Less than two weeks ago, celebrated comics-creator George Perez passed away due to a long struggle with cancer. I had liked Perez's work since I had encountered it in the 1970s, where he put as much work into delineating a toss-off character like Marvel's "Man-Wolf" as he would later devote to Fantastic Four, Avengers, Teen Titans, Crisis on Infinite Earths and the 1987 re-launch of Wonder Woman. FWIW, I even reviewed the first three issues of the Amazon's rebirth for THE COMICS JOURNAL. Without looking back at the old review, I remember stating that I admired the writer-artist's updating of the Marston origin for comics of the eighties and nineties, though I found that the next two issues slumped back into standard superhero fodder-- and I tend to think most of his Wonder Woman scripts, whether he drew them or not, fell into the same rut. Thus, though he worked with superheroes for over forty years, it's my reluctant evaluation that his immense creativity was focused largely on design of spiffy looking new characters, but that he didn't bring to those characters the sort of mythopoeic personality I can find in the creations of Jack Kirby and Gardner Fox.
Nevertheless, the WONDER WOMAN title pushed Perez to incorporate archaic myths into the type of stories he told, and "Legacy" from issue #45 seems to be one of his best ventures into the mythopoeic realm-- even though, oddly, the starring character is barely in it.
One relatively obscure archaic myth-figure whom Perez brought into the WONDER WOMAN mythos in the first issue was Harmonia, daughter of Ares. The Greek war-god, usually given the Roman name of "Mars" in the Marston continuity, was a frequent opponent of the peace-loving heroine, but Marston didn't devote much space to the offspring of either the war-god or any other Greek deity. I won't explore the full history of Harmonia in the Perez Wonder Woman stories. However, issue #45 makes clear that one reason Perez chose to build up this character was because in archaic Greece Harmonia was one of many incarnations of "the Fatal Woman," one who brings bad luck to men without even intending to do so-- not unlike another Greek myth-figure of greater modern renown, Pandora.
"Legacy" opens with Harmonia seeking the counsel of the famed dispensers of mortal fates, the Moirai. Harmonia has overheard various intimations from both her father Ares and from the forge-god Hephaestus about some mysterious identity between the archaic Pandora and the modern heroine Princess Diana. The goddess's desire to resolve the mystery gives Perez the excuse to expatiate upon the heritage of the archaic Pandora, with an eye, naturally, to explaining her significance to modern readers.
Perez then weaves two stories of Pandora. The first follows many familiar tropes of the story from the Greek poet Hesiod, the main source for the tale of the lady and her box, though Perez mixes in his fair share of tropes designed to heighten a feminist interpretation. His first break with tradition is that he depicts how, following the Greek gods' triumph over the Titans, a man named Prometheus-- mortal, and therefore not a Titan himself-- infiltrates Olympus and steals fire for the benefit of his fellow mortals. As in most renditions of the traditional tale, Zeus then has Hephaestus craft a woman of clay, calling her Pandora, which name was said by some to mean, "the gift of all" because a variety of gods bestowed assorted charms upon her. (It's of some interest that when Robert Kanigher rewrote the Wonder Woman in the 1950s, he had her getting her powers from various Greek deities as well.) As in the Hesiod story, Zeus sends Pandora as a peace offering to Prometheus. Prometheus smells a rat and won't receive the gift, but his not-so-bright brother Epimetheus marries Pandora. A second divergence appears, however, in that Pandora brings with her the Box of Evil Fate to which her name was ascribed. In the original tale Prometheus has custody of the container from the first, which is why Pandora's opening of the box rates as a great betrayal.
Perez's version also spreads the blame by borrowing from the Adam and Eve story, in that Pandora doesn't open the fatal box on her own, but incites Epimetheus to do so. However, after the world becomes overwhelmed by multitudinous evils, Epimetheus is not penalized the way Adam is, by getting blamed for his sins. Only Pandora gets cast forth, and presumably dies alone, though the end of the story seems to indicate that her clay may get "recycled" into the prima materia from which Princess Diana is conceived.
Then Harmonia's conversation with the Moirai provides a segue to the second Pandora story, which is far more in line with the way modern feminists would rewrite the story to contradict Hesiod's misogyny. The Moirai speak of a time before either Titans or gods ruled Earth, implicitly "caveman times." The only deity was Gaea, a goddess coterminous with the Earth, who looked upon struggling humans as her children. By some process of "virgin birth"-- yet another shout-out to Marston-- Gaea conceived Pandora, who was not the recipient of gifts but the bestower of only good things from the jar she carries. (Scholars have asserted that the "box" attributed to Pandora, "pyxis" in Greek, was in the original text a "pithos," a storage jar.)
Yet, for reasons not made clear by Perez, the "Age of Titans" comes into being, followed by the Titan-god conflict which razes the Earth even though Later-Pandora has yet to unleash the evils of her box. Humankind at this point seems to lack any agency to be wicked, so Perez elides the traditional reason for the Greek deluge: that Zeus chose to wipe out most of humankind because of their sinful ways. Instead, most of humankind dies because kind-hearted Gaea weeps "ten thousand tears" at the carnage. Perez keeps the idea that two mortals survive the flood, a son of Prometheus and a daughter of Pandora--thus, like Hesiod, making modern humanity the descendants of a "marriage" that didn't happen between the sires of each progenitor. Perez then observes that the later Pandora story was a repudiation of the true, earlier one, so that Woman became not "the Inspirer" but "the Tempter." Following the conclusion of the second story, the last few pages set up later WW storylines, and so aren't relevant to the mythopeic "meat" of the two conflicting narratives.
"Legacy" has a fair number of weaknesses. The artwork-- contributed by three female artists and one male-- is only fair overall, though the artists can't be faulted for a sequence in which Perez shows fierce gryphons guarding Zeus's sanctuary, but never explains how mortal Prometheus gets past the monsters. Perez also notes that the two survivors of the flood fling stones behind them when they survey the wasted world, but he fails to explain that this is the magical method by which the two humans repopulate the world-- an omission so major than one suspects editorial meddling. But overall "Legacy" is still a creditable entry into the ranks of modern mythcomics, and a tribute to George Perez's own legacy.
No comments:
Post a Comment