MYTHCOMICS: KLARION (2005)

 

Grant Morrison’s THE SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY may have been, consciously or otherwise, the author’s attempt to emulate Jack Kirby’s FOURTH WORLD tetralogy. The respective structures of both works are complex enough to deserve a new term: ‘mosaic serials.” In theory all of the serials can be read separately, since they are only loosely tied together, in contrast to the more standard multi-issue crossover—and yet, the author’s intent is clearly to lure readers into investing into all of them, since he generally sprinkles references to the other participating serials in a given continuity. The biggest difference is that while FOURTH WORLD had an open-ended design, in that it might have gone on as long as readers supported it, SEVEN SOLDIERS was finite in structure.

While I would not deem the entirety of SEVEN SOLDIERS to sustain the discourse of a mythcomic, Morrison excelled Kirby in the number of mythcomics he generated in this format. Where FOURTH WORLD succeeded best in mythmaking with THE NEW GODS series and one outstanding issue of MISTER MIRACLE, SOLDIERS succeeded with ZATANNA, SHINING KNIGHT, and KLARION, while the others in the mosaic rate alongside Kirby’s other two Fourth-World serials, JIMMY OLSEN and FOREVER PEOPLE.

Of all the narratives Morrison based upon Kirby concepts, KLARION deviates the most from the source. Kirby devoted only two stories of his 1972 DEMON series to “Klarion the Witch Boy,” and in those issues Klarion receives only a cursory backstory. The youth flees to Earth from a world where people dress like American Puritans, but the reader never sees the world itself. The Demon stumbles onto the scene while Klarion is being pursued by a merciless judge with magical powers. The Demon defeats the judge, and Klarion, who also possesses formidable magicks, tries to make the Demon his personal protector against other pursuers from Klarion's world. There’s probably no knowing as to why Kirby named the witch-boy after a medieval trumpet, but he modeled one aspect of the character on Puritan stories of witches, since Klarion is accompanied by an animal-familiar in the form of a cat. Klarion’s magical powers, his derivation from another world, and his cat Teekl are the most substantial elements Morrison borrows from Kirby. Interestingly, Morrison does not exploit one Kirby-trope: Teekl’s ability to transform herself into a sexy cat-humanoid. Possibly Morrison didn’t want anything that might have distracted from his revision of Klarion into a character embodying childlike innocence.

In the SEVEN SOLDIERS series, Klarion belongs to a pale-skinned people who are a hybrid of Puritan-era humans and invaders from the land of the faerie-like Sheeda. These people inhabit Limbo Town, a commonwealth built far beneath DC-Earth, and they survive in part through limited trade with the upper realms. 

A parliament of “witch-men” serve as the community’s secular government, while religious life is administered by a clique known as “Submissionaries” (a fortuitous combination of “submission” with “missionary.”) The community’s life is stultifying enough in having been patterned after Puritan culture, but Klarion has an additional reason to desire escape: his father disappeared into the realms above and was never seen again. Further, Klarion is intensely intelligent, so that his intellect is confined by the dull rote of Limbo Town—where, among other things, the inhabitants resuscitate their own deceased relatives and use the risen corpses as slave labor. (The resurrection-power is related to Sheeda-magic, itself based on the Celtic myth of the Cauldron of Rebirth, and Morrison ties this magic into whatever forces revived perennial DC-monster Solomon Grundy.)

Inevitably, Klarion does escape Limbo Town. In the corridors above Limbo, he meets Ebeneezer Badde, a “bad father” surrogate in that Badde like Klarion’s father is also a refuge from Limbo Town. However, Badde plans to exploit Klarion by selling him to a coterie of surface-world slavers. Klarion retaliates by taking magical control of Leviathan, a hive-mind comprises of numerous feral children who live in the sewers, and then uses the kids to rend Badde limb from limb. (To be sure, Badde serves as Klarion’s protector so briefly that there isn’t a big patricidal vibe in this scene.)

As Klarion proceeds upward, he learns more about the bizarre surface-world, where in his eyes even the most mundane things, from skyscrapers to candy bars, are sources of ceaseless wonder. He doesn’t precisely ever internalize Badde’s one piece of good advice—“it’s just a world; you’ll soon grow bored”—but Klarion does learn that the upper world privileges the exploitation of the young, as much as Limbo Town subsists upon the exploitation of citizens who perish of old age. It's through one of these child-exploiters, Mister Melmoth, that Klarion has his first-seen interactions with kids his own age. However, in time Klarion learns that Melmoth plans to harvest the people of Limbo Town for his own purposes. Thus the careless youth is obliged to come to the rescue of the people he deserted, and at the conclusion of the limited series, to become a “soldier” against the incursions of the evil Sheeda. (To be sure, Klarion’s cat Teekl acts as a conscience to Klarion much as Jiminy Cricket does to Disney’s Pinocchio, with Melmoth standing in for Stromboli the Puppeteer.)

Clearly, Morrison’s Klarion, though sometimes ruthless, is a more noble soul than Kirby’s mischievous brat. Whereas Kirby used the idea of a “witch-boy” as a one-dimensional “bad kid,” Morrison situates his Klarion between two milieus representative of colonial America—one milieu governed by backward superstition and religious fanaticism, one by endless expansion and economic oppression. Thanks to Klarion’s mastery of his people’s magic, Limbo Town enjoys a perhaps temporary victory over the world of Melmoth (who meets his comeuppance elsewhere, in the FRANKENSTEIN series). Like many authors from Great Britain, Morrison shows a more acute understanding of American history than do many American creators—though the limited nature of the KLARION series ensures that the insights go no further than this schematic mythological opposition.