MYTHCOMICS: "DON'T DO THAT VOODOO YOU DO SO WELL" (MSH SPRING SPECIAL #1, 1990)

A few years back I played around with using "Black History Month" as a theme for February, though I was pretty loose in my criteria, often mixing racial myths as I pleased. I wasn't really thinking about following the theme this year, but I chanced upon a one-shot story in one of Marvel's many inventory-filled publications, which is like finding the proverbial diamond in the garbage.

And it seems even more improbable, given that the star of this story is Brother Voodoo. This Haitian hero was launched by Marvel in 1973 around the same time as a similarly-themed title, TALES OF THE ZOMBIE, both of which showed a peculiar obsession Marvel Editorial formed at the time for the linked subjects of voodoo and zombies. Neither feature was successful, and in fan-circles Brother Voodoo has often seen as a lame character, particularly thanks to humor-artist Fred Hembeck. I don't recall if Hembeck's mockeries of the hero predate or postdate this 1990 story, in which he himself adopted a more "straight" style to illustrate this one-off tale with writer Scott Lobdell. Absent further information, I will assume that Lobdell submitted this VOODOO script in his tryout period, and that it was assigned to Hembeck after the fact.

Intentionally or not, VOODOO utilizes a trope I think appeared with some frequency in Chris Claremont's work of the seventies and eighties; a trope I'll call "good man gives in to bad desires." Despite the story's punny title it's entirely serious in tone, and one reason I may like it is because the original hero in his short-lived seventies series was so good as to be thoroughly bland.

The hero narrates his own story, and his first line foregrounds his fallibility: "It was never my intention to become Brother Voodoo." In the course of the narrative he references the basics of his origin. Born Jericho Drumm of Haiti, he studied psychology in the U.S. but returned to his native land to support his brother Daniel. Daniel, a priest of voodoo, was slain by a rival, and Jericho mastered the Haitian mystic arts in order to avenge him. His most notable power was that Jericho had somehow merged with the spirit of his dead brother, and could send Daniel Drumm's spirit into the bodies of enemies, possessing them to do Jericho's will a la the DC hero Deadman. FWIW, the Daniel-spirit never seems to have any personality, as if it was just a raw magical force instead of the ghost of a once living human.

On the second page Jericho, who has said that "voodoo is all about belief," illustrates this credo by rescuing a boat on a storm-swept sea, seeming to become a giant, though this may be only in the minds of those being rescued. The reader meets Jericho's girlfriend Loralee Tate, a nurse seeking to cure an immunological crisis among the Haitian people. She mentions that she's glad she didn't leave for the States as she planned earlier, but Jericho's guilty thoughts make clear that he had something to do with both her change of mind and the medical crisis. 

Page four sets down the cause of that guilt. Upon being informed of Loralee's plan to go home, he confesses, "I was afraid of losing her, so I used my brother's spirit to possess her, to insure our love-- to destroy our love." Though the script does not specify everything that followed, it's logical to presume that Jericho had sex with Loralee while she was under his control, or he wouldn't be nearly this guilty. The caption about his having "removed the lie" proves confusing, given that she still seems to be under his mental dominion back on page 2.

In any case, precisely because of Jericho's bond with nature through his voodoo mastery, the nature spirits of Haiti have brought about the immunological breakdown. He pleads with the spirits for forgiveness, but they only state that "forgiveness must come from you, and one other."

 Due to the limited page count, Lobdell doesn't actually show the Haitian people being freed from the "penance" inflicted upon them by Jericho's sinful misuse of his power. Since on page seven Loralee is shown leaving Haiti as she originally planned, the most logical conclusion is that Jericho finally released her from his thrall, and that she realized what he had done. Loralee echoes Jericho's own intuition that his sin was a failure of belief in their love, strongly implying that because of this sin, he's lost out on any chance with her. She's clearly the "one other" that the spirits say must forgive him, and page eight wraps up with Jericho realizing that he must at least conditionally forgive himself in order to do better, to become the hero he meant to be.

I've seen only one online commentary on the story. Predictably enough, the speaker seemed to think that Lobdell was indulging in a rape-fantasy via mind-manipulation. But literary rape-fantasies are usually predicated on the enjoyment of superior power, and they don't show the rapists wallowing in guilt for what they've done. (Jack Hill's 1966 MONDO KEYHOLE provides a good shorthand example.) Current gender politics imply that a male can never transgress against a female without deserving eternal perdition, while female transgressions against males are not even conceptually possible. All I can say is that I think the ethic of forgiveness applies to this particular fictional situation, and for situations taking place in real life, each one must be evaluated individually as well. 

A last point on the subject of Forgotten Continuity: though the "Haitian plague" is original to Lobdell's story, Loralee Tate did debut in the last three BROTHER VOODOO stories-- where she was still a registered nurse, but was also Black, unlike the one in Lobdell's VOODOO. Black Loralee may have been intended as a potential romantic partner for Jericho, but if so there are no indications in her only appearances. White Loralee, possibly occupying one of those many "alternate Marvel Earths," does not seem to have appeared again. And that's probably for the best given the ideological climate at the current Marvel Comics.

BTW, I belatedly found a page where Hembeck explained his involvement in the "Brother Voodoo is So Lame" schtick, which he admits that he continued but did not originate.

http://www.hembeck.com/More/Voodog/Why.htm

MYTHCOMICS: "CORPSES, COAST TO COAST" (VOODOO #14, 1954)

Like the 1951 story "Crawling Evil," "Corpses-- Coast to Coast" is a story credited only to "the Iger Shop" on the Grand Comics Database. Within the realm of comic books, "Corpses" is a rare zombie-story in which no literal zombies appear, since the whole thing is a dream. And the whole story is also celebrated by a few online sites as a weird fever-dream. However, in contrast to most of the dim-witted attacks on Communism seen in comic books, "Corpses" is also a clever spoof of the movement, particularly its history at organizing labor unions in the United States.

First, here's one of the sigils designed for the 1905 association "Industrial Workers of the World," a.k.a. "the Wobblies:"

And here's the first page of "Corpses," which also presents a three-letter sigil for the world's new conquerors, the United World Zombies.

The narrator of the dream, identified in the narrative as "Z-One," is focused on just one highly improbable form of striking labor: that of grave diggers. Z-One, although he claims that he's an undertaker by trade, is actually one of the men responsible for the strike. Instead of being concerned that his establishment is being filled up with unburied corpses, he and his confederates simply make the cadavers "the raw material of one of the greatest revolutions ever planned."

The dead bodies-- including females as well as males-- are then "reactivated" at a special plant and sent out to conquer America. Not surprisingly, zombies sound a lot like the 1950s idea of doctrinaire Stalinists. "No fear, no minds," says Z-One's superior (getting the order of things somewhat backward), as he reminisces about some "old days" to which the reader is not privy (but may well go back to 1905 and those other unionizing efforts).

In no time, and with no real sign of warfare, the zombies take over the world, and invite all "non-zombies" to either "become zombies or die."On page 5 Z-One explains that there are some jobs that "regular zombies"-- presumably the ones that died and deteriorated somewhat-- can't do as well as can living people who are transformed into "synthetic zombies."

However, Z-One admits that even world conquest can have its down side, for "it seems that zombies can be just as stupid as so-called people!" For reasons that the dream does not explain, one faction of zombies attacks the government of "Big Z" with nuclear weapons, and even the leader himself perishes. Z-One ascends to power, hoping to "make the world safe for zombiocracy." There the dream ends, and the tale-teller delivers one last loony revelation to his listeners-- though, since there's no evidence for it in the story proper, I tend to disregard it as a lame joke.

In some ways this is a pretty even-handed spoof, since Z-One is also taking stabs at particular phrases associated with American hegemony ("making the world safe for democracy") or even the capitalistic ideal of slave-workers ("They work 24 hours a day, and never need any rest.") But what most makes me consider the story mythic is the idea of human cadavers being transformed into zombie laborers, simply because the grave-diggers are striking and thus leaving the country open to the reign of the dead.

The whole story appears on Comic Book Plus.