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: BLACK ADAM/JSA BLACK REIGN (2004)

Though I'd already seen the 2022 movie BLACK ADAM without having read this JSA compilation, I decided I would give the TPB a read in order to determine whether or not the film's writers for the movie had borrowed any important plot or character points. The short answer is that, if one subtracts all the over-complicated subplots provided in the Geoff Jones-Rags Morales graphic novel, there is a rough similarity of the main plotlines. 

In REIGN, Black Adam somehow assembles a small coterie of super-powered aides with which he overthrows the local dictatorship of his native land. (Note: in the comics-character's original appearance in 1945, he was an Egyptian of an archaic era, but at some point in his DC revival he was reworked as an archaic native from a fictional DC country named Kandahq.) Though the character had been reworked in other ways when DC took over the Fawcett library of characters, I imagine that in 2004 Johns probably was not bound by any previous iterations, and so Adam's conquest of Kandahq here may be the "first" time he ever did so in Johns' version. Adam's ruthless conquest of the country suggests that he may planning the conquest of other neighboring nations. To prevent that contingency, about a dozen well-known Justice Society heroes descend upon Kandahq and have an involved battle with Adam's forces. In the end, enough chaos erupts that Adam pledges to the JSA that he will remain within his own borders unless attacked.

In the film, Adam is newly revived by a band of Kandahq freedom fighters seeking to oust a vaguely defined occupying force. Logically enough, Adam does not attempt to collect any allies, given that as a possessor of the "Shazam lightning" he's almost unstoppable. Adam doesn't take any immediate action to take over the country of his descendants, but four members of the JSA descend upon Kandahq on the theory that Adam's very existence is a threat to cosmic order. In contrast to the graphic novel, the JSA heroes and Black Adam are forced to work together against a common menace. 

I won't expatiate on the film further here, since I'll review it separately. BLACK REIGN is a very ordinary superhero punch-em-up, and I say that as a critic who believes that fight scenes can have a lot of extra-ordinary significance. For my taste at least there are far too many subplots, with the result that no single plot stands out, though since some of the issues appeared in the HAWKMAN title, there's a strong emphasis on the contentions between Adam and the Winged Wonder, just as one sees in the movie. The closest thing to a myth captured in REIGN is not sociological, as it is in the film. Johns' script emphasizes psychological trauma about the loss of loved ones and roads not taken, but the only scene that has any resonance takes place when Adam demonstrates to his uncertain ally "Atom Smasher" the fruits of their violence: the preservation of innocents.

MYTHCOMICS: JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE DARKSEID WAR (2015-16)

 

In the thirty-something years since 1986’s CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, DC Comics has published many similar multi-feature crossovers, few of which have possessed any mythic content. But the subject of this essay—henceforth WAR for short—not only achieves such symbolic amplitude but does so through some inventive riffing on many of the myth-tropes of CRISIS. (Note: I’m not reviewing here any tie-ins to this Justice League series.)

The purpose of the 1986 CRISIS was not purely artistic, for its purpose was to merge the many parallel worlds of the diverse DC universe into one cosmos, patently emulating the successful business model of Marvel Comics. As I observed in my CRISIS review, the authors did so by interweaving two loosely related concepts from DC’s Silver Age. The first was the idea of parallel Earths in which the archetypes of DC heroes took on somewhat different configurations—a Flash named Jay Garrick on one Earth but named Barry Allen on another, or a world where all the characters who were heroes in the Justice League became instead a group of criminals called “the Crime Syndicate.” The second was the notion of universes that were made either of “positive matter” or of “negative anti-matter.” The Earths of the Justice League and all their congeners fit into the positive universe, while the negative universe was represented only by the irredeemably warped world of Qward. In CRISIS, the positive universe gave birth to a protective super-being, the Monitor, while the negative continuum spawned the Anti-Monitor, an entity obsessed with annihilating all other realities (and thus serving the purpose of the authors). It’s interesting that DC’s way of getting rid of all the unmanageable doppelgangers from their company’s long history was to spawn a pair of cosmic twins, though both are dead by the end of the series like the other troublesome duplicates. The authors also threw in at least one other new doppelganger: a good version of Lex Luthor, who also gives rise to a son, Alexander Junior, who took on something of a “secular savior” role by story’s end. In addition, the reordering of the DC cosmos gave the company the chance to debut brand new versions of Superman, Wonder Woman and others.

WAR was not such a reboot, but it followed in the wake of a 2011 crossover event in which the DC cosmos was once more re-arranged, this time to allow for the return of many of the alternate worlds, including (most prominently) that of the “Crime Syndicate” Earth. During that reboot, familiar franchises were once more rebooted, but only two are relevant to the WAR storyline. First, Wonder Woman no longer enjoyed an immaculate conception via clay statue, but became the offspring of the deity Zeus with Amazon mother Hippolyta. Second, Cyborg’s artificial body, originally the invention of the hero’s scientist-father, became interfused with the technology of the New Gods from the classic Jack Kirby series. Both the good and bad gods of that franchise—respectively from the worlds of New Genesis and of Apokolips—sat out the events of 1986’s CRISIS. In contrast, the new origin for Cyborg insured that the revised 2011 Justice League would be strongly linked to the New Gods sub-cosmos. To be sure, the New Genesis gods barely figure into WAR, except that one of their kindred becomes the hero Mister Miracle. In WAR most of the authorial attention goes to the mythos of Apokolips, to whose activities Cyborg becomes attuned. Aside from the modifications to Wonder Woman and Cyborg, the rest of the starring characters—Superman, Batman, the Flash, the Hal Jordan Green Lantern, Shazam, and Lex Luthor—are broadly recognizable. The newbie in their ranks is one Jessica Cruz, who bears a complicated relationship to the evil Green Lantern from the Crime Syndicate cosmos, which I’ll forbear to discuss here.

Johns wastes no time in doubling down, so to speak, on the presence of doppelgangers. A flashback reveals that on the night that Hippolyta birthed Princess Diana on the island Themiscyra, another Amazon, Myrina, produced yet another female child, but her father was Darkseid, more or less the obverse of Zeus’s role in the Wonder Woman cosmos. Myrina names her child Grail, referencing the mystic Celtic vessel that restores life, because the Amazon mother believes that Grail will save the universe from the evil of Darkseid. (This idea may owe something to the mythology of Achilles, a child whom oracles claimed would overthrow his father— which prophecy restrained the usually randy Zeus from having sex with Achilles’ mother.)

Just as Grail is deeply implicated in the New Gods mythos, so too is the new version of the Anti-Monitor. In Kirby’s original series, he includes the character Metron, a relentless quester after knowledge, who moves about the cosmos in his “Mobius Chair.” Kirby never implied that anyone but Metron constructed the miraculous mobile throne. In Johns’ world, Mobius is the mortal inventor of the chair, as well as an inhabitant of the Qwardian anti-matter universe. In addition to gifting Metron with the chair, Mobius duplicates the function of the Guardian Krona in CRISIS, being a man obsessed with peering into forbidden secrets. As the result of Mobius’ prying, he beholds the “anti-life equation”—another NEW GODS concept, now tied to the “anti-matter universe”—and is thus transformed into the Anti-Monitor. Some story extrinsic to WAR causes the newborn fiend to annihilate the Crime Syndicate world, and this will eventually lead to the surviving super-criminals of that world making common cause with the Justice League. However, in the early chapters the cosmic colossus doesn’t immediately rush out looking for new worlds to destroy. Grail is the agent who calls him into conflict with both the Justice League and with Darkseid, the father whom Grail wants to murder.

To make things even more complicated, throughout the story most of the heroes undergo assorted transformations into god-like beings—a tacit response to the many superhero fans (like me) who view superheroes as recapitulations of archaic myth-figures. Some transformations are merely functional in nature. Batman becomes bonded to the Mobius Chair because Johns needs one of the good guys to tap into the chair’s ability to endow the sitter with copious knowledge. More promisingly, the Flash becomes bonded to the Black Racer, Kirby’s “New God of death,” which plays into the fact that Flash is one of the heroes who dies during CRISIS. Johns’ best scripting deals with the quarrelsome team of Superman and Lex Luthor, who get teleported to Apokolips and have to work together, but not with very positive results. 

On top of all that, the main subplot with the Crime Syndicate, out to avenge themselves on the Anti-Monitor, involves their one female member giving birth to a sort of anti-savior. Said female, Superwoman, is an alternate-world mashup of both Wonder Woman and Lois Lane, and the father of her demon-kid is a nasty version of Alexander Luthor, who was a good guy in CRISIS.

Whew.

I’ll forbear to discuss the very involved denouement here. I’ve long been aware that Geoff Johns knows his DC history inside and out, but this is the first time I’ve been strongly impressed by his artful repourings of old wine into new bottles. Not everything works, of course. Near the beginning Johns tosses in references to Brainiac and to Aquaman that may relate to some extrinsic stories, but which have nothing to do with WAR. Also, the deific names Johns gives to the transformed characters are lame. Shazam becomes “the God of Gods”—why exactly?

But I do like other playful recastings of continuity points. Luthor, abandoned on Apokolips by an evil-ized Superman, is taken in by a group of anti-Darkseid rebels, and they’re led by a woman named Ardora. In the Silver Age this was the name of an alien woman who fell in love with Luthor, and it’s through contact with the new Ardora that Luthor usurps the destiny of his enemy Superman and becomes the potential savior of Apokolips. Johns even has the Crime Syndicate version of Superman mention a woman named Luma Lynai, who in the Silver Age was a potential lover for Superman, for all that she looked like an age-appropriate version of Supergirl, as well as not being in any way related to the Man of Steel.

I freely admit that only a continuity-hound would get much mythic impact out of this highly referential opus. But for those so invested, the game is definitely worth the candle.

NEAR MYTHS: STARS AND S.T.R.I.P.E. (1999-2000)

Though I liked “Stargirl” a little better than most of the new heroes introduced at DC during the first part of the 21^st century, I was fairly surprised to see the CW group decide to devote a series to the character. Though as I write this only one episode of the TV-show has aired, I’m currently theorizing that either Greg Berlanti or some other CW-bigwig had some notion of re-living the producers’ first big superhero hit, the equally teen-oriented SMALLVILLE. Be that as it may, I decided to look over the fifteen issues (fourteen regularly-numbered comics and a “zero”) in which Stargirl made her series debut.

Not surprisingly, despite the title, the feature has nothing whatever to do with American patriotism. STARS is first and foremost a legacy concept, devoted to a millennial version of a Golden Age DC series, “the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy.” To be sure, the original concept, conceived by Jerry Siegel,, did not display strong patriotic content except with respect to the costumes of its two heroes. In essence the Golden Age concept was yet another version of “Batman and Robin,” but one in which the teenager, rich boy Sylvester “the Kid” Pemberton, was the boss of a full-grown man, his employee Pat Dugan, a.k.a. Stripesy. The feature was not particularly successful, any more than was the super-team of which the two flag-draped heroes were members, the Seven Soldiers of Victory, the others being the Crimson Avenger, the Shining Knight, the Vigilante, Green Arrow and Speedy. (The latter three were retconned as “Earth-Two” versions of characters who had become best known to readers as their Silver Age “Earth-One” counterparts.)

No comics-writer seemed in a great hurry to revive this part of DC history. A 1972 JUSTICE LEAGUE story revived the Seven Soldiers, explaining that the team’s members had been dispersed through time. The consequence of the time-travel gimmick was that all of these 1940s heroes returned to the 1970s without having aged, including teen-hero Sylvester Pemberton. He was the only one who got fast-tracked into a regular series, appearing for a time in DC’s revival of the Justice Society, while his partner Pat Dugan got out of the superhero game entirely. Dugan (and from now on I’ll use that name for him, even when speaking of his tedious-to-type identity S.T.R.I.P.E.) made occasional appearances. Pemberson at least enjoyed a varied history in his revival—using a “cosmic converter belt” (to upgrade from his former dependence on simple athletics), changing his name to Skyman, and ultimately getting killed.

I don’t imagine any fans were clamoring for a new version of the Star-Spangled Kid in 1999, but Geoff Johns had already made his bones with assorted “DC continuity” stories, and he presumably promoted the idea of a new character taking up the costume. Despite sporting the name of Courtney Whitmore—which, by accident or design, sounds nearly as upscale as Sylvester Pemberton—the new female “Kid” was just your basic middle-class high-schooler, albeit somewhat more athletic than most. However, she has the fortune—be it good or bad—that her mother divorces her father and eventually marries Pat Dugan.

Courtney fumes with teenaged hauteur about her mother’s new marriage and her own transplantation to a new dwelling-place in Blue Valley (traditionally the home of another teen hero, Kid Flash). However, the move coincides with Dugan’s decision to get back into the superhero game, building a gigantic robot exoskeleton for himself, given the aforesaid acronym. Despite resenting her new stepfather, Courtney soon learns about his heroic heritage. Though she mocks his old cognomen of “Stripesy,” she’s quick to take on the equally ludicrous title of “Star Spangled Kid” once she, like Pemberton before her, gets hold of a super-technological power boost. (To be sure, during the series a character suggests that she ought to call herself “Stargirl,” and at present that’s the name the character currently uses.)

For the most part, the short run of STARS is just another routine superhero opus, slightly enlivened by Lee Moder’s humorous artwork and various references to DC continuity. Neither of these justify my calling the series a “near myth,” though, and indeed Johns’s cumbersome use of continuity works against the serial’s only mythic aspect: the psychological bonding of a young girl’s to a new father, in order to replace the one who deserted her. In the space of fifteen issues, Johns had ample opportunity to show the relationship of Courtney and Dugan grow, as she comes to respect the man she originally resented as an intruder upon her family. But Johns is more comfortable with silly jokes than with any dramatic arc. A particular point where the continuity bug nullifies the drama is a scene when another of the Seven Soldiers, the Shining Knight, involves himself in the supervillain problems of the two stars. To satisfy readers with the continuity jones, Johns has the Knight go into a long recap of his history with the Soldiers and the All-Star Squadron. Yet at no point does the writer deem it necessary to tell his readers how all these hyper-dramatic stories of World War Two heroism sound to a child of the 21^st century. This sort of shift in perspective might have contributed to Courtney’s ability to bond with her stepfather. But because their bonding feels forced, the current star-spangled team is just about as mediocre in terms of its psychological myths as the original Golden Age feature.

After the cancellation of the series, Courtney, taking the more mellifluous name of Stargirl, has mostly participated in larger super-groups. I haven’t read most of these, but given this middling beginning, I’d be surprised if she ever became much more than a pretty face and a cool costume.