The year was 1989.  The comic book industry was in the midst of the expansion bubble that would eventually burst in 1993 (a story for another day).  Comic books were now not just items in the collectibles market, whose value was based on past performance, but items in a speculative futures market, where value was guessed based with Ponzi-like logic.

In response, publishers pushed better paper and printing processes that littered the landscape with all sorts of novelties guaranteed to turn any issue into an instant classic:  multiple covers, embossed covers, holograms, and foil inserts.  The big two (DC and Marvel) pushed out large arcs, mega arcs, crossovers, and huge interlocking storylines with regular titles supplemented with special issues.  Thousands of pages drenched the reader in color and pageantry and melodrama.

What chance could an independent comic possibly have in competing with all this eye candy?  A learned observer may be inclined to say little or none, especially if the comic was in black and white, dealt with previously unknown characters that find themselves placed in the far more humble circumstances of the urban jungle rather than a world-spanning alien invasion or the cosmic end of the universe.

But, as it turns out, such a learned observer would have been wrong.  James O’Barr’s The Crow showed how a touching, human-focused story coupled with evocative art can more than overcome the lack of the backing of an industry giant.

The Crow was so successful that it spawned numerous sequels and a movie and television franchise that persisted for decades after its publication.  What’s most telling is the fact that the original series is as moving and compelling today as it was nearly 30 years ago.

How did this veritable David outpace the mainstream Goliaths?  In a sentence, The Crow was both a labor of love and moving love story.

For those unfamiliar with the story, a short synopsis is useful and spoils nothing; the reason being that, in a real sense, there is nothing to spoil.  There are no plot twists or surprises – simply a story of love, loss, pain, and coping.  The core of the story centers on the tragedy of Eric, a young man who was cruelly and wantonly murdered along with his fiancée Shelly when they have the misfortune to breakdown in a lonely spot where they are found by a gang of street thugs.  About a year later, Eric is granted a chance to come back and set things right.  His soul is transported to the land of the living by a crow, who is both the source of his strength as well as his spirit guide and advisor.

Gifted with invulnerability and superhuman reflexes and strength, Eric begins hunting down the scum who killed him and his fiancée, extracting brutal revenge in a variety methods. His abilities are not exactly classic super powers and it is probably fairer to say that his invulnerability doesn’t protect him from harm so much as it keeps him unharmed even while he is ‘harmed’.  For example, when stabbed with a knife, the blade bites deep, severing flesh and causing blood to flow, but the wounds cause neither pain nor lasting damage.

There is little to no suspense as he achieves his revenge.  The story starts with Eric already resurrected, already empowered, and already seeking revenge.  O’Barr makes it clear that Eric will have his revenge and he will make the punks pay dearly.  The only questions of where, when, and how are minor considerations. The story gets its drive and interest from poetry of love and pain that comes to the reader as he learns more about the love and joy Eric and Shelly shared before the fateful day where they encountered the punks, the pain and suffering of that encounter, and the aftermath of the tragedy.

The story of The Crow is so compelling that it could have succeeded with mediocre art and routine writing.  Fortunately, O’Barr’s art is first rate and his writing above average, turning the tale into a classic.

His visual stylings are basically divided into two parts:  clean lines and well-constructed panels for real-world sequences, and ‘hazy-focused’, softened images for the more emotional or tender sequences.  He is great in using character expressions to enhance the evocative nature of the story, especially around the gut-wrenching events when Eric and Shelly are killed.  Consider the following panel progression just after their car has broken down and the punks have arrived to help.

The narrative portion of the writing is solid and, while not often moving, does not detract from the story in any substantial way.  The dialog is where O’Barr shines creating some of the most haunting phrases including ‘Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of all children.’ and ‘Amazing God would waste skin on trash like that…’.

One of the best comes in the following exchange between the Crow and Funboy:

From top to bottom, The Crow delivers; delivers on art, on dialog, and, most of all, on story.  All this from a small, independent creator working on a shoe-string budget to create something really meaningful.  If only the big guys would learn the lesson.

Last month I reviewed the compositional elements of Watchmen that made the book a genuine work of comic book art.  Moore and Gibbons primarily used 5 different and complementary compositional elements (page layout, panel detail, background material, repeated visual elements, and repeated narrative elements) in a consistent but unobtrusive way during the 12-issue run and, in doing so, created a critical and commercial success.

This month I want to examine the underlying philosophical themes and messages that the story conveys.  The central point with which Watchmen wrestles is one of existential nihilism; the notion that human life is meaningless, banal, without purpose and that morality, as a result, is a convention or societal trapping at best.

While Gibbons claims that Watchmen ultimately celebrates the superhero genre and, therefore, rejects existential nihilism, there is little in their work that actually supports this assertion.  It is true that at ‘the end’ of the series, a sort of equilibrium is achieved wherein the surviving main characters have found that the human race has value (no individual member per se; simply the race as a whole), but the justifications rest on weak first principles about the nature of man.  Throughout the series, it is easy to find Thomas Hobbes’s famous characterization of human life as being ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ being expressed by almost every character, large or small, each in his own distinct way.

The Comedian (aka Edward Blake) is by far Watchmen’s poster boy of existential nihilism.  His code name derives from the cynicism he has about the value of human existence and the fact that he sees into ‘the joke.’  As a result, he doesn’t put a lot of stock in humans or their institutions and Moore and Gibbons afford us many opportunities to see inside of his philosophy.  The most telling are his interactions with Doctor Manhattan (aka Jon Osterman) in the Viet Nam war.  At Blake’s funeral, Manhattan reminisces about their time in Viet Nam.

The time they spend together seems to have a profound effect on Doctor Manhattan, driving his already detached attitude even further away from compassionate sensibilities and into cynicism of his own.

The Comedian’s own attitude seems to shift as he gets older and his cynicism, it seems, has limits.  Moloch, once one of the most feared crime lords in the Watchmen universe, becomes an unexpected confidant of the Comedian’s.  Blake breaks into his apartment for a little heart-to-heart.  Having discovered Ozymandias’s (aka Adrian Veidt’s) plot to sacrifice millions to save billions, Blake is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and openly weeps in front of Moloch as he opens his soul about his past sins and how disturbed he is over Ozymandias’s plan.

It isn’t explicitly stated but I am left with the impression that this change in Blake’s attitude is the result of his realization that his own daughter could be one of the victims of Veidt’s plan.  In other words, that Blake finds some limit to his nihilism seems to result from the biological fact that he has a child.

By the start of Watchmen, it is uncertain how much of Doctor Manhattan’s attitude is shaped by his interactions with the Comedian and how much is the result of his ‘other-worldliness’.   What is certain is that he claims to no longer find value in human life,

despite the fact that he has a human lover in the form of Laurie Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre II). Regardless of what he says, Jon still possesses enough human emotion to be easily manipulated into leaving the Earth for Mars.  His absence is engineered by Veidt/Ozymandias precisely so that the latter will have no impediments for his great plan of salvation (essentially the same reason that Veidt kills the Comedian).   However, Jon’s emotional attachment to Laurie Juspeczyk leads him to bring her to Mars, where she tries to convince him that human life has meaning.

Each of her arguments fails utterly and it looks like there is no possible way for her to convince Jon to return to save the world.  It is only in the last minutes of their dialog that the situation changes.  Jon unwittingly enables her to correlate all her memories and to realize that Edward Blake – the man who once tried to rape her mother – is her father.  This sudden realization changes Jon’s perspective on the human race and allows him to see people as a thermodynamic miracle.

The most curious attitudes about the human race come from Walter Kovacs (a.k.a. Rorschach).  Outwitted and framed by Veidt for Moloch’s murder, Kovacs is captured by the police, held at Sing Sing penitentiary, and forced to undergo mandatory psychological counselling by Malcom Long.

After days of evasion, Kovacs explains to Long how he got his unique ‘face’

and the connection between this ever shifting viewpoint on black and white and how he decided to adopt Rorshach as his superhero persona.

It should be noted that the modern viewpoint of the Kitty Genovese story is that the New York Times exaggerated the indifference of the neighbors, neglected to mention that the cops were called twice, and failed to state that no one could clearly see or hear what was happening in that alleyway.  Nonetheless, Moore makes a lot out of this story and how it influences Kovacs into becoming Rorshach.

The last evolution for Kovacs occurs when he takes on the case of the kidnapping and butchering of a little girl.  The particular brutality of the monsters who killed this little girl when they realized that she wasn’t the daughter of a rich man but simply shared the name drive Rorschach into becoming a monster himself.  After that pivotal event, Rorschach is the prime personality and Kovacs is the mask.

The title of issue #6, in which Long discovers the truth, is The Abyss Gazes Also, a clear reference to the famous quote

And true to this sentiment, by the end of the session where Malcolm Long discovers the truth behind Rorschach, he too is embracing nihilism.

Perhaps the most interesting of all the Watchmen characters is the one who, through the bulk of the series, gets the least attention – Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias.  Dubbed the most intelligent man on the Earth, Veidt is fascinated with the ancients and their approach to life.  In particular, he admires the campaign and conquering of Alexander the Great, even though he has taken as his superhero name the Greek name of the great Pharaoh Ramses II.

Originally planning to make a difference as a costumed adventurer, Veidt’s perspective changes abruptly under the influence of the Comedian, who argues that no amount of small scale crime fighting will change the basic equation of the Cold War.

Soon after, Veidt gives up his masked persona and seemingly retires to become a highly successful captain of industry 2 years before the government eventually declares all masked adventurers outlaws.  In actuality, Veidt is merely the mask that Ozymandias wears as he engineers his world-saving solution.  As he explains to Rorschach and Nite Owl, the Cold War was a modern Gordian Knot; something that needed to be solved by out-of-the-box thinking.

Thus Ozymandias engineers the plan for a mock alien invasion that will unite, at least briefly, the entire Earth as one brotherhood.

The fact that millions die so that billions live is something that Ozymandias seems to be able to live with and justify.  Nonetheless, Moore and Gibbons suggest, though their Tales of the Black Freighter comic-within-a-comic, that Ozymandias through his struggle to stop the monsters of the human condition has become one himself.

The Tales of the Black Freighter is introduced and presented to the reader through a young boy who hangs around a newsstand to read the reprinted editions of this classic horror comic written years before.  This comic-within-a-comic is visually distinct from everything else in the Watchmen and is given out in installments.  As a compositional element, it is interesting in that it serves at least three distinct functions: it gives homage to the old EC comics of the 1950s; it represents one of the few attempts at a frame tale in comics; and it serves as a vital element to explain Ozymandias’s psychology.

The two-part story focuses on an unnamed man who is marooned on an island after his ship has been attacked by the ship from hell called the Black Freighter.  Initially dismayed by the threat the damned pirate ship represents to his home town, the man fashions a raft from the dead bodies of his compatriots.  The horrors he endures and embraces eventually take him from genuine concern for this family, through the hunger for vengeance, and finally to a willingness to sacrifice innocent lives to see his loved ones protected.  This final action results in his ultimate damnation aboard the very ship he loathes.

This narrative metaphor is meant to emphasize the sentiment of Nietzsche who warns of the cost when battling monsters – a theme that Moore attaches to the actions of the superheroes of the Watchmen.

Of course, not all characters embrace nihilism.  There seem to be three or four genuinely ‘nice’ characters:  Nite Owl I (Hollis Mason) and II (Dan Dreiberg), and Silk Spectre I (Sally Jupiter) and II (her daughter Laurie Juspeczyk).  The positions and arguments against existential nihilism from these characters are not mounted in any serious way.  Both Mason and Dreiberg are portrayed as powerless characters.  Mason dies at the hands of a gang of hoodlums, and Dreiberg (who is the ‘knight’ of the story – see the additional material at the end of issue #7) is shown to be both sexually and strategically impotent.  Sally Jupiter is shown to be in it for the money and to be materialistic and shallow.  Laurie is first introduced as the sex kitten used to keep Doctor Manhattan happy and, when introduced later as a costumed adventurer, she, of all the main characters, is not provided a dramatic pose that features her alone (see the team image from last month’s post).

So, what to make of existential nihilism in Moore’s story?  Well, it seems that Moore pulls from Nietzsche here as well, when the latter states “If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence.”  But the affirmations provided in Watchmen are weakly supported and full of strong metaphysical contradictions.  For example, the Comedian’s point about seeing the joke implies the existence of a jokester to tell it, in turn implying purpose to human life; a point further emphasized by Blake’s ‘biological repentance’ once he knows he is a father.  Doctor Manhattan’s grasp of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, the structure of spacetime, and quantum mechanics should afford him a better grasp on metaphysics so that the human mating revelation he has on Mars should have never needed to be.  This is especially troubling given the notion of predetermination that comes from Doctor Manhattan’s ability to see past, present, and future simultaneously.

Rorschach finds only value in abstract things like Justice and Truth but finds no motivation in Love or Beauty, so how does he truly know Justice?  So he hates the human race, for whom he fights, but continues on fighting.

Ozymandias sees only value in control, so the thing that is worth controlling (here the human race in total) has value, but it isn’t clear why he values the race while valuing no single member within.  In addition, the world’s smartest man, who is capable of engineering this alien invasion plan, is not smart enough to have standard password protection.

The superhero genre, like the classic epics and mythology on which it is built, always has nobility and baseness side-by-side.  Characters of profound capabilities put their gifts to use, both good and bad, even if they themselves are not necessarily good or evil.  The classic superhero story doesn’t deny the existence of horror or evil, but rather celebrates those individuals who can look into the abyss without becoming monsters.  In the Watchmen one finds only the baseness, only the abyss, and only the monsters.

So if the compositional elements of Watchmen can be regarded as the wrapping paper on the outside of a gift box and the themes of existential nihilism can be regarded as the gift inside, then the Watchmen is one gift best admired for how it looks unopened.

I’ve had something of a love-hate relationship with the Watchmen comic series since it first premiered in September 1986.

This admission may seem something of a surprise given that the Wikipedia article on the Watchmen notes that “several critics and reviewers [consider it] to be one of the most significant works of 20th-century literature”, that “Watchmen was recognized in Time’s List of the 100 Best Novels as one of the best English language novels published since 1923”, and that “[t]he BBC described it as ‘The moment comic books grew up.’”.

I’ve heard things like this since Watchmen hit the stands in 1986 and I scraped enough money to buy it in its original serialized form (a huge task given that I was in college at the time with very little money).  But I have never been able to fully embrace it nor to clearly explain why.  That’s 30 years of pondering what is it about this particular comic series that attracts me and what pushes me away.  It’s 30 years of wrestling with how to clearly articulate the reasons why.  Finally, I think that after all that time I can, at least, put down the basic structure behind my ambivalence towards Watchmen.

In a nutshell, I think the physical composition and narrative structure are among the best I’ve ever seen while the underlying message and philosophy are empty and nihilistic and vapid.

I’m going to spend this column and the next expanding on particular points that support this assertion starting with the parts of Watchmen that I like – its physical composition and the narrative structure.  In the next column, I’ll discuss the underlying themes and messages that produce a philosophy that is both nihilistic and intellectually vapid.

But before launching into the review, a quick synopsis of the plot is in order.  For those unfamiliar, Watchmen is set in an alternative timeline where some ‘normal people’, inspired by the pulp novels of the 1930s and 1940s, have become masked adventurers for a whole host of reasons, which, according the psychoanalysis featured in the story, include a desire to address societal woes and do good, the need to get their kicks (physically or sexually), or because they are seeking their fame and fortune.  Being a bit of a fad, these normal folk in extraordinary costumes see their popularity rise and fall just as any fad does.  Things change about a decade later when the physicist Jon Osterman, through fate or blind randomness, becomes the superman of his world.  Dubbed Doctor Manhattan, Osterman is able to manipulate matter at the atomic/sub-atomic level, teleport, bi-locate, and ‘see’ the past, future, and present all at once. His presence re-energizes the superhero movement, causing a new generation to don masks and tights and fight for justice.  However, this new influx is ultimately viewed as a destabilizing influence on society and ‘masks’ are outlawed by the Federal government in 1977.  The Watchmen is set in 1985, when the only legally operating superheroes are Doctor Manhattan and the brutal, cynical holdover from the earlier days called the Comedian.

The Watchmen starts proper with the death of the Comedian at hands unknown.  The story features the ramifications that result as the other masks – Rorschach, Nite Owl, and Silk Spectre – investigate the Comedian’s murder.  As the various threads are put together they slowly realize that the Comedian’s death was engineered to hide the scheme of Adrian Veidt, a.k.a. Ozymandias, a former compatriot, who has taken on the responsibility to save the world from itself.  Ozymandias‘s plan is simple; fool the people of Earth into thinking that there is a cosmic threat waiting to invade and they will unite against a common enemy.  Ozymandias/Veidt is willing to kill millions in New York with a simulated invasion by a monstrous alien in order to drive the threat of invasion home.  At series end he is both condemning and congratulating himself for having pulled off what he, no doubt, would term a Platonic noble lie that brings peace to the whole world.

Written predominantly as a psychological exploration, the action in Watchmen is fairly limited but the moral and existential horrors drip from every page.  Part social commentary, part critique of comics, part moral play, the 12-issue series was different from much (but not all as many critics believe) that was on the market at the time (the Squadron Supreme 12-issue series from 1985 has nearly identical themes – albeit dealt with differently – and premiered about a year and a half earlier, but that is a post for another day).

To emphasize that the Watchmen was something other than the run-of-the-mill comic, writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, tried to design a look-and-feel quite different from anything that was currently in vogue.  They did this in a number of interesting and successful ways:

• Page layout
• Panel detail
• Background material
• Repeated visual elements
• Repeated narrative elements

Page Layout

Throughout almost every page of the visual material, Dave Gibbons uses a 3×3 grid with the smallest panels measuring about 2 inches wide by about 3 inches high.  The main variation in this layout is to combine these atomic panels into composites that span more than one column and/or row.  Despite Moore’s protests to the contrary, this gives the entire series a movie storyboard feel, as seen in this ‘silent sequence’ showing how Rorschach gets into the Comedian’s apartment at the start of his investigation.

This is why so little of the core plot needed to be cut from the comic for the successful adaptation of the Watchmen into the movie (and in fact some new material was added).  Gibbons does depart from the strict 3×3 grid in a few places (pages 6, 12, 16-17 & 27, and 28 of issues #1, #2, #7, and #11, respectively) but these are places where time is meant to move more slowly than in the normal pacing of the book.

Perhaps the most interesting experiment and one that I missed until it was pointed out to me, is that issue #5, entitled Fearful Symmetry, is completely symmetric front to back (a comic book palindrome).  For example, the first three pages are in a 3×3 grid with Rorschach at the apartment of an old supervillain named Moloch.  Likewise, the last 3 pages (26-28) are a 3×3 grid showing Rorschach at Moloch’s apartment.  Page 9 is a mirror image of page 20, both having 3 panels per row (one spanning two columns in each) and both dealing with the comic-within-a-comic story about the Black Freighter.   The central opposing pages (14 and 15) have one continuous fight sequence rendered in ‘fearful symmetry’.

Panel Detail

Besides the overall panel placement within the page, Dave Gibbons put a great deal of effort into the contents of each panel as well.  As can be seen at a glance, the detail in each panel is top notch, but attention to detail for art’s sake alone is not nearly as impactful as is detail that advances the story for the careful reader.

Below is a panel from one of the many street scenes in New York.  The first things that grab one’s attention in the background are the advertisements for the ’86 Buicks and the Nostalgia perfume – both serve a purpose.  While the Buick ad helps to remind the reader (especially the new ones) when this piece is set, it is the Nostalgia ad that actually provides important clues linking Veidt with the plot to hoax the world.  The newspaper in the foreground gives the reason for Veidt’s intervention – the nuclear war that is about to break out between the USA and the USSR.

Scores of panels all throughout the series provide similar clues linking the World War III events with Veidt’s scheme to bring the world kicking and screaming back from the brink.

Background material

Since psychology plays a crucial part in the Watchmen storyline, Moore provides extra, non-comic material, usually spanning the last 4 pages.  These materials include: excerpts from books and articles written by the main characters, which enable us to get inside their heads; dossiers and internal memos from the various institutions associated with other main characters; and news and magazine articles that reveal the public mood and discourse to the reader.  One cannot fully appreciate what is happening in the gutters and why it is happening without taking the effort to ‘research’ the Watchmen world.

Repeated visual elements

Similar to the panel detail discussed above, Moore and Gibbons link various events together with repeated visual elements.  The most well-known one is the smiley face motif that links the Comedian with cataclysmic events that started the whole chain of events that ends with the mock alien invasion.

A less obvious visual motif is the reoccurring imagery of the Nostalgia perfume.  Not only does it link Veidt to the desire to change, it provides a vital link to Ozymandias in that the perfume bottle, when turned on its side, looks like a letter Z contained within the letter O.  This visual linkage appears at least 7 times in issue #9 when Laurie (Silk Spectre) and Jon (Doctor Manhattan) debate whether life has any meaning while they travel across the face of Mars.

The most disturbing repeated element concerns the behavior of the Comedian, aka Eddie Blake, around women.  It seems that Blake believes that women are there for his gratification and he easily brutalizes them when they don’t “behave.”  It is interesting to note that in the two cases shown in the book, when Blake begins to ill-use a woman, her response is to attack by scratching/slicing the right side of his face.

These scars remain with him until he dies – an outward symbol of his inward sins perhaps.

Repeated narrative elements

The final method used by Moore and Gibbons is the linkage between disparate sub-storylines by using the kinds of transitions that Moore discusses in his book on writing comics (see Story Construction – Part 7: Just One Bit Moore).

The first panel below shows how, with some dark humor, Moore is able to transition from Rorschach’s monologue that begins issue #1 to the detectives investigating the death of the Comedian.

This next example is a classic movie transition that signals a flashback to earlier times and happier events (ah, Nostalgia).

All told, these five elements make the form of the Watchmen a pleasure to see, to read, and to ponder.  They go a long way in explaining the enduring success of the series and they certainly are the best part.

Next month, I’ll analyze the content of the Watchmen messages and not just the beautiful package in which they are wrapped.

In this piece, the 3-month-long look at the Marvel experiment called the New Universe comes to a close.  The previous two articles discussed the overall original concept and the short-lived series that were repurposed halfway through their run to provide the supporting material for the series that survived.  This article will examine the series that made it to the end (D.P. 7, Jvstice, Psi Force, and Star Brand) and the corresponding limited series (The Pitt, The Draft, and The War) that were used to create the backdrop of world war and paranormal involvement in the conflict.

As a result of the ‘editorial renavigation’ at the end of year one, what were once loosely-connected titles transformed into a set of commonly-themed tales all branching off of a main trunk.  This new approach apparently worked, as sales of these remaining titles increased and, according to Fabian Nicieza – who got his industry start as a writer on Psi-Force, the four remaining NU titles were profitable up to the end of year three when Marvel pulled the plug.

Why, exactly, Marvel ended the imprint isn’t clear; Nicieze simply says that Marvel wanted to go in a new direction.  The likely explanation is that, while profitable, the New Universe tied up resources that could have been used elsewhere for an even larger return on investment.  Whatever the reasons, as the New Universe drew to an end, Marvel did two things that are quite interesting.  First, it promised and actually followed through on a limited series, The War, that tied up most of the loose ends associated with the World War III overarching storyline.  Second, each of the remaining titles bore an inscription above their titles for the final issue declaring that that issue was ‘#19 in a Nineteen-Issue Limited Series’.

Whether this latter move was to save face by implying the NU was never meant to last or whether it was acknowledgment that all of the NU titles had transformed from their original intention, the implication was quite clear.  The writing and editorial staff recognized that what had started as an open organic universe had, by the action of many outside forces, become one of the largest architecturally-structured crossover events attempted.  As a result, the New Universe ended up having a sprawling internal consistency absent from the larger universes of DC and Marvel.  This consistency gave it a feeling more like a set of vignettes in a larger novel rather than a set of titles set in a shared universe.  It is not hard to see similarities to the structure, size, mood, and feel found in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira,  which is a huge graphic novel (over 2000 pages) of how metahuman presence in the world triggers global war and subsequent disasters.  (Note that this was a common theme of the 1980s and it formed the backbone for another sprawling graphic novel of that time, The Watchmen.)

D.P. 7 (32 Issues & 1 Annual)

Certainly the most stable of the long series runs was D.P.7, which was an abbreviation for Displaced Paranormals 7.  The brainchild of Mark Gruenwald, who wrote every issue, the series followed the fate of various individuals who were one day normal humans and the next day transformed by the White Event into paranormals.

Much of the initial story centers around an institution set in the back woods of Wisconsin with the name of Clinic for Paranormal Research, or the Clinic for short.  Each of the original D.P.7 team members has come to the clinic to get ‘treatment’ for their unique paranormal ability.  Unbeknownst to them, the Clinic is run by an incredibly powerful paranormal, Philip Nolan Voigt, who had used his equally powerful wealth to assemble a staff of like-minded paranormals to help him develop, mold, and eventually control his own private army of super-powered humans.

Becoming aware of Voigt’s intent, seven of The Clinic’s patients band together and flee.  Hounded by the Clinic’s paranormal hunters, the group has many adventures as they try to figure out how they fit together with each other and society as a whole.  Eventually, they are recaptured by the Clinic, but manage to seemingly defeat Voigt (issue #12).

Now free of the main villain that kept both the team (and the plot) united, the D.P. 7 team begins to fracture.  The Clinic becomes a self-governing paranormal institution and it doesn’t take long before internal politics turns the situation into something more befitting The Lord of the Flies, as various loyalties begin to split along demographic lines (African-American paranormals versus teenage paranormals versus…).  Before long it is paranormal against paranormal in full-scale donnybrooks.

The situation changes when the destruction of Pittsburgh happens (see Star Brand & The Pitt below) and the government begins to recruit paranormals while global tensions rise and war with the Soviet Union seems certain.  Once again finding themselves united against a common foe, the paranormals battle official forces

in a desperate attempt to remain on their own.  Despite these efforts, many of the women are pressed into service with the CIA and many of the men are conscripted for the Army’s paranormal division.

The series enters into its third and final arc, which shows the consequences of military/government service and the aftermath.  In the final couple of issues, a unique paranormal, called the Cure, becomes the focal point.  True to his name, the Cure is able to undo the paranormal transformation in anyone who wants to be ‘normal’ again, and the series ends with a bit of closure as many of the most tragic figures go back to being human.

Overall, the series tried from the onset to be ‘real-world’, although it often failed to match Shooter’s original vision of a muted approach to the fantasy/science fiction and the hope that passage of time in the title would match that of our world.  The themes explored were mature, with religion, racial tensions, and overall alienation central to the plots.

Jvstice (32 Issues)

Jvstice is the one outsider from the set of NU long-running books.  In the beginning, the lead character was a Justice Warrior called Tensen who came from a magical other dimension.  Tensen had been exiled to Earth and was seeking an evil wizard by the name of Darquill, who was using the drug trade in our dimension to build up power in order to destroy Tensen’s people.

Tensen was very much visualized as a product of the 1980s with balloon pants, futuristic shades, and a Flock of Seagulls haircut.

Not only did his clothes seem over the top, the fantasy-based magic theme was completely at odds with the core NU concept.  Matters were made worse by the fact that no stable creative staff materialized – 6 writers and 6 artists in the first 14 issues – and by the wandering storyline that continuously waffled in its portrayal of Tensen as victim, sinner, or hero.

Fortunately, the last change happened when Peter David took over the writing chores on issue #15.  He retconned the entire series motif in one fell swoop by transforming Tensen Justice Warrior into John Tensen, undercover officer in the Department of Justice.  He explained away the magical aspects of the first year by making them a by-product of a psychic struggle between officer Tensen and the drug kingpin Daedalus Darquill, both of whom acquired psionic powers after the White Event.

From this point on, David’s clever plots and skillful dialog changed the entire tenor of Jvstice, placing it firmly as the best offering from the NU.  A brilliant sample of his approach is captured in the following exchange between Tensen and another character about comic books

Mindful of his audience, David provides a nice closure for the series in issue #32 with Tensen becoming a just ruler of a paranormal community located on Coney Island, of all places.

Psi-Force (32 Issues & 1 Annual)

The least interesting of the bigger titles, Psi-Force follows the ups and downs of a team of paranormal teenagers from different countries and walks of life.

Aside from their paranormal abilities, the only other commonality was that the core team was limited to 5 individuals.  The reason for this is that federal agent Emmett Proudhawk, himself a paranormal, brought the team together because of a dream he had,

in which he foresaw that the powers of each team member could be merged into an immensely powerful entity called Psi-Hawk.

Fewer than 5 members caused Psi-Hawk to be too weak and greater than 5 drove it mad with power.  In this way, the Psi-Force writer could regulate membership in the team and, presumably, simplify story creation.

The entire run is generally unremarkable from a narrative point of view, with the team implausibly transitioning from scared teenagers to secret agents in a matter of a couple of years.  Nonetheless, it has some of the best art of any of the NU titles

and some of the more interesting, if horrific, deaths for some of its characters.

At the end of its run, the core 5 members have joined into a loose alliance with the Medusa Web, a paranormal mercenary group, before riding into the sunset for some R&R.

Star Brand (19 Issues & 1 Annual) & The Pitt/Draft/War

The final entry into the NU titles that made it through the whole duration of the imprint is Star Brand,

which follows what happens to Ken Connell, a Pittsburgh auto mechanic, when he receives a weapon of surpassing power called the Star Brand from a mysterious old man.

With the Star Brand, Connell is essentially unstoppable, as long as he concentrates and keeps his emotions in check.  He soon realizes that having this much power isn’t as easy as it seems and that real world problems can rarely be solved by bludgeoning something or somebody.  He begins trying to think rather than punch through the challenges that face him.  This theme, which lasts mostly for the first 6-10 issues, is truest to the original NU concept of real-world consequences of having super powers and for good reason – Jim Shooter was the writer for the first 6 issues.

Shooter’s influence is abruptly erased when John Byrne takes over the chief creative role on Star Brand.  Byrne’s first action is to have Connell become dejected with the Star Brand and attempt to transfer the brand to a dumbbell.  The result is the immediate destruction of the city of Pittsburgh in a ball of light reminiscent to the destruction of Tokyo in Akira

The destruction of Pittsburgh, which is mostly the subject of The Pitt one-shot, is the trigger event for the World War III scenario that tied the NU titles together from that point onward.  Thinking the destruction had been caused by a nuclear explosion, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union come to a fever pitch.  Both sides recruit and train paranormals for the eventual conflict as covered in The Draft one-shot and ongoing issues of D.P.7 and Psi-Force.

The remains of Pittsburgh and surrounding areas, now known as the Pitt,

become capable of mutating anyone exposed to the materials and energies at play.  The Pitt becomes an additional source of paranormal manifestations, including the transformation of Jenny Swensen into an organic metal woman.

Overcome by guilt, Connell retreats from the world in depression and insanity.  His son, who received the power of the Star Brand at his conception, grows at a rapid rate, becoming an adult known as the Star Child (with no apologies or credit given to 2001) within a year of his birth.

The Star Child intervenes, in a messianic fashion, and stops the war between the US and the USSR (as chronicled in The War limited series)

before going on to try to clean up the real source of damage and danger, the Star Brand.

It seems that the White Event, which brought paranormal powers world-wide, was caused when the mysterious old man, now simply called the Old Man, tried to transfer the brand to an asteroid.  Inanimate objects are ill-suited for the power of the brand and they detonate with a burst of energy that can mutate and transform every living creature caught in their path.  The Star Child also realizes that the Old Man, and Ken, and himself are all three aspects of the same man.

In order to save the universe, the Star Child insists that Ken needs to go back in time to become the Old Man, he needs to go back in time to become Ken, and, presumably, the Old Man also goes back in time to become the infant Star Child.  Of course, this makes absolutely no sense, and Byrne’s job of explaining this is badly flawed as almost all time-travel stories are.

It is ironic that the one title in the New Universe imprint which started out most faithfully following the NU concept that paranormal abilities come with real-world consequences should end with, arguably, one of the biggest deus ex machina moments in all of comics history.

This month’s column covers the smaller-run books in the New Universe.  Originally conceived with the hope that each would become a regular, ongoing, and essential independent title, these series underwent a marked change in tone and direction about 3/4 of the way through their first year.  At this turning point, it seems clear that the Marvel editorial staff had decided to pivot the entire New Universe line to a more integrated set of books that would serve as an extended, interlocking set of graphic novels more than anything else.

The specific series that made it only to their first anniversary were Kickers Inc., Mark Hazzard: Merc, Spitfire and the Troublemakers, and Nightmask.  As will be discussed in detail below, each of these series was mostly independent and oblivious of the rest of the NU when it was launched.  At the turning point, all four became grimmer and three of them (all but Nightmask) became supporting vignettes for escalating tensions between the United States and Russia.  In addition, the lead characters would be spun off into the larger The Pitt and The War storylines that would come later.

Kickers Inc. (12 issues)

The first of the short-lived books and definitely the weakest in terms of premise and overall storyline was Kickers Inc., which sported 8 different writers over its 12-issue run.

Created by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenze, the plot line followed the star quarterback of the New York Smashers, Jack Magniconti, who acquires super-human speed, endurance, and strength.  The original explanation offered, at least to the characters within the framework, is that Jack’s brother has exposed the star athlete to a state-of-the-art performance enhancing substance, although later Jack’s power is attributed to the White Event.

The series never got its legs underneath it and the reader was left wondering what there was to care about and how it had anything to do with the world outside his window.  After his metamorphosis, Magniconti founds a non-profit aid group comprised of himself, his wife, and three of his teammates.  Their aim was to help people who had nowhere else to turn.  This idea never panned out and the trajectory of the story ping-ponged between the group, Jack’s guilt over having an unfair advantage on the gridiron, and a ludicrous situation where the owner of the team, a vindictive harpy, plays Jack in a tennis match to decide the fate of the team.  Not to mention the ludicrous notion that a set of professional athletes would have the time and skill to run around the world confronting bad guys risking their football careers.

Kickers Inc. finally settled in on a much grimmer plot where the footballers are played by the CIA into doing their dirty work.

These events later set the stage for Captain Magniconti being at the forefront of the paranormal soldiers who were drafted to fight in the World War III events that unfold at the end of the NU line.

Mark Hazzard: Merc (12 issues & 1 annual)

Initially conceived and written by Peter David, Mark Hazzard: Merc was the odd-man out of all of the NU books.  There was no tie-in with the White Event, and the initial stories, while interesting at times, offered nothing in terms of the science fiction theme that Shooter claimed he wanted as central to the NU.

Instead, David’s plots focused on the attempts to balance work and home life of the titular character.

This approach was certainly consistent with the ‘world outside your window’ tagline but not with anything else NU had to offer.  David left after only writing four issues and was subsequently replaced by Doug Murray, who stayed at the helm for the remainder.  At times, his depiction of armed conflict was downright silly,

but eventually the series started to deal honestly with the costs of war.  The art was far more of an issue and, by my count, there were 11 different illustrators used in 13 different tales.

The book also features one of the most unusual moves ever published – the death of the main character before the end of the series.  In the annual published between issues 11 and 12, a mortally wounded Mark Hazzard is taken off life support and allowed to die peacefully in his sleep

The final issue, entitled Merc, followed the secondary characters and their adventures in the Middle East and Near East Asia that had appeared in the latter half of the series.  The only lasting feature of the book was the introduction of the Afghan conflict as a central plot point that would be knitted into the World War III scenario.

Spitfire and the Troublemakers (13 issues)

Elliot R. Brown and Jack Morelli conceived of this series but, oddly enough, contributed only to the first issue; a sign of the chaos that swirled around the launch of the NU.

According to the Wikipedia entry, Brown is on record as saying:

about the original concept for the series.  Unfortunately, Gerry Conway, who wrote the first 6 issues, must not have gotten the memo as his plots really couldn’t have been more farcical.

As mentioned in the last post, Conway’s stories covered the adventures of the far too brilliant female MIT professor by the name of Jenny Swensen (nicknamed Spitfire by her father) and her four favorite students who were already accomplished engineers and scientists and mechanics and truck drivers and so on (sure, every college student at MIT has a commercial driver’s license and knows how to handle a big rig – it’s a requirement in the application).

This series also had no direct tie-in with the White Event, and its initial place in the NU was unclear.  The basic premise was that Swensen’s father had invented an exoskeleton (called M.A.X.) while in the employ of an evil business man.  This crooked captain of industry, Fritz Kroetze by name, subsequently killed Papa Swensen in order to lay claim to armor that he paid for in the first place.  Has nobody heard of contract law?  Also, why are all technological geniuses such poor judges of character?

Jenny, judging herself morally entitled to her father’s work rather than the man who bore the development cost, steals the armor and off she goes.  It is true that she struggles with the ethics of this choice and she gets tossed in jail for some of her actions in the suit, but that is the extent of the ‘world outside your window’ motif.  Mostly, this phase of the book could be best thought of in terms of the kind of super-science found in Spy Kids (without as much humor and charm).

Neither Swensen nor her cadre of young groupies ever seemed bound by the constraints normal people suffer.  They never seemed to be stumped for ideas, or to need sleep, or make mistakes.  With that much drive and know-how, they could have started their own tech-giant and simply bought out the ‘bad guy’ rather than resorting to theft.  Alternatively, they could have even invented a better suit and had a real mechanical donnybrook with the original.  Not that this latter scenario would have been realistic but at least it would have been consistent and entertaining.

Thankfully, when Conway’s run ended, Cary Bates took the book in a whole different direction.  Along the way Jenny and her gang had crossed paths with a terrorist who they defeated and humiliated.  He returns with a vengeance and kills off most of the Troublemakers, showing that knowledge and cunning are two different things.

With her reputation in tatters and her band of merry kids dead or discouraged, Swensen is easily pressed into CIA service and is given a better M.A.X. armor (see, I knew that someone other than her father could do it).  Her subsequent adventures overlap with the Afghanistan conflict, further advancing the imminent World War III scenario.  In the final stage of her development, NU editors decide that Swensen is more interesting when she is made of metal rather than being inside of a metal suit.  Exposure to the bizarre substances from The Pitt slowly transform her into a female analog of the X-Men character Colossus and she becomes the reoccurring character Chrome in the last third of the D.P. 7 series.

Nightmask (12 issues)

The final entry in the short-and-not-sweet group of NU publications is Nightmask. Created by Archie Goodwin, the premise revolves around a young man named Keith Remsen who has acquired the ability to enter other people’s dreams.

In the first issue, Keith is thrown into a coma as a result of an explosion designed to kill his parents and which, incidentally, turned his sister into a paraplegic. Though not clearly tied to the White Event, Keith awakens from his coma after its occurrence with the ability to project his consciousness into the mind of a dreamer.

The idea of dream walking had been around for a long time but mostly in the realm of movies (e.g. Dreamscape).  One notable comics exception is the first Doctor Strange story ever written in which the Master of the Mystic Arts journeys into the dreams of a haunted sleeper only to encounter Nightmare.  However, all these stories seemed a bit hollow as they seemed to lack real-world consequences.  It would take another 3 decades or so until the movie Inception would go on to show us just how compelling the whole idea could be.

Unfortunately, like the other dream-based tales of its time, Nightmask also failed to capture the cool aspect of shared visions.  Instead, many of the earlier stories centered on Remsen getting some kind of revenge on his parent’s assassin (interestingly, the final revenge story had to wait 20 years for publication in the Untold Tales of the New Universe). Eventually, Goodwin would drop away from the stories and Roy Thomas ended up writing the series until its cancellation.  These later stories were no more interesting and the publication run closed on a voodoo storyline that was boring at best.  In addition to the lackluster plots, the graphics left much to be desired.  Although there is a clear homage to the Ditko style used on Doctor Strange

the art on most of the books seemed rushed – a problem that plagued the entire NU line.

The Nightmask character outlived his book and became a pivotal figure in the World War III scenario, with Keith Remsen working as an Army officer whose prime responsibility is to judge the fitness for service of other paranormals who have been drafted.  His one wrong call on an unbalanced recruit haunts him as the man ends up becoming a serial killer who literally assassinates his victims by blowing up them and himself.  Keith finally feels that the only way to set things right is to kill the assassin; an action that drives him mad with guilt.

Next month, I’ll close out this look at the New Universe by delving into the longer running titles that provided the richer storylines.

July 22^nd, 1986.  The day of the White Event.  The day when the world changed.  That’s it! That’s the answer.  Build a consistent universe from the ground up for the discerning comics reader.  A universe as real and nuanced and believable as the world just outside their window.  Thus began the New Universe.

The brainchild of Jim Shooter, the New Universe concept promised a wholly independent playground that would be launched to celebrate Marvel’s 25^th anniversary.  In Jim Shooter’s own words, the New Universe

And so eight titles were launched:  D.P. 7, Jvstice, Kickers Inc., Mark Hazzard: Merc, Nightmask, Psi-Force, Spitfire and the Troublemakers, and Star Brand.  (Note: I know that the ‘purists’ will point out that Jvstice should actually be spelled Justice after the name of the character but the covers clearly show a ‘v’ in place of a ‘u’ and that’s the convention I’ll follow).

The idea was to make a science-based universe, free of mythical figures, undiscovered worlds, and farcical technology.  The intention was to create something much closer to hard science fiction than to fantasy.  To follow the rules of a world similar to the real one but with the extra component of some people having super powers.

Unfortunately, it was obvious from the start that there was a lot wrong.  The initial launch was behind schedule, the production value of the books was generally poor, and the writing was often not consistent with the premise.  As time went by, some of it got better and some of it got worse.  By the end of the first year, half the books were cancelled, one had been downgraded to bi-monthly and three continued on.  These were supplemented by three graphics novels: The Pitt, The Draft, and The War. All told the New Universe lasted about 3 years.

The reasons for the failure seem to be firmly rooted in the usual cause of such things – the human condition.  Creators seemed to think that they had free-reign to go off in any direction they wanted.  Corporate and business types seemed to be very worried about the non-reoccurring costs of creating a new publishing line.  Budgets were cut, schedules delayed, and so on.  Ironically, the drama surrounding the rise and fall of these properties makes for much better stories than most of the fictional ones told during the initial publication run.  That said, this column will not be dealing with the business side of this short-lived endeavor but rather will critique the stories themselves.  The reader is encouraged to read the Comic Book Resources interview with Jim Shooter for more background on the corporate situation at Marvel during that time.

Interestingly, despite the initial failure of the line, the stories seemed to have resonated in some fashion with the fan base.  Its influence went beyond its 3-year life, shaping a variety of Marvel properties over the following decades.  The characters of the New Universe were revisited several times after the collapse and a variety of new stories were told, including the Untold Tales of the New Universe

and an imaginative effort by Mark Gruenwald, which brought the NU characters into the Marvel multiverse and into direct contact with the central Marvel universe.  And the NU concepts have had surprising longevity with aspects, like superflow, and characters, like Starbrand and Nightmask, figuring prominently into the recent Everything Dies/Secret Wars storyline.

Background and Structure

The central idea of the New Universe (NU) is the idea of the White Event, a singular astronomical phenomenon that is responsible for the creation of the generation of superpowers amongst the Earth’s population.  While neither the root cause nor the full effect of the White Event was explained initially, as the line evolved it was ‘revealed’ that the White Event was directly connected to the titular character of the Star Brand book (see image just above for a classic portrayal of Ken Connell the Star Brand) and that the percentage of humans altered was relatively low.  These altered humans were collectively called paranormals.

When first launched, it was clear that each book was independent of all the others – often embarrassingly so.  Whether due to creative differences or the fact that much of the initial NU work was done on a volunteer basis due to budget, Shooter’s vision didn’t take hold with a lot of the creative staff.  The first issues of Spitfire and the Troublemakers and Jvstice gave particularly egregious violations of the idea that the universe would be more thoughtful and science-based and less fantastic.

Spitfire and the Troublemakers followed the extracurricular activities of a genius professor at MIT and her four precocious students.  There seemed to be nothing the latter couldn’t do, including inventing advanced robotics, rapidly fixing technology they had never seen or studied, and knowing how to drive a 18-wheeler.  One wondered why they were even at MIT instead of running their own businesses or starting their own universities or running the world as a cabal.  Indeed, where did they manage to find the time to attend class in between having adventures here, there, and everywhere?

Jvstice went in the other direction by following an extra-dimensional warrior named Tensen from the magical realm of Spring who has been banished to Earth due to an adulterous affair with the queen (shades of Lancelot).  While on Earth, Tensen metes out justice by reading people’s auras while searching to find the evil overlord of Winter, who just happens to be a drug kingpin here on Earth.

Even in Star Brand, the one book initially written by Shooter before his departure, and the one most uniquely suited to follow his vision, one can find the creative team mocking the real-world concept.  In an exchange between the Star Brand and Howard Mackie and John Byrne,

the two comics creators argue, somewhat obliquely, that the very notion of realism in superhero comics can’t possibly work.   In essence, the reader wants the fantastic and is willing to look past the inconsistencies to get it.

As time progressed, a central set of circumstances, many of which seem derivative of other works, were contrived to bring the various storylines into closer communion, presumably to partially bolster sales and to partially allow the creative teams to do things they couldn’t in the regular Marvel brand.

The Russian invasion of Afghanistan, which was also being discussed in Watchmen, made for the volatile geopolitical backdrop needed for the World War III finale that brought the NU to a close.  The destruction of the city of Pittsburgh by the thoughtless actions of Star Brand is the trigger for the conflict.  The United States Government, assuming that the event is a terrorist action carried out by paranormals from another country (possible the Soviets) reinstitutes a draft with a special emphasis on acquiring paranormals to strike back.  The entire plot line is strongly influenced in both its visuals (especially the ‘sphere of devestation’)

and dystopic consequences that follow by the destruction of Tokyo and subsequent aftermath as told in Otomo’s massive manga Akira.  The build-up of forces (conventional and paranormal) in the NU and the accompanying tensions eventually cascade into open hostilities which then escalate into outright war.  The war is ultimately stopped by the intervention of the star child (Star Brand’s son) in nearly the same fashion as was seen in the 1984 movie 2010: The Year We Made Contact.

Since the threads of all 8 books and 3 graphic novels are interwoven, it isn’t possible to review each series in a standalone fashion.  The order in which they will be presented is, perhaps, the most logical one that can be achieved.  The short-lived books will be discussed first, in Part 2, with special note being made as to how these stories and their main characters transition into the larger back drop of World War III.  Finally, the longer runs will be reviewed, in Part 3, in conjunction with those graphic novels that have the best overlap with the central story thread.  Specifically, D.P. 7 and The Draft will form one unit while Star Brand, The Pitt, and The War will form the other.

In the next installment, New Universe: Part 2 – The Supporting Books, the four smaller runs, which set the stage for The War will be reviewed.

Please, dear reader, have no worries.  I haven’t co-opted this column to provide a review of videogames; not even for that really fun old Atari game Yar’s Revenge. No, in this case, YAR is an acronym standing for ‘Yet Another Reboot’ and it applies to the big new re-alignment and retconning effort that is coming out of DC comics.

According to DC Comics Previews, this effort, known as Rebirth, promises to evolve the original universe into something that mixes traditional values with a modern aesthetic.

The central figure of the DC Comics Previews is not Batman, or Superman, nor is it the Flash or Green Lantern, or any other from their stable of mythical figures.  Rather it is DC’s Chief Creative Officer, Geoff Johns.  Johns has been involved in many of the ‘adjustments’ and isolated ‘rebirths’ that DC has carried out in recent memory and he seems to be the central force in this particular one.

Johns is quoted in both an open letter, printed on page 1, and in the feature article talking about Rebirth on page 3.

In his open letter, Johns says

and

That all sounds fine but before taking it at face value it is reasonable to spend some effort putting Rebirth in context.

There are two aspects to the context that are worth considering.  The first is the storytelling aspect that Johns mentions, including that piece of the DCU that was/is missing.  The second is the business aspect that Johns dismisses with his comments about branding or marketing but which are, nonetheless, important.

The first front – the storytelling aspect – needs to be placed within the real world timeline of the various soft and hard reboots and retcons that DC Comics has published in the last 30 or so years.  During this 30 year period, the DCU has been significantly modified 7 times (counting Rebirth).  That is approximately once every 4.5 years.

The first, and arguably the best, reboot was the Crisis on Infinite Earths (CoIE).  This storyline grew out of a desire to clean up many of the continuity issues that had collected in the DCU for the prior 50 years. And although it was a laudable it didn’t quite accomplish this goal.

Since CoIE, DC has revisited that event, tweaking and re-tweaking the continuity.  The following table summarizes the various efforts.

In addition to the links contained in the table above, the interested reader may find the overview of the ‘Crisis Trilogy’ by Dan DiDio, the succinct summary of the retconning that is found in the overview/background to Convergence, and James Whitbrook’s post entitled How to Keep Track of All the Insane Changes DC Comics Has Been Going Through to be helpful.

So what to make of DC’s 30-year evolution?  Well, the simplest and least cynical viewpoint seems to be that the original mess of untangling the continuity was a lot harder than anticipated.  This conjecture is reasonable since the DCU was strewn with numerous examples of the three best ways to screw up comics.  For instance, what to make of Earth-2 and all the other Earth copies?  Should the reader really care about these doppelgangers?  How can Superboy go forward in time to help the Legion of Superheroes in the 31^st century without violating the 20^th?  And so on it goes.  These storytelling devices were (and still remain) quite charming and maybe if continuity didn’t matter (different versions of the story of Oedipus didn’t matter to the Greeks) then it all could have been tolerated.  But the insistence on logical consistency that lead to the CoIE demands a high cost.   Each of the subsequent tweaks is needed to fix some problem in an earlier one and, in turn, each one spawns additional problems.

However, there is a more cynical explanation that deserves some discussion as well.  DC is a for-profit company and they need to sell product.  Nothing wrong here – capitalism is the backbone of the American way of life. But there is often a pattern in the entertainment industry of eschewing originality and to continue going to the well until it runs dry.  Without much in the way of marketing support, CoEI did extremely well and it was both a commercial and a critical success – it became the proverbial well.  This was during a time period when DC ruled the movie circuit (Superman franchise, 1978-1987) but was struggling with it comics arm despite some notable exceptions including Swamp Thing (1982) and Watchmen (1986-1987) under Alan Moore and Batman: The Dark Knight (1986) under Frank Miller.  CoEI provided a much needed boost to sales and the DCU, along with the companion Vertigo imprint, soon had DC running high.

I enjoyed the run of almost all their books from CoEI until Zero Hour.  This next tweak was the second trip to the well and the waters were nowhere near as refreshing.  Like any stimulus based on solely on an emotional high and adrenaline, the thrills had be more shocking and the scope bigger in order keep the same level of excitement.  Each of the following crises continued the escalation leading to the need to retcon more frequently.

Rebirth is just the last in a long line of ‘wash, rinse, repeat’ reboots designed to attract attention – this time by bringing in the one truly critically acclaimed work from DC in recent memory, The Watchmen.  However, I am not sanguine for its chances of success.  I don’t think the mythic content of Superman and Batman has gotten stale nor do I think that comics can only succeed through escalating novelty.  Rather I think that there is combination of unimaginative management and uninspired writing that drives this cycle.  Meaningful stories that could be told are dropped by the wayside because building a solid narrative requires time and skill.  Fortunately, this downward cycle has to stop soon.  Ultimately, there won’t be enough time to publish comics with the new status quo before rebooting to the next one.  Hopefully, once the dust clears, DC will give up on the reboot gimmick and actually realize the gold mine they have.

The last column was devoted to The Badger comic book run of the 1980s.  This column is devoted to the 5-issue mini-series (at least at the time of this writing) that revamps the Badger character to be in line with the current day.

Mike Baron is again the writer and creative force behind the book and much of bones of the original story are present in this incarnation.  The central three characters of Ham, Norbert (aka the Badger), and Daisy Fields again grace the pages of the book.  And their origins and backstories closely parallel the original material but with variations designed to coincide with today’s zeitgeist.  Let’s start with Norbert.

Unlike the original Viet Nam motif, where, no doubt, Sykes was drafted, this time around he volunteers for military service.  From the get-go, Norbert is a bit strange, as evidenced by his behavior when he enlists with the army.

He is soon teamed with a bomb-sniffing dog and both of them pull a tour in Iraq.  Sykes shows an aptitude working with Otis (as he so named the dog) and a positive aptitude for combat.  However, he is a bit standoffish with his fellow non-comms.

Their time together is short-lived and, as most of the stories from Iraq go, jihadis have soon killed Otis and captured Norbert.  They torture him with a combination of physical and psychological techniques, but the one that sends him over the edge is when they place a puppy in a bucket to drown on top of the cage in which they keep him.  Driven mad by his impotence in helping an animal, Sykes soon has a vision in which he is visited by a badger (get it – a badger)

In return for his assent to be a human champion for animals, Myrtle grants him an even greater ferocity in combat – a skill he soon employs to great effect when he breaks free and slaughters his captors.  Thus the Badger is born and, perhaps, his personality is splintered.

After he has made his way back to the US held side, he is honorably discharged and sent home.  But being a restless sort, Norbert doesn’t stay in Walter Reed to receive the attention he needs.  Slipping out, he heads for the open road, hitchhiking back to Wisconsin.  Along the way, when asked how many jihidis he killed, Norbert remarks that he didn’t kill any, Pierre did.

Shortly after his arrival in Wisconsin (Racine perhaps, maybe Madison), Norbert comes on a bunch of punks hassling a wheelchair-bound man who had just left the bank.  When Sykes comes to his aid and roundly beats the spit out of the thugs he is rewarded with arrest, trial, and subsequent commitment to the sanitarium.

There he meets Dr. Daisy Fields – yes she’s become her own woman and has moved from assistant to full-fledged doctor.  She soon recognizes that Norbert suffers from multiple personalities but her reaction is one filled far more with concern than with fascination.

For a while, the sanitarium permits him to roam the grounds freely, but when he intervenes to stop some orderlies from abusing some geese he again is rewarded; this time with a nice straight jacket and a stay in the padded room.  It is while Norbert is looked up in that dark, confined space that the final ingredient in our little drama shows up – Hammaglystwyth (Ham for short).

To prove his power, Ham first unleashes Max, the gay-architect splinter of Norbert’s psyche, and, second, arranges for him to have a fine suit, tailored to his needs.  Max is getting along splendidly with Doctor Bor, the head of the sanitarium,

handing out decorating advice, when one of the orderlies bursts in to inform the Doctor that they can’t find Sykes.  Back goes the Badger into the general population but not before he is so impresessed with Ham’s magic that he agrees to be Ham’s familiar.

Ham soon affects his release from the Sanitarium using magic far more powerful than that of the Druids – today’s legalistic, wired, politically correct sensibilities.

Using the stipend provided on his release, Ham soon turns $500 in mega millions.

Meanwhile, Daisy has arranged for Norbert to be an outpatient, and hoping to get him a new set of clothes as the first step to trying to help him reintegrate into society, she pulls up to a store with Sykes in tow.  But her rehabilitation plans soon go awry, when the Badger comes out to physically punish a rich, arrogant, punk who parks in the handicapped spot since he’ll “only be a sec”.  Before the cops can come by, Ham shows up (as if he knew) and whisks them both away in his limo.

Ham soon fills in his Druidic origin; how he was placed under spells in the 4^th century that caused him to sleep until modern times; how his inert body was carried to the new world and left buried by Vikings; and how he subsequently woke up and educated himself using that handy modern magic of the internet.  Ham further reveals that his plight was the result of the machinations of Rathkrogen, his eternal enemy, and that Rathkrogen is none other that Vladimir Putin.  Ham claims that it is only a matter of time before Putin sends an assassin to kill him.  No sooner are those words uttered, than a behemoth of a man bursts in (how does he know where and how to penetrate the castle) and the farce is underway. Despite the size differential, the Badger makes short work of the villian.

Ham interogates the now-defeated ‘bully boy’ and finds some startling changes have occurred while he slept

Putin, it seems is vying to be the Fifth Wizard.  So end Issues #1-2.

Well there’s more – a lot more.  But very little else is important.  The key groundwork has been laid and I, frankly, am a bit dissappointed.  Not by the story itself, which is reasonably well constructed and paced.  Nor by the art, which, while not as vibrant as the original, is pretty good.  No, what is disappointing is the tone of the story, which is a queer mix of too much and too little.

Too much time is spent on Norbert’s origin.  His enlistment in the army and tour of duty in Iraq is very serious and dramatic and depressing.  It pulls back the curtain too much on what made Norbert the man (or men/women/little girl/dog) that he is.  The mystery of the Badger was one of the most enjoyable components of the original run.  You never knew just what was going to be revealed.  Too much pathos is generated around Norbert’s plight – being punished for being a good guy, being misunderstood, and so on.

Too little time and space is spent on the crazy hijinks that made the first series so much fun.  Gone are the random acts of pummelling jay walkers and smacking people who don’t fill in their checks before getting in the cashier’s line.  Gone are the wacky social observations and zany one-liners.  Gone is the banter between the main three characters.

In short, this mini-series has too much drama, too many explanations, too few jokes, and too little of the original style that made the Badger of the 1980s a hit.  It is true, that the tone does lighten as the series progresses but in all cases it is more accurate to say that broods along rather than capers.  As I mentioned above, the Badger has been recast to fit in with modern times.  Perhaps reflecting the zeitgeist is not the way to go – a sad commentary on our current day.

Yo! Larry.  If that rallying cry doesn’t mean anything to you then you were not exposed to one of the most fun and quirky comic book runs of the 1980s – The Badger.

The central character, one Norbert Sykes, just happens to a Vietnam vet who exhibits multiple-personalities, a curious devotion to and the ability to speak with animals, a penchant for mastering various abstruse martial arts, and a total disregard for both social convention and for his own safety.  In his role as Badger, Sykes is, more or less, the familiar of a 4^th century Druid wizard who goes by the name Ham since his original Welsh name is a touch too long to pronounce.

Whether Ham is a force for good or evil or just in it for a little material comfort and wealth (well a lot of wealth – more on that in a moment) is difficult to pin down, but his magic certainly gets him and the Badger into some curious and amusing spots.

The final member of our little group is a clinical psychologist named Daisy Fields.   On paper, Daisy is Ham’s private secretary, but closer to the truth, she seems to be both a moderator and enabler of the hijinks and insanity that ensue.

If my description seems murky, weird, confusing, and aimless then I shall have been true to the nature of the book.  And what a wonderful nature it is.  Rather than being a ponderously heavy and serious examination of modern life, The Badger has its tongue fairly planted in its cheek even when displaying biting social commentary on everything from annoying people in the checkout line in front of you or those who start their yard work a wee bit too early in the morning to the sometimes self-involved behavior of the rich and corporate malfeasance.  The Badger shows that a good sense of humor is a powerful tool for both entertaining and making a point.

The trio is first brought together in a state sanitarium somewhere in Wisconsin, where the central figures of these tales, Norbert and Ham, are enjoying room and board and relaxing padded rooms courtesy of that fine state.  It seems that Norbert has been committed for committing a variety of civil disobediences of the sort mentioned above.

On the other hand, the state has consigned Ham to a rubber room of catatonia and vagrancy.  The former condition is a consequence of some early handling of the Druid by the angry townsfolk of the 4^th century British Isles.  It seems that Ham had a nasty habit of sacrificing whatever he needed to get the magic he wanted

Having had enough, the various peoples subdue him and, failing to be able to harm or kill him, they place him under spells of deep sleep and then hiring explorers to drop his body off the face of the Earth.  Mistaking North America as the end of the world, the explorers deposit Ham in what would later be one of the Midwest’s most interesting commonwealths.

Sharing adjacent rooms, Ham and Badger forge a psychic connection that soon blossoms into a full-fledged working relationship

Affecting their joint release, Ham soon discovers that the magic of money may be as powerful as the magic of sacrifice.  Using his wizarding skill, he amasses a small fortune which he uses to set to build a castle in which he and Badger will use as a base of operations.  He also entices Daisy from the Sanitarium with both a promise of more money and a chance to examine Norbert and his various splintered personalities at her leisure.  He wants her part of the team so that she can help manage his growing wealth and to help manage the Badger, who is an integral part of his scheme.

As Ham later explains to a supernatural entity called the Hodag, the Badger is his familiar

and that connection – sometimes strained, oftentimes cordial, and always strange – catapults them into bizarre territory and unimagined adventure that allows the series creator, Mike Baron, the material he needs to explore spirituality, individualism, society, lunacy, and fun.

For example, one the earliest adventures involves a California-based energy company being a poor corporate citizen.  Wanting to build a Midwest power plant, the company has procured a parcel of land that contains an extremely old oak tree.  They plan to level the parcel in order to make way for their new power plant, thus ending the oak’s long life span.  Being a Druid, Ham desperately wants the land since the ancient oak is a powerful source of magic.  Being rich, Ham tries to purchase the land in the usual fashion – directing one of his minion’s to dig up information while he is chauffeured in his Bently by another

When he discovers that he has been too late to save the oak, Ham vows revenge.  He asks the Badger to

Using the resulting, mystic surf-board, Ham mounts a huge tidal wave which he has aimed at the power company’s California headquarters.

At the last minute, disaster is averted, but not before the corporate-types are sufficiently chastised by the whole experience.

Other zany vignettes include an exchange between a flight attendant and a westward-bound Badger that reflects a point many air travelers have pondered

and a self-absorbed, wealthy woman, who disregards the need to evacuate an upscale Madison mall when two jaguars free themselves from a mall-attraction and decide to do a little shopping

Along the way, the reader gets to meet some of the various personalities that make up Norbert’s psyche

Of particular interest, is Max, who is charming, refined, and gentlemanly in ways that neither Norbert nor Badger can be

Along the way, Mike Baron throws in a lot of esoteric modern lore, including a whole-issue (#23) homage to the Church of the SubGenius, in which the International Brotherhood of Brujos (IBOB) has sent a powerful demon, who just happens to bear a striking resemblance to J.R. ‘Bob’ Dobbs, to take on the Badger (a sampling of their verbal sparring shown below)

All told, I wish there were trade paperback versions of The Badger readily available because it was a fun read and remains quite fresh.  It would do the new generation of comics readers some good to see some of the crazy but charming ways in which a series can be both enjoyable and meaningful.  A new version of The Badger, stylistically updated to reflect the 30-years that have elapsed, is being published.  Whether it can conjure the old fun remains to be seen but if not we always have Yo! Larry to fall back on.

This past Sunday I had the pleasure to sit in on a round-table discussion about comics in general and the recent Secret Wars storyline in particular.  This book discussion was put on by a local shop by the name of Third Eye Comics, which has locations in Annapolis and Lexington Park, Maryland.

For those who have never visited Third Eye, it is series of three stores; two of them (Annapolis and Lexington Park) are focused on comics, manga, collectibles, and the like.  The third store (also in Annapolis), which is devoted to gaming, sports an eclectic mix of games, including the usual European board games (Catan, Ticket to Ride, Princes of Florence, etc.), collectable card games (Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, etc.), and more specialized franchises like Warhammer and Dice Masters.

The book club was held after hours in the common area of the gaming store. This type of discussion was the first of its kind that I ever attended and, I believe, the first such event that Third Eye held.  And before I share my impressions, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the Third Eye staff were quite hospitable.  They brought in food and refreshments, provided swag, and were welcoming and engaging.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this experience.  As I’ve written elsewhere, my exposures to panel discussion at comic cons have left me with a bad taste.  But the conversation was here was different.  The mood was relaxed but respectful and everyone acted as and were treated as human beings.

While the majority of the discussion was on the Secret Wars, it was inevitable that other topics were introduced.  Comparison and contrast with other mega-series brought in conversation points from DC’s numerous Crisis events.  In the same vein, Hickman’s work on East of West was also touched upon if for no other reason than to note the differences in his style when he is creating his own work rather than interpreting the properties of others.

But the most interesting component was when the group started looking at the various Battleworld spin-offs and companion series that went on during the whole reboot of the Marvel Universe.  I only followed two of the numerous satellite series: Infinity Gauntlet and the Ghost Racers, and it didn’t really enjoy them.  Apparently my experience was not reflective of the rest of the group and their experiences, especially with Weird World, were quite positive.

And it was out of this discussion that I actually learned the most interesting point of the evening – consistency really matters to most readers.  I’ve always cared about consistency but I didn’t really have a sense of how much anyone else does.  If book club discussion is a guide, the answer is quite a bit.  Admittedly, this conclusion is not based on a statistically valid sample size with a carefully crafted questionnaire delivered in a well-designed double-blind fashion.  It is based on common sense and on listening to what was said and how it was said and how often.

Perhaps the most intriguing part was when the mechanics of ‘healing factors’ were explored.  The trigger for this discussion is very amusing side moments in Secret Wars when Mister Sinister loses his head, which then gets knocked around for a while like some demented sort of soccer ball.

The group started to wrestle with just how does the how thing work.  Take, in particular, Deadpool.  If he has his hand cutoff, does it grow back?  If it does, does the severed hand grow back an entire Deadpool.  Clearly this isn’t the case since there aren’t numerous Deadpools running around, but why not? How does Deadpool compare to Wolverine?  Where does the energy come from to do all this?

This line of questioning shouldn’t be dismissed as the idle musings of a fanboy.  Rather these are the normal trains of thought for intelligent minds trying to understand the world around them.  These are the sort of questions that lie at the heart of scientific inquiry.  True they deal with a fictional world constructed, only partially, by men but the point is this.  Reading comics (and reading in general) may be an escape but the escapee take his reason and his sense of cause-and-effect with him.  The writer would do well to pay more attention to consistency.  It matters – just ask Mark Gruenwald.