COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 3

 In the first COSMIC ALIGNMENT essay I cited a few exceptions to my general rule that every time a given Sub-icon appears within the cosmos of a particular Prime icon, that Sub is aligned with that Prime. The most relevant exception was this one:

... in comic books Thanos first appeared in an IRON MAN story, but he was never established, via escalated appearances, as an Iron Man villain. Instead, his creator Starlin aligned Thanos first with the third Captain Marvel and then with Warlock, and given the demise of the former, I would tend to think that he aligns most strongly with Warlock.

Probably as a result of seeing DEADPOOL VS WOLVERINE, I gave some thought to the way various X-MEN characters had been mixed and matched with respect to alignment in their media-history, and I settled on illustrating my thoughts with the example of Lady Deathstrike. All of the stories I study herein also count as near-myths in my system.

Strangely, Lady Deathstrike starts as a side-character in a five-part DAREDEVIL story by Denny O'Neil. She isn't even in the first part of that story, but Wolverine is. I haven't troubled to check exactly what the status was re: the origin of Wolverine's adamantium skeleton, but O'Neil's story came out in 1983, eight years before Barry Smith produced the "Weapon X" continuity. In DAREDEVIL #196, both Wolverine and Daredevil learn of a plot by Japanese criminals to ship the bedridden hitman Bullseye-- reduced to a paraplegic toward the end of Frank Miller's run on DAREDEVIL-- in order to restore the villain to health by duplicating aspects of the bone-reinforcement operation used on Wolverine. Now, O'Neil had the unenviable task of keeping up the sales of the DAREDEVIL title after Miller's departure, and plainly one of his strategies was to bring back Bullseye. O'Neil had no involvement in the X-titles, so patently he must have got editorial approval to forge a link in the "Wolverine's origin" chain. But though one might think in 1983 Wolverine would be extremely curious about Bullseye's benefactors-- or anyone who had any information on the process of making an adamantium skeleton-- the X-Man quickly loses interest in the case so that the Man Without Fear is free to journey to Japan alone. Incidentally, though O'Neil isn't very good with Wolverine's dialogue, he does seek to play the X-Man's disregard for "playing for keeps" against Daredevil's compunctions against killing.

In Japan Daredevil rescues a young woman, Yuriko Oyama, from her father, the man responsible for seeking to remake Bullseye into his own private assassin. Said father runs his own private island full of mercenaries, and he has assumed the sobriquet "Dark Wind" to indicate his passion for taking Japan back to its warlike past. As an indicator of his monomania, he has inflicted facial scars on all of his adult children, including Yuriko, because he himself suffered scarring in his war years. Yuriko helps Daredevil infiltrate Dark Wind's island, but the two of them are too late to prevent both the operation on Bullseye and his subsequent escape back to America. (Daredevil concludes the sequence by following him back for a confrontation in issue #200.) All the Japanese issues, then, deal with Daredevil getting involved in Yuriko's quarrel with her father. There's a frustrated romantic arc involved as well, just as there was in O'Neil's previous father-daughter meditation, the alliance of Ra's Al Ghul and Talia in Bronze Age BATMAN. Yuriko has fallen in love with one of Dark Wind's retainers, and she wants to free her lover Kira from her father's influence. Her part in the story concludes when she saves Daredevil by stabbing her evil dad from behind.

In all likelihood O'Neil deemed Yuriko a minor support character, and since he concluded issue #199 (poetically entitled "Daughter of a Dark Wind") by giving her a romantic reunion with her lover Kira, he probably would never have revived her in another story. Since Dark Wind scarred Yuriko's late brothers the same way he scarred her, one can't argue a straightforward Oedipal complex-- though it's still mildly significant that Yuriko has to kill her dad to get access to her young lover. Had Yuriko been left alone, she would have remained a subordinate icon with very minor charisma.

But she wasn't left alone, as I'll address in Part 4.