LEGACY REALIGNMENT

 While glancing through issues of Eclipse's 1980s AIRBOY comics-- all of which I reviewed in 2019-- I realized that I'd never seen anywhere a case of such "super-cosmic re-alignment." That is, in articles like this one, I've usually been addressing only minor re-alignments, where Character X is introduced in Cosmos Y but then gets transferred to Cosmos Z, or even becomes a "free agent," bouncing around into any cosmos where some raconteur wants to place him or her.

"Large pastiche" concepts are somewhat more ambitious. The original run of MASTER OF KUNG FU centered upon the new character of Shang-Chi, whose exploits drew upon the hero's acrimonious relationship with his father Fu Manchu, an established and familiar fictional icon. In the course of the series, the writers worked into their cosmic continuity about a half dozen other Sax Rohmer characters. But there was no idea of a total re-alignment of all Rohmer's "Fu-concepts" into the cosmos of Shang-Chi.

What Eclipse did with the "cosmos" of Hillman Comics was rather different. Though Hillman ceased publication in 1953, a handful of reprints had established a very loose continuity for a few of their features. In three stories I examined as a quasi-triptych, first one AIRBOY story introduced a new villain, Misery. Two issues later, the titular hero encountered a new opponent, Valkyrie. But though she started off fighting the Allies as a native of Germany, in the same story she was converted to the cause of good by Airboy's charms and is turned against the Axis. Then, three years later-- during which time Valkyrie had again appeared alongside Airboy as an ally a couple of times-- the two of them took up arms against the recrudescent Misery, in what might be considered an "informal crossover." After Misery's defeat, I don't believe he appeared again in the Golden Age, though Valkyrie did, even not all raconteurs were consistent with her character.

          

Another type of "informal crossover" appeared in AIR FIGHTERS #3 (1942), in the feature SKY WOLF. This titular hero and his squadron, in the midst of battling evil Nazis, had to take time out to destroy a weird muck-monster named The Heap. It seems unlikely that the creators of the story meant for the Heap to be anything but a one-off menace. However, it's been claimed that readers wrote to Hillman wanting to see more of the once-human monstrosity. This the Heap got his own backup feature, which only fit into AIR FIGHTERS because the creature had been a WWI German pilot before getting transformed into a swamp-thing. Further, though I don't believe Golden Age Airboy ever met the Heap, Airboy had at least one crossover with Sky Wolf. However, most Hillman featured characters-- the Black Angel, the Iron Ace, etc-- never encountered any other characters in the "Hillman Universe."

  

 Rather ambitiously, Eclipse sought to forge the idea of a fully shared universe, built around a legacy version of the original Airboy. The original hero, now some thirty years older in 1986 since his feature's demise in 1953, appears only in the first issue long enough to be killed by the forces of his old foe Misery. Davy Nelson III, the dead hero's grown son, takes over his father's mantle, and by so doing becomes the new Prime to whom Misery is a Sub. In addition, the original Valkyrie is restored to life without having aged, and she too becomes a regular Sub in the new AIRBOY series. Other characters from the Hillman-verse, whether they had their own features or not, get drawn into either the Airboy cosmos or that of his backup strip, the revived Sky Wolf. Such characters ranged from the aforementioned Heap and Iron Ace to a couple of new iterations of old icons, like a Black "Black Angel." Some new characters were created as well for the AIRBOY and SKY WOLF cosmoses, but the focus was clearly on having them host all the characters that Eclipse had acquired.

After a year or so, Eclipse also promoted Valkyrie to Prime status with two mini-serials and two solo outings of her combined with an all-female group of stalwarts, "The Airmaidens." The stories were always decent if unremarkable formula-work, even in the one-shot "maybe-a-dream-crossover" AIRBOY/MR MONSTER SPECIAL. But though I can name off a lot of large pastiches in which current authors pulled from the creations of many authors, the "Air Fighters Universe" at present does seem to be the only example of a "legacy realignment," totally attributing every possible crossover-icon from one cosmos to another.                

NEAR MYTHS: AIRBOY 1-50 (1986-89)

Of the many patriotic comics-heroes born in and around the WWII years, Hillman Comics' AIRBOY seems to be the only American character who survived long past the war's end. This may be because, even in the absence of a shooting-war, Airboy still appealed to young readers thanks to the appeal of having his own personally owned plane. Without having come close to reading all of the character's Golden Age exploits, I'd say that in general the art and writing was somewhat better than many comparable postwar series, and of course, I discovered a high level of mythicity in these three interrelated stories. AIRBOY's last issue appeared in 1953, the same year that Hillman quit publishing comics for good. Since I'm not aware that any of their titles were attacked during the anti-comics craze, it may be that the company simply decided that comics were no longer profitable enough to bother with.

I recently committed myself to re-reading the entire AIRBOY series from Eclipse, which I've long considered one of the company's best productions. I don't know if the Hillman properties had fallen into public domain or if Eclipse actually purchased rights from someone, but Eclipse was certainly devoted to creating a "Hillman-verse." Even from the first couple of issues in 1986, writer Chuck Dixon and his various artists not only created a modern-day legacy version of Airboy, but also brought back some of the original heroes, some of whom were simply older (Sky Wolf) and some of whom had been transformed (the armored Iron Ace gets turned into a robot).

The new Airboy, David Nelson III, doesn't know anything about his father's heroic past, knowing him only as the head of an aeronautics corporation. The relative innocence of the youth (whose age isn't specified, though he doesn't look fifteen like the Golden Age version) is shattered, both when his father is slain and David learns that his dad was selling arms to a tyrannical regime in the made-up South American realm of Bogantilla. However, David also learns of his father's heroic deeds, and that his revolutionary airplane "Birdie" is still functional, so he dons his dad's old outfit and goes looking in Bogantilla for his father's slayers. There he and his allies (among them the aforementioned Sky Wolf) find out that David II was empowering the tyrants because their master, Airboy's old sorcerer-foe Misery, has extorted the former hero's obedience by threatening his old love Valkyrie, kept in cryonic preservation for the past forty years. The New Airboy avenges his father in part, though Misery escapes, and revives his father's former lover. However, since the new hero looks the same as the old one, Valkyrie is attracted to David. As for his reaction to her, this cover sums it up.

For the next forty-nine issues, Airboy and various allies-- not least the Heap, the original swamp-monster of comics-- alternate between fighting in relatively realistic paramilitary conflicts and fending off the plots of arch-enemy Misery. But the series' most piquant appeal was the "will-they-won't-they" romantic sparks between Airboy and Valkyrie. Clearly, even though Eclipse had designed David III to look just like his father, he wanted her to see him for himself, as opposed to being simply his father's lookalike. Valkyrie, even though she's been revived after the fashion of the Silver Age Captain America, seems to adjust to eighties America pretty easily, but she's got considerable ambivalence toward her potential swain. Little is ever said about the rocky Oedipal issues that might arise when a son courts his father's old lover, except for a throwaway line that tells readers nothing about New Airboy's actual mother except that she, like Valkyrie, was a pilot. Only once or twice does Valkyrie put her ambivalence into words, as in a dialogue from AIRMAIDENS SPECIAL #1. After a female friend (specifically, a legacy version of Hillman's Black Angel) questions Valkyrie about the latter's feelings, Valkyrie says, "It's just that Davy's younger than I am. When I'm with him, I don't think about that. But when we're apart, I feel as though I 've picked someone up off the school yard. And his father and I..."

That's about all the Oedipal exploration seen in the fifty issues, though there's not much doubt that David III is of legal age. Chuck Dixon, in concert with such artists as Tim Truman and Stan Woch, always supplies dependable action-formula, though in the final issue editor Cat Yronwode remarked that even in the eighties it was a lot harder to do an aviation-series set in the real world than it had been during WWII.

Though the series' main appeal was the romantic soap opera, it did scrupulously follow up on some of the appeal of the early Valkyrie appearances. I remarked in the above cited review that there was an age discrepancy between the Golden Age hero and his femme fatale. There was also a brief flirtation with sadism, and this seemed again on display in this cover for 1988'S AIRBOY AND THE AIRMAIDENS.

I don't know how many comics-fans of the eighties were invested in seeing the Hillman heroes back, but I for one did enjoy the revivals of such interesting obscurities as the Bald Eagle and Rackman. However, the series didn't really ever establish a modern-day identity for New Airboy, perhaps in part because its makers were so preoccupied with building the Hillman-verse. Further, Dixon didn't introduce any interesting new villains for the hero, though he did a creditable job of making Misery into a master fiend worthy to stand alongside the best of the eighties arch-foes.

Only once does the series come close to the level of mythicity in the Golden Age Misery stories: in the final issue, done by Dixon and Andy Kubert, with Adam Kubert providing inks. Like his father before him, Airboy ventures into the supernatural domain of Misery and manages to end the villain's menace-- though, unlike his father, this Airboy vanishes from the sight of his allies, and so, even though Misery doesn't claim the hero, his disappearance carries the value of a "faux death." In the final issue's editorial Yronwode mentions the possibility of reviving the hero for an Eclipse graphic novel, but it never happened, though the Airboy franchise did surface again under the aegis of other publishers.

It wasn't the best ride of the eighties. But it was worth a try, nonetheless.

MYTHCOMICS: [MISERY & VALKYRIE], AIR FIGHTERS/ AIRBOY (1943/1946)

This week on my film-blog I looked at three episodes of STAR TREK-- all written by different writers-- because I felt that they were all riffs on an idea important to the show's producer, and because they seemed to complement one another, like images in a triptych-painting. Here I'm going to investigate three separate stories of the 1940s hero Airboy, even though they weren't published concurrently and may have been written by different authors. I've usually only considered stories that were unified continuities, but these three tales seem united by mythic theme rather than plot.

The first story appears in AIR FIGHTERS COMICS #12, less than a year after Airboy's debut in November 1942. GCD credits the first story to one Harry Stein, though the other two lack writer-attribution, but all three were drawn by artist Fred Kida. The story introduces a new villain, Misery, who looks like a walking skeleton and sometimes wields an axe. The weapon may have a stand-in for the scythe of the Grim Reaper, since Misery has been designed to be a "Grim Reaper of the skies." He's given an origin of sorts, though the script doesn't make the matter entirely explicit.

Duray-- whose reasons for being in India are not disclosed-- is a martyr to the science of unpowered flight, and the Airtomb, the stone structure that marks the place of his sacrifice.  Over the next two centuries, the Airtomb becomes a symbolic harbinger of death to fliers, but it only seems to show itself as a direct threat in 1943, moments after Airboy has shot down an Axis plane. As if in retaliation the Airtomb shoots down several RAF planes, but eludes the young hero. He finally seeks out the legendary location of the plane in Calcutta, and meets the craft's eerie pilot.

Eventually Misery overcomes Airboy and hurls him into a ravine styled "The Black Hole of Calcutta." The real "Black Hole" was a dungeon in which several British officers of the 1700s perished, and it somehow became a standard trope to describe a horrible place. Here it's become almost a gateway into some dismal underworld, full of "poisonous gases."

Airboy escapes the ravine, fights Misery again, and then, by weird coincidence, a volcanic eruption takes place. Airboy escapes while Misery is engulfed by lava. He defiantly claims that he'll live again, even though "the Earth has robbed me, Misery, of my victory."

Misery doesn't appear for a few years thereafter, but two issues later (labeled volume 2, #2), Airboy meets another foe whose name carries one similar connotation, in a story drawn by Kida but not credited to an identified author. The Valkyrie is a pilot for the German forces, and commands an all-female squadron, "the Aurmaidens." While she and her aides are purely mortal, her name is derived from the Nordic valkyries, who were also, as Misery professes to be, "collectors of brave men."

No sooner does Valkyrie perpetrate a successful attack on the RAF than Airboy follows her all the way to Germany and attacks her base. She takes to the air and the two of them square off, but Airboy loses because he's too much of a gentleman to shoot a woman.

An interesting psychological "split" than ensues during Airboy's captivity at the base. Valkyrie wants the secrets of Airboy's plane, and is more than willing to whip them out of him. As the scene shows, she shows the hero no mercy whatsover, being entirely committed to the German cause.

This torture-scene may be deemed a loose parallel to the hero's consignment to the Black Hole of Calcutta, in that he's totally within the power of evil. However, this time the softer side of femininity arises to his defense. The other Airmaidens are impressed with Airboy's bravery and good looks, so after he's stuck in a cell, they liberate him and hide him elsewhere. The base commandant sees through the girls' innocent act and orders them whipped. Valkyrie doesn't have any sentimental side where an enemy of her country is concerned, but she can't abide having her "friends" whipped even though they're guilty of traitorous activities. Valkyrie tries to save them while at the same time worming the hero's secrets out of him.

Airboy yields Valkyrie the secret of Birdie, and she fully intends to betray him. However, when Valkyrie tries to leverage her knowledge to save her friends, the arrogant commandant won't cut her a break. It would be tempting these days to wonder if Valkyrie enjoyed some deeper relationship than "friends" with her fellow lady-pilots-- something not unlike a later group of aviatrixes in Ian Fleming's GOLDFINGER. In any case, the commandant's intransigence costs him both his best pilots and the secrets of Birdie, for Valkyrie and her Airmaidens join Airboy and turn against the Nazi cause. In addition, though Valkyrie did not become a regular figure in the Airboy feature, she did become an off-and-on girlfriend-- an interesting breakthrough, since she's clearly an adult and he is, as the previous cover states, fifteen-year-old "jail bait."

Three years later, in another story with no author-ID but drawn by Kida, Airboy-- who has met Valkyrie once or twice in the ensuing years-- encounters both characters at once. The title of the comic has been changed to AIRBOY, but it's issue #12 within the same publishing-volume. Though Stein might have been the author on the first Valkyrie story given the continguity with the first Misery story, this one might have been by anyone seeking to bring together two evocative characters from the past-- the better to shore up the hero's appeal, since he'd been created for a war that had been concluded for roughly half a year (January 1946). The opening splash portrays Misery's domain, "the Black Hole of Calcutta," with some of the traditional iconography of Hell.

As the story opens, Airboy crosses paths with Valkyrie in Burma. He makes a somewhat indelicate reference to "the old Nazi days," and though a new reader wouldn't know what he's talking about, Valkyrie doesn't take offense and even gives him major lip-lock before leaving on her flight-assignment. For his part, Airboy learns why the base commander has summoned him. Not only have several British planes inexplicably disappeared, the commander has received a note from Misery, who claims to be flying the Airtomb once again. While Airboy goes off in quest of the villain, he also finds out that Valkyrie's plane has disappeared. Then, to his horror, he sees her plane attacking British crafts, and her "old Nazi days" seem to have come back once more.

It will surprise no one that Misery has placed Valkyrie in thrall. Once again Airboy is forced to fight and subdue her, after which he flies them both to the site of the Airtomb near the fabled Black Hole. Once he's there, Misery-- whose sole reason for enthralling Valkyrie was to use her as bait--offers the hero her freedom in exchange for his own. While most commonplace stories would have simply had the villain escort the sacrificial hero away, the story's author throws in this lovely bit of grotesquerie:

However, like most villains Misery underestimates the power of friendship; she comes to herself and pushes the villain into the ravine while saving the hero. However, the fall doesn't stop the fiend, who later manages to trap Airboy inside the Airtomb. The craft is, like the Black Hole, filled with deadly fumes, albeit those of helium, which apparently helps the incredible craft fly. Again, Valkyrie saves the hero from death-- more or less performing a function to that of her mythic namesake-- and the villain is left to gnash his teeth in frustration.

From what I can tell the characters came back again in later stories, but they entirely lost their engagement with the myth of the ultimate doomed "hero of the skies," who soars through heaven but is eternally fated to crash to earth with the rest of mortal beings.

REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE, PT. 1

For once I'm going to link to a UTILITARIAN post without dumping on its author. I'll still disagree with him, but this time I can see the difficulty of his position.

For some time a writer named Robert Stanley Martin has providing HU with an abbreviated look at the chronological publication of key North American comic books. He focuses only on what he calls "the aesthetic cream of the crop," an elitist position with which I disagree, as did a poster who replied:

Apparently, the “history of North American comic-book publishing” includes almost nothing other than Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, and Plastic Man books, with a bit of Disney thrown in. Seriously??? -

Martin defends his concentration on the cream of the crop, stating that he doesn't plan to include anything from, say, the Batman title except things like "the first appearances of Batman and Robin" and "the debuts of the better known villains."  By so doing, it goes without saying that Martin is deferring to the community of comics-critics who tend to marginalize Batman in favor of, say, Plastic Man. I might advance the counter-argument that even though Cole's Plastic Man may boast superior design-work than the best of the Batman artists, the former is not necessarily better written than the latter. Indeed, many of the Cole issues Martin cites are bland tales from the standpoint of the writing, and would never have earned their place amid the "aesthetic cream" if they had been drawn by a less heralded artist-- even if it was by one who was arguably Cole's equal in formal talent, like Paul Gustavson or Lou Fine.

Still, though I disagree with Martin's emphasis on artists who have been validated above their peers for dubious reasons, one of his points is unassailable. Neither he nor anyone else could or should try to include everything. If I attempted such a list, I'm sure that on first consideration I would default to the fannish tendency seen in comic book price guides: to focus on events in DC or Timely Comics that affected the later avatars of those companies-- the first battle between the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch, or the first appearance of the Injustice Gang of the World in the JUSTICE SOCIETY feature. Yet on second consideration, I think I'd realize that these events shouldn't be any more important than events that influenced comics whose publishers did not survive into the Silver Age.

Companies like Hillman, whose big seller was AIRBOY, seen here encountering the ghoulish villain Misery...

Or Lev-Gleason, which gave us the memorable multi-issue crossover of the villainous Claw and the original Daredevil-- part of which was drawn by Jack Cole.

As a pluralist I would maintain that these are as good examples of their genre as Plastic Man is, so I wouldn't concur with the elitist POV that puts them beyond consideration. (The reasons for that superficial opinion I'll detail elsewhere.) However, these examples raise another point: are only the "big events" worth considering in a pluralist "best of" list? Further, to extrapolate from a point Martin makes: are the first appearances of Batman's iconic villains their best "aesthetic" moments? Is the first Joker story the one every comics-fan ought to read? Will it tell the non-hardcore reader everything he wants to know about the Joker? Or would the reader be better off reading a less Gothic but arguably more "aesthetically pleasing' story like "The Joker's Millions" from DETECTIVE COMICS #180 (1952)?

Yet even with the most pluralist will in the world, something has to be left out, and one has to form some criteria for disinclusion. As a reader I feel less fondness for Carl Burgos' seminal "Human Torch" character than for his earlier, much goofier hero "the Iron Skull," shown below (with art by Sam Gilman) bouncing bullets off his indestructible noggin--

--yet I know that if push came to shove, my Golden-Age list would have to include some notation on Burgos' Human Torch, even if I thought it was a great concept that Burgos totally muffed. Old Iron Skull would have to be left behind in the annals of obscurity, because the Torch had one thing going for him that the Skull did not: a superior design, albeit by a less than superior artist.

I can't speak to Martin's aesthetic priorities, but I'll take a wild guess: like many critics influenced by the COMICS JOURNAL-- an influence he cites in another of his posts-- his choices are informed by a vision of comics becoming something other than what they were in the Golden Age. Cole's "Plastic Man" feature didn't really escape the genre-boundaries of the superhero, but a lot of critics, not least Art Spiegelman, pleased themselves to think that it did. That gave Cole's stretchy dogooder a luster that lifted it above the majority of Golden Age work-- not to mention the majority of Jack Cole's other comics work.

But, then, the question arises: how does one form standards for formula-work that was meant to be standard-less? I'm certainly not speaking only of the superhero genre, for which comics became famous, but all of the genres that were meant to be read quickly and tossed away. Is there anything in the first twenty years of ARCHIE that merits celebration, and if so, what makes those ARCHIE stories better than other comics in that genre, like Harry Lucey's GINGER and Morris Weiss' MARGIE?

My "mythcomics" feature was instituted to explore one of the four "potentialities" around which creators organize their narratives, and through which audiences experience them. This is an entirely feasible approach to assigning merit to formulaic material that sought to meet "aesthetic standards" only insofar as they promoted good sales, and thereby put money in the creators' pockets. However, though I consider myth-analysis to be a heuristic device to that of aesthetic criticism-- whose failings I pointed out here-- I must admit that the myth-criticism methodology must be firmly grounded in a sound understanding of the way popular art works-- which I'll cover in Part 2.