INDIVIDUAL VS. COLLECTIVE AMPLITUDE PT. 2

In my first essay on this subject, written three years ago, I pointed out the way a given group of characters might accue mythic amplitude even though said mythicity inhered only in the character's membership in the group, my first example being the Injustice Society of the World. Then I cited another example, the portrayal of the X-Men in the graphic novel GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS, and noted that all of the mutant heroes had a collective form of amplitude even though individually they were less than distinctive.

This week's mythcomic, "A Dream of Monsters," follows the latter pattern. Four of the six heroes-- Quantum Queen, Elvar, Dartalon, and Aviax-- have no mythic identities individually, but only collectively, insofar as they are part of Clonus's brood of mutated "children." Re-Animage has a little more individual mythicity, simply because his creators had to devote some cosmological thought to the process by which his body regenerates. The mental mistress Psyche, however, plays a more central role in the tale insofar as she is "the good mother" against Velissa's "bad mother," though even so, "Monsters" seems to be much more about the Frankensteinian story of Clonus-Prime, his wife Velissa, and the Hatchlings. Later stories in the short-lived WANDERERS series made some attempts to give the heroes some myth-status, as when Aviax, a fellow who can turn into various types of birds, fights an evil scheme that involves the extermination of birds, but all of these stories failed to imbue the sketchy characters with any symbolic stature.

In THE INJUSTICE SOCIETY OF THE WORLD, the starring heroes of the Justice Society don't have much mythicity compared to the villain-group. In the earlier tale A CURE FOR THE WORLD, the Society-members have more mythicity, but only in the collective sense. None of the heroes' particular skills or potentialities are emphasized, bur rather, all of them are made into vessels for the story's message regarding the liberating effects of democracy. If the same story had been told with six different DC heroes, it probably would have read about the same.

It is, however, not impossible for a narrative to sustain both individual and collective myth-amplitude, at least better than "Dream of Monsters" does. In THE JUSTICE LEAGUE'S IMPOSSIBLE ADVENTURE, five League-members are transported to an alien world by a group of judgmental beings named "the Impossibles."  The Impossibles remove the powers of Superman, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and J'onn J'onzz simply because all five received their abilities without working to earn them. The powerless heroes are then obligated to defend the cosmic judges against a group of predacious aliens. During the battle, most of the heroes find that the removal of their powers turns out to be a Good Thing, because it either removes their weaknesses or prevents them from having their former powers turned against them. (For instance, Aquaman is attacked by mental waves from a brain-creature, but he realizes, somehow, that the waves could've slain him had he still had his telepathic powers.) So collectively, all the members share the amplitude of "earning what was not earned," but since the script exploits each of their individual myth-identities, each hero also has an individual myth-amplitude.

ADDENDA: Since, going by Google, I seem to be alone in appreciating JLA #59, I'll add that although Gardner Fox works into the story the weaknesses of Superman and J'onn J'onzz readily enough, he couldn't really do this with the other three. The Flash has no specific vulnerabilities, Aquaman's weakness of needing immersion in water only takes place after a full hour, and Fox probably didn't even know that the Amazon, as written by her creator, lost her strength (sometimes) if a man chained her-- or welded her bracelets together-- or whatever Marston wanted to write at the time. That's probably just as well, as we spared a scene in which Wonder Woman had to say, "The Crystal Man welded my bracelets together, but since I don't have my Amazon strength, I-- uh-- well, I'm still chained up!" (Oddly, the story does give Wonder Woman a psychological block, which is slightly appropriate, just because her creator was of the psychological profession.)

MYTHCOMICS: "A DREAM OF MONSTERS" (THE WANDERERS #1-5, 1988)

Most comics-fans are more than a little familiar with the many revisions of major DC Comics characters like Superman and Wonder Woman following the 1985 "Crisis" mega-event. But of all the characters revised following the Crisis, the team of future-heroes known as "the Wanderers" may be the most obscure. Prior to 1988, the team had only appeared a couple of times as guest-stars in DC's successful LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES feature, and there were no indications that anyone had designed the seven characters of the team to be a continuing franchise. I would guess that when writer Doug Moench and artist Dave Hoover pitched the idea of THE WANDERERS as an ongoing series, their interest had less to do with their fascination with the characters than with the chance to promulgate a somewhat darker vein of science fiction than what usually appeared in the LEGION's "space opera with superheroes."

Most of the Crisis-era revisions didn't necessitate killing the original version-- the pre-Crisis incarnation of Wonder Woman proving the exception to that rule-- but WANDERERS #1 starts out with the deaths of all seven heroes by forces unknown. The dead bodies of the heroes, floating around in their derelict spaceship, are discovered by a being belonging to the race called "Controllers," said race being a familiar presence in the LEGION cosmology. This individual, eventually dubbed "Clonus-Prime," finds the slain heroes while he's in the midst of tracking the monsters responsible for attacking both the Wanderers and various other alien races. (These creatures are not given a specific name as such, so for the rest of the essay I'll call them "the Hatchlings," a name given to one of their intermediary development-stages.) Clonus-Prime takes time out from his pursuit to arrange a rebirth for the deceased stalwarts, but only in an indirect (and somewhat confusing) manner. He intends to bring the Wanderers back in new bodies cloned from their corpses. However, since Prime doesn't want to get off the trail for too long, he first clones himself. This results in an identical twin, usually named just "Clonus." Clonus-Prime downloads some or all of his memories into Clonus, and then leaves. Clonus, who possesses all of his "parent's" scientific skills and also inherits the immortality common to all Controllers, gets to work and tries to clone new bodies for all seven. One of the seven clones does not take, but the other six prove viable, although for reasons not well explained, Clonus modifies most of their powers and appearances, as well as growing them to adult status in a matter of weeks. 

Once they "come alive," the six clone-heroes possess all of the memories of their "primes," or originals. Yet they're more than a little alienated by their new physical forms, and some of them are angry to have been made into lab-rats by their new "father." For the first five issues, the heroes' main mission is to learn what forces destroyed their primes. None of them seem to have any memories of their predecessors' final moments, which is perhaps just as well, since the saga of the new Wanderers is already fairly confusing, owing to its being started in media res. Moench puts forth a familiar but still appealing idea-- that of giving a murder-victim a second chance to find his murderer-- but whereas this is given an elegant simplicity in a feature like DC's DEADMAN, the concept becomes vitiated by the demands of a team-book. Team-concepts flourish when the team-members all have separate concerns and thus butt heads over their respective priorities-- but with a few exceptions, the New Wanderers all share the same overall problem: that of being reborn in mutated forms, and of finding their murderers.

Further, even in the first five issues-- easily the best arc in the feature's 13-issue run-- Moench does not succeed in creating strong interpersonal dynamics for the members, despite a transparent attempt to make two of the heroes look like, respectively, Nightcrawler and Wolverine of THE X-MEN. The two female team-members keep the names they started with, Psyche and Quantum Qneen, but the four males all assume new monickers-- Elvar, Dartalon, Aviax, and Re-Animage-- none of which are any better than their primes' cognomens. The heroes get a little time to experiment with their powers before the next catastrophe: an assassin from the Controller universe. Clonus reveals to his "children" that in that universe, cloning is expressly forbidden, which is why Clonus-Prime fled his own cosmos in order to perfect his cloning-procedures. So the Wanderers must continue their own quest for their murderers while a stalker pursues them. For good measure, both Clonus-Prime and Clonus perish, though the latter survives as a computer-program in the Wanderers' starship. One of the heroes, the intuitive Psyche, discovers an infant Hatchling in the ship and hides the imp from the others, seeking to use her mental abilities to purge the Hatchling of the violence inherent in its species.

To say the least, this overplotted narrative proves ponderous in the extreme. The mythic meat of the story, though, might be called Doug Moench's subversion of the novel FRANKENSTEIN. Clonus-Prime's obsession with cloning bears some comparisons with the obsession of Shelley's character to make a "new Adam" out of diverse body-parts, and many critics have commented that Frankenstein's primary sin was to attempt to create a human being through science rather than using the tried-and-true organic methods.

Clonus-Prime, though ultimately responsible for the genesis of the Hatchlings, does not make his monsters exclusively through science. Before he's even created his first clone, he meets a human woman of the Legion-verse, and the two of them fall in love. Clonus-Prime and Velissa repeatedly try to conceive the old-fashioned way, but they fail to bear any children due to biological incompatibility. Unlike Clonus-Prime, Velissa ages like all mortals, but rather than simply letting her perish naturally, he prolongs her life via cloning, making new young versions of Velissa and then euthanizing the aged bodies. For generations Clonus-Prime keeps making new versions of Velissa, as well as continuing to try biological reproduction. But as the Controller-assassin eventually reveals, clones can't be allowed to reproduce, or they will produce monsters. It's not clear as to why Clonus-Prime never knew this, but it's due to his ignorance that he and Velissa eventually do bear children: the Hatchings, who reproduce asexually and are hostile to all species save their own kind. Thus in a sense Clonus-Prime is ultimately responsible both for killing and for re-birthing the Wanderers (sort of like series-creators Moench and Hoover).

The climax of "Dream" also touches on Frankensteinian themes, for the Hatchlings not only escape their father, they take their mother Velissa with them, and she's kept alive by their will, as a sort of zombie-queen. Though her husband has the greater responsibility for the Hatchlings' depredations, the image of Velissa presiding over her ravening offspring reminded me of Frankenstein's fears that if he created a bride for his monster, she would become the mother of a new race of monsters. In contrast to Velissa, Psyche is the "good mother," in that she's successful in using her emotion-based powers to purge her adopted Hatchling of its violent tendencies. But Psyche can't save the whole nest of Hatchlings, and thus the arc I've named "Dream of Monsters" comes to a cataclysmic conclusion. 

For the remainder of the series, Moench and Hoover, rather than working on the dynamics of their ensemble, placed more emphasis in showing each of the Wanderers trying to find their individual destinies in various new situations. Even the best of these stories are rather predictable and unaffecting, despite the creators' attempts to play up the melodramatic angles. As a team the "X-Wanderers" were a failure, but the initial arc, however tortuous, does have a few memorable myth-moments.