NEAR-MYTHS" "THE TRILLION DOLLAR TROPHIES" (SUPERBOY #221, 1976)

 

This story, one of the last Jim Shooter wrote for The Legion before he became an assistant editor at Marvel, is a curious venture into "quasi-adult" subject matter for both Shooter and for a feature associated with the Superman mythos. That, more than the story's formal qualities, are its foremost features, and the tale garnered a degree of negative response for its appatrent employment of B&D elements.

Short version: the Legion-heroes are the "trophies" of the title. Two criminals, Grimbor and Charma, seek to capture the heroes for purposes of reaping a ransom from the group's rich patron. Charma is in some ways the "dominant" member, for she has the power to dominate any male and make him her subservient slave. However, this same talent evokes titanic rage in any female, even though Charma may not be impinging on anyone's particular mate. Charma thus needs a powerful male protector, so she enslaves the reluctant lock-maker, Grimbor the Chainsman. The duo seem like castoffs from a William Moulton Marston story, though I tend to think they represented a "one-off" idea for Shooter, rather than any syndromic obsession.

          First, while Grimbor takes on Colossal Boy, Charma gets beat on by Shadow Lass.

 

Timber Wolf and Light Lass try to separate their enemies, but as Charma takes another beating from the female Legionnaire, her cries cause both Grimbor and the male Legionnaire to come to Charma's aid, so these heroes are also captured.

Later, when Charma is about to kill off some of the captive heroes, Shrinking Violet, one of the weakest Legionnaires, comes to the rescue. Though Violet is governed by the same compulsion to punch out Charma, the heroine does so with an eye to making the captive males so angry they break their chains and accidentally clobber Grimbor. The story closes on the revelation that at some point Grimbor planned to get back in the driver's seat by making special chains to restrict her domination-power.

It's not a very good story, nor a deep story. But one must admit- it's not a dull story.  

  

NEAR-MYTHS" "THE MUTINY OF THE SUPER-HEROINES" ( ADVENTURE COMICS #368, 1968)

 

There's no way to be sure whether or not Jim Shooter read Jerry Siegel's 1964 "Revolt of the Girl Legionnaires." There are no direct callbacks in "Mutiny," and so it's just as easy to believe that Shooter came up with his tale purely as his own take on "the war between men and women." But whereas Siegel had used the trope of "Delilah conquering Samson with sex and guile," Shooter's trope is more like 'what if Male Samson meets Female Samson"-- which is pretty much what the cover depicts.

The narrative opens on a violent male activity, although it turns to be merely a training exercise, in which Karate Kid's "murdered" sparring-partner is the invulnerable Superboy in disguise. We don't see how the female Legionnaires occupy their free time until page 7. 

Extreme feminists would be irate that the girls are all seen cooing over fashion and furniture decorations. Princess Projectra poses an interrogative about their recent encounter with Thora, ambassador from a matriarchal world, Saturn Girl seems to think female dominion absurd, Light Lass provides some pushback by claiming that their Kryptonian XX member is as powerful as any old XY version, and Supergirl herself demurs, suggesting that at base her super-cousin is probably her superior in pure strength.

   

  

Shooter weaves no mysteries around Thora: she's immediately shown using special technology to artificially boost the powers of the Girl Legionnaires. She doesn't immediately employ brainwashing techniques, but is content to sow dissension as the males find it difficult to accept the change.

Things soon come to a head-- or maybe, bonking heads.

Despite the fact that the Legion's leader Invisible Kid claims to have figured out Thora's plans, he and the other males just bull their way into fighting her female pawns, and, in contradistinction to the Siegel stories, the power-boosted XXs stomp the XYs into the ground. Supergirl is actually the one who foils Thora's plans, after which she commits suicide and everything goes back to status quo. But what causes Supergirl to break Thora's brainwashing? We see it in an earlier scene:

  Some quick background: for several 1960s stories, Supergirl and Brainiac 5 dated off-and-on, but in the two-parter introducing Shadow Lass (AC #365-66) the new girl makes a very mild overture toward the cerebral Legionnaire, though it goes nowhere. Issue #368, appearing just one issue after Shadow Lass's debut, the blue-skinned heroine seems to have some sort of grudge against the green-skinned boy, as she fantasizes about forcing Brainiac 5 to be her servant. Supergirl's memories of romance with the brainy youth cause her to be offended by the theoretical assault on Brainiac's dignity, and it's her feminine protectiveness toward a boyfriend-- even though the two of them are never precisely "serious" -- that saves the day-- though there's also an element of feminine competition involved as well. There's not a big symbolic lesson here, unless it's that women are the best weapon men can have in "the war between men and women."      

NEAR-MYTHS: "THE REVOLT OF THE GIRL LEGIONNAIRES" (ADVENTURE COMICS #326, 1964)

 I decided I would dedicate this day to the recently passed Jim Shooter by writing about Jerry Siegel. Well, to be more precise, I've wanted for some time to sit down and cross-compare the respective takes each author took toward the trope of "the war between men and women," as expressed through a series both raconteurs worked on: The Legion of Super-Heroes. One might argue that Siege's shortcomings in this case shine a brighter light on Shooter's bushel-- or something like that.

  

The first page of "Revolt" shows some of the Girl Legionnaires shows them occupied with mundane activities, but the second ramps up the action, revealing that the six female Legionnaires have sent six male members of the group off on a phony errand. They then discuss their plans to lay traps for the remaining males in order to destroy them all and claim the club only for Girl Power.  

First, Light Lass mousetraps Element Lad. "Thrilling," right, EL?

Then Triplicate Girl splits herself in three, makes up to three separate males, and forces them all to admit that size does count.

Saturn Girl makes only a token effort at seduction, but then tricks Superboy into a rescue mission that gets him trapped.

Supergirl, who could easily twist any form Chameleon Boy might take into knots, feels it necessary to use some arcane formula to block his shape-changing power.

  And finally, Phantom Girl goes back to the Delilah-mode, liplocking Star Boy before she makes him imprison himself with his own powers.

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There's not much myth-material in all of these simplistic "betraying women" scenarios, but there is a little bit in the Big Explanation. Queen Azura of the planet Femnaz (paging Rush Limbaugh) brainwashed all of the girls into hating men, because for many years the Female Femnazians had become obsessed with war-games, to the extent that they exiled their pacifistic males. Jerry "hurry-up-the-damn-exposition" Siegel conflates the Femnazians' desire for warfare with their ritual of shooting rockets at the moon-- which, in Earth cultures, most often represents feminine intuition and periodicity. Apparently shortly after the tyrannical women exile their men, they also decide to spread their desires for female supremacy to the Legion, if not to Earth generally, and use magical jewels to infect the Girl Legionnaires with man-hatred. But the other male Legionnaires, whom Saturn Girl sent on a false errand happen to pass by Femnaz, and two of the members keep the planet's moon from colliding with the planet. The heroes also reunite the chastened, no-longer-overaggressive females with their (presumably still pacifistic) males, while the Girl Legionnaires release all of the Boy Legionnaires from their traps, and good times are had by all.

The repetition of the Samson-and-Delilah seduction-trope is pretty repetitions, as if Siegel were indirectly suggesting that the girls had to resort to duplicity in most cases because girls just couldn't conquer boys (with the exception of Light Lass, who really does overcome Element Lad in a power-over-power struggle). However, there's more complexity when Siegel reworks elements of the Superman-origin for this little jaunt. Instead of a planet exploding, it's the moon of Femnaz, though the planet is saved by two Superboy-like heroes. Instead of a noble mother and father dying together as their child survives, there's a whole group of Amazons who kick out their wimpy males for being too tolerant, though the two groups are brought together, and an exile ends rather than an adoption of one survivor by a younger culture. But Siegel's conflation of two conflicting myths-- that of the martial Amazons and that of the seductive Deliah-- work agsinst one another here. In my next essay, I'll show that Shooter's pursuit of this theme was at least more unitary.               

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THOUGHTS ON JIM SHOOTER

Jim Shooter passed on the last day of June this year. I won't be writing a general overview of his work, given that I only knew his Marvel and DC accomplishments, and almost nothing about his efforts for companies like Valiant. Defiant and Broadway. But I'll cover a few career highlights (and lowlights) here.

 

I'm sure almost every Shooter-obit will mention that he sold his first scripts to DC Comics, via mail, at the age of 14. Shooter became well known for improving the often staid adventures of DC's team of futuristic super-teens, the Legion of Super-Heroes, by crafting more engaging melodramatics and a greater use of action. By the middle 1960s, some long-time DC artists had started using greater dynamism in their stories, such as Gil Kane in GREEN LANTERN and Mike Sekowsky in JUSTICE LEAGUE, probably as a response to the increased popularity of Marvel's action-heavy product. But Shooter brought the sensibilities of a fan-reader to these early scripts: he wrote the sort of things that he, as a teen, liked reading. That included a greater emphasis on battle-scenarios, and even the often stodgy SUPERMAN books under editor Mort Weisinger were improved on that score. I'm sure many obits will mention that Shooter created a new recurring foe for the Man of Steel: the Parasite, who could drain off Superman's powers and then use those powers to beat the snot out of the hero. But I have a nostalgic preference for his script for SUPERMAN #191. In it, the Kryptonian must fight against DEMON, an evil cabal with fantastic weaponry, to keep the agents from obtaining a forbidden artifact. This issue might be the only time long-time Super-artist Al Plastino even came close to rendering the sort of hyperkinetic action one expects from American comic books. 

  Shooter left DC for a few years, and then came back and wrote a few more stories. But he would prove more important as an editor at Marvel, particularly when he rose to the position of the company's chief editor in 1978. All reminiscences of the period seem to agree that Shooter came into Marvel when there was something of a power vacuum, and that the company was losing a lot of money on ventures with dubious commercial potential-- some fan-favorites like the McGregor KILLRAVEN, some unlikely "throw-stuff-against-the-wall" creations like THE GOLEM and GABRIEL DEVIL HUNTER. Shooter imposed a greater editorial authority over Marvel raconteurs for the next nine years, and although he made the trains run on time, many long-time employees, among them Doug Moench, complained of micro-management that limited creativity. Back in the day, I protested the regimentation of the Shooter regime by writing a negative JOURNAL review of the 1984-85 SECRET WARS. Not that my review, or anyone else's. made any difference to the success of that maxi-series. The sweet deal that Shooter or his reps negotiated with Mattel Toys got the comic book promoted on TV alongside Mattel's SECRET WARS toy line-- and so WARS was a big hit for Shooter. (I never knew why afterward Marvel kept adapting toy lines that DIDN'T promote the comics on TV. With the exception of G.I. JOE and maybe TRANSFORMERS, most of the toy-adaptations went down the tubes.)

  Now, in those days, Shooter represented the apogee of mediocre commercial comics to the JOURNAL and its readers. I can't claim I didn't channel some of this virulent anti-Shooterism at the time, but I think I was at least aware that some creators, such as Frank Miller and Walt Simonson, produced good-to-great works under Shooter's editorial aegis. Gary Groth's take was more adversarial-- if a company wasn't producing what he deemed "great art," it was worthless. (Note how, on the JOURNAL cover above. Shooter is getting dubious looks from many characters from "alternative comics:" Rorschach, Mister X, Mister Monster, Zippy the Pinhead, and Ed the Happy Clown, for five.) By the early 1990s, the JOURNAL's devaluing of all commercial comics was so complete I for one quit submitting to the editors, since I believed that a critic had to be able to appreciate excellence in any form.       

    I don't remember finding any excellence in any of the stories Shooter wrote during his nine years at Marvel: not even the excellence of good formula comics, like LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES . However, as an editor he helped deliver the balls-to-the-wall, super-melodramatic conclusion of the "Dark Phoenix Saga " in X-MEN 137. As many fans know today, originally the X-MEN creators Claremont and Byrne had meant to deliver a fairly low-impact, cop-out (IMO) conclusion to the story. Shooter insisted that Dark Phoenix had to pay a price for succumbing to her cosmic killing-rage, and whatever one might think of imposing moral judgments on ficitonal characters, in this case Shooter's instincts were better, for that particular story, than those of Byrne and Claremont. It didn't matter to me then, and doesn't matter to me now, that Phoenix and Jean Grey would be revived many more times, in many more permutations. All that matters now was that the original story delivered a good finish to its dramatic action. Without Shooter, X-MEN fans might not have had that.

And for that accomplishment, I can even forgive SECRET WARS.