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. 

 

THE READING RHEUM: FLAME AND CRIMSON (2019)

Since this essay allowed me to deal with the questions of "escapism in entertainment" raised in Brian Murphy's FLAME AND CRIMSON, here I can concentrate on more of a straight review of the book. 

To my knowledge FLAME probably stands as the first substantive history of the sword-and-sorcery subgenre in prose, with only moderate attention to developments in other media. The author not only shows a strong familiarity with all of the major authors in the subgenre-- even the bad ones-- he took pains to read most or all of the AMRA fanzines (1959-1982) in order to get a sense of how the magazine endeavored to keep alive a very niche type of entertainment, particularly in the days before the Lancer paperbacks of the middle sixties revived the subgenre and made it widely popular for roughly the next fifteen years or so. As I said in the previous essay, I don't necessarily think the subgenre fell out of favor due to "the bad driving out the good." It may just be that the competing subgenre of epic fantasy offered a lot more variety to the fantasy-oriented reader than even the best exemplars of sword-and-sorcery.

In any case, Murphy's research includes many topics of interest, such as the role of Sprague de Camp in launching the sixties Lancer reprints, apart from the work de Camp and Lin Carter did in adding to the saga of REH's most popular barbarian. Murphy provides a lot of detail about the possible influences upon Howard's almost "sui generis" development of sword-and-sorcery-- influences such as Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, and A. Merritt. However, Murphy seems laser-focused upon positioning sword-and-sorcery within the tradition of what I call "magical fantasy stories," even though Murphy himself runs down a list of Howard's favorite authors and concludes that "Howard favored historical fiction authors and adventure stories largely absent fantastic elements." To support this claim, Murphy runs down a list of seventeen authors whom Howard is known to have read (and sometimes overtly imitated) and claims that only four of those on the list-- Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft were "fantasy authors." However, there were certainly well-known fantastic works in the oeuvres of such figures as Jack London, Conan Doyle, and Rider Haggard, while the majority of Sax Rohmer works-- works which Howard emulated in his "Skull-Face stories"-- have almost as much focus on "real-world fantasy" as the works of EA Poe.

I won't rate Murphy's opinions of other, non-Howard prose authors of S&S or on S&S cinema; such things boil down to individual opinion. The only estimation I found hard to swallow was his overly politicized reading of CL Moore's "Jirel of Joiry" stories, which were the only female-centric S&S stories produced during Howard's lifetime." When Murphy writes that "the dreamy, out of body sequences typical of the Jirel stories are battlegrounds of traditional gender roles," he not only sounds like he's parroting feminist academic scholarship, he also fails to make a good case for his interpretation.   

Lastly, Murphy tries a little too hard to create a radical opposition between S&S and the epic fantasy of Tolkien. He's somewhat on an interesting track when he quotes from the prologue to an anthology, SWORDS AND DARK MAGIC, in which the editor briefly ventures a comparison between the large scale of the epic fantasy subgenre and the similar scale of Homer's ILIAD, and also between the more limited scale of the S&S tale and the events of Homer's ODYSSEY. But Murphy tries to improve on what the anthology-editor wrote. For Murphy the iconic epic-fantasy hero traces from Hector, the noble antagonist, while the iconic S&S hero is embodied by-- Achilles, the ILIAD'S protagonist? I can only guess why Achilles appealed to Murphy more than Odysseus. But whatever the reason, his idea just obscured the more promising comparison: comparing the concerted, large-scale conflicts of the Trojan War to epic fantasy and comparing the generally peripatetic, small-scale adventures of the S&S heroes to the wanderings of Odysseus. But whatever my technical disagreements with Murphy, I never thought he was a phony, which was my reading of the authors of the proto-woke tome DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME.      

A TALE OF TWO COSMS

 Though the terminology introduced here may not stand the test of (my) time, I felt like better organizing my thoughts on "ontology and epistemology." I'm fairly sure that nothing I write here will supersede my literary definition of both, I formulated in 2023's WHAT VS, HOW. But the proposed terminology might be better than trying to repurpose the standard "tenor/vehicle" terms I put forth in 2024's VERTICAL VIRTUES.

My current difficulty stems from my realization that in essays like A NOSE FOR GNOSIS I've frequently been using "ontology" and "epistemology" as if they could stand for all the ontological or epistemological elements in a narrative, when in fact the words signify the disciplines involved in thinking about what things exist or how we have knowledge of their existence. "Tenor and vehicle" also don't work that well because each word sounds like a single unitary thing, rather than a combination of elements that comprise a greater whole. Since the connotation for Greek *cosmos* is that of an ordered whole, my new terms are *ontocosm* for the totality of lateral elements (relating to the kinetic and dramatic potentialities) and *epicosm* for the totality of vertical elements (relating to the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities). Whether I'll use the terms a lot depends on my future sensibilities. But at this point it seems easier to reword my statement in NOSE FOR GNOSIS re the respective potentialities of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN and the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR. Now I would say that said iteration of SPIDER-MAN had a more developed ontocosm, while said iteration of FANTASTIC FOUR had a more developed epicosm. 

On a related note, while I was looking at my "greatest crossovers" series on OUROBOROS DREAMS, it occurred to me that my criteria for greatness were certainly not primarily epicosmic. There were some crossover-stories with strong virtual elements, like JIHAD and THE BOOKS OF MAGIC. But for the majority of my choices, I believe I responded to the elements of lateral storytelling. Thus I included Spider-Man's first encounter with The Avengers on the basis of both kinetic and dramatic elements, while the wall-crawler's first meeting with the Fantastic Four was, in a word, forgettable in ontocosmic terms. Other times, I might not think the lateral story was all that good in itself, but that it comprised some landmark crossover-event-- the first time the Avengers met the western-heroes of Marvel's Old West, or that GAMBLER movie that brought together a dozen or so actors to play either real or simulated versions of their TV-characters. In these stories, it wasn't so much the actual execution of the concept but its potential that I found intriguing.        

STIMULATING RESPONSES PT. 3

 More fun with geometrical approximations as in Part 2, but this time, a little shorter.

In that essay, I gave visual examples as to how the concrescence of vertical meaning in a narrative could be represented as an increasing amplitude of the up-and-down variations in a straight line, which represented the forward progress of lateral meaning. Now, the only complication to this illustration is that my previous essays have established is that such concrescence also appears in the elements of lateral meaning, the potentialities I've labeled "the kinetic" and "the dramatic." However, whereas the increasing concrescence of vertical values can be shown as greater amplitude, concrescence of lateral meaning is geometrically expresssed by the relative thickness of the line, as per these three examples:

 

 The thinnest, and thus least dense, of the lines represents the "poor" state of either kinetic or dramatic potentiality. the next thickest represents a "fair" state, and the thickest represents a "good" state.

Just to give three examples applicable only to the dramatic potentiality:

A story with possibly the least dense drama-- for instance, a Roy Rogers Z-western-- would be represented by the thinnest line.

A Lee/Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR would usually be in the middle, representing a fairly dense dramatic potentiality.

And something like Faulkner's A LIGHT IN AUGUST would merit the thickest line of good drama. Of course, the lines would also be more or less jagged depending upon the intensity of the vertical amplitude. The mythopoeic amplitude for particular FANTASTIC FOUR stories might vary according to each story's content, even though the thickness of the lateral representation might stay the same. Thus "The Impossible Man" and "The Galactus Trilogy" might have the same level of emotional drama (even though one is expressed through comedy) but very different levels of mythopoeic amplitude.    

CUTTING REMARKS ON SWORD-AND-SORCERY

 I've been trying to find time to review Brian Murphy's 2019 book FLAME AND CRIMSON: A HISTORY OF SWORD-AND-SORCERY, which I basically liked. with reservations. But I happened to make a remark about the book on one online forum, and it occurred to me that I might justify it in advance of a formal review, since the crux of the book is the question as to how to define "sword-and-sorcery" as a genre, as well as its place in history.

FLAME, in addition to charting the predecessors of S&S and its provenance within pulp magazines, also advances a theory as to the subgenre's relative downturn after a surge in mass popularity in 1960s magazines and paperbacks. That theory is loosely a restatement of Gresham's Law-- "bad money drives out good"-- but substituting "bad product/good product." I'm not entirely opposed to that interpretation, though I think the matter might be more involved. The crux of the interpretation depends heavily on what one defines as "escapism" and what different people expect from it. The remark I made was as follows:

"At one point Murphy twitted Lin Carter for his view of S&S as escapist, yet Murphy said something similar at the end of CRIMSON."

To provide a little more context to the statement, Murphy extolls the essential creator of the subgenre, Robert E Howard, as a rare voice of genius within pulp fiction, and he has similar glowing praise for such innovators in the subgenre as Poul Anderson, Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber. But he considers that much of the less innovative works of the 1960s, by such authors as Lin Carter, John Jakes and Gardner F. Fox, to be generally responsible for the subgenre's downturn in the 1980s. Carter, for those not in the know, was a lifelong devotee of fantasy, though he wrote work in other genres. I have not read or reread any of Carter's books in many years, but I recall only liking a handful of works. I wouldn't credit Carter with much more innovation than Murphy does, and indeed, Carter's statements as Murphy reprints them indicate that Carter sincerely believed that S&S was meant to be "completely derivative" and thus not really defined by innovation. And one must admit that Murphy was hardly unique in denigrating the Conan-imitations of the 1960s, the various works by Carter, Jakes and Fox, as "escapist and wish-fulfillment" (p. 171).

Yet Murphy, as I said above, attempts to define "escapism" in such a way as to validate REH and other esteemed S&S writers-- who to this day are still not really embraced as "real literature"-- as being a cut above the rest. In the last chapter, Murphy says:

"Fantasy is the literature of escape, and sword-and-sorcery falls squarely into this tradition. It offers a glimpse at existence beyond our ordinary round, awakening world-weary hearts to the possibilities of productive disruption and rebellion." 

Murphy cites Tolkien and a couple of others as champions of this interpretation of fantasy and thus of all its subgenres. However, the author never quite defines what makes "good escape," as opposed to "bad escape." If a given story depicts any sort of fantastic entity or contrivance, doesn't it possess a power to take readers "beyond our ordinary round?" Or is there some special level of communication that a story in any genre should have, to open hearts "to the possibilities of productive disruption and rebellion?" In the "escapist and wish fulfillment" remark Murphy makes on page 171, he ventures a comparison between paperback sword-and-sorcery and the similar light women's entertainment known as "bodice-rippers." My impression is that the majority of these-- not counting offshoots like Gothics and supernatural romance-- are without fantastic entities or contrivances. But if those stories lack the power to bring forth "good escape," is it because they lack fantastic elements, or do the stories lack something else, something that can also be found in non-fantasy books by Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, as much as in the greatest fantasy-authors?

I have my own solutions to these conundrums, of course, and maybe Murphy does too. His purpose in writing FLAME was obviously not to propound a synoptic definition of "fantasy literature vs. realistic literature." Still, any time one uses the word "escapism," it opens some of these pitfalls, into which anybody, even with the best intentions, can fall.                                  

WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES PT. 3

 I would say, then, that all mysteries after Poe tend to follow either the rational model of the Dupin stories, where the detective's acumen resolves all the problems, and or the irrational model of "The Oblong Box," where even the solution of a given problem merely generates a sense of greater mystery, often of some mystery that remains insoluble.-- RATIONAL AND IRRATIONAL PROBLEMS, 2019.

In Part 2 of this series, I mentioned that Infantino's investment in infusing "Rational DC" with the irrationality of the Gothic was signified by (1) the "spookification" of HOUSE OF MYSTERY and the debut of DEADMAN, both in 1967, and (2) the reinvention of the 1950s character The Phantom Stranger in SHOWCASE #80, in 1969. But in between those two, another DC stalwart showed similar changes in 1968, a little before the Bat-books went full-bore Gothic. I have no direct testimony that Infantino intervened to alter the direction of DC's CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, which had dealt with rationalized versions of the metaphenomenal since its genesis under Jack Kirby and Dave Wood.

  

For roughly six years Arnold Drake had been writing the CHALLENGERS title, often with art by Bob Brown, and all of their contributions had fallen into the rational model. By some odd chance, their last two issues on the title effectively launched the irrational, Gothic direction for the remainder of the series' original run. In issue 62 (June-July 1968), Drake introduced a new set of villains for the heroes, The Legion of the Weird, which comprised five villainous wizards from different cultures: the vaguely East European Count Karnak. the Egyptian Kaftu, the possibly American Mistress Wycker, the archaic Brit druid Hordred, and the unspecifically Indian medicine man Madoga. Drake had used this multicultural approach to sorcerous evildoers before in a 1964 Mark Merlin story, which took much the same rational approach as everything else DC published in that year. 

The Legion "weirdies," as one panel calls them, uses various mystic forces against the Challengers, not least with a gigantic mummy named Tukamenon. However, for whatever reason Drake and Brown were unable to finish the Legion's battle with the "Challs."  

Though #63 ended in a cliffhanger, the next two issues of CHALLENGERS were fill-in stories written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Jack Sparling, who would be the closest thing the title had to a regular penciler. Though many of the stories that followed involved mad science as much as mysticism, Sparling, whatever his limitations, was much better than Brown at rendering freaky-deaky visuals, so it's not unlikely he was selected for just that purpose.

  

Issue #66 finishes up the Legion of the Weird story with Sparling and a Mike Friedrich script. The villains are defeated but escape, never (as far as I know) to return. Denny O'Neil then took over the series for the remainder of its original run, and he certainly showed even more penchant for supernatural mystery-stories than anyone previous. O'Neil's stories for the title were as pedestrian as those of Drake and Kanigher. but there are a couple of minor landmarks in his run. In #69 O'Neil finds a reason to get charter Challenger Prof Haley out of the way so that he can bring in the Challengers' first regular female member, Corrinna Stark, to take Prof's place. In the early sixties the Challs had a recurring "irregular female member"    named June Robbins, but Corrinna was the first regular female Challenger. 

O'Neil didn't really think that much about the character, though. She starts out helping the Challs because her mad-scientist father half-killed Prof, but though she offered to take Prof's place, she didn't really have any skill except that of being a hot girl, depending on whether she was drawn by Sparling, Dick Dillin or George Tuska. Three or four issues into O'Neil's run, Corrinna suddenly gets psychic medium-powers for the sake of some more spooky stories, and there's a moderately entertaining story in #74 that guest-stars both Deadman and O'Neil's private dick Jonny Double. Then in #75, Corrinna and the four guys finish the last of the mag's new material with a one-page introduction to a Kirby reprint, and such reprints take up the rest of the issues until cancellation with #80. (Technically the book on its bimonthly schedule ended in #77 and the last three Kirby reprint-issues appeared about two years later, in 1973.) There's a mention of Jack Kirby's new works for DC in the lettercol to issue #76 (1970), and that's probably the only reason the dying book went reprint at all. Someone, maybe Infantino, thought that Kirby fans might desert Marvel to pick up anything the King did at DC, even old work that was largely out of fashion. 

So the CHALLENGERS title spent most of its life as Rational Fantasy, detoured into Irrational Fantasy for its last two years, and then went back to its origins for its unspectacular finish. Infantino's Gothic preoccupations had some great results for the Bat-titles and tapped a market for horror-tales that Marvel never quite accessed. But despite preceding PHANTOM STRANGER into the new Weirdie terrain, "Gothic Challengers" is a mostly forgotten chapter in DC history.

WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES PT. 2

 I decided to supplement last year's WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES with further details, but realized that the original essay supplied only the rationale of distinguishing "weirdie" metaphenomenal fictions from the "worldie" type, as per the Brian Aldiss history mentioned, and then I jumped to a particular late manifestation of "weirdies at DC." So to bridge that gap, here's my essay from OUROBOROS DREAMS where I dealt with the importance of Carmine Infantino to my schema. ___________________________

DC jumped feet first into the supernatural/Gothic thing after having generally avoided that type of story for over 20 years, and it seems likely that Carmine Infantino was the biggest influence, as he himself claims in a JOURNAL interview:

I was trying to prepare for the inevitable. In my mind, “What if these things die? What if we’re back in the old days and suddenly superheroes drop off?” The reason I threw out a mess of different titles was, I wanted to sneak in The House of Mystery and The House of Secrets without people much realizing what was going on. Which I did. And also we had a chain of them out there, if you remember, and they were all successful before anyone at Marvel realized what was going on. So we had those going for us, and the superheroes going for us. Meanwhile I kept experimenting with different things.

So in Evanier's book KIRBY, ME claims, maybe a little dubiously, that when Kinney Corp bought DC in 1967, they thought they were getting the top company, only to become displeased when they learned that Marvel was such a strong second. (I think Roy Thomas claimed Marvel didn't obtain the majority market share until the early seventies though.) Still, that story isn't absolutely necessary to put across the notion that someone in management thought it was time for some changes. Infantino was made first art director and then editorial director in 1966 and 1967, and it looks like promoting horror and the Gothic was his major "experiment." Not only did he get rid of the superheroes in HOUSE OF MYSTERY in '67, he also debuted DEADMAN in the failing book STRANGE ADVENTURES. The Spectre had been revived earlier under the tutelage of Julie Schwartz, but the initial format was so rationalized that any "weirdie" appeal of the hero was nullified. Spectre also got his own title in 1967, and though it didn't last long it soon converted into spookier stories before it died. In the late sixties and early seventies, even some of the "mainstream" DC superheroes began exploiting Gothic/horror themes on their covers, such as (obviously) BATMAN but also less obvious types like FLASH and TEEN TITANS. 

One fan attributed the big change to the influence of DARK SHADOWS in '66, but I think it was more likely that DC saw that the Warren magazines had been doing well since 1964 (EERIE) and 1966 (CREEPY) respectively, and that they hired guys like EC stalwart Joe Orlando to cut into that action. That also probably led to the revival of The Phantom Stranger in 1969, as well as another fifties character, Doctor Thirteen. The intersection of the two seems to be the first regular convocation of two "weirdies" at DC Comics, in 1969's SHOWCASE #80-- though the good doctor was dropped from the Stranger's adventures pretty quickly.

 

MYTHCOMICS: DAY OF VENGEANCE (2005)

 

One of my main purposes in maintaining my mythcomics-project is that I'm engaged with the ideal that great myths sometimes arise from the humblest (if not literally crappiest) prima materia. But I never quite saw my thesis validated quite so quickly as today. A day or two ago, I decided to work my way through a library loaner, THE DETECTIVE CHIMP CASEBOOK, which collected all of the Golden/Silver Age stories of the analytical animal. I didn't like any of the scripts or even Infantino's artwork, but it made me curious to find out: when exactly did DC Comics decide not only to revive "Bobo T. Chimpanzee," and why did someone decide to stick the ape in the midst of DC's newly-forged "Weirdoverse?" It was easy enough to find out that Chimp started hanging out with magic-users in the 2005 six-issue series DAY OF VENGEANCE, penciled by Justiniano and written by Bill Willingham of ELEMENTALS and FABLES fame. I hadn't read that series, but since it seemed in predictated on the "Green Spectre" storyline from DAY OF JUDGMENT, I had to re-read that limited series for the first time in 25 years. As I noted in my review today, this Geoff Johns item may be one of the worst of its type out there.         

So, as I said, I never read VENGEANCE in the twenty years since it came out, and I more or less expected some adequate formula from Willingham at best, as opposed to Johns' extremely lame hackwork. The only thing VENGEANCE took from JUDGMENT was the idea that The Spectre, the divine "Spirit of Vengeance" in the DC Universe, needed a mortal body in which to exist. He apparently had Hal Jordan's body to occupy for about four years after the events of JUDGMENT, but at some point, they got a divorce, and at the beginning of VENGEANCE, the Ghostly Guardian has gone a little nuts. Eclipso, one of the Universe's foremost tempter-figures, decides that it takes a nut to crack a nut, so he manages to possess the body of Jean Loring, who joined the domain of the cuckoos in 2004's IDENTITY CRISIS. In this new female form, Eclipso-Jean uses feminine wiles to tame the unquiet spirit and give him an inventive new mission. Since the Spectre is opposed to all lawbreaking, why not destroy all magic within the Universe, since magic is based on breaking, or at least bending, natural law? The Spectre, being a sucker for a bad girl, falls for this queasy logic and begins a jeremiad against all things mystical.                 

I suppose that Willingham sorta-borrowed one other thing from Johns: a loose confederation of magic-affiliated heroes who would save "the Day." But Johns whipped together a bunch of big-name magi and gave them the portentous name of "The Sentinels of Magic." Willingham came up with a new lineup and coined the group-name "Shadowpact," which would get its own DC title the very next year. Willingham purposely got many of the "big guns" out of the way for his story-- Doctor Fate, Phantom Stranger-- and concentrated on a Defenders-like collection of oddballs: Ragman, Enchantress, Nightshade, Blue Devil, the aforementioned analyst-ape, and the sword-and-sorcery type Nightmaster, who like the chimp had only recently been revived for a handful of stories.             

Though there are still one or two powerful forces to be enlisted against the Spectre, not least being the Original Captain Marvel, the less powerful Shadowpact members have to seek to use strategy against the supremely powerful spirit. It may not be total coincidence that this was also the modus operandi of the 1980s SUICIDE SQUAD, which is also where most DC readers would have previously encountered both Nightshade and Enchantress. The heroes' chances are not improved by the fact that Enchantress herself has an "evil self" that sometimes emerges to muck things up, or that she and Nightshade shared the same body for a time during their SQUAD days.  

Shadowpact's initial strategy is twofold: Enchantress does a spell that draws power from other magicians and funnels it to help Captain Marvel, while the others take on Jean-Eclipso, who's considerably less powerful than her astral ally. As a backup plan, Nightshade and Chimp go looking for a trump card in Black Alice, a side-character introduced in Gail Simone's BIRDS OF PREY comic. It's during this section that Willingham explains how Chimp became one of the magic-users who hung out at Nightmaster's "Oblivion Bar." In line with a 1981 story that showed Chimp and Rex the Wonder Dog both becoming immortal from drinking at the Fountain of Youth, Willingham asserts that now Chimp also has the power to talk to animals as well as to converse in human speech (which wasn't a property of "Bobo T. Chimpanzee.") 

  

 

    

Suffice to say that despite lots of heady, cosmos-shattering battles-- the very thing JUDGMENT did not offer-- Jean-Eclipso and the Spectre aren't easily defeated, and a scene in which the crazed Spirit of Vengeance contends with the wizard Shazam upon the Rock of Eternity looks a bit like what might happen if Spectre contended with the standard long-bearded image of the Judeo-Christian God. Shazam has one of the best lines in the series when he tries to reach the Spectre and warn him that he can't do away with magic, that all he can accomplish will be to is to remove all the controls that centuries of magecraft have elaborated-- a topic that also figures into this 2018 JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK arc. Shadowpact does finally defeat Jean-Eclipso by sending both the insane Jean and her puppet-master into permanent sunlight. However, that's all the closure the reader will get, because Willingham was obliged to leave things in a state of partial chaos for the sake of the ensuing INFINITE CRISIS story by Geoff Johns. All that said, Willingham actually gave the nature of the "Weirdoverse" some thought, as well as coming up with some genuinely funny badinage for the motley crew of heroes. I'm not sure if he originated the idea that former S&S stalwart Nightmaster was now a greying fifty-something who ran the Oblivion Bar where Detective Chimp came to get drunk. But I liked the varied number of cameos that the writer and artists worked into the bar's background scenes, such as Arion, The Vixen, Andrew Bennett, Animal-Man, Jennifer Morgan of WARLORD and Valda from ARAK SON OF THUNDER.               

EDIT: On 5-23-25, I was able to read a supplement that more or less provided closure for the VENGEANCE series: a follow-up, again by Willingham and Justiniano, called DAY OF VENGEANCE-INFINITE CRISIS SPECIAL. Though the story wasn't as well-plotted as the six-issue series, the special showed various occult heroes (1) solved the problem of the Spectre running amok and (2) re-assembled the Rock of Eternity after the Ghostly Guardian shattered it. Thus, even though like DAY OF JUDGMENT the conclusion juggled more characters than it needed, the special counts as the conclusion to VENGEANCE-- even though the special also generated some new plotlines that played into both Geoff Johns' INFINITE CRISIS and Willingham's ongoing SHADOWPACT series that same year of 2005. 

NULL-MYTHS: DAY OF JUDGMENT (1999)

 

Though I have never tried to follow the vast majority of the DC and Marvel multi-character crossovers, I think I actually bought and read DAY OF JUDGMENT'S five issues back in The Day. I remembered nothing about the story 25 years later, except that it spotlighted the hare-brained (and quickly reversed) idea of following up Hal Jordan's crimes as a mind-controlled mass-murderer by turning the Silver Age Green Lantern into a new incarnation of The Spectre. Rereading it now, I'm ready to pronounce it not only an egregious example of a null-myth, but one even worse than the one I usually cited as the worst such multi-feature crossover, Jim Shooter's 1984 SECRET WARS. I think that even had I not reread WARS for that 2016 review, I would probably have at least remembered some of the story's events, clunky as they were. DAY is nothing but writer Geoff Johns and artist Matt Smith setting up the lame Green Spectre concept.                                  

Of course, WARS had 12 issues and DAY has only five, but that in my mind just more fully indicts the editors and creators who stuffed the story with Too Many Damn Characters. It doesn't help that artist Smith and writer Johns are just not suited to depicting a big cosmic cataclysm-story, so there are a lot of scenes with colorful figures standing around exchanging dull snatches of dialogue. Unleashing all the demons of Hell upon Earth was a plot that had been done before this by both DC and Marvel many times. But this one may be the least hellraising raisings of hell ever.     

Given that the Green Spectre idea turned into a whole lot of nothing, the only significance this DAY can be judged to possess would be that it was one of the first 1990s attempts of DC to exploit its "Weirdoverse," as discussed here. So at most DAY might have provided a stepping-stone to better things. But then, it's so bad, it would almost have to.      

MYTHCOMICS: BORN TO KILL (BATMAN AND ROBIN 1-8, 2011-12)

 

Not long after Grant Morrison finished his run on various Bat-titles with DEMON STAR, writer Peter J. Tomasi and artist Patrick Gleason launched a new BATMAN AND ROBIN title. The first eight issues continued Morrison's narrative regarding the Caped Crusader's relationship to his ten-year-old son, whom Batman agrees to train as the New Robin. And just as Morrison rewrote some elements of the 1987 SON OF THE DEMON story for his narrative, Tomasi did the same for Morrison. In SON, Batman has a consensual love affair with Talia Al Ghul and departed without knowing he'd left a bun in her oven, after which Talia put up the child for adoption. Morrison revised this scenario, in which Talia drugged Batman into having sex with her and thus knocking her up, and then kept the child Damien, but raised him as one of her assassins, capable of killing without remorse. Tomasi alludes to the copulation but implies that it was once more consensual. Tomasi may have done this because he wanted to de-emphasize Talia's role in the molding of Damien in order to better focus on the main conflict of the BORN TO KILL arc: how does a crimefighter dedicated to fighting evil without killing evildoers get through to a young boy who's been taught to "destroy your enemies before they destroy you?"                       

                           

A short prelude introduces the reader to a new Bat-enemy: a professional assassin named Nobody. He targets one of the various "international Batmen" whom Bruce Wayne funded during the Morrison run, and the killer later comments that the appearance of a particular European Batman provoked Nobody to journey to Gotham for a confrontation with the original. This event takes place around the same time as Batman's annual pilgrimage to Crime Alley, to venerate the memory of his slain parents. He encourages Damien to go along for the first time ever, and the boy does so, though he complains of his father's "sentimental nonsense." In truth, Damien desperately wants his father's approval, this being the reason he set himself to become the New Robin. However, the apple has not fallen far from the tree, for like his father Damien also does not like to admit needing anyone but himself. For Batman's part, his new role as a parent may have moved him to break with tradition for the sake of the future. He tells Damien that he will no longer honor the date of his parents' hideous deaths, but rather the date of their wedding, as a means of celebrating life. Batman concludes his last vigil in Crime Alley by taking a memento of that fateful night-- a ticket or brochure from the movie Bruce Wayne and his parents before the latter two perished. He makes the keepsake into a paper boat and watches it sail off into the sewer-river beneath Crime Alley.                                                                                                                                                                

Shortly thereafter, Batman and Robin contend with a gang of gunrunners. The criminals appear to get away but in truth they're caught and killed by the newly arrived Nobody. The villain makes a telling reference to his earlier slaying of the Euro-Batman, whom he regards as part of the crusader's "new global circus act." (Was the "circus act" metaphor a Dick Grayson reference?) Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne frets about Damien's barely repressed tendencies toward homicidal violence. The hero wonders if he's as perverse as Talia, for though Batman was born to prevent other children from meeting terrible fates, he shows an uncanny penchant for attracting younger people to serve in his crusade. But soon Batman has bigger problems, as he encounters, for the first time in many years, Morgan Ducard, grown son of Henri Ducard, one of the men who tutored Bruce Wayne in certain crimefighting skills. As a result of this new encounter with an old enemy, Batman grounds Robin from going on patrol.                                                                                                                                   

Not surprisingly, the volatile son of Batman takes the restriction as a personal affront, refusing to stay under cover from a threat his sire will not identify. Robin duly takes down some thugs harassing a couple of victims, with a very timely scene in which one thug tries to take phone-photos of Robin's death and the young crusader punches both the creep and his phone. However, his being out and about gives Nobody the chance to play mind games on the boy. Nobody correctly notes that one of Robin's opponents, while alive, is now all but brain-dead from the beating, and the assassin finishes the man off. He also paralyzes Robin, moments before Batman arrives. The older hero contends with Nobody, instantly realizing it's Morgan Ducard despite the concealing costume.                                                           

   Batman loses the fight, but Nobody, like many an earlier Bat-foe, wants the chance to gloat. He binds both heroes and makes them watch a homemade movie on an otherwise deserted drive-in movie screen, showing "Batman's Greatest Failures"-- that is, all the chaos made inevitable because Batman would not simply execute the villains he battled. Alfred comes to the rescue with Bat-tech, and Nobody is forced to flee. However, the fact that Batman didn't bare all regarding the origins of Nobody leads to new friction between the two crimefighters. Robin once more escapes Wayne Manor, though this time he plans to fake allying himself to Nobody in order to bring the villain down. While searching for Robin, Batman records, for his son's potential benefit, the full story of Bruce Wayne's experiences with Henri and Morgan Ducard. I won't elaborate that backstory here, except to say that Wayne's training under Father Henri resulted in creating Morgan's jealousy of the new student, thus leading to this current jeremiad.                                                         

    

Refreshingly, though, Tomasi reveals that Nobody never really intended to make Robin his new apprentice just to screw with Batman's head. Rather, because Morgan Ducard tried to kill Bruce Wayne, who retaliated by beating Morgan bloody and dumping Morgan in Henri's lap, Nobody intends to visit the same violence upon Damien, just to one-up Batman in symbolic terms. "You stole my father, so I'm stealing your son! Quid pro quo!" The two foes battle, and Batman wins, predictably sparing Nobody's life despite Batman's earlier "and you expect to live?" rhetoric.                                                                         

               

                                                                                                                                                                  However, because Nobody knows the heroes' civilian identities, and thus can strike at them again and again, Damien does what his mentor won't do: using the same paralysis technique Nobody taught him, in order to terminate the villain's life. Yet Batman does not upbraid his son this time. He only tells him that he will have to live with his act for the rest of his life-- even as Bruce Wayne lives with having come close to killing Morgan earlier-- but that he can still "be the best Damien Wayne you can be." And so, going back once more to my distinction between problems and conundrums, the "dramatic problem" of what to do about Nobody's menace is solved, but the "mythopoeic conundrum"-- as to whether killing is ever justified-- always remains partly open.