I referenced this TEEN TITANS
story-arc in my essay NO FOOL LIKE AN OLD PRO, where I talked about the
futility of imposing moralistic restrictions on transgressive content in art. More
recently, I decided to reread JUDAS CONTRACT and review it. I was certain that it
was not a mythcomic, but was it just a near-myth, like many other stories in
the Wolfman-Perez corpus, or a null-myth, like the narrative I reviewed here?
My verdict is that although writer
Wolfman’s focus here is the same as in “Trigon Lives”—the almost Manichean presence
of sheer evil—here his focus is a little better because he embodies his evil not
in some road-company Satan, but in a teenaged superheroine, the junior to the
older teens (and non-teens) of the Titans group. This is “Terra,” who is
admitted into the ranks of the Titans despite her generally snarky
attitude and occasional outbursts of uncontrolled rage.
According to Wolfman’s public
statements, he meant to fake out readers by making them believe that Terra would
fulfill a role not unlike that of Kitty Pryde in Marvel’s X-MEN. I don’t how
many readers were fooled back in the day—Wolfman is not exactly known for the subtlety
of his writing—but the fact that one established Titan, Beast Boy, was deeply
in love with the minx probably helped put the hoax across. After a handful of
issues in which Terra serves as an apprentice member of the super-group, the
first issue of “Judas Contract” reveals that she’s a mole, using a miniature
eye-camera to take pictures of the Titans’ routines and local haunts. She then
funnels this intel to one of the heroes’ worst enemies, Deathstroke the Terminator.
The same issue also reveals that fifteen-year-old Terra is not only Deathstroke’s
partner in crime, but also his partner in bed.
Once Wolfman tips his hand in the
first part, a great deal of time is devoted to depicting the ways in which Deathstroke systematically captures capture
of most of the heroes, all of whom look rather stupid for not harbored any
serious suspicions of the teen traitor—not Raven, despite her empathic powers,
and not the former Robin, with his detective training. I say “former Robin”
because it’s also in this story-arc that Dick Grayson assumes his new (and still
current) superhero identity of Nightwing. He’s the only Titan to escape capture,
though he’s only able to secure the release of his friends with the help of yet
another “new member.”
As if to compensate for the loss of
Terra, he and Wolfman debut the character of Jericho, who can possess the body
of most if not all living beings and usurp their wills. Just to ramp up the
soap operatics, Jericho also happens to be the son of Deathstroke. The arc also
reveals the origin of the Terminator and his own tangled familial history, but
neither Deathstroke nor his superhero son rise to the level of mythic
presences.
Prior to the inevitable scene in
which the captive heroes are released by Nightwing and Jericho, Wolfman twists
the knife for his protagonists by having Terra strut around, gloating about how easily she tricked
them. When the rescue comes off, followed by the usual pyrotechnics, Terra goes
berserk, lashing out at Deathstroke as well for supposedly betraying her. In her
big death-scene, Wolfman leaves no doubt that she’s a “Bad Seed” with no real
motive for her obsessive hatred of all things good: “Due to the fault of no one
but herself, she is insane. No one taught her to hate, yet she hates… without cause,
without reason.” At least one later writer chose to claim that Deathstroke had
driven her mad with a drug meant to enhance her powers. But even though Wolfman’s
portrait of destructive behavior lacks any psychological depth, I prefer the
idea that this “nasty Kitty Pryde” is just evil for the sake of being evil.
On a side-note, Wolfman and Perez
seem to have had eye-symbolism on their minds during this arc. The first
section of the arc repeatedly emphasizes “The Eyes of Tara Markov,” meaning the
camera-implant with which the traitress records everything she sees while spying
on the Titans. Jericho also uses “the windows of the soul” to make his power
work, since he must catch the gaze of anyone he wishes to control. During the
big end-fight, Jericho possesses his evil father and makes him slug Terra,
after which she tries to kill him as well as the escaping Titans. Then, if all
this eye-stuff wasn’t enough, Beast Boy commits a classic “injury to the eye.”
Even though the shapechanging hero doesn’t believe that Terra’s truly corrupt, he
turns himself into a small insect and assails the camera-lens in one of Terra’s
eyes. Instead of making her more vulnerable, the minor injury enrages her so
that she loses control of her powers and kills herself. Though Wolfman and
Perez could have chosen a lot of ways to inflict this injury, and even though Beast
Boy isn’t being vindictive when he assaults her, the attack on the traitorous “eyes
of Tara Markov” provides an ironic way for the simon-pure heroes to vent their
wrath on the rogue heroine—and to pave the way for a new member who knows how to use “the
power of the gaze” for the forces of good.
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