MYTHCOMICS: INFINITY GAUNTLET (1991)

Jim Starlin rose to prominence at Bronze-Age Marvel like the proverbial comet. After he took over writing and drawing Marvel Comics’s moribund CAPTAIN MARVEL title, he spun an inventive tale of the mad demigod Thanos, who worshiped a feminine incarnation of Death and ascended to godhood with the help of a Lee-Kirby artifact, the Cosmic Cube. Indeed, it could be argued that this was the first multi-issue narrative that rivaled those of Lee and Kirby. Captain Marvel defeated Thanos by playing on the villain's ego, but though the hero later passed away, the demigod proved far more durable. During Starlin’s tenure on the feature WARLOCK—one portion of which I reviewed here—the artist-writer arguably pursued his cosmic vistas to even greater effect. It was in the stories devoted to Warlock—a reworked version of a Lee-Kirby character known only as “Him”—that Starlin slightly pilfered motifs from the work of Michael Moorcock, and evolved the idea of a “soul gem.” Though Thanos was largely left alone by other Marvel raconteurs, possibly in deference to Starlin, over time one soul gem multiplied into several, all with different properties from the jewel used by Warlock. By the early nineties, Starlin apparently decided to weave a tapestry capable of dovetailing all of these continuity-additions into his own cosmos of personal concerns.

Though in the early nineties I was still keeping a weather-eye on Marvel comics, I didn’t read INFINITY GAUNTLET or any of its subsequent spin-offs. I was far from pleased by either Marvel’s exploitation of the concept of the “multi-series crossover,” or with Starlin’s dubious Metamorphosis Odyssey, one part of which I negatively reviewed here. So I ignored this saga of the “soul gems,” which, when placed upon Thanos’s glove, bestowed on him the power of “the Infinity Gauntlet.” To the extent that I even was aware of the series’ basic plotline, I probably would have thought it to be little more than a reworking of that first “Cosmic Cube” story.

Now that I’ve read GAUNTLET, I think this is an accurate judgment, but in this case, Starlin improved upon the earlier story. The CAPTAIN MARVEL narrative is a fun cosmic superhero tale, but it shows little insight into the master villain and his perverse fascination with a feminine version of Death. Further, GAUNTLET, despite being prefaced by several issues of a Starlin-scribed SILVER SURFER feature, and being tied in to various other Marvel features, shows a surer mythic discourse than the big-screen film it inspired, AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR.

One superior aspect of Starlin’s narrative is that the initiating action of the story begins on a metaphysical plane too ambitious for the live-action movie. It’s Death herself, not Thanos, who gets the idea that the universe has become too prolific with living beings, and needs to be culled. In the movie Thanos is given a more “realistic” motive, that of wanting to prevent suffering by thinning the universal herd, but this putative realism is one that begs not to be examined too closely. In this case, a strong metaphysical myth—“Death Gets Tired of Too Much Life”—proves far more resonant than a weak sociological extrapolation. At any rate, Death resuscitates Thanos from whatever grisly fate he last met, and sends him out to gather the Infinity Gems. With these, he crafts the Gauntlet, with which he can wipe out half of all living beings with one snap of his fingers.

“The snap” which received so much emphasis in INFINITY WAR appears for just one panel in GAUNTLET. Still, like the movie-makers, Starlin gets a lot of mileage out of the resultant drama, as various Marvel characters lose friends and loved ones, though to be sure Starlin devotes less attention than the movie does to rank-and-file humankind. But then, Starlin takes far more time than the movie did to explore the villain’s psychology, suggesting that Thanos's eroticization of the force of Death reveals his basic fear of failure in life. Not that psychology is in the driver’s seat here. The forces of life are championed by most of Marvel’s major heroes, as well as almost all of Marvel’ quasi-omnipotent beings, from the famed Galactus to the obscure Living Tribunal (who, in a demonstration of cosmic legalism, chooses not to join the fight against Thanos because it’s the nature of life to devour life).

In contrast to, say, SECRET WARS, where all of the combined heroes share roughly the same narrative emphasis, most of the champions in GAUNTLET come “on stage” just to speak a few lines and toss a few blasts, fists, or adamantine claws at the god-powered evildoer. Thanos gets so much attention from Starlin that he’s almost the star of the show. However, Starlin subtly allows the narrative to be dominated by the hero who functioned most often as Thanos’s nemesis following the demise of Captain Marvel: the aforementioned Warlock. With this character, Starlin may have been subconsciously influenced by another myth from the Lee-Kirby bag of tricks. Lee and Kirby gave readers a dynamic opposition between the angelic Silver Surfer and the planet-devouring Galactus, and Starlin uses similar motifs, contrasting the arrogant, world-destroying “false deity” Thanos to the calm, almost Christ-like mien of Warlock. Nevertheless, Starlin’s variation on this metaphysical myth has its own organic charms. When Thanos’s would-be mistress Death spurns him for the act of assuming godhood, he tries to scorn her in return by creating a female version of himself, but one who mirrors his own desires. You certainly wouldn’t catch Galactus creating an erotic double of himself in order to stroke his ego.

There are flaws. Starlin devotes considerable space to a character he didn’t invent, Nebula, the granddaughter of Thanos. But though she manages to steal the Gauntlet from her ancestor, she remains a flat character, both here and in most of her appearances. In this particular case the Marvel Studios films improved on Nebula in terms of her dramatic impact.

In my review of AVENGERS: ENDGAME, I called attention to the way in which the filmmakers used the event of “the Snap” to evoke the tragic sense of “survivors’ guilt” following a great catastrophe. Like most cosmic Marvel sagas, the events of GAUNTLET have no more lasting impact than sweeping the pieces off a board in order to initiate a new game. INFINITY WAR borrows the ending of GAUNTLET—the scene of a contented Thanos, satisfied to live a bucolic existence and give up being a super-villain. In both stories, this conclusion is designed to be shattered at some future time. Nevertheless, whatever Starlin chose to do with Thanos in his next big cosmic extravaganza, the narrative within GAUNTLET is so impressively coherent that one may choose to believe that within this one story-arc, Starlin really did bring his massively insecure malefactor a measure of peace.

ADDENDUM 11-26-2020: The more I think about it, the more I believe that Thanos really IS the star of this particular show, not least because he passes on his burden to Warlock. That would explain why Warlock, despite being the master organizer, is to some extent outmaneuvered at the conclusion-- for all that Starlin had another epic on the horizon.

MYTHCOMICS: "WELCOME TO DYNAMO CITY" (SILVER SURFER #40-43, 1990)

In ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, Northrop Frye asserts that adventure and irony are practically inversions of one another, and I tend to agree, since these two mythoi seem to interweave far less well than the other two mythoi, comedy and drama. Most Marvel franchises fall squarely within the mythos of adventure, and any ironic content-- say, that of Peter Parker having to work for the man who wants to ruin Spider-Man-- is subsumed by the more exhilarating aspects of adventure.

In most of the Silver Surfer's incarnations, the character has been bereft of ironic content. Norrin Raad is known for being a pop-Christ figure, spouting doleful speeches about man's inhumanity to man, and he demonstrates a level of power that necessitates pitting him against opponents able to match his level of potency. However, for four issues of the 1990s SURFER feature, writer Jim Starlin and artist Ron Lim took the surfboard-riding stalwart in a darker direction.

Issue #39 concludes a plotline in which the Surfer overcomes a suitably cosmic menace-- the much-heralded Thanos, who dies yet another temporary death at the end of the narrative-- and #40 follows up with the Surfer and his allies ruminating on the villain's demise. Unexpectedly, the Surfer receives a summons from an outer-space satellite community, Dynamo City. The authorities of the satellite want the Surfer to testify as to the demise of Thanos. Though the summoner cannot compel the powerful hero to comply, the agent plays on Norrin Radd's curiosity by claiming that Thanos left behind a taped message for the Surfer as part of his last will and testament.

As soon as the sky-rider arrives in Dynamo City, however, he finds that he's been too confident in his great powers. Dynamo City's rulers insist upon a total hegemony of power, and as soon as Norrin enters the satellite, his cosmic powers are drained from his body, making him entirely mortal. Though bemused by this development, Norrin accedes to the authorities' demand for testimony regarding his role in Thanos's death. The court rules the Surfer innocent of Thanos's murder. But the villain's taped message suggests that Thanos has somehow mousetrapped the hero by bringing him to the satellite.

The Surfer finds out why when he tries to leave, for a local policeman informs he cannot depart without paying an "exit tax." Of course the hero has no money of any kind on his person, and he's forced to do what any ordinary shlub in Dynamo City would have to do: get a job in order to pay his debts. Starlin and Lim capture a rare level of ironic humor as the Surfer faces the horror of job placement, trying to explain his talents as a former herald to Galactus. Unable to get regular employment, the Surfer is forced to join Dynamo City's huge community of homeless vagrants. He makes the acquaintance of a scruffy little alien, Zeaklar, who knows the workings of Dynamo City even though he's never been able to escape the poverty level himself. It's through Zeaklar that the Surfer learns that he can make some money by selling his memories to the citizens of Dynamo. The Surfer is disgusted by this prospect, but he badly desires to escape the city, and so he makes a deal to let the jaded Dynamo populace be titillated by his personal experiences. However, the producers of the memory-show take advantage of his lack of business sense and cheat him.

Once more relegated to vagrant status, the Surfer gets the idea that even if the underlings serving the system are corrupt, he may win clemency from the ruler of Dynamo City, "the Great I." Of course any reader who hears that name will rightfully suspect that the hero is setting himself up for a fall, since "Great I" sounds a much more famed ruler of pop-fiction, "the Great Oz." When the Surfer manages to confront the ruler, he finds that there isn't even a clever mountebank behind the curtain of power. Instead, the "Great I" is just a near-brainless creature who does nothing more than process information. There isn't even a particular power behind the throne: just a bunch of self-interested, self-important  bureaucrats.

Indeed, even the down-trodden citizens of Dynamo are largely complicit in the corruption. By his continued defiance of the city's mores, the Surfer earns himself a trial, and though he's guilty of all the charges brought against him, the court can't resist tossing in a bunch of false charges as well. This scene is one of the few in which any female characters show up during the four-issue story, but they're just as bad as any of the males in terms of framing the Surfer for phony crimes.

Both the Surfer and Zeaklar are scheduled for execution, and the hero can do nothing about it. Only dumb luck, and the inherent stupidity of the Dynamo hierarchy, saves the two of them, for their means of execution is to hurl condemned prisoners into deep space.

This, of course, turns out to be a case of throwing Br'er Rabbit into the briarpatch, though the Surfer has no inkling that this is what the authorities plan to do. Once he's in space, his cosmic powers return and he saves Zeaklar from extinction. The Dynamo cops send a few robot spaceships after the Surfer, and the hero gets the chance to vent some fury by wiping out all of these mechanical maraudders. However, when the hero considers wreaking vengeance on the satellite-city as a whole, Zeaklar reminds him that to do so will expose thousands of innocents to death. The Surfer decides that he will find some way to avenge his suffering, but since Dynamo City has never appeared again in a Marvel comic, that threat turned hollow.

This story was certainly not the first time Jim Starlin attempted to make satirical points in his various works. However, this is probably his most thoroughgoing attempt to mount a story devoted purely to the satire of a particular social system, implicitly that of commodity-driven capitalism. Starlin is no subtler here than anywhere else, but at least his mythic theme is fully developed, and at no time can the normal thrills of the adventure-genre overthrow the sense that Dynamo City's way of life cannot be undone even by "the Power Cosmic."

MYTHCOMICS: [THE MAGUS SAGA] (STRANGE TALES #178-81, WARLOCK #9-11, 1975-76)

Though I rated Jim Starlin's THE PRICE as one of the worst of the null-myths, the writer-artist did have a short period in which he showed immense creativity with respect to the mythopoeic potentiality. During his run on the CAPTAIN MARVEL title he attracted the adulation of fans for giving that rather mediocre hero a new lease on life, not least by introducing a new major villain, Thanos, a demigod devoted to the worship of Death.

The CAPTAIN MARVEL material is straight-out space opera, but Starlin's series of WARLOCK stories-- which I've given the title of "the Magus Saga"-- combined spacefaring adventure with a broad approach to religious satire. He remarked in one online interview that "I’d grown up very Catholic, parochial school, and Warlock was a way of working a lot of things out."

The character of Warlock has a complicated history I'll touch on elsewhere, but in essence, he already had some strong religious associations in his first series, and Starlin took those basically respectful references to Christian belief in a 180-degree direction. Warlock, technically the offspring of Earth, took off to the stars, and found that the cosmos was endangered by a fanatical religious movement, the Universal Church. Starlin continued to imbue his cosmic hero with touches of Christian religiosity; in issue #179, he tells a group of aliens clamoring for his leadership to "rule themselves." Yet this version of Warlock, rather than communing with God-in-Heaven, finds himself opposed to the Church, which is controlled by the Magus, a being who has set himself up as God. Further, in due time Warlock learns that he is the Magus, or, more precisely, that Warlock will transform into the Magus in an alternate timeline. Aided by such dubious allies as the aforementioned death-lover Thanos, his female pawn Gamora and comic-relief Pip the Troll, Warlock must find a way to prevent the Magus from being born.

One of Starlin's other creative breakthroughs related to the hero's powers.  During the character's first series, he received a "soul gem," a jewel he somehow affixed to his forehead, which gave Warlock the power to re-arrange physical matter. Starlin made little use of this power, instead giving Warlock the somewhat vampiric power to consume the souls of those he attacked. This version of the soul gem seems to borrow equally from two creations of prose author Michael Moorcock: Dorian Hawkmoon, who wore a jewel in his skull, and Elric, a swordsman whose blade could consume the souls of opponents. In addition, Moorcock had also portrayed characters who were alternate versions of one another, though Starlin's ecclesiastical satire seems entirely original. In any case, though Marvel had many feature-heroes whose super power, as Roy Thomas once wrote, was that of breast-beating, Starlin's Warlock was rare in showing some degree of emotional complexity.

There were flaws in the saga, of course. From the first Starlin-- who borrowed many visual tropes from Kirby and Ditko-- seemed to display the same "tin ears" as those artists when he wrote dialogue, though not nearly to the same extent. His sense of humor also was something less than stellar, though he outdid himself in STRANGE TALES #181, when the humorless hero, subjected to mental reprogramming, resisted by imagining all of his tormentors as clowns, whose mighty church was nothing but a tower of rubbish-- albeit with a few diamonds thrown in. Not a few comics-fans speculated that Starlin might have also been satirizing the comics-industry-- though, to be sure, the "diamonds in the garbage" metaphor was not original to Starlin and could be applied to just about any human endeavor.

I also rather liked that the Magus' church was run by a "female pope," the Matriarch, who also combined aspects of Judas and Mary Magdalene. Starlin wrote other Warlock stories, but his first venture into the intersection of cosmic adventure and religious satire remains his outstanding accomplishment.

MYTHCOMICS: 'SHANG-CHI, MASTER OF KUNG FU" (SPECIAL MARVEL ED. #15, 1973)

Both of the previous examples in "Racial Other Mythcomics Month" reflected both positive and negative aspects to racial heritage. In "The God Killer" the hero, the Black Panther, incarnates the good aspects, while Killmonger and his henchman Sombre incarnate the bad aspects. In contrast, in the "Black Talon" story Strangler Burns, the black murderer whose legacy empowers the Caucasian villain, was shown to embody both negative and positive traits, though Burns himself must be deemed more of a plot-device than a substantial character. The "origin story" for the feature MASTER OF KUNG FU roughly follows the pattern of the Black Panther story, but makes the connection between protagonist and antagonist more intimate, as well as centering their heroic and villainous natures in terms of time.

The cover for "Shang-Chi" is a small masterpiece of design, not just in terms of kinetic effects but also in terms of conjuring with Asian representations from differing eras. Even though this was the hero's first appearance, most if not all comics-purchasers in 1973 would have quickly recognized the iconography of the young Asian kung-fu fighter. This racial icon had by 1973 been popularized in part through English-dubbed martial arts films made in Hong Kong and distributed to the U.S. According to this site and to Wikipedia, the film known in the U.S. as THE CHINESE CONNECTION, released to the States in November 1972, jump-started the brief American kung-fu craze, though the TV pilot for ABC's KUNG FU teleseries contributed as well, airing in February of that year. Both of Shang-Chi's co-creators, Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin, have asserted in online interviews that the David Carradine TV show was their main source of inspiration, and this is reflected in the characterization of Shang-Chi as an earnest seeker of truth. Even the cover's design uses Chinese iconography to communicate this via the yin-yang symbol on the floor. Note that Shang-Chi's foot stands upon the white, "good" section and his bad sumo-opponent stands in the black, "evil" section-- although some colorist goofed and failed to darken the spot inside the "yang" section.

Looming over Shang-Chi on the cover is the gigantic figure of Fu Manchu, though his name does not appear until the first page of the interior story. Most viewers would automatically call Fu Manchu's image-- given both pointed ears and clawlike fingers-- to be unreservedly racist. I will write no apologias for the pointed ears, but I think it worth pointing out that the widespread icon of the Asian with Clawlike Fingers may have come about as a Western response to the Chinese custom of incredibly long fingernails. For the Chinese long fingernails signified an aristocrat's freedom from the necessities of manual labor, but many Westerners, whether actively racist or not, plainly found the image off-putting and so evolved their own reading of this image. To be sure, as the story reveals, Fu Manchu is an aristocrat in the sense that he hopes to restore the prominence of the Manchu dynasty-- though one cannot necessarily render the same reading for every Asian villain who had "claw" in his name.

Following a stunning action-scene by Starlin-- from back in the days when he could do stunning action-scenes-- Shang-Chi reveals his relationship to the "most infamous villain of all time:"

Having supplied a modicum of action for the impatient reader, Englehart and Starlin then produce in their hero's mind a flashback far longer than any seen on the KUNG FU series. Through dialogue between the son and his sire, it's established that from childhood Shang-Chi has been trained in the martial arts to become a "living weapon." Fu Manchu asserts that he labors ceaselessly for the betterment of the world, and that Shang-Chi's first mission on his father's behalf will be to go to London and assassinate an evildoer named Doctor Petrie. Shang-Chi goes where his father bids him, and though he vacillates when he stands by the bed of an ailing old man, he does slay Petrie with a single blow. However, the unwilling assassin is caught leaving by a gun-wielding old man in a wheelchair: Fu Manchu's long-time adversary Denis Nayland Smith. Shang-Chi disarms Smith, but the older man-- who will in later stories become a new father-figure to the martial artist-- reveals to Shang the truth about Fu Manchu's villainous nature-- in imagery, I should note, that reflects all of the prejudices of the era when both Fu and Nayland Smith were conceived. 

Today it might be almost impossible for audiences to credence this association of the Chinese villain and "spiders, rats, reptiles, and other loathsome vermin," much less extend their sympathies to a character, even an older one, who spoke of his Asian enemy as a "yellow devil."  Nevertheless, Englehart and Starlin are more careful than Fu Manchu's creator sometimes was, to keep the villain from being a representative of the Chinese people. 

The flashback ends with Shang-Chi's tortured realization of his father's duplicity, so he returns to Fu Manchu's stronghold for answers. He battles the gigantic sumo Tak, who was his father's tool in putting Nayland Smith in a wheelchair, and defeats him. He finds proof of Nayland Smith's accusations in his father's laboratory, where he is attacked by a huge gorilla. This battle lasts only two pages, but is less consequential for its action than for what the reader is told via captions about the gorilla: that Fu Manchu endowed the beast with a brain "capable of elementary reasoning," and then tormented the beast so that it would become savage enough to attack anyone trespassing on the laboratory. Though Shang-Chi is not privy to the information in the captions, he's horrified to see that his father's cruelty has resulted in "demons like this [creature]."

After the death of the guard-gorilla, Fu Manchu appears before his son, attempting to cajole his offspring back to the fold. However, Fu only reveals his own monomania by boasting of "an invisible, world-wide empire opposed to all governments." Shang-Chi, a peaceful pluralist at heart, renounces his father as a madman and swears to dedicate his life to preventing his evil schemes.

The series was so successful, albeit briefly, that the title in which the feature premiered, SPECIAL MARVEL EDITION, was quickly revised to MASTER OF KUNG FU, and remained under that title for the duration of its run. However, neither co-creator remained with their creation long: Starlin left with MOKF #17, and Englehart departed with #19. Curiously, neither man had planned to use Fu Manchu in their concept: this addition came about because Marvel had already licensed the "devil-doctor" but had been unable to find a way to make him salable.  Editor Roy Thomas reputedly injected Fu Manchu into the mix, but though his main motivation may have been economic-- that of justifying the license-- the combination proved more felicitous than might have been expected. Though Fu Manchu was not as popular in the second half of the 20th century as he'd been in the first half, his presence in the MOKF book forced creators to continually play the old, negative image of the Asian against the newer, positive one for as long as Marvel retained the license to Sax Rohmer's character.

To be sure, although writer Doug Moench and his many artist-collaborators produced some good mythcomics with Shang-Chi, none of them succeeded in portraying the Asian villain with as much dimension as did Englehart and Starlin. It's conceivable that their lack of enthusiasm was rooted in the dominant political view that Fu Manchu was only a racist artifact and nothing more-- or worse, that the prevalence of the many stereotypical Asian villains in pop culture signified that the most archetypal Asian villain should not be used by conscientious persons. It's a view with which I do not concur, as I will address in a future essay.

NULL-MYTHS: THE PRICE (1981)

When I attempted to come up with a "Bizarro version" of this week's "mythcomic," I wanted a work that tried to do something akin to what Jack Kirby began in 1971 with his "Fourth World" series-- a work that sought to deal with the metaphysical concepts of good and evil, but did a really horrible job of it. Sadly, I was forced to choose THE PRICE, which is the second section of Jim Starlin's bloated space-and-sorcery opera, THE METAMORPHOSIS ODYSSEY. I didn't reread any other sections of this unholy mess-- which by its title alone offends the memories of both Ovid and Homer-- but I may review some or all of these sections for future null-myth essays, since I remember disliking every part of the opus in its original publication.

Why do I say "sadly?" Well, the ODYSSEY's lack of overall quality rivals that of Mark Millar's WANTED, which I panned in this review, following which I further critiqued it as being "practically inconsummate in every way."  But Millar never showed any real talent, while Starlin had showed himself a superior superhero artist in such Marvel Comics works as CAPTAIN MARVEL and WARLOCK. However, the direct market's boom in the 1980s made it possible for many graduates of the Big Two to attempt their own creator-owned works. In Starlin's case, the first part of his ODYSSEY appeared in EPIC ILLUSTRATED, while THE PRICE was published by Eclipse Comics. But some raconteurs also made themselves "independent" of good storytelling practices, and so THE PRICE, like WANTED, fails in terms of all four of the potentialities. Since I'm trying to focus here upon the work's failure as symbolic discourse, I'll get the other failures out of the way quickly:

DRAMATIC-- though the story's set in a far-flung cosmos, it begins like a murder mystery, as master magician Syzygy Darklock, a priest in the service of a religious order called the Instrumentality, tries to find out how his brother was slain by a demon assassin, and why. The story fails as drama because at the beginning Starlin barely devotes any time to establishing the nature of Darklock's character, or that of his confidante Sister Marian, but he does dump a lot of character-backstory at the story's conclusion, almost as an afterthought. When Darklock does find the man behind the assassination, he finds that the villain did it so as to force Darklock to become a kind of super-magician, the better to deal with a major cosmic crisis that will evolve in a future narrative.

THEMATIC-- his work on WARLOCK established that Starlin had an animus against organized religion, particularly Christianity. But whereas the argument against religion is moderately well presented in WARLOCK, here Starlin "coasts" on the same theme and doesn't really analyze what makes the Instrumentality evil-- except that it kills people, which Darklock himself does too.

KINETIC-- whereas Starlin could draw excellent superhero action, THE PRICE is mostly a conglomeration of talking heads, usually reciting tedious exposition. I would also rate an artist's ability to name his characters as an appeal to the kinetic, in that a good name rings well in the ears and a bad name has an irritating sound. And while "Syzygy Darklock" may sport one of the worst hero-names ever, the name of the villain-- "Taurus Killgaren"-- is even worse, especially when one suspects that Starlin unconsciously modeled the awkward name on that of a real-life celebrity: "Dorothy Killgalen," a reporter/game-show guest of the 1940s and 1950s.

With all those failures, how does Starlin also manage to fail in the realm of the mythopoeic?  Well, putting aside all of the artist's phony-baloney attempts to reproduce the effects of ceremonial magic, the core of the story is seen below:

See, after Taurus explains everything he's done to make Darklock into a super-magus for this future crisis, the villain reveals that Darklock can only obtain his super-magic if he sacrifices the thing he loves most, which happens to be Sister Marian. 

Given the numerous indirect references to Christianity throughout the story, it's impossible not to read Marian's death as a reference to Christ's Passion-- except that this time, it's the Serpent who gets the upper hand:

Now, if Starlin's protagonist had asked Marian to sacrifice herself, and she had agreed, then that might have worked in one fashion or another, be it as a serious *imitatio Dei* or as a satirical version of same. But because Darklock does not give Marian a choice-- and yet he isn't abrogating to himself any superior freedom to act with cruelty, as one might argue of Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia-- Starlin's murder of "what he loves most" comes off as shallow in its self-aggrandizement. I've critiqued on various occasions the thin-skinned gender-complaints summed up by the trope "women in refrigerators." But even if I'd cross off the names of a lot of female characters on the "WIR" list, Sister Marian would probably remain on it-- and maybe even move to number-one position.

The real price of THE PRICE was the one this work levied on Starlin's capacity as an artist, since I'd argue that he never subsequently lived up to his initial potential.