NEAR-MYTHS: DARK KNIGHTS OF STEEL (2021-2022)

I've not reviewed many of DC's "Elseworlds" projects-- which is what DARK KNIGHTS OF STEEL is, even though it does not use that tag-- because they tend to be no more than gaming-scenarios, where the creators move various characters into new positions for nothing but novelty's sake. An example of such an aesthetically nugatory work is 2015's DOOM THAT CAME TO GOTHAM. An awful lot of STEEL consists of just the usual aimless moving of franchise chess-pieces around for little effect, so in one sense there's not much that's special about this effort by writer Tom Taylor and artist Yasmine Putri (assisted by various artists drawing in her style).

The basic concept: Krypton still explodes, but this time Jor-El and his still pregnant wife Lara escape their doomed world and migrate to a "high-fantasy" version of DC-Earth. By "high fantasy" in this context, I mean that there's no necessary connection with anything in real-world history or with anything in regular DC-Earth, which theoretically is "our" Earth with superheroes and magical critters. The STEEL world is made up of assorted faux-medieval kingdoms inhabited by rough facsimiles of DC characters, and although magic is a regular presence, science is just barely getting started. 

Through assorted contrivances Jor-El and Lara ascend to the monarchy of one land after the deaths of the previous rulers, Thomas and Martha Wayne. In addition to Lara birthing Kal-El, she also births "Zala Jor-El," a.k.a. Supergirl, who seems to have been partly named for her "real" DC-Universe father "Zor-El." And then there's Bruce, who goes around in a Bat-helmet and is one of the few double-identity characters called by his superhero name. He's called a "bastard" in the genealogical sense, for reasons not revealed until halfway through the story, and the relationship of teenaged Bruce and teenaged Kal-El was the one or two elements that kept me curious about how the story would turn out.

The other thirty and forty characters are all spawned on the high-fantasy Earth and range from close approximations to the originals (John Constantine, "court jester" Harley Quinn, Princess Diana, Jefferson Pierce) to '"in-name only" congeners (The Metal Men, a bunch of knights who use the names of metals). We get two lesbian relationships, one more or less canonical (Harley and Poison Ivy) and one out of the blue (Diana and Zala), but they don't consume a lot of space. John Constantine gets the second longest arc, as he's responsible for a doomsday prophecy that seems to condemn the El Family. The prophecy appears to come true in such a way that three major kingdoms go to war, but Constantine eventually discovers that the menace behind the conflict is tied to a different flavor of DC-alien. I confess Taylor surprised me with his subterfuge here.

I said that the witty, lively relationship between Kal-El and Bruce was one of the things I esteemed about STEEL. The other is Putri's art. In a period when an awful lot of comic-book art is banal and ugly, Putri's designs possess a grandiose quality that reminds me of the strong fantasy-work of stellar figures like Richard Corben and Craig Russell, just to name two. Even when Taylor's just giving readers a jejune rehash of "How Oliver Met Dinah," Putri's art has an elevating quality foreign to most 21st-century comics art. I can see myself coming back to enjoy STEEL years from now, just to see how Putri gave the various DC heroes a "Brothers Hildebrandt" treatment.

MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 3

                             
The last comics-item I rated as an inconsummate null-myth was 1965’s “THE HAUNTED ISLAND” (CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN #43). It’s without question a story whose constituent parts don’t cohere into a pleasing whole, but it also illustrates my new distinction regarding concrescence, in that its parts don’t even relate to one another within the narrative.



For purposes of comparison with other narratives, I’ll identify ISLAND’s master thread as being that of “hero must confront evil counterpart.” To be sure, the story probably came about for extrinsic reasons of stoking the feature’s sales, in that editor Murray Boltinoff probably made the decision to give the heroes new uniforms, and assigned Bill Finger to come up with a rationale in story-form. Finger’s oddball solution was to have the “Challs” (as they were informally called) kidnapped by five mutated scientists, all of whom considered that they lived “on borrowed time”as did the quartet of adventurers. I mentioned that the imagery of ISLAND is all over the place, best exemplified by a mutant who looks like the Frankenstein Monster in a Beatle wig (the haircut even gets an explicit comment from one of the heroes). Yet even more damaging to the story as a whole is that the mutants initially want the heroes to subject themselves to mutation willingly—meaning that they’ll no longer be the heroic figures that the mutants found appealing. When the Challs decline, the mutants threaten to put them in suspended animation like the rest of their collection—though both scenarios would seem to render the idea of giving the heroes new costumes nugatory. Thus ISLAND demonstrates both a state of inconsummation and a poor level of mythopoeic concrescence.

To remain focused on the “evil counterpart” thread, a more effective example is 1969’s “AND SO MY WORLD ENDS” (JLA #71). Like the Challengers story, this one focuses upon an ensemble of heroes, though one among them, the Manhunter of Mars, receives “special guest star” billing. J’onn J’onzz convinces the heroes of Earth to follow him to Mars to prevent a Martian threat to Earth, but even the Martian doesn’t know that a civil war between Mars’ two races has decimated both sides, leaving only handsfuls of survivors on both sides. Green Martian J’onn meets his White Martian opposite number in battle, and though J’onn prevails, the victory is pyrrhic, since his civlization is all but perished. This is an entirely consummate story insofar as it gives the reader a feeling of completeness and satisfaction, even if it may incorporate one or two lapses in logic. But the master-thread of “hero’s evil counterpart” is only adequately explored, though a subordinate thread about the futility of war provides ample support, giving WORLD a fair level of mythopoeic concrescence.

   Finally, the 1947 story “THE INJUSTICE SOCIETY OF THE WORLD” provides an example of both consummate status and a high level of concrescence. In my review I wrote:

Other comics-features had played around with the idea of pitting heroes, whether in solo features or in groups, against teams of villains, so the basic idea of the Injustice Society was nothing new in 1947. What makes this story a "mythcomic," though, is Kanigher's attention to making the villain-group a formidable reflection of the good-guy group.
Much of the time, the JSA heroes won their battles a little too easily, partly because so many of their foes were just ordinary thugs and swindlers. I've argued elsewhere that one has to respect the gumption of commonplace crooks in challenging do-gooders who had godlike powers, but it still didn't usually give rise to many memorable battles.

I won’t repeat the various reasons I stated for validating the mythopoeic discourse of INJUSTICE, though, like the other two stories analyzed here, the tale’s not free of flaws and is not one of the more“sophisticated” even within the superhero genre. But it provides a good example of a story notable for just one strong master-thread, and nearly no subordinate threads in the mythopoeic vein.

MYTHCOMICS: AMERICAN SECRETS (1992)

  “There are no Communists on this world. There were on mine. They’re all dead now.”—J’onn J’onzz, AMERICAN SECRETS.

The DeMatteis-Badger MARTIAN MANHUNTER mini-series was the first major re-interpretation of the J’onn J’onzz character following the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” event. Certain aspects of that series are touched upon—and occasionally subverted—in the 1992 AMERICAN SECRETS by Gerard Jones and Eduardo Barretto. It was, in those days, good business sense to maintain some degree of fidelity to the most recent version of a comic-book character’s continuity, even if the visions of writers DeMatteis and Jones could not be more different.

SECRETS takes place in the decade of the 1950s, apparently not long after J’onn J’onzz, a citizen of Mars, became exiled upon the planet Earth. Thus it's also some time before he became a known superheroic presence, particularly through hie membership with the not-yet-assembled Justice League. If the 1992 story had truly been in line with the 1988 mini-series, then J’onn would have no true recollection of his real life on Mars, as it’s not until 1988 that he knows he’s lived with false, concocted memories since he began his time on Earth. Jones doesn’t overtly dispute the DeMatteis scenario, but it’s important to Jones’ narrative that the hero does remember at least his sense of communion with his vanished people, as well as being able to assume his true, “cone-headed” form when he pleases. One minor reason for this, I would imagine, was that once hardcore fans knew the “big reveal” of the mini-series, there was no longer a compelling reason not to make use of the new Martian Paradigm. This was particularly true given the different ambitions of the two writers. DeMatteis was concerned only with penning a eulogy for a solipsistic, psuedo-poetic civilization, but Jones’s intent is sociological. He explores the cultural differences between the new “DC-Mars” and the post-Crisis version of "DC-Earth"—which, by the way, had consolidated two separate cosmogonies, so that the Justice Society, which formerly inhabited another Earth, now shared a common history with the later Justice League.

The dominant impression of American in the 1950s decade has often been characterized as a time of lockstep conformity, as evidenced by such real-world events as the McCarthy hearings and the advent of the Comics Code. Indeed, once the Justice Society’s history was integrated with that of DC’s current heroes, an explanation for their inactivity during the 1950s had to be propounded: one in which the earlier superheroes, crusaders for justice during the war years, retired from the public scene due to Congressional inquiries.

It’s arguable, though, that the decade of the 1940s evinced greater conformity, and that the social codes of that era began to break down in the 1950s, resulting in a strange admixture of conformity and rebellion. The burgeoning medium of television put forth images of contented nuclear families in shows like “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver.” Yet on the margins of society dwelled the disaffected Beat poets, well represented by Allen Ginsburg’s classic phrase, “lizard-headed hipsters” (which phrase makes an early appearance in SECRETS). It was a time in which Americans set themselves up as a capitalistic bulwark against godless Communism, and yet the abuses of money-hungry gangsters resulted in the growth of Communism in Cuba, so that the tiny island became a blemish upon the escutcheon of the Western Hemisphere. And of course, in the same decade when most Americans believed that comic books were purely the province of children, EC Comics and MAD magazine commenced, forming the vanguard of what most historians deem “adult comics.” Dalton Trumbo contemptuously referred to the decade as “the time of the toad.” But through the efforts of Jones and Barretto, it’s more like “the time of the lizard,” in which the lizard, in real life a creature of instinct, becomes rather an image of alien intellect, expressed through the science fiction image of the bug-eyed monster.

Jones and Barretto structure their story after the fashion of the hard-boiled detective story, a genre that prospered throughout the heyday of the pulp magazines and lived again through the newer venue of paperbacks books, even as paperbacks killed off the old pulps. I would imagine that the authors made that choice in part because the Martian Manhunter first saw print in 1955, as a backup feature in DC’s DETECTIVE COMICS. Yet this “man from Mars” didn’t solve crimes by following clues, like the magazine’s headliner Batman. J’onn J’onzz vanquished criminals using his super-scientific Martian powers, while remaining concealed from humankind in the identity of police detective John Jones.

However, in AMERICAN SECRETS J’onn/John must follow the pattern of the hard-boiled detective story. Like the private dicks of earlier days, J’onn has to learn how to follow instinct rather than logic, operating from “a word here, or a hunch there.” A club for Beat poetry leads J’onn to investigate a nationally popular television quiz show, “The Big Question.”  In the process of asking his own questions, J’onn crosses paths with one of the performers, child-star Patty Marie—and minutes later, J’onn sees another performer seemingly murdered during the show’s on-air broadcast. The Martian watches in disbelief as the show’s producers soothe the audience by claiming that the murder was a technical illusion. Another chance encounter at the studio leads J’onn to investigate a record promoter, and that encounter leads the Martian to meet a country-boy singer named Presl—er, Preston Perkins. Then Preston directs the curious alien to an encounter with a crazy artist who makes books about “lizard-headed conquerors,” and this encounter eventually leads the manhunter—accompanied by both the well-coiffed singer and the distressed child star-- to hunt down the heart of the conspiracy, with the help of comic books.

The preceding paragraph covers only the most basic aspects of the first of the three SECRETS installments, and leaves out a lot of stuff, like lizard-headed cops and men who burst into flames whenever J’onn gets too close to the truth.  J’onn himself is the only unifying agent that links all the pieces of the puzzle, for only he, the alien under cover, can discern the little differences in human culture, the differences that might seem like ordinary human conservatism to other humans, but which stand out to the real alien as indicators of extraterrestrial influence. The investigation also allows Jones and Barretto to satirize the real-life aspects of American conservatism, all of which, so far as we know, were not managed by aliens.

One of these was the growth of the suburb, the closed-off community separated from the city proper. Certain early suburban communities were called “levittowns,” and Jones spoofs these with a suburban division named “Leavitzville,” which also puns upon the title of TV’s family-comedy “Leave It to Beaver”—although the too-perfect family J’onn encounters sports the name of “the Andersons,” a borrowing from “Father Knows Best.”

A second aspect is the position of comic books in American culture. In Leavitzville the Martian meets a publisher of comic books, one Melvin Keene, who is a conflation of two major real-life individuals. Predominantly Keene is a fictional version of William Gaines, for Keene, like Gaines, published a line of boundary-pushing comic books, lost his business due to societal and governmental pushback, and survived only by continuing to publish a satirical comics-magazine (MAD in the real world, NUTS in the DC Universe). Yet Keene is also his own father, for the fictional figure is also William Gaines’ famous father, Maxwell. Maxwell Gaines in effect gave life to almost every major DC hero who wasn’t Superman or Batman, as well as bringing a bunch of the superheroes together as the aforementioned Justice Society. Maxwell’s contentions with other DC personnel resulted in a buyout, after which Maxwell briefly published “Educational Comics”—and upon his death, William inherited the company, changed it to “Entertaining Comics,” and made pop-culture history. When the EC line failed, William Gaines had to have MAD distributed by American News, the same company that distributed the comics of his father’s old partners, and later Gaines was obliged to sell MAD to a company that became part of the Time-Warner empire.

Finally, the Martian has his first encounter with the Golden Age, when he finds that even the heroes of the Justice Society have been subverted by the conspiracy. Or have they? One of the heroes discloses a nonsense-word—itself a distortion of one that appeared in various MAD spoofs—and makes it a vital clue that leads the Manhunter to his quarry. And it’s at this point that J’onn J’onzz experiences the quintessential 1950s irony of “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Almost everything in SECRETS works on the same level as the best hard-boiled fiction: as a sort of existential thrill-ride. The only exception is a sequence in which Jones gilds his lily a bit too much. Most of the conspirators believe the same illusion that they project upon the masses, but one exception is “Whitey.”  This kid-actor plays the titular boy-star of Jones’ imitation “Leave It to Beaver” teleseries, but Whitey isn’t a believer in the cult of niceness and decency. The boy--assuming that he’s a real kid, that is-- uses his stellar position to get lots of adult privileges—smoking and getting laid. He even tries to get familiar with Patty Marie, who, whatever her character’s age, is still a child in spirit. I wouldn’t have a problem with depicting this type of scuzzball character in a story where he fit the prevailing concept. But in this story Whitey’s just an indulgence, a needless red arrow to point out how bad the bad guys are.

SECRETS is not one of the better known graphic novels of the nineties, possibly because its appreciation hinges on the reader’s knowledge of DC cosmology. Additionally, its theme diverges from the academically dominant pronouncement of elitist critics: to the effect that “adult comics”like EC were true art and that superhero comics were merely meaningless “commodity art.” Jones’s theme celebrates creativity in any form, and thus SECRETS is—perhaps appropriately—in disagreement with the current ruling class.

NEAR MYTHS: "AND SO MY WORLD ENDS" (JLA #71, 1969), MARTIAN MANHUNTER 1-4 (1988)

J'onn J'onzz, a.k.a. "the Manhunter from Mars," remains one of the more quixotic DC characters; a C-list character in terms of being able to sustain his own feature, but strongly recognizable thanks to his long association with the Justice League.

The character's origins, first appearing in a backup strip in DETECTIVE COMICS #225 (1955), were not much more auspicious than various other SF-themed DC characters from the 1950s, though he did get more buildup than, say, Captain Comet or the Knights of the Galaxy. If one dates the Silver Age by beginning with 1954, the first year that the Comics Code took effect, then J'onn was one of the first Silver Age heroes, though he was slow, unlike 1956's Flash, to display any "legs." His nature is not unlike Superman's, with whom he shares several super-powers, though Manhunter also has the propensity of changing his shape as he wishes. Manhunter, like Superman, also a convenient weakness to mitigate his great powers; instead of kryptonite, commonplace fire. But whereas the Man of Steel is an infant when he's rocketed from Krypton to Mars, the Manhunter from Mars is a full-grown Martian adult when the teleport-beam of Earth-scientist Doctor Erdel whisks J'onn from his native world to that of Earth. J'onn J'onzz seemed to accept this exile from his people with remarkable equanimity; for the next fifteen years, during which he briefly enjoyed a stint as a headliner in HOUSE OF MYSTERY, he hardly ever expressed a desire to go home. On rare occasions readers saw glimpses of J'onn's race still living on Mars, but the Martians were portrayed as  no more than a run-of-the-mill alien people.

The findings of the 1964 Mariner-4 flyby, which convinced most people that there was no life on Mars, didn't have any effect on DC's version of Mars until 1969. By that time, not only had J'onn J'onzz lost his series berth in HOUSE OF MYSTERY, editors had dropped him from the Justice League. This fact probably contributed to the decision of the Justice League's then-current writer, Denny O"Neil, to devise a retcon story, in which it was revealed that J'onn's people no longer existed in the DC Universe. "And So My World Ends" in JLA #71 posited that at the time J'onn had been transported to Earth by Doctor Erdel, a war had broken out between J'onn's race of Green Martians and the never-before-seen White Martians. In fact, when J'onn was ":untimely ripped" from his world, he had been serving as a military commander for his people. J'onn shows up on Earth once more and involves the Justice League in investigating a new threat from Mars. The story concludes when the last Green Martian is confronted by the last White Martian.

They fight, and J'onn wins a bittersweet victory, becoming the last Martian. Nor surprisingly, later writers contravened this position, while Steve Englehart revised the O'Neil scenario slightly. O'Neil's story suffered from sloppy logic; if J'onn really had been yanked away from his planet during a crucial military situation, wouldn't he have eventually appealed to his JLA pal Superman to simply take him back to Mars? So Englehart, while not contradicting the events of O'Neil's story, suggested that J'onn had grown away from his world even before everyone on Mars had died. Nevertheless, "And So My World Ends" remains a significant near-myth, in giving the Martian Manhunter greater resonance as the last surviving Martian-- which, while not technically true, rings emotionally true.

The 1986 CRISIS series made it possible to revise all the continuities of DC comics-characters. No one was rushing to revise J'onn J'onzz for a new series, but by chance the 1987 reboot of the JUSTICE LEAGUE under Keith Giffen, Marc DeMatteis, and Kevin Maguire gave the old Martian new life. Manhunter had already returned to the League as a regular member in pre-Crisis days, but during the DeMatteis tenure he became the "straight man" to the new "funny JLA." J'onn became more popular with fans, which almost certainly contributed to DC's greenlighting a 1988 mini-series by DeMatteis and Mark Badger.

True, the four-issue MANHUNTER story tailgates on a plot-development from the JUSTICE LEAGUE comic, and several JLA members serve as support-cast-- and comedy relief-- appear in the narrative. However, the life of J'onn J'onzz and his Martian heritage is given a serious treatment, albeit of the "everything you think you know is wrong" nature.

In the JLA story, J'onn ingests a spore in order to save humanity from the spore's effects. Then he begins seeing a strange fiery specter that he originally takes as a hallucination brought on by consuming the spore. But it's soon evident that others can see the specter, and that it can wreak real-world effects. Moreover, the entity claims to be H'ronmeer, one of the gods of Mars, and for a while one wonders if the god is trying to claim worship from the Martian, as the assertive deity of Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven" pursues the poem's narrator.

I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.	5
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,

But in time it's evident that H'ronmeer has something else in mind. He spirits the Martian away from his allies, and drops him off (J'onn spends a lot of time falling in this story) in the company of none other than Doctor Erdel. Not only the Erdel in this continuity not dead like his predecessor, he also teleported to Earth a Martian suffering from a massive trauma. In his true Martian form, J/'onn is not a muscular, beetle-browed green humanoid, but a green humanoid whose limbs are almost impossibly attenuated.

While giving aid and comfort to the exiled alien, Erdel talks him into using his shapeshifting power to take his beetle-browed appearance, in order to look less alien. Erdel even used hypnosis to reprogram J'onn so that the Martian thought Erdel had died. J'onn was so traumatized by the events on Mars that he even destroyed the teleport-apparatus, which is DeMatteis' explanation as to why the character never tried to travel back home.

And what were those events? O'Neil followed the standard association of the planet Mars with the God of War, but DeMatteis makes his Mars a place of mystic peacefulness, with not a White Martian in sight. J'onn, as he undergoes the katabasis of his repressed memories, thinks:

"Was there a time when Martians murdered each other? Once, perhaps, in the dim past-- but violence was an aberration among us, not a natural state. We were a race of poets, mystics, seers and dreamers."

When the Martian race perishes, it doesn't come about from the influence of War, but from his old fellow horseman Pestilence. Plague takes the Martian race, and J'onn has spent years repressing the hideous memories, particularly of the deaths of his wife and daughter. Further, it's revealed that the Martian's supposed vulnerability to fire is psychological, not physiological. In the last years of the pestilence, the Martians tried to avert the sickness by burning the carcasses of the dead,  a strategy which DeMatteis  probably borrowed from real-life practices during Europe's Black Plague. Thus, Erdel snatched J'onn away from certain death alongside his people, though J'onn's "survivor guilt" caused him to want to bury the memories-- as well as, perhaps, motivating him to be a hero on his adopted planet Earth. Even H'ronmeer's fiery appearance is the result of J'onn's phobia toward fire: originally he was a god of life, not of "fire and death."

Finally, the life-god's motivations are revealed. Even though J'onn did not remember the true fate of his people any more, somehow his repression caused the massed spirits of the Martians to remain tethered to the planet, rather than ascending to what DeMatteis calls "heaven." Once J'onn has made peace of the "warring" sides of his being, he's able to bid farewell to his people, and truly accept his new home on Earth.

Significantly, the story concludes with an encomnium to "the man who discovered Mars, Ray Bradbury." It seems likely that DeMatteis seized upon the renewed interest in the Manhunter character to rewrite his origins to something more poetic than the O'Neil revision. In terms of both myth and poetry, DeMatteis is not able to reach any of Bradbury's heights, and if I were judging only that part of the story, I would consider MARTIAN MANHUNTER a "null-myth."

Over the years, though the O'Neil and DeMatteis versions have contributed to the established character of J'onn J'onzz. White Martians made a return to DC's continuity, and since they like J'onn have proven to be vulnerable to fire, it's a given that DC writers chose to ignore the psychological angle re: the Manhunter's weakness. However, though DeMatteis's take on "mystic Martians" is not very deep, he contributed much to the image of J'onn J'onzz as the "wise shaman" figure, to whom the Justice Leaguers often turn for guidance. I believe that the idea of his "true form" persists as well, and that the extinction of the Martians is now something of a conflation of both the O'Neil and DeMatteis stories. It's not a very deep myth, but it has had over the years some compelling moments, especially for a "C-list" character.