MYTHCOMICS: NEVADA 1-6 (1998)

In general I didn't like a lot of Steve Gerber's post-Bronze Age work. The antic creativity present in such 1970s features as THE DEFENDERS, MAN-THING and HOWARD THE DUCK faded in favor of an often nihilistic sourness. Possibly this feeling caused me to quickly pass over NEVADA, a six-issue 1998 Vertigo series by Gerber and artist Phil Winslade. But now it seems to me one of Gerber's best accomplishments from the latter part of his career.

In a roundabout way, NEVADA arose from one of the author's more bizarre inspirations. The story goes that in 1977 Gerber missed his deadline for HOWARD THE DUCK #16, and that, rather than simply reprinting an earlier HOWARD story, he and some artists whipped together a series of illustrated meditations on life, the universe, and everything, sometimes through the eyes of the acerbic duck, sometimes from Gerber himself. One two-page piece allowed Gerber to express his absurdist take on the then-prevalent "obligatory fight scene," in which a Las Vegas chorus girl and her pet ostrich battled an animated lamp. Many fans didn't care for the stratagem-- one reader wrote simply "Next time go reprint"-- but supposedly Neil Gaiman opined that he'd actually like to see such a story. Twenty years later, Gerber and Winslade produced NEVADA, though not from Marvel, the publisher of HOWARD, but under DC's Vertigo imprint.

Like many Gerber protagonists, the Vegas showgirl Nevada, whose birth-name is not disclosed, would have no luck if not for the bad kind. She dances for her living at the tacky "Nile Hotel and Casino," has an assortment of cool, trippy friends, and shows her essential kind-heartedness by rescuing her pet Bolero (named for the Ravel ballet composition) from an ostrich farm. Though she has some ongoing hassles, like a rejected boyfriend who won't take "no" for an answer, she came to Vegas to start a new life. To be sure, we learn nothing about the old life except that at nine years she auditioned for a Christmas church play by portraying the Virgin Mary with a pillow that realistically showed the icon as "great with child," thus evoking the ire of Christians who didn't like too much reality in their religion. As if to satirize religion in general, her featured dance at the Nile is a re-enactment of the Egyptian story of Osiris' dismemberment, but given a snarky feminist denouement.

However, soon Nevada has bigger problems than a stalker (who, by the way, gets totally trounced by one of Bolero's deadly kicks). Some innocent tourists at the Nile get literally dismembered by an alien visitor from another realm, and Nevada finds herself the victim of time-slips, causing her to encounter cavemen or to witness a guillotine-execution during the Reign of Terror. Who's responsible? Is it Mister DeVesuvio, a mysterious crime-boss who has a glass tube in place of his head? (A similar character, Ruby Thursday, appeared in Gerber's DEFENDERS.) Or is it the drunken sot Odgen Locke, who once taught theoretical physics but now seems to be able to transform himself into an angel-winged warrior? But no, the real culprit is a cosmic event breaking down the boundaries between worlds, which incidentally makes possible the invasion of the aforementioned killer alien. Nevada actually meets and kills the alien, but there's an unnamed higher power who wants her special talents to be a "Rift Warrior," a defender of the cosmic order.

There have been dozens if not hundreds of reluctant heroes since the debut of Marvel Comics, but Gerber isn't interested in characters who make token protestations before easily acceding to the call of destiny. Through the author's Bronze Age work alone it's clear that Gerber enjoyed the allure of combative heroes while still feeling a lot of ambivalence about the use of violence, particularly sanitized violence, as a means of escape. Thus when Nevada's abducted by the "higher power" to put her through an ordeal called "the Hammer," we're not talking a few strenuous training-sessions with Master Yoda. Instead, Nevada goes through tons and tons of patented Gerber mindfuckery, leaving the reader wondering if her cosmic perceptor is on the side of the angels or not. But Gerber does make Nameless Higher Power the vessel of one essential nugget of wisdom: that most of sentient suffering arises from a hunger so great that it rises to the level of universal decay, not unlike the principle of entropy expoused by the villains in the Man-Thing tale "How Will We Keep Warm When the Last Flame Dies."  Nevada, despite her distrust of her perceptor, Nevada does have the stuff to fight back a downfall that could be brought about not by an evil overlord, but rather by "some moronic soul whose ego cannot endure being second in line." And thus Nevada does become a Rift Warrior and forces back a greater invasion of alien dipsticks bent on destroying the fabric of space-time

After this, the dancer returns to reality, though not without more attendant troubles. Clearly, the author left the door open for more stories with Nevada, Bolero and their quirky pals, but since it was a creator-owned project, this was the last show for the Vegas showgirl. Perhaps it's just as well that she went out on a high note. Nevada sums up her situation and her mordant but courageous philosophy in a letter, ending in part with the words:

"So what do you do when reality bites back and the new life falls apart. I can only speak for myself. Fuck it raw and keep dancing."

MYTHCOMICS: AMAZONIA (1997)

Despite the many diverse iterations of Wonder Woman since creator Marston shuffled off this coil in 1947, few later interpretations have shown a sense of historical perspective with regard to the feature's feminist message.

Marston, of course, conceived of his Amazons as a reaction against the patriarchy of ancient Greece. After establishing this backdrop for the origin of Wonder Woman's lost Amazon isle, he then brought the heroiine and her people into contact with the modern world, particularly with 1940s America, so that Marston's idealized matriarchy could function as tutelary spirits to the young democracy, guiding it away from extreme patriarchy and toward gender equity.

AMAZONIA follows in the footsteps of earlier projects under the Elseworlds imprint by transporting one of DC's venerable characters into a new historical milieu: that of Victorian England. The graphic novel's setup dispenses with Marston's meliorating approach, by showing a domneering patriarchy reducing the idyllic Amazon isle to a shambles, and turning Princess Diana, as well as the mortal women of Great Britain, into mere chattels.

As far as the story's rhetorical argument is concerned, it hardly matters whether or not the real Victorian England was the ultimate expression of patriarchy, either in comparison with other contemporaneous cultures or with England in other eras. Writer William Messner-Loebs and artist Phil Winslade are concerned with a literary myth of Victorian England, even if the creators demolish one of the keystones of that matrix: a mass assassination of the Victoria and most of the British Royal Family. Thus AMAZONIA's version of Victorian England is an alternate history not only for having Amazons in it, but because the world is historically changed on its own terms. Further, after getting rid of most of the Royals, Loebs and Winslade choose to embody the patriarchy of the era in one historical-yet-legendary figure: the same one featured in Alan Moore's FROM HELL.

There had been assorted English serial killers before Jack the Ripper gained infamy. Yet if there's any single figure who has come to embody British patriarchy to modern minds, it probably would be Saucy Jack. His infamy springs not from simply killing women, but from both mutilating and sometimes dissecting them-- thus making him a cardinal representative of male misogyny.

But later for the Ripper: AMAZONIA opens with a scene clearly riffing on a similar setup in Marston's 1942 origin-tale, wherein Princess Diana gets a job showing off her amazing skills on stage. In Alternate-England, long after the demolition of her Amazonian homeland, Diana has grown to maturity as an orphan waif in England, and, upon reaching maturity, she's discovered by an evil (and British) version of Steve Trevor, who marries her, spawns her children, and exhibits her supernormal strength in stage-plays for the wonderment of audiences. Moreover, though Diana does not know it at the time, Trevor is also the reason her homeland was devastated by the English military, thus inverting his original role as a conduit between the Americans and the Amazons.

But the real source of misogyny in Alternate-England is not Trevor. Though the nascent Wonder Woman is the star of the story, she's too far from the seat of power to provide an overview of the situation. Thus the Loebs-Winslade tale is narrated throughout by one of the few survivors of the death of England's aristocracy; Edward, Duke of Clarence. Ripperologists will be familiar with this historical personage as a frequent candidate for Britain's most famous serial killer. Here, he is saved from the (apparent) accident that claims the lives of the other Royals, but reduced to a cripple who nevertheless becomes a near-transcendent spirit who chronicles all that happens in the narrative. But though this Edward is not the Ripper, his survival makes possible the improbable ascension of an American adventurer to the throne of Alternate-England-- and though his surname, "Planters," is supposed to signal his ties to the Plantagenet family, the reader will immediately guess his real nature through his given name: Jack.

Apparently not content with being the King of England, King Jack's rampant misogyny brings about new customs, like having Englishwomen forced to wear chains on their wrists as signs of their submission (another transparent Marston-borrowing). And though he's no longer in a position to go around stalking scarlet women in Whitechapel himself, he has a group of misogynistic nobles run around in masks and stovepipe hats, attacking women. By so doing, King Jack unwittingly brings forth his own nemesis, as Diana defends women against such attacks, and slowly begins to remember her buried history.

Like many a villain before him, King Jack takes steps against his heroic enemy, capturing her but foolishly not killing her. Instead, he takes her to the remnants of the Amazons' devastated island home, which Diana hazily remembers as "Amazonia," and prepares to execute her, along with some other Amazon survivors that the King has kept around, just for this dramatic finish. The Amazons' opponents are none other than Trevor and various Jack-imitators, given a "distillate of masculinity," so that they all change into musclebound monsters reminiscent of the many boulder-shouldered brutes seen in Golden Age WONDER WOMAN.

Naturally, not only does Wonder Woman marshal her own strength against these foes, she also inspires her fellow Amazons to action, while indirectly moving enslaved Enlgishwomen to rise up against their oppressors. Nevertheless, following the defeat of odious males like Jack and Trevor, Loebs and Winslade end the story with an image of a hieros gamos between the world of patriarchy and that of matriarchy, as the Princess Diana becomes wedded to the good son of evil Jack, who just happens to be named Charles-- and yes, Loebs makes the most of the real-world wordplay.