GRIEVANCE IS NOT DIVERSITY'S GOOD BUDDY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEAR-MYTHS: JUSTICE LEAGUE VS. GODZILLA VS. KONG (2023-24)

 

Now THIS is what JLA cluster-crossovers should be: valiant superheroes battling colossal monsters, and monsters battling other monsters, and villains trying to control the monsters before being taken down by the heroes. 

One thing I like about JL/G/K is that even though the DC-verse depicted here is not entirely congruent with the mainstream one-- for one thing, three regular villains and two regular heroes take the dirty nap-- there's no pretense by writer Brian Bucccelato that this is some amalgam universe where the Justice League and the Legion of Doom occupies the same world as the cinematic "Monsterverse." Buccelato possibly realized that it provided more opportunities for exposition if the Legion stumbled into the Monsterverse and brought back its progeny to menace this version of DC-Earth. 

The only icons directly imported from the Monsterverse are Godzilla, Kong, Mechagodzilla, and the Skull-Crawlers, though some new ones are invented to take the place of various Toho-titans. There were no such restrictions on the use of DC characters, so this is not a story for noobs, who really won't be able to tell the players without a scorecard. There's even a scene with some heroes breaking up a supervillain jailbreak in which I, expert though I usually am, strained to figure out some of the obscurities given a few panels here and there.

Characterization is understandably simple since the primary story is about stopping giant monsters, but Buccellato works in some pleasant dialogue nonetheless, and Christian Duce does a fine job of imparting the sense of monolithic hugeness to the big beasts. Sometimes there are continuity goofs because everything's so rushed. When in the story did someone bring the Teen Titans into the mix, and why is the Big S almost killed by Godzilla's atomic fire? If the Legion contacts Deathstroke to employ the League of Assassins, why does Ra's Al Ghul get into the thick of things? But since it's a one-off universe, the blips don't get in the way of all the looney hero/monster/villain fun.          

NEAR-MYTHS: ANGEL AND THE APE VOLUME TWO (1991)

 

This four-issue series, credited to "writer-penciller Phil Foglio and inker K.S. Wilson," never became part of DC's ongoing continuity for any length of time, despite its tying together three different DC franchises. I can't claim that APE II is any sort of neglected gem. Often it comes off like an unholy marriage of Roy Thomas (for continuity-linkages) and Alan Moore (inserting transgressive materials into kids' comics). Given that Foglio sports a comical bigfoot-style-- which is being applied to the silly, short-lived detective spoof from 1968--the humor is unusually shrill and, well, not especially funny. But APE II does make an attempt, however flawed, to follow through on the transgressive vibe I detected, at least in a house ad for the 1968 series.

APE II starts out with girl-on-ape violence.

  

For a moment, this seems like a sequence from the '68 series: a dizzy blonde girl detective messing around with her partner, talking ape Sam Simeon. One big change, though, is that, possibly in deference to feminist imperatives of the period, Angel O'Day becomes more of a tough, no-nonsense action-girl a la the heroines of Chris Claremont. However, while the original series never explained how Angel and Sam became partners in the first place, Foglio devises an origin. As a small child, Angel meets the talking gorilla on a safari in Africa, and somehow or other, Sam gets adopted into Angel's family.

However, Foglio decides that this family also includes Angel's half-sister Athena, a.k.a. "Dumb Bunny of the Inferior Five." My guess is that, because Silver Age writer E. Nelson Bridwell created INFERIOR FIVE and wrote stories for the '68 APE series, Foglio melded the two comic series with this maneuver. Thus Sam is raised alongside both half-sisters, who he regards as his real-but-only-figurative sisters. Athena, unlike Angel, is allowed to be somewhat like the dizzy blonde from the 1967 series, but with a more practical difference. Because she possesses immense super-strength, she's unable to have a physical relationship with an ordinary man. She tells her sister that she thinks she might be able to make Sam her boyfriend-- albeit a platonic one. (DC editorial probably said, "NO BESTIALITY.") 

In the midst of this subplot, it's established that the reason Gorilla Sam has been able to walk around the city without (usually) being noticed is that he has some mental powers he uses to fool people. But something starts messing with the people of the city, turning them (temporarily) into a bunch of damn dirty apes. Plus which, Sam and Angel are attacked by a squad of super-strong humans, who turn out to be apes from Sam's old African haunts-- the Gorilla City of many FLASH adventures.             

  Sam, when told that Athena has a thing for him, is aghast, though Angel seems to have become somewhat more reconciled to the idea. Then, the mysterious boss of the ape-men stops by the detective office, puts Athena through a nightmare in which she kills both Sam and her father, and then introduces himself to all as Sam's grandfather, Gorilla Grodd.  

Athena summons (rather unwisely) the rest of the Inferior Five, who are easily defeated. Grodd drags Sam to his laboratory hideout, revealing that he's gained control of an entity called "The Green Glob" (the narrator of a handful of DC SF-stories). He's tested the power before, and now he plans to transform all humans into apes to solve the problem of human incursions on Gorilla City.  

Then, to his credit, Foglio does come up with a sort of "No Exit" take on things, for Grodd forces Sam to reveal that he does have a covert passion for one of his "sisters"-- but it's Angel, not Athena. I won't go into the way Foglio works all this melodrama out, except to say that Sam doesn't end up with either sibling, and everyone's more or less okay with the way things turn out-- except for Grodd, who gets cursed with a love for human junk food.     

Though I didn't find APE TWO very funny, the original feature on which it's based wasn't that great in that respect either. So APE TWO is at least more diverting than APE ONE, and the way Foglio monkeys around (yes, I went there) with the "beauty and beast" trope at least elevates this short series to the level of a near-myth.  

NULL-MYTHS: ANGEL AND THE APE VOLUME ONE (1968-69)

 

The best thing about the original run of DC's ANGEL AND THE APE -- lasting just one SHOWCASE issue and six issues of a regular magazine-- was the above house ad.

Now, whenever I first saw this 1968 ad, I had been collecting superhero comics for at least two years. Thanks to an easy-to-reach used bookstore where a lot of kids dumped their comics, I had amassed a substantial collection. (Just as a marker, by the time the first SPIDER-MAN cartoon debuted on TV in September 1967, I had read reprints of all the Spider-stories that the show was kinda-sorta adapting.) I didn't have much interest in DC Comics' comedy features, so I never bought any issues of AATA. 

I would have been at least twelve whenever I saw this ad, so I'm not sure my memory is entirely accurate. But what I seem to remember is wondering if the opposition of the "Angel"-- a lithe-looking young woman-- with the brutish (albeit clothed) "Ape" was supposed to have some weird romantic vibe. I may or may not have seen the 1933 KING KONG by 1968, but I'm sure I had heard that there was at least a one-sided amour fou going on there. And everyone knew, without being able to put into words, that the classic fairy tale BEAUTY AND THE BEAST was all about an angelic human female getting mixed up with a hideous male brute. As it turned out, there were no real romantic vibes between the titular "funny detectives" Angel O'Day and her partner, intelligent gorilla Sam Simeon. However, I still think that the artist who drew the ad had a little salacious intent-- for I now notice something I didn't in 1968. I might have mistaken the shape with the logo, the form separating Angel and Sam for an angel's wing-- but now I realize that angel-wings don't have stems. The object separating angelic female and brutish male is the venerable fig-leaf of Judeo-Christian art.     

Two years before AATA, one of the feature's creators, E. Nelson Bridwell, had been responsible for another DC humor-title, THE INFERIOR FIVE. But though both IF and AATA boasted roughly the same sort of cornball comedy, IF at least had a rationale for its parody of superheroes. AATA was a detective parody in which a martially-trained human girl and an intelligent gorilla went around solving mysteries. The creators-- which seems like a committee of three or four guys throwing crap at the wall-- don't supply even a minor rationale as to why the two of them run a detective agency, which kind of conflicts with Sam Simeon's regular job, that of drawing comic books. (He sometimes used Angel as his model.) 

Given the short duration of the original title, I gather most readers weren't even slightly curious about the feature. It didn't help that most of the time the stories wandered about from one comic schtick to another with no rhyme or reason, as if the creators thought the fans would simply go ape over a funny gorilla-- or, in a different fashion, over the toothsome hottie Angel, ably rendered by artist Bob Oskner. Probably those Silver Age fans who remember AATA at all recall that it was one of the first times any comic satirized the figure of Marvel editor Stan Lee, in the form of Sam's wacky editor Stan Bragg. However, Stan himself had already produced better self-satires than anything in this comic.

The only story that stays on point in spoofing detective cliches is issue #3. In "The Curse of the Avarice Clan," Bridwell produces a decent sendup of the "old dark house" subgenre, in which some mystery killer seeks to murder all the heirs to a fabulous will. But how many kids in 1968 even knew what an "old dark house mystery" was? 

The last story in the last issue was the only one in which there was a very minor suggestion of gorilla romance. In it, Angel goes on a date with a handsome rich guy, and Sam spies on their date, allegedly because he doesn't think the judo-savvy lady detective can defend herself against a masher. The main schtick of the story is that Sam repeatedly masquerades as human beings like waiters and cabbies, and that only Angel can see through his transparent disguises. It wasn't much of a story, but it's the only one in which there's a little conflict between the two principals-- and though the jealousy angle is only potentially present, it would finally get some development (albeit not much better executed) in the 1991 ANGEL AND THE APE reboot, to be discussed in a future post.     

ADDENDUM: I posted the house ad on CHFB and another poster thought the "leaf" was a bunch of bananas. If any of the serrations along the edge of the shape were rounded, I would agree that this was a good possibility, since banana jokes were frequent in AATA. At the same time, I admit that the shape dividing the characters doesn't look like a real fig leaf-- and in both canonical and pop art, most fig leaves need to have those compound blades in order to cover all the unmentionables.  My revised theory is that the house-ad artist knew he needed to leave room for the letterer to place the logo on the shape, so what he produced is more like a standardized serrated leaf-- and there's no reason to associate leaves with angels and apes unless you're thinking about primeval angel-ape encounters.

WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES PT. 2

 I decided to supplement last year's WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES with further details, but realized that the original essay supplied only the rationale of distinguishing "weirdie" metaphenomenal fictions from the "worldie" type, as per the Brian Aldiss history mentioned, and then I jumped to a particular late manifestation of "weirdies at DC." So to bridge that gap, here's my essay from OUROBOROS DREAMS where I dealt with the importance of Carmine Infantino to my schema. ___________________________

DC jumped feet first into the supernatural/Gothic thing after having generally avoided that type of story for over 20 years, and it seems likely that Carmine Infantino was the biggest influence, as he himself claims in a JOURNAL interview:

I was trying to prepare for the inevitable. In my mind, “What if these things die? What if we’re back in the old days and suddenly superheroes drop off?” The reason I threw out a mess of different titles was, I wanted to sneak in The House of Mystery and The House of Secrets without people much realizing what was going on. Which I did. And also we had a chain of them out there, if you remember, and they were all successful before anyone at Marvel realized what was going on. So we had those going for us, and the superheroes going for us. Meanwhile I kept experimenting with different things.

So in Evanier's book KIRBY, ME claims, maybe a little dubiously, that when Kinney Corp bought DC in 1967, they thought they were getting the top company, only to become displeased when they learned that Marvel was such a strong second. (I think Roy Thomas claimed Marvel didn't obtain the majority market share until the early seventies though.) Still, that story isn't absolutely necessary to put across the notion that someone in management thought it was time for some changes. Infantino was made first art director and then editorial director in 1966 and 1967, and it looks like promoting horror and the Gothic was his major "experiment." Not only did he get rid of the superheroes in HOUSE OF MYSTERY in '67, he also debuted DEADMAN in the failing book STRANGE ADVENTURES. The Spectre had been revived earlier under the tutelage of Julie Schwartz, but the initial format was so rationalized that any "weirdie" appeal of the hero was nullified. Spectre also got his own title in 1967, and though it didn't last long it soon converted into spookier stories before it died. In the late sixties and early seventies, even some of the "mainstream" DC superheroes began exploiting Gothic/horror themes on their covers, such as (obviously) BATMAN but also less obvious types like FLASH and TEEN TITANS. 

One fan attributed the big change to the influence of DARK SHADOWS in '66, but I think it was more likely that DC saw that the Warren magazines had been doing well since 1964 (EERIE) and 1966 (CREEPY) respectively, and that they hired guys like EC stalwart Joe Orlando to cut into that action. That also probably led to the revival of The Phantom Stranger in 1969, as well as another fifties character, Doctor Thirteen. The intersection of the two seems to be the first regular convocation of two "weirdies" at DC Comics, in 1969's SHOWCASE #80-- though the good doctor was dropped from the Stranger's adventures pretty quickly.

 

MYTHCOMICS: DAY OF VENGEANCE (2005)

 

One of my main purposes in maintaining my mythcomics-project is that I'm engaged with the ideal that great myths sometimes arise from the humblest (if not literally crappiest) prima materia. But I never quite saw my thesis validated quite so quickly as today. A day or two ago, I decided to work my way through a library loaner, THE DETECTIVE CHIMP CASEBOOK, which collected all of the Golden/Silver Age stories of the analytical animal. I didn't like any of the scripts or even Infantino's artwork, but it made me curious to find out: when exactly did DC Comics decide not only to revive "Bobo T. Chimpanzee," and why did someone decide to stick the ape in the midst of DC's newly-forged "Weirdoverse?" It was easy enough to find out that Chimp started hanging out with magic-users in the 2005 six-issue series DAY OF VENGEANCE, penciled by Justiniano and written by Bill Willingham of ELEMENTALS and FABLES fame. I hadn't read that series, but since it seemed in predictated on the "Green Spectre" storyline from DAY OF JUDGMENT, I had to re-read that limited series for the first time in 25 years. As I noted in my review today, this Geoff Johns item may be one of the worst of its type out there.         

So, as I said, I never read VENGEANCE in the twenty years since it came out, and I more or less expected some adequate formula from Willingham at best, as opposed to Johns' extremely lame hackwork. The only thing VENGEANCE took from JUDGMENT was the idea that The Spectre, the divine "Spirit of Vengeance" in the DC Universe, needed a mortal body in which to exist. He apparently had Hal Jordan's body to occupy for about four years after the events of JUDGMENT, but at some point, they got a divorce, and at the beginning of VENGEANCE, the Ghostly Guardian has gone a little nuts. Eclipso, one of the Universe's foremost tempter-figures, decides that it takes a nut to crack a nut, so he manages to possess the body of Jean Loring, who joined the domain of the cuckoos in 2004's IDENTITY CRISIS. In this new female form, Eclipso-Jean uses feminine wiles to tame the unquiet spirit and give him an inventive new mission. Since the Spectre is opposed to all lawbreaking, why not destroy all magic within the Universe, since magic is based on breaking, or at least bending, natural law? The Spectre, being a sucker for a bad girl, falls for this queasy logic and begins a jeremiad against all things mystical.                 

I suppose that Willingham sorta-borrowed one other thing from Johns: a loose confederation of magic-affiliated heroes who would save "the Day." But Johns whipped together a bunch of big-name magi and gave them the portentous name of "The Sentinels of Magic." Willingham came up with a new lineup and coined the group-name "Shadowpact," which would get its own DC title the very next year. Willingham purposely got many of the "big guns" out of the way for his story-- Doctor Fate, Phantom Stranger-- and concentrated on a Defenders-like collection of oddballs: Ragman, Enchantress, Nightshade, Blue Devil, the aforementioned analyst-ape, and the sword-and-sorcery type Nightmaster, who like the chimp had only recently been revived for a handful of stories.             

Though there are still one or two powerful forces to be enlisted against the Spectre, not least being the Original Captain Marvel, the less powerful Shadowpact members have to seek to use strategy against the supremely powerful spirit. It may not be total coincidence that this was also the modus operandi of the 1980s SUICIDE SQUAD, which is also where most DC readers would have previously encountered both Nightshade and Enchantress. The heroes' chances are not improved by the fact that Enchantress herself has an "evil self" that sometimes emerges to muck things up, or that she and Nightshade shared the same body for a time during their SQUAD days.  

Shadowpact's initial strategy is twofold: Enchantress does a spell that draws power from other magicians and funnels it to help Captain Marvel, while the others take on Jean-Eclipso, who's considerably less powerful than her astral ally. As a backup plan, Nightshade and Chimp go looking for a trump card in Black Alice, a side-character introduced in Gail Simone's BIRDS OF PREY comic. It's during this section that Willingham explains how Chimp became one of the magic-users who hung out at Nightmaster's "Oblivion Bar." In line with a 1981 story that showed Chimp and Rex the Wonder Dog both becoming immortal from drinking at the Fountain of Youth, Willingham asserts that now Chimp also has the power to talk to animals as well as to converse in human speech (which wasn't a property of "Bobo T. Chimpanzee.") 

  

 

    

Suffice to say that despite lots of heady, cosmos-shattering battles-- the very thing JUDGMENT did not offer-- Jean-Eclipso and the Spectre aren't easily defeated, and a scene in which the crazed Spirit of Vengeance contends with the wizard Shazam upon the Rock of Eternity looks a bit like what might happen if Spectre contended with the standard long-bearded image of the Judeo-Christian God. Shazam has one of the best lines in the series when he tries to reach the Spectre and warn him that he can't do away with magic, that all he can accomplish will be to is to remove all the controls that centuries of magecraft have elaborated-- a topic that also figures into this 2018 JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK arc. Shadowpact does finally defeat Jean-Eclipso by sending both the insane Jean and her puppet-master into permanent sunlight. However, that's all the closure the reader will get, because Willingham was obliged to leave things in a state of partial chaos for the sake of the ensuing INFINITE CRISIS story by Geoff Johns. All that said, Willingham actually gave the nature of the "Weirdoverse" some thought, as well as coming up with some genuinely funny badinage for the motley crew of heroes. I'm not sure if he originated the idea that former S&S stalwart Nightmaster was now a greying fifty-something who ran the Oblivion Bar where Detective Chimp came to get drunk. But I liked the varied number of cameos that the writer and artists worked into the bar's background scenes, such as Arion, The Vixen, Andrew Bennett, Animal-Man, Jennifer Morgan of WARLORD and Valda from ARAK SON OF THUNDER.               

EDIT: On 5-23-25, I was able to read a supplement that more or less provided closure for the VENGEANCE series: a follow-up, again by Willingham and Justiniano, called DAY OF VENGEANCE-INFINITE CRISIS SPECIAL. Though the story wasn't as well-plotted as the six-issue series, the special showed various occult heroes (1) solved the problem of the Spectre running amok and (2) re-assembled the Rock of Eternity after the Ghostly Guardian shattered it. Thus, even though like DAY OF JUDGMENT the conclusion juggled more characters than it needed, the special counts as the conclusion to VENGEANCE-- even though the special also generated some new plotlines that played into both Geoff Johns' INFINITE CRISIS and Willingham's ongoing SHADOWPACT series that same year of 2005. 

NULL-MYTHS: DAY OF JUDGMENT (1999)

 

Though I have never tried to follow the vast majority of the DC and Marvel multi-character crossovers, I think I actually bought and read DAY OF JUDGMENT'S five issues back in The Day. I remembered nothing about the story 25 years later, except that it spotlighted the hare-brained (and quickly reversed) idea of following up Hal Jordan's crimes as a mind-controlled mass-murderer by turning the Silver Age Green Lantern into a new incarnation of The Spectre. Rereading it now, I'm ready to pronounce it not only an egregious example of a null-myth, but one even worse than the one I usually cited as the worst such multi-feature crossover, Jim Shooter's 1984 SECRET WARS. I think that even had I not reread WARS for that 2016 review, I would probably have at least remembered some of the story's events, clunky as they were. DAY is nothing but writer Geoff Johns and artist Matt Smith setting up the lame Green Spectre concept.                                  

Of course, WARS had 12 issues and DAY has only five, but that in my mind just more fully indicts the editors and creators who stuffed the story with Too Many Damn Characters. It doesn't help that artist Smith and writer Johns are just not suited to depicting a big cosmic cataclysm-story, so there are a lot of scenes with colorful figures standing around exchanging dull snatches of dialogue. Unleashing all the demons of Hell upon Earth was a plot that had been done before this by both DC and Marvel many times. But this one may be the least hellraising raisings of hell ever.     

Given that the Green Spectre idea turned into a whole lot of nothing, the only significance this DAY can be judged to possess would be that it was one of the first 1990s attempts of DC to exploit its "Weirdoverse," as discussed here. So at most DAY might have provided a stepping-stone to better things. But then, it's so bad, it would almost have to.      

NEAR-MYTHS: STAR-SPANGLED ROGUES' GALLERIES

In THOUGHTS ON BILL FINGER, I made some generalized comments on the debt that Jerry Siegel's STAR-SPANGLED KID feature had to the Batman-AND-Robin team that was launched in April 1940 (with the usual allowances for inaccuracy of cover-dates). Jerry Siegel didn't rush to come up with his risible reversal of a kid hero with an adult sidekick, since STAR SPANGLED COMICS #1 debuted as a regular DC feature almost a year and a half after Robin's debut. (To be sure, the Kid and Stripesy first showed up the previous month in ACTION COMICS #40, where the raconteurs clearly hoped that Superman's fans would rush to check out the New Dynamic Duo in their own magazine.) DC editors may have thought, "Hey, Batman was conceived when Bob Kane (supposedly by himself) tried to do his version of Superman. So why wouldn't it work for the creator of Superman-- teamed with humor-artist Hal Sherman-- to riff on Batman?" At any rate, the very name of STAR-SPANGLED COMICS was clearly contrived to spotlight the name of the cover-featured hero, and for the first half dozen issues Siegel and Sherman's heroes got three adventures apiece. There were other features in SSC, but none were all that prepossessing, with only the Mort Weisinger-Hal Sharp Tarantula maintaining any place in DC history.                                                     

  Now, as the title may suggest, my main interest in these early stories is to demonstrate some early examples of the "pattern criminal," which formula I think developed largely in comic books. This conception contrasted with such pulp-favorites as the "one-gimmick villain" and "the all-purpose villain" types, which I argued were the dominant templates for the prose pulps. Thus the only two relevant features of SSC are those of Tarantula and of the Kid and Stripesy. The first adventure doesn't trouble to retell the pair's origin from their debut in ACTION COMICS, but the last one in issue #1 introduces their most persistent enemy, Doctor Weerd. After the villain's regular ID is humiliated by a rather snotty Sylvester Pemberton, the villain reveals that he has his own "Mister Hyde" potion, that changes him into a shaggy-locked, barrel-chested hulk. Unlike Siegel's Superman, whose repeat villains appeared off and on, Weerd appears in every single issue until #7, and he's clearly an all-purpose type like Luthor, whipping up diverse weapons like giant robots, a vortex machine and a mirage-maker. Did Siegel hope Weerd would be the Kid's "Joker?" It seems a fair conjecture. Issue #1 also features the first outing for Tarantula, in a forgettable exploit that doesn't give the spider-man much of an origin either.                                                               

   Issue #2 introduces the comic's first "one-gimmick villain," but in the TARANTUALA feature. Such was the Crime Candle, whose big thing was doping people with candles that exuded toxic gases.                                                                                                             

                                                                                                        Issue #3 holds nothing relevant, but in #4-- dated January 1942, and thus a month or two after Bill Finger unveiled The Penguin in a December 1941 issue of DETECTIVE COMICS-- Siegel and Sherman introduced the Needle. Now, the Needle's weapon of choice was a gun that shot needles, so he didn't "branch out" as the Penguin did, using different gimmicked umbrellas and (a little later) trained birds. But though neither Needle nor Penguin gets an origin as such, both seem to have "patterned" their respective weapons after their respective physical appearances. That said, the Penguin seems like a developed character from the first, and the Needle is a just a flat bad guy.                                                                                                         

   Siegel and Sherman distinguish themselves a bit more in SSC #5 with new villain Moonglow. A wimpy type of professor, he discovers that he can enhance both his intellect and his penchant for evil by prolonged exposure to moonlight. The small touch of characterization, though, doesn't lead to anything comparable to, say, Two-Face, or even Green Lantern's foe The Gambler. More relevant to my "pattern criminal" project, though, is the TARANTULA tale in the same issue. "Warlord of Crime," whose script GCD credits to Manly Wade Wellman, introduces a crimelord named Siva. This villain uses a whopping TWO gimmicks patterned on the mythos of the Hindu god: (1) he's served by a henchman named Ganesha, who wears an elephant-costume like that of Mythic Shiva's divine son, and (2) Siva burns rebellious followers with fire the way the Hindu god annhilated his opponents with fiery powers. However, for whatever reason Siva never appeared again, and remained at large at the end of his only story.                                                             

With issue #6, the Kid gets scaled back to two adventures (one featuring the omnipresent Doctor Weerd, again) -- and then, just one tale in issue #7, in which Simon and Kirby's NEWSBOY LEGION bumps the Kid off the covers. Robotman and TNT join Tarantula as backup features who (I believe) never get cover-featured in SSC. The solo Kid adventure does feature the comic's first villain-teamup in "The Picture That Killed," as The Needle and Doc Weerd challenge the not so dynamic duo. In #8, Manly Wade Wellman apparently caught the teamup bug from Siegel and Sherman, since he assembled three of Tarantula's very forgettable villains into "The Trio of Terror." Siegel and Sherman trumped Wellman by bringing together their three most noteworthy nasties-- Needle, Weerd and Moonglow-- in "Crime by the Chapter." None of those villains, together or separately, were as good as the best Finger foes, though at least the Sherman antagonists were more visually memorable than those of Hal Sharp (except the aforementioned Siva). And that's where I'll leave this short study, for by issue #9 it was clear that the Kid/Stripesy duo had failed to impress the kid-readers as their model had, and whatever "pattern criminals" may have appeared were then overshadowed by many more momentous features in the early forties. Despite various post-Silver Age revivals of the original characters, the two seemed to distinguish themselves most when Geoff Johns reinvented the core idea for his STARGIRL concept, which in turn begat the last good superhero TV show for the CW network. But clearly there was a good reason that no one ever bothered to bring back (to my knowledge) any of the Kid's villains, or those of any other foemen in SSC.                       

NEAR-MYTHS: DARK KNIGHTS OF STEEL (2021-2022)

I've not reviewed many of DC's "Elseworlds" projects-- which is what DARK KNIGHTS OF STEEL is, even though it does not use that tag-- because they tend to be no more than gaming-scenarios, where the creators move various characters into new positions for nothing but novelty's sake. An example of such an aesthetically nugatory work is 2015's DOOM THAT CAME TO GOTHAM. An awful lot of STEEL consists of just the usual aimless moving of franchise chess-pieces around for little effect, so in one sense there's not much that's special about this effort by writer Tom Taylor and artist Yasmine Putri (assisted by various artists drawing in her style).

The basic concept: Krypton still explodes, but this time Jor-El and his still pregnant wife Lara escape their doomed world and migrate to a "high-fantasy" version of DC-Earth. By "high fantasy" in this context, I mean that there's no necessary connection with anything in real-world history or with anything in regular DC-Earth, which theoretically is "our" Earth with superheroes and magical critters. The STEEL world is made up of assorted faux-medieval kingdoms inhabited by rough facsimiles of DC characters, and although magic is a regular presence, science is just barely getting started. 

Through assorted contrivances Jor-El and Lara ascend to the monarchy of one land after the deaths of the previous rulers, Thomas and Martha Wayne. In addition to Lara birthing Kal-El, she also births "Zala Jor-El," a.k.a. Supergirl, who seems to have been partly named for her "real" DC-Universe father "Zor-El." And then there's Bruce, who goes around in a Bat-helmet and is one of the few double-identity characters called by his superhero name. He's called a "bastard" in the genealogical sense, for reasons not revealed until halfway through the story, and the relationship of teenaged Bruce and teenaged Kal-El was the one or two elements that kept me curious about how the story would turn out.

The other thirty and forty characters are all spawned on the high-fantasy Earth and range from close approximations to the originals (John Constantine, "court jester" Harley Quinn, Princess Diana, Jefferson Pierce) to '"in-name only" congeners (The Metal Men, a bunch of knights who use the names of metals). We get two lesbian relationships, one more or less canonical (Harley and Poison Ivy) and one out of the blue (Diana and Zala), but they don't consume a lot of space. John Constantine gets the second longest arc, as he's responsible for a doomsday prophecy that seems to condemn the El Family. The prophecy appears to come true in such a way that three major kingdoms go to war, but Constantine eventually discovers that the menace behind the conflict is tied to a different flavor of DC-alien. I confess Taylor surprised me with his subterfuge here.

I said that the witty, lively relationship between Kal-El and Bruce was one of the things I esteemed about STEEL. The other is Putri's art. In a period when an awful lot of comic-book art is banal and ugly, Putri's designs possess a grandiose quality that reminds me of the strong fantasy-work of stellar figures like Richard Corben and Craig Russell, just to name two. Even when Taylor's just giving readers a jejune rehash of "How Oliver Met Dinah," Putri's art has an elevating quality foreign to most 21st-century comics art. I can see myself coming back to enjoy STEEL years from now, just to see how Putri gave the various DC heroes a "Brothers Hildebrandt" treatment.

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 2

 In Part 1 of this essay-series, I cited my definition for "phase shift:"

"phase shift" is my term for the process by which a function in literature-- which parallels my term "icon"-- shifts from one state of being (within the "horizontal" world of its purely fictional existence) to another state of being.

 Simply as a random choice I cited one of the phase shifts I had identified in a recent essay, but as I said at the essay's conclusion, I could have chosen many others.

My first *sustained* investigations into "crossover-ology" began with Part 1 of the series A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS. The examples in the essay concerned how icons with stature, such as Robin Hood and Fu Manchu shifted into icons of charisma when they were "demoted" into subordinate icons, which was the opposite type of shift discussed in PHASED PART 1. In this essay, I'll deal with a different type of phase shift.

GLAD TO MEET YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME AGAIN in June 2023 introduced the overall concept of iconic bonding. For my example of this literary process, I drew distinctions between the status of Batman and Robin during the thirty years that they were a bonded ensemble, and all the years afterward, when Robin ceased to be Batman's partner. According to some critical evaluations, DC ended the partnership for purely pecuniary reasons. Following the cancellation of the BATMAN teleseries in 1968, sales for BATMAN comics fell precipitously, and DC decided that the presence of Robin in the series reinforced the feature's association with the now unpopular concept of camp. For the first time Robin had solo adventures of his own that were not implicated with the Batman-and-Robin series, as well as entering into ensembles with both Batgirl and the 1970s incarnation of the Teen Titans. (The character had also been with the 1960s incarnation of that super-group, but that iconic bond had been qualitatively secondary to the better-known Batman-and-Robin ensemble.) 

All of the 1970s alterations to Robin's status should be viewed as a minor phase shift, akin to any other time a character in an ongoing partnership gets a "spin-off." However, a different flavor of phase shift transpires in TALES OF THE TEEN TITANS #44 (1984), which I previously reviewed here as part of the JUDAS CONTRACT continuity. For four years Robin had remained in the ensemble of the successful 1980s TITANS franchise, which had become his dominant source of ongoing stature.

 During that time DC also reversed its course on having a Robin in the BATMAN franchise, and since Dick Grayson already had a successful berth in TITANS, the company chose to bring forth a new Robin, Jason Todd, introduced about a year before in BATMAN #357. For whatever reasons, it took roughly a year for DC staff to decide that Dick Grayson would divest himself of the Robin identity for good, and take on a new superhero name, Nightwing.

This is a phase shift of a different nature than the spin-off status of Solo-Robin. Over time DC raconteurs had to evolve a new literary identity for Dick Grayson As Nightwing, even though textually he was the exact same person as Dick Grayson As Robin. This type of phase shift relates not to stature or charisma, but to what I will call the "narrative texture" of a character; of the set of expectations that the audience brings to a given text, separating one persona assumed by Character A from another persona assumed by Character A. By this same logic, I deem DC's Superboy to be a distinct persona from DC's Superman-- but that's a discussion for another time.