate reason for the "woke comics boom" was the initial, albeit short-lived, popularity of MS MARVEL in 2014. But if one wants to see an early example of the X's getting put through the grievance mill, the Milligan run is a great place to start.  

Here's Milligan introducing a mutant named "Boy," because his rich White masters think it's hilarious to call him that. You know Milligan's being edgy because he claims the richies are "liberals"-- though I suspect Milligan counts on his readers not to believe him.  

Here's Milligan having Boy rant about "colonialism" for some damn reason.

Here's some general and the President (wonder which one) showing ingratitude to the mutants for having saved the world again.

And finally, here's some villain dissing John Wayne, and the gung-ho American superheroes being deeply offended.

I imagine Milligan viewed his jejune grievance-baiting as "satire," but it's less insightful than even a nineties issue of MAD Magazine. These 22 issues don't show the heroes and their opponents relating to one another in interesting ways: it's all just superficial "head games," particularly the opening arc "Golgotha," involving an alien spore that causes all of the heroes to rail at one another. The only breaks I'll cut Milligan are (1) he probably didn't think he was going to be writing the X-title very long, so he may have just wrote some piddling stories while keeping the status quo stable, and (2) even Claremont wrote his share of "head game stories." But whenever Claremont did this sort of "Naked Time" schtick, the characters weren't only spouting grievances to attack America, capitalism or just overall White Culture, both European and American.     

Though I don't follow current comics, the few comics podcasts I follow don't indicate any major movements back toward an ethic of meliorism at either Marvel or DC. Possibly there aren't as many extreme examples of radicalism as "Gay Son of Superman" and "Captain America, Hydra Agent." But I suspect that the radical ideal of representation for all aggrieved groups-- rather than the ideal of seeking common ground-- remains entrenched. I consider this ideal, as per my Robert Frost quote, one equivalent to maintaining walls-- walls to be exploited by those who profit from divisiveness and so make it unlikely than diversity measures will ever succeed. It's ironic that as I write this, there's ARE indications that Hollywood, which exploited or even exacerbated the most radical tendencies of Marvel and DC, might be backing away somewhat from peddling grievance all the time.      

COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 4

 At the end of Part 3 I wrote: "Having addressed here the structural differences of monads and serials in terms, Part 4 will deal only with the interordination of icons within differing narratives."  

The icons within both pure and impure monad-works alike are judged solely by qualitative escalation. IVANHOE, unlike OLIVER TWIST, is an impure work because it includes alongside its completely fictional characters the legendary Robin Hood and his merry band as support-characters to Ivanhoe, as well as the historical figure of Richard the Lion-Hearted. But Robin and Richard exist only in the novel as Scott's fixed portraits of them. All of the icons in IVANHOE have a default valence of BASAL ICONICITY.   

Serial-works, whether by one author or several authors, have the ability to evolve over time, which means that the status of icons may change in many ways in terms of both forms of escalation. Serials that possess an ensemble of Prime icons need not be as inflexible as those with a solo protagonist; a character in the ensemble may be killed for any number of reasons without affecting the longevity of the series. If anything, the termination of the character Thunderbird during the early issues of "The New X-Men" probably benefitted the series in terms of making the other characters seem more at-risk. Yet because Thunderbird appeared in two ensemble-stories before he was killed, he possesses ELEVATED ICONICITY-- an elevation due entirely to quantitative escalation in his case.         

I've mentioned earlier that the prose icon of Fu Manchu possesses durability born of both qualitative and quantitative escalation. The first cinematic adaptation of the character in film's sound era, though, possesses only the quantitative type, consisting of just three rather cheap films from Paramount Films in 1929, 1930, and 1931. Moreover, in the third and last film, DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON, Fu Manchu is slain early in the movie, because the script downgrades him to support-status in order to make his daughter Ling Moy the Prime icon of this installment of the series. I doubt that this people behind this low-budget series planned for any more appearances for Ling Moy when they began the project; they were probably simply told to play up Fu Manchu's daughter because Rohmer's book DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU was being sold around the same time. As the star of a single film, Ling Moy would, like Ivanhoe, possess only BASAL ICONICITY. However, she like Ivanhoe would still possess stature, rather than charisma, even though Ling Moy was just a knockoff of Fah Lo Suee, a character who in the Rohmer books was only a charisma-type, and who never became a cultural touchstone as her prose-father did.

The distinction between base and elevated forms of iconicity is particularly important in serials wherein Sub icons make repeated appearances. Almost none of the canonical Sherlock Holmes stories contain "repeat offenders" among Holmes' foes, and the celebrated Professor Moriarty only escapes sharing the lowly basal status of Stapleton and Grimesby Roylott by having full appearances in two Doyle stories-- even though one of them is a prequel to the story in which Moriarty appears to bite the big one. Other prose serials toyed with bringing back favorite villains to oppose series-heroes, though it would seem that no one exploited "elevated iconicity" for Sub icons as thoroughly as did Golden Age comic books.      

A Sub icon who appears only once can only possess Basal Iconicity with respect to quantitative escalation but may take on greater durability in terms of qualitative analysis. The Death-Man, who made his only appearance in BATMAN #180 (1966), was never meant by his creator to have any future appearances, and indeed he's only been "bought back" in a couple of later iterations that may not be identical with the original evildoer. Most Bat-fans did not want to see Death-Man keep returning like Joker and Penguin, because Death-Man's only schtick was that of making himself appear to have died-- something he only did so to cheat the executioner. The single "Death-Man" story also does not give him more than basal iconicity, but he does have durability in Batfan-circles because of the perceived high quality of the story.      

The rule of "one doesn't count but two does" can be illustrated with two other Bat-foes, but from the '66 teleseries. In one episode, "The Sandman Cometh," Michael Rennie makes his only appearance as master crook Sandman. This episode counts as a "villain-mashup" since Sandman teams up with Catwoman, a high-charisma "repeat offender" in the comics and one who'd been the main Bat-enemy in three previous episodes. But because Sandman possesses only basal iconicity, it's not a "villain-crossover." 

However, though Sandman is not more than an average one-shot villain-- not nearly as good as either False Face or Chandell-- he gets outscored in terms of iconicity by two-timer Olga, Queen of the Cossacks. She like Sandman first appears in the company of an established Bat-foe-- though Vincent Price's Egghead had only made one previous appearance-- and if she'd never appeared again, she would have stayed at the basal level. But the "Olga-Egghead" team made one more appearance, and so she earns the "elevated" level. (And since I brought up qualitative analysis before, Olga's maybe a little better than Sandman, but not anywhere as bad as Anne Baxter's previous one-shot evildoer, Zelda the Great.)      

More on these matters as they occur to me. 

       

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.

THE APPROPRIATION HUSTLE PT. 3

I have not used the above essay-title since I completed a couple of posts on the subject of appropriation in 2017, but since my views on the subject have not changed, the title seems fully applicable here, to extend my remarks on the topic as they appear in Brian Attebery's 2013 book STORIES ABOUT STORIES.

In the last section of my Attebery review, I quoted the author's opinion of a particular White Australian author's "appropriation" of Aboriginal stories for her fantasy-novel.

As with similar endeavors in Canada, the United States, and other colonial locales, a goal of the [colonial] project... was to get rid of indigenous peoples through a combination of assimilation and genocide while APPROPRIATING [my emphasis] their songs, stories and rituals.

I won't repeat my refutation of this dubious logic, though I'll add the point that Attebery managed to conflate all those colonial persons urging for "assimilation" of marginal peoples with those who were supposed "appropriating" the sacred narratives of those people. In point of fact, the powers urging assimilation would have been totally focused on erasing all cultural differences. But when a researcher with an interest in Native American culture like Henry Schoolcraft devotes six volumes to preserving Native American culture-- research that, in turn, provided much of the content of Longfellow's HIAWATHA-- one could hardly call that erasure. It's also possible to fairly critique the characterizations Schoolcraft or Longfellow made of Native American culture without assuming some dire plot to heap opprobrium on Indians, and without assuming that the respective authors made tons of money by adapting their stories. (Longfellow did; Schoolcrafr probably did not.)

On a separate matter: Attebery was very vocal against the idea that only authors aligned with "living traditions" like that of Aboriginal worship could be deemed worthy to weave fantastic fiction out of those sacred narratives. He said nothing about other Aboriginals would approve of what the hypothetical Aboriginal author did with their sacred narratives, though Attebery dismissed the complaints of Christians who didn't always like what authors like C.S. Lewis wrought in his fictions about the "living tradition" of Christianity. Somehow I doubt Attebery would be quite so sanguine if traditional Aboriginals were upset with their religion's depiction, even by one of their own-- or even one who was ethnically related to that subgroup, but not "living the life." 

A specific example of some real-world condemnation can be found in the public criticism of fantasy-author Rebecca Roanhorse. Of her six published books, I've read both entries in the "Sixth World" series, which take place in a future where an apocalypse has more or less returned certain parts of the U.S. to their pre-Columbian status. So, given that it's a author with partial Native American ethnicity writing about Native American culture, it all must be good, right?

Not quite. According to Roanhorse, she's half-Black and half-Pueblo Indian, but her "Sixth World" fantasy is based upon Navajo religion. After Roanhorse became well-known, certain Navajo pundits claimed that a non-Navajo, even one who had lived for some years on the Arizona reservation known as "Navajo Nation," had no right to utilize Navajo narratives for fiction irrespective of formal literary quality. From Wikipedia:

Dr. Matthew Martinez, former Lieutenant Governor of Ohkay Owingeh,^[8][9] welcomed Roanhorse on her first and only visit to the community, in 2018, and spent time with her. He said, "I recognize that adoption is an emotional experience for families and communities and especially those who have been adopted out with no real connection to home....At Ohkay Owingeh, our current enrollment process privileges family lineage and not blood quantum." Agoyo explained that "anyone who descends from an Ohkay family - as Roanhorse has publicly claimed - can become a citizen. But Martinez said the author has chosen a different path."^[1] Martinez continued, "by not engaging in any form of cultural and community acknowledgement, Roanhorse has failed to establish any legitimate claim to call herself Ohkay Owingeh." He eventually concluded, "It is unethical for Roanhorse to be claiming Ohkay Owingeh and using this identity to publish Native stories."^[1]

 

 

Serendipitously, a similar example of small-minded exclusionary attitudes was brought to my attention by this CRIVENS post. It seems that a 2024 facsimile of the renowned GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1 came out with an advisory warning reading, in part, that the story contained "negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures." But GSXM is not some 1940s cartoon making jokes about African cannibals or the like. The advisory also claims that its purpose is "spark conversation to create a more inclusive future." But how can there be a conversation, when the authors of the advisory don't even say what was wrong with "Second Genesis?" Did the story fail to depict non-White characters like Sunfire and Thunderbird as even-tempered? Or did some Marvel drone get the whim-whams from the scene in which a group of tribal Africans are shown worshiping mutant heroine Storm as a goddess, because neither they nor she know better?

Those are both possibilities. However, I'm of the opinion that the real issue was probably that all of the creative people involved were dominantly Caucasian in ethnicity. Yet the idea of having a concept like X-MEN being written so as to satisfy all ethnicities is absurd. Navajo pundits may be content to have no fiction-author base a story upon their sacred tales unless it's someone who truly came, ethnically and culturally, from the Navajo community. But how could any single writer or artist satisfy the demands of writing for all the ethnicities in this or any X-MEN story? Storm is ethnically though not culturally Black American, so I guess Rebecca Roanhorse could write her. But she couldn't write Thunderbird (even had he survived), because he's Apache. Nor could she write any hero from any other culture. And the same would apply to any other author. (And yes, I know that there are no "sacred narratives" in X-MEN, but obviously the whole "appropriation argument" extends far beyond the specific "religious fantasy" context it assumed in Attebery's screed.)

While I will admit that some pro-appropriation individuals may be motivated to preserve the integrity of their cultures, I stand by my imputation that an awful lot of talk about "appropriation" is what I called it in the title, a hustle designed to make sure some people get jobs and others don't. What did Ryan Coogler, a Black American from Oakland, know about real African cultures before he helmed a motion picture based on a made-up African nation? Wasn't he as dependent as a White writer-director would be, upon what expert researchers advised him? Even though he's credited with scripting, I feel sure that he depended on outside research as much as Longfellow depended on Schoolcraft. 

I have seen some online essays claiming that some of the worst political correctness is losing its hold on American culture. That doesn't mean an absolute return to the days when almost all comics-creators shared the ethnicity of European Jews and/or Gentiles. But it could mean a return to the idea that the quality of the work is more important than the identity of the work's creator.

SELLING THE SUPERHERO WOMEN

 

I started to respond to Tom Brevoort's post on Marvel's 1977 reprint collection THE SUPERHERO WOMEN, and to its attendant comments on that blog. But I decided I would do so here first, and reprint my remarks there afterward. 

______

First, I agree with Tom that the selection from SPIDER-MAN #62 doesn't really make the character of Medusa look all that great. Of course, there was no inherent sexism in this guest-starring story, because Stan Lee had written other Spidey stories in which male guest-stars like Quicksilver or The Iceman acted stupidly in order to make the story work. A better selection would have been Medusa's solo story from MARVEL SUPER HEROES, published around the same time as the Spidey story, which in turn may've been designed to get casual readers interested in the long-locked lass.

The RED SONJA story is an okay selection, and the FANTASTIC FOUR entry is well chosen. This story depicted Sue Storm gaining her force field powers, thus responding, after roughly three years, to fans' complaints about her lack of overall power. 

I have the impression that the MS MARVEL selection arose from the company's ongoing agenda to protect the "Marvel" name in any character. Certainly that agenda underlay the creation of the "Marvel Captain Marvel" in the first place, and since a CBR article mentions that the company was taking pitches for various "Ms. Marvel" concepts as early as 1972-- two years after UNCANNY X-MEN and Marvel Girl were off the stands-- that applied to the final, approved version as well. (I couldn't locate an online recapitulation of the story that Jean Grey herself was considered as a possible "Ms. Marvel.")

The selection of the two-part THOR story featuring Hela was a strange one. Since she wasn't purely villainous, she wasn't all that consequential to THOR in particular or to Marvel as a whole. Why not the first Enchantress story, since she was at least important to the universe, and since the tale was a good stand-alone? Maybe Stan just wanted to spotlight some of his post-Kirby work with the God of Thunder, which work was actually pretty good. I'm not surprised there was no Sif-centric story, because I can't think of any at all up to 1977.

A better choice IMO would have been issues X-MEN #62-63. Granted, Marvel Girl was usually a pretty weak sister for most of the feature's run, but this was one of the few times, if not the only time, she was allowed to shine and save the day. And until re-reading the issue, I'd forgot that it included Magneto hitting on Jean Grey big-time, in the old "reign at my side" context. So, Mags, checking out the Young Talent? Sort of like that story where Magneto has the mentally enslaved Scarlet Witch do a hootchie-koo dance for him, years before she was retconned into his pride and joy.

The "Femizons" story was meh, and I suppose the CAT and SHANNA stories were attempts by Stan to repeat his "Well, we tried" defense. The Black Widow story from SPIDER-MAN is another story where the guest star acts stupidly to make the story work, but it holds some historical interest for debuting the bitchin' catsuit-costume. 

That leaves only the Wasp's debut story in the ANT-MAN feature from 1963, which is IMO the best story in the collection. Though Stan's only credited with the plot for "The Creature from Kosmos," I'd theorize that he gave scripter Ernie Hart a pretty thorough breakdown of the whole story, since Stan was after all doing his best to build his then-small universe. For an early Silver Age adventure, it's pretty layered. Ant-Man starts having existential doubts about who will carry on for him while simultaneously grieving for his lost wife Maria. When he considers the possibility of a partner, 1963 readers might have expected (if not for the cover and splash page) the introduction of a kid sidekick-- "Pismire, the Ant Wonder!" Instead Henry Pym gets a meet-cute with Jan Van Dyne, a young woman who slightly resembles Maria, and thought balloons establish that both are instantly attracted to one another. Despite Pym's defensive reaction to the effect that Jan is just "a child," I think it's obvious that she's close to 20, and probably a bit older, given that there's no question of her inheriting the Van Dyne fortune when her pop gets killed. None of that Magneto-type trolling for Old Henry!

I also don't think there's a good argument for Jan, before or after she becomes The Wasp, being an "airhead." Her determination to avenge her dad is what leads Pym to play "Batman" to her "Robin," and to give her the chance not just for vengeance, but to take up the life of a superhero. But she accepts the duty partly because she knows that he's attracted to her, and not as a kid. So all of her subsequent expressions of stereotypical femininity-- drooling over other men, or her frequent references to shopping-- are part of her plan to stay close to Henry and keep reminding him that she's a woman, not a sidekick. And of course, she may actually LIKE shopping. I have it on good authority that some women really do!

GENETIC FREAK-OUTS

I was barely reading any Marvel Comics in the 2010s, but I followed in a loose sense the consequences of the company's bizarre decision to play down the successful X-Men franchise and promote that of the never-successful Inhumans. I'm not sure I knew that plans for an Inhumans film were initiated in 2014, but I certainly saw the result that same year in the AGENTS OF SHIELD teleseries. The first season of that ill-conceived cockup had already been lousy, but the show reached new Heights of Stupid with an attempt to shoehorn the Inhumans concept (though not the familiar comics characters) into a secret agent format. After plans for a movie stalled, in 2017 the principal Inhumans of the so-called "Royal Family" appeared in an eight-episode ABC teleseries. The series proved a huge bomb, critically and commercially. I found in it but one virtue-- a strong performance by actor Anson Mount as the silent king Black Bolt. In my book that put the INHUMANS show on the same quality-level as AGENTS OF SHIELD, whose only strength was the casting of Ming-na Wen as agent Mathilda May.

All these idiotic machinations almost certainly came about because some genius in Disney Marketing decided that the company wasn't getting enough bang for its buck by playing up the X-Men franchise, since that property's movie and TV rights were then owned by Fox. I can imagine the conversation going like, "Hey, Marvel still totally owns the Inhumans, right? The fans will just accept anything we push at them as long as it has a bunch of weird, colorful people in costumes to help them (the fans) compensate for their drab lives." And once this blockhead came up with this genius idea, no one else could point out its fatuity, lest that person seem like he wasn't in favor of the company making more money. One hopes the genius got kicked to the curb for whatever monetary losses Disney suffered for the failure of the INHUMANS teleseries.

As I said, none of these Marvel machinations affected me back in the day, since I wasn't reading the X-books, or for that matter the FANTASTIC FOUR features that also got downplayed for an analogous reason. But when I recently caught sight of a TPB collection of a 2016-17 Marvel series, INHUMANS VS. X-MEN, I wondered if the story, written by Charles Soule and Jeff Lemire,  might signal some of the company's priorities during that historical moment. 

I also dipped into a handful of Inhumans stories published around the same time as IVXM, but I'm sure I've missed a lot of fine points about the execution of the Inhumans franchise. That means that any conclusions I make here are partial at best. But IVXM by itself sets up a situation that COULD have been used to shunt the Unwanted X-Franchise off Planet Earth and to play up the Inhumans, though this possibility does not actually come to pass by the end of the story. Overall the Soule-Lemire story conforms to the "Marvel heroes fight over a misunderstanding" trope, though I will say that, unlike a lot of multi-character crossovers, the writers manage to give most of the characters therein a "spotlight moment" or two. 

Perhaps more tellingly, IVXM attempted to "democratize" the process of genetic-diversity-with-superpower-benefits. The 1970s X-MEN capitalized on this trope far more than its 1960s iteration by disseminating that diversity over countless human cultures and ethnicities. By contrast, the concept of Marvel's Inhumans, as initiated in 1965, was that of an insular culture that had a thing for inducing mutations in its populace, even though the people came from the same stock as common humanity. Following the 1960s, most of the attempts at giving the Inhumans ongoing serials were hampered by the difficulties of endowing such exotic characters with any relatability. Some of the Inhumans stories produced in the middle 2010s, though, sought to modernize the franchise by introducing an assortment of younger Inhumans, sometimes termed "Nuhumans," who in my opinion were designed to compete with the more numerous and successful X-spawn.

I don't have enough information to render any aesthetic judgment on the various INHUMANS comics of this period. There may be some very good works in the actual books, whatever the motives of the marketing people who were responsible for the X-Men X-cision. Still, history will record that Marvel customers still wanted the X-Men, no matter how much the company pushed its favored franchise. Perhaps the fact that the comic-book version of Kamala Khan, originally retconned into an Inhuman as part of the "Inhumans First" project, is now being touted as being "both an Inhuman AND a mutant."

In 2019 Disney bought out Fox and now has the right to monetize any X-adaptations the company might want to do. I suspect, though, that the failure of the Great Inhumans Push will not teach Disney anything about the folly of trying to manipulate their customers' desires for entertainment purely to help the company's bottom line.

NULL VS. NASCENT STATURE/CHARISMA

(NOTE: I posted this yesterday but belatedly realized I needed to correct a few things, so the continuity may be a bit rocky.) 

In ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2 I sought to establish some ground rules for my conception of stature as it operates either through what I termed either Qualitative or Quantitative Escalation. The theory's best summation would be that at times a given literary character can ascend to a certain height of popularity purely through quality irrespective of the number of times the character appears, but that it's more common for characters attain popularity through repeated appearances.

I began by giving two examples: one of a famous literary character who only appeared once, and another who appeared several times. 

This is the most important aspect of escalation with relevance to cultural significance. It does not matter that Ivanhoe had just one literary outing while Fu Manchu had twelve novels and four short stories; what matters most is that they became cultural touchstones. Once this happens, these iconic characters, no matter how much they may be changed in later adaptations, have had their stature escalated to the highest level possible for a purely literary character; the level of Qualitative Escalation.

For the present I believe that the contrasting example of Quantitative Escalation is clear enough for my purposes at present. Yet as I've studied my previous statements on crossovers, I've decided that there are occasional exceptions to the Qualitative Rule that evoke the matter of "quality" without involving what I called above "cultural significance"-- and this "quality" stems from the author's success in giving his characters a relatively high level of stature over time, in comparison to those authors who are not so successful. In this essay most of what I'll be writing about both stature and charisma will concentrate on how they operate within the context of crossovers. Wherever I speak of stature and charisma in this context, I will use the terms "c-stature" and "c-charisma," since I've already stated that Primes and Subs both possess certain amounts of stature and/or charisma even when they are not in a crossover context.

In the above-cited essay, I also wrote:

...I noted that I deemed the now obscure Golden Age heroine Miss Victory to have accrued a moderately high level of stature-- one related purely to how often she appeared-- so that when she was revived in the 1980s series FEMFORCE, her original stature "crossed over" with the new heroes created for the series, even if this "crossover" existed only in the initiating episode of the FEMFORCE series, since the character, re-dubbed "Ms. Victory," became thereafter absorbed into the Femforce mythos.

 

But the question comes to me: can I truly regard FEMFORCE #1 as a "crossover" if the renamed "Ms. Victory" is the only one with stature accruing from Quantitative Escalation? The other three heroines seen on the above cover-- The Blue Bulleteer, Tara the Jungle Girl, and the She-Cat-- are all familiar riffs of earlier superheroine types, but to my knowledge none had previously appeared in commercially published comic books or in any other professional medium. So at the time of this issue's publication, doesn't that mean that these three heroines actually had no more stature than any other character who appeared just one time-- say, no more than a hero who just got one story and never appeared again? And if they did not possess stature within the first issue, then one might reason that none of the "regular" issues of the magazine would possess "c-stature." (I say "regular" because some issues were devoted to reviving other public domain Golden Ages like Miss /Ms. Victory.)

My answer is that such a combination of a "established character" with "newbie characters" can possess "c-stature." However, the presence or absence of "c-stature" can only be determined once the feature or franchise has accrued some history as a recurring venue in which the established character and the newbie characters continue to interact and in which the newbies are free to "spin off," if only temporarily, from the parent concept. In such a feature, the author's intent to launch a "new universe" has been realized, and so I conclude that all three "newbies" in the FEMFORCE comic book start out with what I call "nascent c-stature."

The opposite type of "c-stature," one in which the stature-potential is not realized, is what I call "null c-stature." This type would appear whenever there's an unsuccessful attempt to launch a new starring character (or characters) with help from an established one. The best example can be found in the television concept of the "back-door pilot," in which a producer would seek to foment a new series by having the proposed series' principal(s) interact with the characters of an established series. In 1968 Gene Roddenberry attempted to launch a concept for a new SF-series by having its characters, Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln, encounter the characters of STAR TREK in the episode "Assignment Earth." If a series had eventuated from this encounter, I would have deemed the characters of Seven and Lincoln to share Prime stature with the TREK characters, and so both newbies would have "nascent c-stature" until their series actually manifested. In earlier essays I suggested that Norman Lear's character Maude had stature even prior to getting an actual series, having only appeared on two episodes of ALL IN THE FAMILY, but I did not have a distinct term for this particular type of stature, which is, again, "nascent c-stature." In those two episodes of FAMILY, Maude shares Prime c-stature with Archie Bunker and the other regulars, but only in a nascent sense. But no series for Seven and Lincoln eventuated from "Assignment Earth," and so the characters only possess "null c-stature," but only from the standpoint of a crossover analysis. For those who watch the episode without knowing that it was a back-door pilot, Seven and Lincoln are perceived to be just like any other Sub supporting characters on the show, possessed of charisma but no starring stature of any kind.

The same principle applies to null and nascent c-charisma. A character who appears just once and never again-- such as this 1947 Bat-villain The Glass Man-- has a base level of ordinary charisma, but he has no claim to any sort of c-charisma.

Now a character who appears only once may debut under circumstances that make it more POSSIBLE that he could be revived. Also in ESCALATION PT 2, I focused upon the 1996 multi-villain crossover BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN, writing:

The same [principle of charismatic crossovers] applies to a multi-villain crossover like THE LONG HALLOWEEN-- but only to those villains-- Joker, Mad Hatter, Scarecrow et al-- who have "made their bones." This same story introduces a new villain, Holiday, but since he never appeared prior to that story, he has negligible charisma and so is not part of the charisma-crossover per se. 

Given that close to twenty years have passed, and that Holiday, like the Glass Man, was slain in his debut, it seems at this point that Holiday also possesses ordinary charisma in that he achieved neither Quantitative nor Qualitative Escalation. Still, if someone did revive Holiday, I *might* judge that he retroactively possessed "nascent c-charisma" within the LONG HALLOWEEN narrative in a manner analogous to the newbie heroines of FEMFORCE possessing "nascent c-stature." But I'm not holding my breath for that to take place.

Of course a number of low-charisma characters were reinvented over time to have either high charisma or even high stature, both of which improved their chances to accrue either "c-charisma" or "c-stature." During the Golden Age of Comics, the Batman villain Deadshot only appeared once while the Riddler appeared only twice. But the Riddler's first appearance in the Silver Age led to his adaptation to the 1966 TV show, and he was almost instantaneously promoted to being a first-rank villain. One might say that this promotion also stemmed from quality rather than quantity, since Frank Gorshin's performance gave the character greater appeal to audiences than he had ever garnered from comic-book readers as the result of his three appearances in comics.  Eventually he would become notable in respect to both Quantitative and Qualitative Escalation, and even branches out to "cross over" with other DC heroes like the Elongated Man-- probably his first "c-charisma" crossover.

As for Deadshot, he certainly became Quantitatively more significant. The 1970s Englehart-Rogers redesign of his costume and modus operandi made him more popular with fans, and further articulations, particularly by John Ostrander in SUICIDE SQUAD, gave Deadshot a more well-defined character. I would not say that Deadshot became as Qualitatively exceptional a figure as did the Riddler. However, unlike the Riddler, Deadshot accrued high Prime stature through his membership in the eighties SUICIDE SQUAD (and, I  assume, later incarnations of the franchise as well). By definition,  of course, SUICIDE SQUAD was a crossover of many characters, almost all of whom had started as Subs, and this change resulted in all of them obtaining both regular stature and c-stature. 

The relevance of the "null and nascent" categories with respect to "charisma crossovers" also means that only from a historical perspective can I consider a story a crossover if it contains the association of a "first time villain" with a "repeat offender." In SPIDER-MAN #14, the "repeat offenders" are The Enforcers, though they had made but one previous appearance. The Green Goblin was the "first timer," and though his creators patently intended for him to be a repeat villain, his first appearance can only be seen as having "nascent c-charisma" from the perspective of knowing that the Goblin made further appearances. But from the current historical perspective, most comics-fans know that the character became far more iconic as a Spider-villain than the Enforcers ever could have been, and so SPIDER-MAN #14 also can be deemed a charisma-crossover. 

As I begin to wrap up yet another convoluted concoction of categories, I may as well circle back to a series that runs counter to that of the opening example. In A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT 5, I outlined three types of ensembles, concluding with what I called "the semi-inclusive ensemble." The earliest example of this known to me was the Golden Age series "The Girl Commandos," in which the feature's creators picked up an established solo character, Pat Parker, and "included" her in a team made up of "newbies." Now, the pattern here superficially resembles that of "Femforce," where only one established character with a bunch of newbies. However, "Girl Commandos" was not a crossover in my judgment as "Femforce" was, because the female allies of Pat Parker were not designed to operate independently of the "Girl Commandos" feature. The heroines of "Femforce," however, were over time frequently spun off into individual features, however short-lived, so that they began to resemble a purely inclusive ensemble, but one where team stature came first and individual stature came later. 

Semi-inclusive groups became far more prevalent in the 1970s. The  1960s X-Men team was entirely exclusive in its members were meant to remain in their own feature aside from very rare individual guest-shots in other features. However, the 1970s X-Men combined a group of newbies with one legacy character from the first series (Cyclops) and a smattering of mutant characters who had only appeared in supporting roles. The newbies for the most part became the most popular characters, along with one-shot Hulk-antagonist Wolverine, and the characters' association with the X-Men largely effaced any piddling associations that Wolverine or anyone else-- except Cyclops and, slightly later, Marvel Girl-- had accrued, so I would not tend to judge the X-Men to be an ongoing "static crossover" series as I would FEMFORCE and SUICIDE SQUAD.

NOTE: Some of the terminology in this essay has been discarded since its writing.

MYTHCOMICS: "DAYS OF FUTURE PAST" (X-MEN #141-142, 1981)

 

It's a mark of my long-retired investment in the seventies X-MEN franchise that I can still recall the experience of reading the first pages of DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. 

A few months earlier, Chris Claremont and John Byrne had concluded the ambitious "Phoenix Saga," which, despite its tragic climax, also sported a couple tons of "sense of wonder" elements. Then came X-MEN #141, depicting how, thirty-six years later (than the comic book's cover date), all of America would be reduced to a doomed world bereft of wonders. In the future, the robotic mutant-hunters known as The Sentinels, whose potential had never really been tapped in their first stories. took control of the United States (at the very least) and killed all the Marvel superheroes and most of the X-Men. Only a tiny handful of the mutants survived, kept in power-dampening collars and dressed in jumpsuits designed to evoke the sufferings of real-life WWII Jews. DAYS OF FUTURE PAST addresses the desperate attempt of the survivors to cancel out their dreadful future. Not until re-reading DAYS, however, did I perceive one reason why this dystopian fantasy seemed so much better grounded in reality than dozens of others. 

The two issues are cover-dated January and February 1981, though the whole adventure as such is internally dated as occurring on "Friday, October 31, 1980... the final Friday of one of the closest, hardest-fought Presidential elections in recent memory." To be sure, since one might argue that Marvel-reality may not always line up with our reality, one can't be entirely sure that Claremont is talking about the 1980 victory of Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter. But even had Claremont wanted to address a real political situation, it's unlikely that any Marvel Comics editor, least of all Jim Shooter, would have allowed a Marvel writer to editorialize about a living political figure. That said, given the lag time between comic-book production and the comics' availability to customers, it's not impossible that Claremont plotted DAYS before he actually knew of Reagan's victory-- which may be a reason why, when the new President does appear in the story, he's only a shadowy figure with no name or distinguishing characteristics. In fact, DAYS might be Claremont's projection of what might happen if America went down "the wrong road" that most liberals of the time associated with the Republican Party.

From the conception of the Sentinels, they incarnated the idea of isolating a subgroup of human beings from the rest of humanity. This science-fiction motif was pointedly compared to the human history of racism and chauvinism by many comic-book readers and creators, not least Claremont himself. To my knowledge no one from 1976 to 1980 accused Ronald Reagan of wanting to impose some version of the Nuremberg Rules upon the United States, though at least one of his campaign speeches back in 1980 was accused of recrudescent racism. But it's still interesting that on the very day that the new President of Marvel-Earth was announced, a set of circumstances arise that will bring about the destruction of civil rights-- not only for mutants, but for all human beings.

In 2013, there are six surviving mutants. Five are older versions of Storm, Wolverine, Magneto (now crippled and out of the action), Colossus and Kitty-- now "Kate"-- Pryde. The sixth is a new character, a psychic named Rachel, whom Claremont will explore in great detail over the next decade. The X-survivors intend to erase their doleful era by using Rachel's mind-skills, projecting the consciousness of 2013 Kate to inhabit the body of 1980 Kitty. Then, rather than simply watching over Kate's comatose body to see what happens, Storm, Colossus, Wolverine and Rachel-- joined by the last surviving scion of the Fantastic Four, Franklin Richards-- plan a frontal attack upon the Sentinels.

The mind-transfer succeeds. Kate Pryde takes over Kitty's body and informs the X-Men that a new incarnation of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants is out to assassinate Senator Robert Kelley, a politician obsessed with legally restricting the activities of mutants. Kate informs the heroes that in her world, this murder doesn't cow humanity, as the Brotherhood intended. Instead, in 1984, a new President-- carefully unnamed-- approves the creation of a new set of Sentinels, who carry out their draconian plan to corral all mutants, which extends to keeping all humanity under control as well. Kate also asserts that the Sentinels in her era plan to extend their control to other countries, which will certainly bring about nuclear Armageddon. After overcoming a natural reluctance, the X-Men-- then consisting of Storm, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Colossus, Kitty and guest-star Angel-- zoom off to prevent the Brotherhood's dirty deed.

The battle of the X-heroes and the Evil Mutants isn't particularly mythic in itself, though it's in this narrative that Claremont and Byrne decided to give the ranks of the villains a makeover. The new roster includes only one old-time X-foe, The Blob, and debuts three new malcontents, Pyro, Avalanche, and the oracular Destiny. Lastly, Claremont re-purposes a character he created for the MS. MARVEL series, Mystique, as the new leader of the Brotherhood. Mystique's reasons for believing she can intimidate all of humanity with one assassination are not explored at all, possibly because Claremont, following up on a plot-thread introduced in a 1980 story, was preoccupied with suggesting a connection between Mystique and Nightcrawler. (Eventually she's revealed to be his long-lost mother, FWIW.) The heroes triumph, Kate departs the body of Kitty (who has no memory of the events). and Robert Kelley's life is spared. However, the concluding clincher is that the heroism of the X-Men means nothing to the obsessed politician. In a coda, Kelley is seen conferring with the President-elect-- as said before, given no name and depicted in shadow-- as the new President does what his 1984 successor originally did: authorizing a new series of Sentinels. 

The fact that 1980 present-day events are only partly rewritten may have been Claremont's rationale for not erasing the Sentinel-future from Marvel continuity. I don't remember what happens when Kate's mind returns to 2013, by which time the future-versions of Storm, Wolverine and Franklin Richards have all been slain-- though I have a feeling that the threat of nuclear doomsday somehow gets taken off the table. Unlucky 2013 has to continue, though, because Claremont has introduced the telepath Rachel for the purpose of having her time-travel back to Marvel-present. In due time it will be revealed that she comes by her psychic talent honestly, for she's the child of Cyclops and the recently-deceased Jean Grey a.k.a. Phoenix. For many years to come, Claremont will get a lot of mileage out of Rachel Summers, though DAYS is probably more notable for all the stories Claremont and other Marvel writers generate from Kelley's "Mutant Control Act," which will morph into the Superhuman Registration Act underlying the CIVIL WAR continuity of the 2000s. 

One last myth-point: though a lot of superheroes are mentioned as having been slain by Sentinels by 2013, only the Fantastic Four and their mythos has any direct impact on DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. I've noted that the survivor-mutants are briefly aided by Franklin Richards, but not that he's also the boyfriend of Rachel, and that he's killed early in the story, His presence seems to be nothing more than a foreshadowing of the revelation that Rachel too will prove to be the offspring of superhero parents. The Sentinels, when attacked by the 2013 mutants, have made the Baxter Building their HQ, which would carry a sense of irony were the occupants not unfeeling robots. Finally, a scene in which Kate walks by the tombstones of dead superheroes displays only the names of either X-Men or FF-members. Much later, Kurt Busiek's MARVELS would comment on how the transformed foursome of heroes were lauded by the public while the mutant crusaders were despised for being fundamentally different from the rest of humanity. But Claremont anticipated the same contrast. The Fantastic Four is the "first family" of Marvel-Earth, and the fall of those heroes could be interpreted as the demise of Silver Age Marvel. In contrast, though most of the 2013 mutants also perish, the future of Marvel turns out to be more aligned with the children of Xavier than the buddies of Reed Richards. Claremont was at the top of his game when he plotted out this challenging opus. The downside, though. was that he kept churning out less resonant visions of nightmare realities, most of which were as bad as DAYS OF FUTURE PAST was good. But such is the conundrum of talent: praise a writer for doing one thing well, and nine times out of ten he'll run the same idea into the ground.

NEAR-MYTHS: THE JUDAS CONTRACT (1984)

 

  

 

 

I referenced this TEEN TITANS story-arc in my essay NO FOOL LIKE AN OLD PRO, where I talked about the futility of imposing moralistic restrictions on transgressive content in art. More recently, I decided to reread JUDAS CONTRACT and review it. I was certain that it was not a mythcomic, but was it just a near-myth, like many other stories in the Wolfman-Perez corpus, or a null-myth, like the narrative I reviewed here?

 

My verdict is that although writer Wolfman’s focus here is the same as in “Trigon Lives”—the almost Manichean presence of sheer evil—here his focus is a little better because he embodies his evil not in some road-company Satan, but in a teenaged superheroine, the junior to the older teens (and non-teens) of the Titans group. This is “Terra,” who is admitted into the ranks of the Titans despite her generally snarky attitude and occasional outbursts of uncontrolled rage.

 

According to Wolfman’s public statements, he meant to fake out readers by making them believe that Terra would fulfill a role not unlike that of Kitty Pryde in Marvel’s X-MEN. I don’t how many readers were fooled back in the day—Wolfman is not exactly known for the subtlety of his writing—but the fact that one established Titan, Beast Boy, was deeply in love with the minx probably helped put the hoax across. After a handful of issues in which Terra serves as an apprentice member of the super-group, the first issue of “Judas Contract” reveals that she’s a mole, using a miniature eye-camera to take pictures of the Titans’ routines and local haunts. She then funnels this intel to one of the heroes’ worst enemies, Deathstroke the Terminator. The same issue also reveals that fifteen-year-old Terra is not only Deathstroke’s partner in crime, but also his partner in bed.

 

Once Wolfman tips his hand in the first part, a great deal of time is devoted to depicting the ways in which Deathstroke systematically captures capture of most of the heroes, all of whom look rather stupid for not harbored any serious suspicions of the teen traitor—not Raven, despite her empathic powers, and not the former Robin, with his detective training. I say “former Robin” because it’s also in this story-arc that Dick Grayson assumes his new (and still current) superhero identity of Nightwing. He’s the only Titan to escape capture, though he’s only able to secure the release of his friends with the help of yet another “new member.”

 

As if to compensate for the loss of Terra, he and Wolfman debut the character of Jericho, who can possess the body of most if not all living beings and usurp their wills. Just to ramp up the soap operatics, Jericho also happens to be the son of Deathstroke. The arc also reveals the origin of the Terminator and his own tangled familial history, but neither Deathstroke nor his superhero son rise to the level of mythic presences.

 

Prior to the inevitable scene in which the captive heroes are released by Nightwing and Jericho, Wolfman twists the knife for his protagonists by having Terra strut around, gloating about how easily she tricked them. When the rescue comes off, followed by the usual pyrotechnics, Terra goes berserk, lashing out at Deathstroke as well for supposedly betraying her. In her big death-scene, Wolfman leaves no doubt that she’s a “Bad Seed” with no real motive for her obsessive hatred of all things good: “Due to the fault of no one but herself, she is insane. No one taught her to hate, yet she hates… without cause, without reason.” At least one later writer chose to claim that Deathstroke had driven her mad with a drug meant to enhance her powers. But even though Wolfman’s portrait of destructive behavior lacks any psychological depth, I prefer the idea that this “nasty Kitty Pryde” is just evil for the sake of being evil.

 

On a side-note, Wolfman and Perez seem to have had eye-symbolism on their minds during this arc. The first section of the arc repeatedly emphasizes “The Eyes of Tara Markov,” meaning the camera-implant with which the traitress records everything she sees while spying on the Titans. Jericho also uses “the windows of the soul” to make his power work, since he must catch the gaze of anyone he wishes to control. During the big end-fight, Jericho possesses his evil father and makes him slug Terra, after which she tries to kill him as well as the escaping Titans. Then, if all this eye-stuff wasn’t enough, Beast Boy commits a classic “injury to the eye.” Even though the shapechanging hero doesn’t believe that Terra’s truly corrupt, he turns himself into a small insect and assails the camera-lens in one of Terra’s eyes. Instead of making her more vulnerable, the minor injury enrages her so that she loses control of her powers and kills herself. Though Wolfman and Perez could have chosen a lot of ways to inflict this injury, and even though Beast Boy isn’t being vindictive when he assaults her, the attack on the traitorous “eyes of Tara Markov” provides an ironic way for the simon-pure heroes to vent their wrath on the rogue heroine—and to pave the way for a new member who knows how to use “the power of the gaze” for the forces of good.