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.

A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 5

 Lsst 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)

THE STORY OF MANKIND (in which a debate between Satan and "the Spirit of Man" is supported by a bunch of vignettes starring diverse historical figures ranging from Cleopatra to Peter Minuit. (NOTE: though I'm leaving this example in to show where my mind was at back then, I now do not deem it a crossover because none of the historical figures interact with one another, nor with the two debate-happy demiurges.)

MYTHCOMICS: [“ORIGIN OF A SPECIES”] (THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS AND PHOENIX 1-4, 1996)

 

       

 

I wasn’t regularly reading Marvel’s line of X-books in the late eighties. I did purchase secondhand issues, so I was vaguely aware of the debut of two major X-villains, “Apocalypse” in Louise Simonson’s X-FACTOR and “Mister Sinister” in Chris Claremont’s X-MEN. But few such developments had any personal resonance for me once I was no longer reading with a sense of total involvement. I even scoffed at the latter villain, since his design seemed derivative of the X-Man Colossus. Eventually I came to understand that Sinister was some sort of clone-maker, which became significant in the long and winding “Madeleine Pryor saga," and that Apocalypse was an immortal badass dedicated to “the survival of the fittest.” Most of the stories collected in the TPB “X-MEN: THE RISE OF APOCALYPSE” didn’t make me any more invested in the two villains. The one exception, though, was the mini-series THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS AND PHOENIX, written by Peter Milligan and illustrated by John Paul Leon and Klaus Janson. The four issues possess no over-arcing story-title, so I’ve chosen one of the intertitles to designate the whole narrative: issue #2’s “The Origin of a Species.” The cover-copy promises the reader a more specific origin—that of Mister Sinister—while the cover itself shows the figure of Apocalypse, Sinister’s sometime partner-in-evil, looming in the background.

 

Origin-tales require their authors to turn back time’s winged arrow figuratively, but in “Species” the time-shift is literal. With the help of your basic “time lord intervention,” X-heroes Cyclops and Phoenix are charged with journeying back to 19^th-century England to prevent the immortal Apocalypse from wreaking havoc in that timeframe. The heroes are dropped Terminator-style (i.e., buck naked) into 1859 London—which date Milligan clearly chose because it was the year in which Charles Darwin published ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES. It’s also a time-period when Marvel-Earth harbored no mutants except Apocalypse, who was spawned in ancient Egypt. In effect Cyclops and Phoenix have entered a “terra incognita” for their kind, a singular era in which the scientific idea of mutation was first codified—as well as one in which the conflicts between humanity and inhumanity took on new dimensions.

 

Coincident with the arrival of the heroes, Apocalypse awakens from hibernating in a time-capsule beneath the sewers of London, without much detail about when and why he chose that site for his big sleep. Upon awakening, the villain doesn’t seem to have any particular big scheme in mind, though as always, he’s raring to unleash the dogs of war upon humanity as part of his personal eugenics program. But by dumb luck he happens to learn the name of a scientist named Essex—and thereby hangs the story of the first collaboration of Apocalypse and Sinister.

 

The reader meets Nathaniel Essex and his wife Rebecca before either Apocalypse or the heroes. Following a two-page teaser which takes place in “real time,” Milligan and Leon send us back one extra month, to show us the background of the Man Who Will Be Sinister. Essex, a prominent English biologist, is seen at his estate reading the recently published Darwinian magnum opus. He complains to Rebecca—who is pregnant with the couple’s second child—that Darwin is “still shackled by too many moral constraints.” Rebecca, a mother-to-be who’s already lost their previous child to illness, defends the need for morals to structure society. But Essex, despite never having seen a super-powered mutant in his life, intuits that “some humans might, in time, evolve into gods,” and so he has no use for anything reminiscent of a Christian god and his restrictions.

 

Later, Essex unveils his radical theories to a conference of the British Royal Society, which the celebrated Darwin himself also attends. The obsessed scientist confirms the influence of “incremental changes” upon the flow of life, but also argues for the position we now call “saltation theory,” which allows for sudden, rapid transformations as well. To illustrate his almost religious conviction, Essex imitates one aspect of the Frankenstein mythos—constructing a hybrid organism out of corpses, apparently “mutated” by the addition of angel-like wings—though he stops short of the Full Victor, since the corpse-construct is no more alive than any other medical cadaver. The gathered scientists are revolted by this mix-and-match approach to biology, and Darwin opines that Essex has been addled by the loss of his son, broadly implying that the new theory is compensation for that loss. 

 

Essex’s reaction to this rejection is precisely that of Frankenstein: he buries himself in experimentation on unfortunate “freaks” taken prisoner by a local band of cutpurses, “the Marauders” (figurative ancestors of a similar group of henchmen Sinister will use in the 20^th century). Rebecca sees her husband more and more consumed by his inhuman crusade, and by the end of this jaunt into “one month ago,” she intuits that he may even have defiled the grave of their first son for his experiments. This is the resolution of the two-page teaser I mentioned earlier, wherein pregnant Rebecca is seen feverishly digging up her first child’s grave—and finding an empty coffin. A reader might reasonably expect that Essex exhumed the corpse to revive it, but Essex doesn’t do resurrections, and Milligan doesn’t ever say what the scientist did with the boy’s remains—though the fact that the kid was named “Adam” brings in yet more Shelleyan overtones.

 

Around this same time, Apocalypse wales up and just happens to question one of Essex’s Marauder-henchmen, which makes the villain eager to talk with the scientist. Cyclops and Phoenix not only arrive naked, they also get separated into very different venues. Cyclops manifests in the depths of the sewers from which the Marauders cull their deformed quarry, and, despite an early contretemps, he ends up making allies of London’s quasi-Morlocks. Phoenix gets to make a more celestial descent, crashing through the roof of Westminster Abbey during services. Leon and Janson (whose inks here are some of his best work ever) get quite a bit of visual mileage out of the contrast between the “upper” and “lower” worlds, which contrast is of course something Milligan exploits throughout the SPECIES script.

 

Milligan explicitly refers to the relationship between Essex and Apocalypse as a “Faustian bargain,” but like Faust, Essex hasn’t completely given himself over to evil. Essex does put Apocalypse (deftly wearing a human disguise) in contact with a society of corrupt aristocrats whom the mutant can manipulate, and these sordid rich guys are also an X-reference, for they make up the 19^th century Hellfire Club—albeit long before it was taken over by the full-time villainous club-members who make life difficult for the X-heroes in the 20^th century.

 

When Cyclops and Phoenix finally encounter Essex, they recognize him as the man who caused them endless suffering with his cloning science, and Cyclops is mightily tempted to play “kill baby Hitler,” even though Essex has not yet become Mister Sinister. Apocalypse fights with the duo and spirits away Cyclops, after which he binds the hero and makes him listen to screeds like, “You cannot combat strength with goodness and loyalty, only with greater strength.” Meanwhile, Essex regains a little of his humanity by succoring Phoenix when she’s injured. However, it’s too late for the Man of Science. Rebecca dies in childbirth, taking her second child with her, and leaves her husband with his new identity, that of being entirely “sinister.”

 

Apocalypse continues his plot to make Earth into a “modern Golgotha” (by which one assumes he means a “hill of skulls,” not the site of a transcendent savior). Phoenix tries to rescue Cyclops, but the villain subdues both crusaders. Apocalypse then confers super-villain status upon Essex, so that he becomes “forever branded” as Mister Sinister. However, the machinations of the high and mighty are laid low when some of Cyclops’ lowlife-allies venture into Apocalypse’s lair and free the X-heroes. By that time Apocalypse is off to foster the, uh, apocalypse. Phoenix manages to restrain Cyclops from killing the nascent super-villain Sinister, and to some extent Sinister responds by telling the heroes where they can find Apocalypse. The two of them prevent Apocalypse from one of his dastardly deeds, but the time-spell starts wearing off, drawing them back to their own era. Apocalypse, his plans foiled by both Sinister and the X-Men, returns to his hibernation chamber, the better to set up continuity with whatever Marvel writers had him do next.

 

In my review of GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS, I noted that only rarely had X-writers managed to use the implicit themes of the X-concept to best effect. “Origin of a Species” can take its place as one of the few times an author managed to use those themes to meditate on the divided nature of humanity. There are no super-powered mutants, but our myths of exaltation and damnation are as real as the proverbial Berkleyan stone. “Species” concludes in 1882, as the mutated Essex attends the funeral of his former colleague Charles Darwin. The story ends with the villain reaffirming his commitment to inhuman experimentation—and yet, the last image is that of a music box that once belonged to Essex’s wife. Sinister discards the trinket, trying to put the past behind him. But the “camera’s” focus on the box, uttering its bell-like sounds, may be sounding the toll for the eventual overturning of his evil devotions—to the extent, that is, that any comic-book super-fiend’s destiny can ever come to an end.