NEAR-MYTHS: WONDER WOMAN EARTH ONE (2016-2021)

 

I have a dim recollection that when Grant Morrison first began publicizing his WONDER WOMAN EARTH ONE project-- and I was not able to locate the item I'm remembering, so this is at best a paraphrase-- that he considered it something of a challenge to devise a Wonder Woman concept modeled on the original Marston/Peter series of the Golden Age. Morrison stated that he intended at the very least to address the bondage element in some way, which element has been largely elided from many if not all post-Crisis WW renditions. Whatever I read sent up a bit of a red flag in my mind. I've liked a lot of Morrison's work, particularly many of his takes on DC characters like Superman (in ALL-STAR SUPERMAN) and Batman (various arcs from roughly 2008 to 2013). However, I wondered if he was simply undertaking the WW project because she was part of the "DC Trinity," not because he had a sincere interest in Marston's concepts.

Well, the three graphic albums of WW EARTH ONE-- part of a DC imprint that sounds like little more a refurbished ELSEWORLDS-- are at least more focused than Morrison's scattershot ACTION COMICS run. Still, I never felt like Morrison was allowing his EARTH ONE take on WW to soar into the heights of erratic creativity for which the writer is best known.

Several departures from the Marston canon are entirely justified. The Marston series was launched a few months prior to the Dec 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, but there was no way that a contemporary WW series, even a limited one, would begin in a WWII setting. However, one of the base concepts of the Marston series was that the heroine undertook her mission to man's world not just to fight Nazis, but to reform warlike males and bring them under the loving authority of the Amazon goddesses Athena and Aphrodite. I don't imagine that Marston, as much as he may have believed in his gynocentric philosophy, had any notion of showing the rise of a dominion of pagan goddesses in 20th-century America. However, Morrison-- who honors Marston as a representative of "alternative lifestyles-- decides that his Amazing Amazon will not just attempt such a conversion but accomplish it within a span from the 21st century to a time three thousand years in the future.     

To emphasize this manifest Amazon destiny, Morrison dials back the eternally-frustrated hieros gamos Marston arranged for his heroine and her beloved American Steve Trevor. In order to tweak expectations, Morrison makes his Trevor a Black man. However, Morrison isn't interested enough in his Trevor to make him into even a two-dimensional character. Morrison gives the readers mixed signals regarding the Diana-Steve relationship. It's as if he and artist Yanick Paquette were leery of imparting too much importance to the Amazon Princess's first potential heterosexual encounter. It's clear all the Amazons of Paradise Island have had frequent lesbian relationships, including both Diana and her mother Hippolyta-- even though no erotic encounters as such are shown-- so it's arguable that he might as well have dispensed with Trevor altogether.

Surprisingly, Morrison gets far more mileage with his version of perpetual comedy-relief Etta Candy, here renamed "Beth" and given the persona of a randy, plus-sized cheerleader for Wonder Woman's feminist agenda. Even the famed "woo woo" schtick works, possibly thanks to Morrison emulating various plus-sized celebrities. As a counter to all of the countless stories in which Diana's mother, Amazon queen Hippolyta, was simply a timely aid to her heroic daughter, Morrison forges a more acrimonious relationship between the two. But given that Hippolyta is destined to be disposed of in the second book, the effort feels somewhat doomed. Morrison also dispenses with WW's "clay statue" origins, but to no great effect  

But just as Marston couldn't really elaborate villains who had a well-conceived reason to oppose the Amazon's "loving authority," Morrison also struggles to embody believable masculine villains. Though a prelude establishes that in ancient times Hippolyta did encounter the genuine son-of-Zeus Hercules, the status of the Greek gods in the EARTH ONE domain is dubious. Does Ares, usually the opponent of loving Aphrodite in the comics, really exist, or is he just metaphorically true in the head of main villain Maxwell Lord? Possibly Morrison wanted any converts to Diana's philosophy to embrace her POV without any assurance of deific confirmation.

 Morrison's version of Doctor Psycho is not any better. In Marston, Psycho is an ugly dwarf who seeks to control women with his mental weapons, rather than with male muscle. Morrison's Psycho is a handsome charmer who comes close to seducing Wonder Woman with skillful mind games, but he like Trevor lacks depth. 

Similarly, Morrison devotes no background to his only female villain, the only holdover from WWII-- the Nazi Paula Von Gunther. Hippolyta allows Paula to join the Amazons after mental conditioning, much as Marston did, but this time, mercy for Paula has dire consequences. All of the villains, like most of the support-cast, are a little too transparent in their status as plot-functions.

Paquette's art is nice-looking but far too poised to possess any dynamism, even in the fight-scenes. Rough and blocky though H.G. Peter's art was, there were times it got across the cruel basics of the sadist/masochist tangos between various characters. In the hands of Morrison and Paquette, all that transgressive stuff just seems a little on the vanilla side.st

I'm not sorry I read WONDER WOMAN EARTH ONE, but it's clearly not really Grant Morrison's jam. I'd be totally okay with Morrison steering clear of Matters Amazonian for the future.        

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.  

NEAR-MYTHS: "REQUIEM FOR A TITAN" (TEEN TITANS #14, 1968)

 

In this essay I distinguished three general periods in the first run of the TEEN TITANS feature: "Wacky Titans," "Relevant Titans," and "Spooky Titans." But "Requiem for a Titan" was an odd game-changer for long-time DC scripter Bob Haney. "Requiem" didn't mark a sea-change for the feature-- future stories still utilized a lot of wackiness revolving around the alliance of the teen sidekicks-- so it seems like Haney just had a sudden desire to thrust the innocent barely-adults into the chaos of guilt and moral breakdown.     

In a haunting sequence-- or as haunting as a comic with brightly clad superheroes can get-- artist Nick Cardy outdoes himself. Robin the Boy Wonder meets a new fiend, The Gargoyle, in a graveyard that includes prominent markers for Robin and his teammates. At the white-clad villain's command, Robin divests himself of parts of his costume, as if surrendering parts of himself. He balks at removing his mask, but the Gargoyle conjures up giant phantom images of the other Titans, all of whom mock the Boy Wonder. Robin capitulates and removes the mask, upon which action the villain projects a ray from his ring. Robin vanishes as the Gargoyle cackles that "the Teen Titans are embraced by Limbo-- and in Limbo rule I, the Gargoyle."

So what is Limbo, before it was the name of a Trinidadian dance? Early Catholic theology, particularly that of Augustine, posited Limbo as an intermediary realm between Heaven, which was a reward for believers, and Hell, a punishment for unbelievers. Since Bob Haney never defines the nature of the otherworldly dimension he calls Limbo, it's fair to speculate that Haney wants to get across the idea that the place is somehow an exception to the norms of good and evil, even if Limbo's under the control of a demonic-looking master.

A long flashback then transpires, as we are told how the Gargoyle came into the Titans' lives. Though none of them ever saw him before, the costumed figure claims that he went to prison, and that one of the Titans sent him there by falsifying evidence. Though Gargoyle produces zero evidence for his claim, three of the Titans-- Aqualad, Kid Flash and Wonder Girl-- simultaneously place credence in the notion, and all three suspect the detective member of their group of the malfeasance. But nothing about the Gargoyle's story is anything but gaslighting; he fed the heroes his phony story in the hope that all of them would suspect one another. Robin alone did not suspect his teammates, but the doubt nurtured by three of them allows the Gargoyle to consign them to his domain. 

Further, after exposing the doubt-ridden heroes to the influence of Limbo, Gargoyle can bring them back as giant phantom versions of themselves, but with their morals reversed, so that they now hate Robin and everything in the "real world." Gargoyle leaves the noble-minded Boy Wonder to perish in a fire, but he survives, though the world thinks the other Titans dead. Robin then seeks out the security of the Titans secret HQ, only to learn that Gargoyle and his "phantom titans" have taken it over, with the fiend claiming that he and his allies will "wreak crime and evil for the greater glory of the Gargoyle." (Note that nowhere in the story does Gargoyle ever disclose any simple, mundane motive for gain or power.) Robin escapes again, but he refuses to reach out to any other heroes, such as his mentor Batman or the Justice League. Though he's done nothing of which to be ashamed, he's immensely guilt-ridden by his failure to stop Gargoyle-- which is more regret than one sees in the story from the three "faithless" Titans.

After a couple more pages the flashback ends, and we see how Robin, after being hit by the rays from the villain's ring, has entered the free-form world of Limbo, now transformed into another giant phantom. However, the Boy Wonder tricked the villain into merely thinking he Robin had filled his mind with evil thoughts. (Gargoyle's raison d'etre seems to be the opposite of Peter Pan's, where "happy  thoughts" conferred power.)

  After Robin clobbers his ensorcelled teammates, he and Gargoyle have a battle in the bizarre Limbo-realm. Robin cleverly sabotages Gargoyle's ring, which action conveniently strands the villain between dimensions, but delivers all four Titans back on Earth and none the worse for wear. The three "traitors" have forgotten all of their evil deeds, and there's no firm evidence in the story that Robin tells any of them what happened.

Haney, like other DC writers of his generation, must have executed dozens of "scientific-Gothic" story-resolutions, wherein an apparently supernatural phenomenon is neatly explained by some technological gimmick. Not only is Gargoyle's true identity never revealed here, one sees no firm denial that he may indeed be some extra-dimensional being. Now, there are a few concessions to the possibility that he's just some clever Earthman. Nick Cardy's Gargoyle has claws on his hands and toes, but he also seems to have seams separating what might be gloves and boots from the rest of the silvery body. Robin calls the Gargoyle's appearance a "getup," meaning he sees it as a costume. But as I said earlier, Gargoyle certainly acts as if he just worships evil for its own sake, and as if he takes pleasure, like a medieval devil, in corrupting pure hearts. The Limbo-ring may be some form of "magical technology," and since Gargoyle admits he has no "power to remain in Limbo" without the ring, that mitigates against any view that he was actually a native of that dimension. Gargoyle did return for a small handful of stories, but no one, not even his creator, ever again gave him this level of mythic ambivalence.                             

NEAR-MYTHS" "THE MUTINY OF THE SUPER-HEROINES" ( ADVENTURE COMICS #368, 1968)

 

There's no way to be sure whether or not Jim Shooter read Jerry Siegel's 1964 "Revolt of the Girl Legionnaires." There are no direct callbacks in "Mutiny," and so it's just as easy to believe that Shooter came up with his tale purely as his own take on "the war between men and women." But whereas Siegel had used the trope of "Delilah conquering Samson with sex and guile," Shooter's trope is more like 'what if Male Samson meets Female Samson"-- which is pretty much what the cover depicts.

The narrative opens on a violent male activity, although it turns to be merely a training exercise, in which Karate Kid's "murdered" sparring-partner is the invulnerable Superboy in disguise. We don't see how the female Legionnaires occupy their free time until page 7. 

Extreme feminists would be irate that the girls are all seen cooing over fashion and furniture decorations. Princess Projectra poses an interrogative about their recent encounter with Thora, ambassador from a matriarchal world, Saturn Girl seems to think female dominion absurd, Light Lass provides some pushback by claiming that their Kryptonian XX member is as powerful as any old XY version, and Supergirl herself demurs, suggesting that at base her super-cousin is probably her superior in pure strength.

   

  

Shooter weaves no mysteries around Thora: she's immediately shown using special technology to artificially boost the powers of the Girl Legionnaires. She doesn't immediately employ brainwashing techniques, but is content to sow dissension as the males find it difficult to accept the change.

Things soon come to a head-- or maybe, bonking heads.

Despite the fact that the Legion's leader Invisible Kid claims to have figured out Thora's plans, he and the other males just bull their way into fighting her female pawns, and, in contradistinction to the Siegel stories, the power-boosted XXs stomp the XYs into the ground. Supergirl is actually the one who foils Thora's plans, after which she commits suicide and everything goes back to status quo. But what causes Supergirl to break Thora's brainwashing? We see it in an earlier scene:

  Some quick background: for several 1960s stories, Supergirl and Brainiac 5 dated off-and-on, but in the two-parter introducing Shadow Lass (AC #365-66) the new girl makes a very mild overture toward the cerebral Legionnaire, though it goes nowhere. Issue #368, appearing just one issue after Shadow Lass's debut, the blue-skinned heroine seems to have some sort of grudge against the green-skinned boy, as she fantasizes about forcing Brainiac 5 to be her servant. Supergirl's memories of romance with the brainy youth cause her to be offended by the theoretical assault on Brainiac's dignity, and it's her feminine protectiveness toward a boyfriend-- even though the two of them are never precisely "serious" -- that saves the day-- though there's also an element of feminine competition involved as well. There's not a big symbolic lesson here, unless it's that women are the best weapon men can have in "the war between men and women."      

NEAR-MYTHS: "THE REVOLT OF THE GIRL LEGIONNAIRES" (ADVENTURE COMICS #326, 1964)

 I decided I would dedicate this day to the recently passed Jim Shooter by writing about Jerry Siegel. Well, to be more precise, I've wanted for some time to sit down and cross-compare the respective takes each author took toward the trope of "the war between men and women," as expressed through a series both raconteurs worked on: The Legion of Super-Heroes. One might argue that Siege's shortcomings in this case shine a brighter light on Shooter's bushel-- or something like that.

  

The first page of "Revolt" shows some of the Girl Legionnaires shows them occupied with mundane activities, but the second ramps up the action, revealing that the six female Legionnaires have sent six male members of the group off on a phony errand. They then discuss their plans to lay traps for the remaining males in order to destroy them all and claim the club only for Girl Power.  

First, Light Lass mousetraps Element Lad. "Thrilling," right, EL?

Then Triplicate Girl splits herself in three, makes up to three separate males, and forces them all to admit that size does count.

Saturn Girl makes only a token effort at seduction, but then tricks Superboy into a rescue mission that gets him trapped.

Supergirl, who could easily twist any form Chameleon Boy might take into knots, feels it necessary to use some arcane formula to block his shape-changing power.

  And finally, Phantom Girl goes back to the Delilah-mode, liplocking Star Boy before she makes him imprison himself with his own powers.

-

There's not much myth-material in all of these simplistic "betraying women" scenarios, but there is a little bit in the Big Explanation. Queen Azura of the planet Femnaz (paging Rush Limbaugh) brainwashed all of the girls into hating men, because for many years the Female Femnazians had become obsessed with war-games, to the extent that they exiled their pacifistic males. Jerry "hurry-up-the-damn-exposition" Siegel conflates the Femnazians' desire for warfare with their ritual of shooting rockets at the moon-- which, in Earth cultures, most often represents feminine intuition and periodicity. Apparently shortly after the tyrannical women exile their men, they also decide to spread their desires for female supremacy to the Legion, if not to Earth generally, and use magical jewels to infect the Girl Legionnaires with man-hatred. But the other male Legionnaires, whom Saturn Girl sent on a false errand happen to pass by Femnaz, and two of the members keep the planet's moon from colliding with the planet. The heroes also reunite the chastened, no-longer-overaggressive females with their (presumably still pacifistic) males, while the Girl Legionnaires release all of the Boy Legionnaires from their traps, and good times are had by all.

The repetition of the Samson-and-Delilah seduction-trope is pretty repetitions, as if Siegel were indirectly suggesting that the girls had to resort to duplicity in most cases because girls just couldn't conquer boys (with the exception of Light Lass, who really does overcome Element Lad in a power-over-power struggle). However, there's more complexity when Siegel reworks elements of the Superman-origin for this little jaunt. Instead of a planet exploding, it's the moon of Femnaz, though the planet is saved by two Superboy-like heroes. Instead of a noble mother and father dying together as their child survives, there's a whole group of Amazons who kick out their wimpy males for being too tolerant, though the two groups are brought together, and an exile ends rather than an adoption of one survivor by a younger culture. But Siegel's conflation of two conflicting myths-- that of the martial Amazons and that of the seductive Deliah-- work agsinst one another here. In my next essay, I'll show that Shooter's pursuit of this theme was at least more unitary.               

r

NEAR-MYTHS: "SEALED IN BLOOD" (SGT. ROCK ANNUAL #2, 1982)

For the last Memorial Day, I decided to read some random war comics from DC, few of which I ever sampled previously. I was aware that in the late 1950s, DC's war titles, generally under the editorship of Robert Kanigher, began to evolve a regular lineup of featured characters, some of whom then began to cross over frequently in the sixties, seventies and eighties. The particular 1980s crossover I encountered was not surprising for its crossover of heroes, but for the way that Kanigher-- who certainly was not given to the Stan Lee method of endlessly recycling even the most obscure antagonists-- decided to exhume a "bad guy" so obscure, she isn't even indexed in Grand Comics Database.

So far as I can tell, the one and only time Nazi officer Helga Voss appeared in a comic was SGT. ROCK #422 (1978.)

 Lieutenant Helga Voss introduces herself to the redoubtable Rock by machine-gunning a small squad of Brit soldiers, fighting with the sergeant, and then trying to get him killed by a patrol of her countrymen, all of whom Rock kills. All the backstory we get is that Helga's father and brothers died in the field, so she took their place. Rock takes Helga prisoner and returns with her to his unit.

 

Once Helga encounters Easy Company, she finds it "easy" to make all the grunts drool over her, except for Rock-- and according to Kanigher's hints and Frank Redondo's art, even Rock is not insensible to her charms. Despite his refusal to let her cozy up, she still takes him by surprise, steals a gun and kills one of Rock's men. (Not one of the well-known ones, of course.) She leads the "feldwebel," as she repeatedly calls him, into a German ambush, but Rock triumphs even though Helga escapes. Though she swears to make another run at Rock, Kanigher apparently dropped her as a potential menace.

     Four years later, Kanigher and artist Dan Speigle launched SGT ROCK ANNUAL #2-- which I assume had a #1 under some other title. In the story proper, a flashforward scene shows Rock in the same situation seen on the cover-- Rock hanging from a cable-car while being menaced by a man with a gun-- but now we learn that that the would-be killer is Frank Rock's only brother Larry, who's fighting in the same war, but in the Philippines.

A montage, apparently in Rock's mind, rehearses how Larry, despite grievous wounds, saves the famed General MacArthur from an assassination attempt. Larry later saves MacArthur from a second attempt, and the creator of "Enemy Ace" gets into heavy poetry, using fraternal imagery to describe  Larry and the pilot of a zero plane as "murderous twins," until their bond is severed by the breaking of an "umbilical cord of madness."

Back in Rock's terrain, he gets two sets of orders (one open, one sealed) from fellow warcomics-star Lieutenant JEB Stuart and his "Haunted Tank," complete with the tank's resident Civil War ghost.  
   

When a battle temporarily incapacitates the Haunted Tank, Easy Company proceeds to follow the already opened orders, to seek out a German castle and to liberate a prisoner there. They encounter a ten-foot-tall Kraut robot whom the soldiers nickname "Goliath" before eventually taking him out with their guns. 

After the robot's demise, another pitched battle erupts, but this time Easy gets help from frequent guest-star Mademoiselle Marie, as well as returning evildoer Helga Voss. Given that Kanigher and others had already established an ongoing relationship between Rock and Marie, it's tempting to think that the only reason Kanigher revived Helga for just a few pages was to portray a machine-gun "catfight" between the French brunette and the ice-blonde Nazi.

    In order to justify the third hero-crossover, Rock gets an air-lift to the German castle by "Navajo air ace Johnny Cloud," while the rest of Easy keeps footing it overland. Somehow Marie and Cloud both know that Rock carries sealed orders that he can't open till he reaches the castle. Once Rock infiltrates the castle, he makes two discoveries. One is that Rock's frequent sparring partner The Iron Major is present in the schloss. The other is that the orders tell him to kill the prisoner if he can't rescue him. A page or so later, Rock makes a third discovery-- the identity of the prisoner-- but the more astute readers will probably have figured that Kanigher didn't keep bringing up Larry Rock for no reason.

          

As a minor twist, Kanigher reveals that the Iron Major is of an older German echelon and so doesn't approve of Nazi depravity. The depraved Nazi colonel orders the Major executed, so Rock has to save his enemy from his other enemies, and then clobber the Major when the more cultured villain gets in the hero's way. Surprisingly, Kanigher rushes past the revelation that the prisoner is Larry Rock-- maybe he thought it was so obvious, everyone would have seen the handwriting on the wall. The two Rocks escape the Germans by cable-car, but Larry's old wound makes him irrational. He demands his brother kill him to keep Larry from falling into enemy hands and being tortured to reveal vital information.  
   

   

For the big dramatic finish, Larry vanishes into the icy mountain wastes, sparing Brother Frank from having to execute the prisoner as his orders demanded. So even if the orders were "sealed in blood"-- that of fraternal blood, blood-ties that couldn't be allowed to trump the needs of the military-- Frank Rock actually defies those orders for sake of brotherly love. Larry actually has no good reason to tell Frank to kill him-- once they're on the cable-car, they're no longer in danger of recapture-- but I guess Kanigher used Larry's head-wound to justify the big sacrificial moment. Yet though it's a very contrived tale, there's just a few myth-tropes here worth preserving. And from what I've heard, I believe Larry Rock comes back later, so the big sacrifice gets overturned for the sake of another story in the Rock mythos.