A few years back I played around with using "Black History Month" as a theme for February, though I was pretty loose in my criteria, often mixing racial myths as I pleased. I wasn't really thinking about following the theme this year, but I chanced upon a one-shot story in one of Marvel's many inventory-filled publications, which is like finding the proverbial diamond in the garbage.
And it seems even more improbable, given that the star of this story is Brother Voodoo. This Haitian hero was launched by Marvel in 1973 around the same time as a similarly-themed title, TALES OF THE ZOMBIE, both of which showed a peculiar obsession Marvel Editorial formed at the time for the linked subjects of voodoo and zombies. Neither feature was successful, and in fan-circles Brother Voodoo has often seen as a lame character, particularly thanks to humor-artist Fred Hembeck. I don't recall if Hembeck's mockeries of the hero predate or postdate this 1990 story, in which he himself adopted a more "straight" style to illustrate this one-off tale with writer Scott Lobdell. Absent further information, I will assume that Lobdell submitted this VOODOO script in his tryout period, and that it was assigned to Hembeck after the fact.
Intentionally or not, VOODOO utilizes a trope I think appeared with some frequency in Chris Claremont's work of the seventies and eighties; a trope I'll call "good man gives in to bad desires." Despite the story's punny title it's entirely serious in tone, and one reason I may like it is because the original hero in his short-lived seventies series was so good as to be thoroughly bland.
The hero narrates his own story, and his first line foregrounds his fallibility: "It was never my intention to become Brother Voodoo." In the course of the narrative he references the basics of his origin. Born Jericho Drumm of Haiti, he studied psychology in the U.S. but returned to his native land to support his brother Daniel. Daniel, a priest of voodoo, was slain by a rival, and Jericho mastered the Haitian mystic arts in order to avenge him. His most notable power was that Jericho had somehow merged with the spirit of his dead brother, and could send Daniel Drumm's spirit into the bodies of enemies, possessing them to do Jericho's will a la the DC hero Deadman. FWIW, the Daniel-spirit never seems to have any personality, as if it was just a raw magical force instead of the ghost of a once living human.
On the second page Jericho, who has said that "voodoo is all about belief," illustrates this credo by rescuing a boat on a storm-swept sea, seeming to become a giant, though this may be only in the minds of those being rescued. The reader meets Jericho's girlfriend Loralee Tate, a nurse seeking to cure an immunological crisis among the Haitian people. She mentions that she's glad she didn't leave for the States as she planned earlier, but Jericho's guilty thoughts make clear that he had something to do with both her change of mind and the medical crisis.
Page four sets down the cause of that guilt. Upon being informed of Loralee's plan to go home, he confesses, "I was afraid of losing her, so I used my brother's spirit to possess her, to insure our love-- to destroy our love." Though the script does not specify everything that followed, it's logical to presume that Jericho had sex with Loralee while she was under his control, or he wouldn't be nearly this guilty. The caption about his having "removed the lie" proves confusing, given that she still seems to be under his mental dominion back on page 2.
In any case, precisely because of Jericho's bond with nature through his voodoo mastery, the nature spirits of Haiti have brought about the immunological breakdown. He pleads with the spirits for forgiveness, but they only state that "forgiveness must come from you, and one other."
Due to the limited page count, Lobdell doesn't actually show the Haitian people being freed from the "penance" inflicted upon them by Jericho's sinful misuse of his power. Since on page seven Loralee is shown leaving Haiti as she originally planned, the most logical conclusion is that Jericho finally released her from his thrall, and that she realized what he had done. Loralee echoes Jericho's own intuition that his sin was a failure of belief in their love, strongly implying that because of this sin, he's lost out on any chance with her. She's clearly the "one other" that the spirits say must forgive him, and page eight wraps up with Jericho realizing that he must at least conditionally forgive himself in order to do better, to become the hero he meant to be.
I've seen only one online commentary on the story. Predictably enough, the speaker seemed to think that Lobdell was indulging in a rape-fantasy via mind-manipulation. But literary rape-fantasies are usually predicated on the enjoyment of superior power, and they don't show the rapists wallowing in guilt for what they've done. (Jack Hill's 1966 MONDO KEYHOLE provides a good shorthand example.) Current gender politics imply that a male can never transgress against a female without deserving eternal perdition, while female transgressions against males are not even conceptually possible. All I can say is that I think the ethic of forgiveness applies to this particular fictional situation, and for situations taking place in real life, each one must be evaluated individually as well.
A last point on the subject of Forgotten Continuity: though the "Haitian plague" is original to Lobdell's story, Loralee Tate did debut in the last three BROTHER VOODOO stories-- where she was still a registered nurse, but was also Black, unlike the one in Lobdell's VOODOO. Black Loralee may have been intended as a potential romantic partner for Jericho, but if so there are no indications in her only appearances. White Loralee, possibly occupying one of those many "alternate Marvel Earths," does not seem to have appeared again. And that's probably for the best given the ideological climate at the current Marvel Comics.
BTW, I belatedly found a page where Hembeck explained his involvement in the "Brother Voodoo is So Lame" schtick, which he admits that he continued but did not originate.
http://www.hembeck.com/More/Voodog/Why.htm
2 comments:
Loved the way Hembeck tore the bejeezus out of character while at the same time elevating him and keeping him visible. Voodoo did seem to dominate the American imagination for some few years in the early 70's. Suddenly zombies were in comics (Brother Voodoo) and TV (Kolchak The Night Stalker) and movies (Scream Blacula Scream).
I always thought that in the early seventies both voodoo and zombie films were marginal menaces in horror films of the decade, but I couldn't find a good chronology. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD didn't spawn many cinematic imitators-- before 1973, I only recall CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS. However, now it occurs to me that LIVE AND LET DIE, released in June 73, gave voodoo a big visual boost. That might have been in theaters around the time that guys like Roy Thomas and Len Wein were brainstorming about the possibility of a voodoo hero.
I should have remembered that after the success of TOMB OF DRACULA Marvel tried to build franchises around almost every sort of monster-icon out there-- a Golem, a Scarecrow, a Living Colossus. They might not have needed any successful model to follow: voodoo and zombies were just on the list of iconic menaces.
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