MYTHCOMICS: ["TOUGH LOVE"], BATGIRL #45-50 (2004-05)

 As I noted here I belatedly remembered that May was AAPI Heritage Month, so I thought it would be something of a self-challenge to find at least one mythcomics story starring either an Asian American or Pacific Islander character. Well, I succeeded, but I certainly am glad I didn't set myself to find two. I encountered a number of reasonably entertaining stories featuring such characters as Jubilee, Karma, Kamala Khan and even Jimmy Woo, but none were imbued with the symbolic complexity of myth.

I mentioned that I thought the 2000 BATGIRL series featuring the half-Chinese character Cassandra Cain might bear some fruit, and I admired the way the character's creators Kelly Puckett and Damion Scott (with collaborative help from Scott Peterson) laid out the basics of Cassandra's complex backstory-- though these early stories, too, did not meet my criteria.

Cassandra, the daughter of professional assassin David Cain and martial arts mistress Lady Shiva, is raised entirely by her father. Cain becomes intrigued with the idea of training a child to become a perfect assassin by having her read "body language" rather than communicating through the spoken word, and giving her tons of martial tutelage but no affection. When Cassandra turns eight, Cain takes her to meet an assassination-target, and instructs Cassandra to use a certain martial move on the man, but without telling the child that the move will kill its victim. The target dies, and despite her hard upbringing, Cassandra is appalled at having killed anyone. She flees her father and spends roughly the next ten years "off the grid." At eighteen she arrives in Gotham City and through involved circumstances takes over the role of Batgirl from Barbara Gordon, "benched" by virtue of her becoming a paraplegic. 

For whatever reason, in issue #39 a new writer, Dylan Horrocks, was assigned to BATGIRL, as well as other artists, principally Rick Leonardi. In the feature's earliest issues, the series had explored some of the emotional issues of Cassandra finding a "new dad" in the stern and demanding figure of Gotham's guardian. Horrocks ratcheted up the tension by having Cassandra courted by not one but two young swains. This dramatic turn caused the heroine to become more active in her quest for self-definition, even as Batman-- who'd never been responsible for a teenaged girl-- found his authority increasingly challenged.

The six-issue arc I've entitled "Tough Love" (after the arc's concluding episode) follows up on earlier stories in which Batman and the New Batgirl encounter a sinister chemist, Doctor Death. The villain has created a new designer drug, "Soul," which is causing manic behavior in those who take it. Cassandra restrains a couple of users, but one of them sparks in the heroine a deep uncertainty by telling her that she Batgirl has "no soul." This causes Cassandra to question her role as the new Batgirl, as well as her relationship to her father-figure, and she seeks counsel from her new "mother-figure" Barbara Gordon.

 This leads Cassandra to temporarily don the costume of the former Batgirl, in part as a means of coming to terms with her own sexuality, and she gets an enthusiastic reaction from current Robin Tim Drake.

Meanwhile, at the end of that adventure, Barbara responds to an earlier question, "What is soul," and gives a philosophical answer that Cassandra didn't necessarily ask for, though it's clearly something she needs.

In the following story, Cassandra gets an inkling of sexual discontents when she learns that Barbara and her former paramour Dick "Nightwing" Grayson have permanently broken up. Nothing daunted, Cassandra continues seeking the purveyors of Soul, and her path takes her to a gang, "The Lost Girls" (sort of a feminist take on Peter Pan's "Lost Boys"). Cassandra attacks the gang-girls, but during the altercation she's exposed to the psychotropic influence of Soul. She imagines herself assailed by all of her allies talking mean about her, but she still manages to beat down the Lost Girls. As a comical capper to this tale, Barbara sends Nightwing to render assistance, but when Cassandra sees him, she sees him only as the guy who hurt her "mom" and renders him a kick in the face.

The third section of "Tough Love" pits Batgirl against a serial killer, The Doll Man, but she also encounters a linguistics professo, who turns out to have been David Cain's influence for his ruthless tutelage of Cassandra. The professor even met young Cassandra earlier, though he had no idea of Cain's plans to use her as the perfect assassin. This encounter gives Cassandra new insights into notions of non-verbal communication, which enables her to track down and capture the Doll Man. But this causes a greater rift with Batman, who expressly told her to stay out of the matter.

In the fourth part, penciled by Jean-Jacques Dzialowski, Batgirl again defies one of Batman's orders by tracking down a child-stealing ring. Yet, rather than being angry, he confesses to Barbara that he may be doing her harm by using her in his anti-crime crusade; that he may be doing her as much psychological damage as David Cain caused. Cassandra overcomes her foes, but Batman claims that her defiant actions make her too erratic to continue as Batgirl, and he revokes her right to be a costumed hero in Gotham.

The reader of course knows that Batman isn't laying down the law to be a hardass. He's become at least partly convinced by Barbara's argument that she needs a real life rather than a crimefighting crusade. However, Cassandra can view the ban as nothing more than a fatherly rejection, and she responds with daughterly defiance. She dons a revised costume (which, significantly, exposes the eyes in a way the old one did not, hearkening back to the Soul-user's complaint that Cassandra's eyes were "cold and empty"). She finds Soul's creator Doctor Death in one of his lairs, but at the climax, Batman finds her.

What follows is something a combination superhero battle and therapy session, as Barbara herself more or less observes. Batman tries once more to assert his authority. Cassandra-- whom her father forced to express herself through peerless battle-skills rather than affection-- attacks the crusader.

To further complicate matters, Doctor Death puts his two cents in. Just as Cassandra gets atop Batman-- Barbara observes from afar that she looks more ready to kiss him than kill him-- the villain exposes both heroes to Soul, hoping to make them even more irrational. And indeed, it seems to work, as the crusaders take their quarrel into the city, exchanging biffs and bams in the tradition of balletic superheroes everywhere. This doesn't help Death, though, since Robin captures him. On a side-note, Death is shown making Soul by extracting chemicals from fresh corpses, which means that the drug has certain cannibalistic/necrophiliac associations.

Though "father" and "daughter" exorcise a lot of their hostilities in this fight, Batman possesses enough control to maneuver things so that Cassandra finally gives the reins of her "soul" to the better angels of her nature. She faults him for rejecting her, but even after being re-inducted into the Bat-family, she makes clear that she will follow her own independent path, guided by Daddy's influence but not bound to it. Batman gets the last word here, though. Barbara figures out that the Gotham Guardian was only partly affected by exposure to Soul, and that he let Batgirl fight him in the hope that she would be able to work through her conflicts that way. This suggests that Batman made a 180 degree turn away from the notion that Cassandra ought to seek an ordinary life, but maybe he just wanted to test her determination to remain in the Bat-family.

On a side-note, BATGIRL #50 was one of many DC titles that carried an obituary for Julie Schwartz. The editor made many contributions to the saga of Batman, but one of the biggest was his role in charting the course of the Barbara Gordon Batgirl. "Father" Batman and "Son" Robin had been the main focus of the feature for almost twenty years, but the character of Commissioner Gordon's daughter was the first real intimation of an "extended family." Over the years, said family would become far more dynamic in its growth than one can imagine having happened with Barbara Gordon's 1950s predecessors Kathy and Bette Kane.

NULL-MYTHS: HICKSVILLE (1998)

I'm going to try really hard this time not to address anything but the mythopoeic potentiality here, but it's going to be hard because Dylan Horrocks' graphic novel HICKSVILLE is almost as bad as the work I've called "practically inconsummate in every way." It might even be worse, given that it's plain that whereas Millar has no talent beyond conceiving graphic scenarios of violence, Horrocks occasionally shows some mythopoeic capacity, particularly in respect to his idea of a perfect comics-reading community-- even if it is in his homeland of New Zealand, and thus not overly accessible to most.

It's hard to avoid the didactic potentiality, though. The basic myth-idea of Hicksville-- a town where everyone appreciates the medium of comics-- is over-determined by Horrocks' confused historical perspective of the medium. This perspective is in turn employed for the same end seen in Clowes' DAVID BORING: as a diatribe "designed to please dull-witted elitists." However, at least Clowes can draw assorted characters who can be distinguished from one another, even when they are supposed to share some similar physical qualities. Horrocks' two viewpoint characters-- New Zealand-born comics-artist Sam Zabel and Canadian-born comics critic Leonard Batts-- aren't supposed to look alike, but they and other characters look like they were copied from the same artistic template, as do the characters of "villain" Dick Burger (representative of evil commercial comics) and the principal female character of Grace, who seems to be the only resident of Hicksville who doesn't give a crap about comics.

At base, Horrocks' invention of a comics-happy town reflects the optimism of the late 1990s, during which graphic novels were beginning to get distributed by bookstore chains-- admittedly, along with a lot of stuff elitists prefer not to acknowledge. The company Image Comics-- whose success had a noteworthy impact on the mainstream acceptance of comics-- is never mentioned by name. However, when Horrocks chooses to show images from the absurdly successful superhero comics of Dick Burger, Horrocks draws them in the overheated style of Rob Liefeld, and his artist Zabel complains about their lack of anatomical accuracy-- probably the most familiar condemnation of Image's books.

Dick Burger is, in essence, a fictional re-creation of the trope "the comics-artist-as-movie-star," another phenomenon seen for the first time in that decade, thanks to the media-presence of Liefeld and Todd McFarlane. But Burger is also a man with a secret, for his success is the result of violating one of the taboos of Hicksville, his former home. Horrocks attempted satire of the media-star is thoroughly derivative and lacking in nuance. Burger is simply everything about modern superhero comics that Horrocks dislikes, and not even as much a character as the other three-- though their claim to three-dimensional status isn't much better.

There is a sort of simple wonder to be found in Horrocks' idea of a community where all of the residents know Tintin and Popeye as well as they know modern superheroes like Batgirl. But Horrocks goes further, positing that Hicksville's library is a haven to which comics-artists all over the globe send their dream-projects for posterity.

Obviously in the real world, where professional artists have to use their skills to put food on the table, the idea of Wally Wood devoting countless hours to a never-to-be-published fantasy-epic is a pipe dream at best. But I can forgive deviations from reality when they serve an artistic purpose. At the same time, willful distortions to serve an pretentious theme are another matter. For instance, Horrocks tries to assert that his comics-critic Batts is an authority on comics. It's not exactly clear when Batts grew up, but he references having read both Spider-Man and the X-Men as a kid, so he's obviously from the sixties or later. And yet, Horrocks has Batts claim that the superheroes he loved as a child "spoke in preschool vocabularies." Since on the contrary both the Marvel and DC books were known for their heavy textual qualities-- not least Stan Lee's sesquipedalian floridness-- this comes down to Horrocks telling a lie to please his indie-loving readers. It's made more objectionable in that HICKSVILLE itself isn't particularly well-written, much less being exceptional in terms of the artist's vocabulary.

One of the leitmotifs of HICKSVILLE is that Sam Zabel keeps encountering isolated segments of an uncredited comics-story, as if the God of Comics were sending them to him to make sure that Horrocks can express his admiration for Moore's "Tales of the Black Freighter." These segments come closest to the true mythopoeic, for they deal with the encounter between New Zealand's early Maori occupants and two representatives of English colonialism, Captain James Cook, who first circumnavigated the island and Charles Henphy, a cartographer who charted what he saw. Here's a segment in which the Englishmen explain their motives to a Maori guide, who understandably suspects that their advent won't bode well for the Maori people.

I won't go so far as to say that Horrocks precisely exculpates these historical figures from their part in the colonization of New Zealand, but at least his view is not determined by a narrow ideological outlook; it recognizes that people may do things, even bad things, for complex reasons. Yet though Horrocks can extend this broad-mindedness to his colonial ancestors, he can't do the same to the American comic book industry. I'm not saying that he should gloss over its real abuses, but by creating Burger, a flat representative of acquisitiveness, Horrocks betrays his own theme. In addition, Horrocks's imitations of the Image style show no understanding of what made the books popular, even through the lens of parody. Worse, the story that supposedly vaults Burger to international fame is atrocious even by the standards of superhero comics. It may be that Horrocks views even the most venerated story-lines of commercial comics-- say, the Galactus trilogy-- to be as awful as any Image comic. But that would be beside the point. Horrocks, like many indie-comics artists trumpeting their superior creativity, often relies on straw-men opponents. His example thus shows that there may be sound creative reasons why a lot of these artists do not win wide acclaim.