MYTHCOMICS: "BLACK MASK: LOSING FACE" (BATMAN #386-387, DETECTIVE COMICS #553, 1985)

(NOTE: as discussed in this essay, continued story-lines from this period of DC's BATMAN franchise alternated chapters in the pages of both the BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS periodicals. I have chosen the title of one chapter to represent the three-part story-line devoted to the villain Black Mask.)

Contrary to the cover-copy on BATMAN #386, new villain Black Mask was not affirmed by Bat-fans (so far as I can tell) as being either crazier than the Joker or deadlier than Ra's Al Ghul. But I believe he's the only villain co-created by Doug Moench who became a recurring Bat-foe in the hands of later raconteurs. The author's character of Nocturna arguably had more mythical potential, but possibly her charms became diffused from being interwoven into an ongoing soap opera. In contrast, Black Mask's myth is tightly structured from start to finish.

After a one-page intro emphasizing that the new villain will have a special enmity for Bruce Wayne, we're told that the infant version of Roman Sionis is first introduced to the "world of hard knocks" by an obstetrician in a surgical mask. Roman is not related to Bruce Wayne but baby Bruce is born only slightly after Roman, and the Wayne family is socially acquainted with the equally prominent Sionis family, who run a major cosmetics firm. As a boy Roman feels stultified by his parents, who register as superficial and indifferent. He then has a mind-wrenching encounter with a "masked" animal, a rabid raccoon who bites the youth and causes him to plunge into a nightmarish state, "an endless movie of his own making, played out somewhere deep behind his face." (This issue was published roughly a year ahead of the first issue of Frank Miller's THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, in which young Bruce Wayne had a similar hallucinatory experience with a monstrous bat.) 

Roman recovers, and in his young manhood, his father brings him into the cosmetics business, which is given the symbol-fraught name of "Janus." Roman quickly rises to vice president of Janus Cosmetics, and in that position of power he becomes fixated upon a new model, whose real name is not disclosed and whose professional name is yet another myth-reference, "Circe." Roman's parents voice their disapproval of such a low-class liaison, and within no time, their mansion burns down, killing them both. Roman avoids any suspicion for their deaths, but his overweening pride brings him down, as he almost bankrupts Janus Cosmetics with his foolhardy schemes. Bruce Wayne extends the hand of charity to the company solely due to his family's friendship with Roman's parents, but only if Roman agrees to "lose face" by resigning as president. Roman then seeks to forge a new identity by desecrating the mausoleum of the parents he murdered, tearing a fragment of ebony-hued wood from his father's casket. From this wood he forges the visage of his new fully criminal identity of Black Mask, which he uses to organize a criminal gang, the False Face Society. He even holds the first meeting of the society in the family tomb, with his parents' coffins in full view.

If Black Mask isn't the equal of Joker and Ra's Al Ghul in all respects, he's certainly on the same level of obsession, constantly prating about how masks give their wearer new powers. In addition to sending his gang to rob Gotham businesses, he also assassinates the men who took over Janus Cosmetics with a chemical created at the firm-- so that Black Mask's mask doesn't in the least conceal his true identity as the former Roman Sionis. However, he doesn't kill Circe, his former lover who deserted him when times got tough, but he uses one of his flesh-corroding masks to destroy her beauty and make her his slave. 

When Batman and the new Robin can't track down the False Face Society, the Caped Crusader uses Bruce Wayne's resources to throw a masquerade party, knowing that Black Mask will try to attend the affair, despite his anticipating a trap. The villain dons a raccoon-mask in deference to the beast who initiated him into evil and attempts to kill Bruce Wayne. He fails at this goal but escapes. Yet Robin tracks him to the crypt, and soon the Dynamic Duo brave the crypt, battling Black Mask's thugs. The main villain again escapes, this time to the mansion of Roman Sionis, The heroes follow and fight two more of Black Mask's goons, while the mastermind raves about how he needs to kill off his old self Roman Sionis. He sets the mansion on fire and almost kills his new self, but Batman rescues him. The fire, however, scars and blackens his natural physiognomy, which from then on is Black Mask's most distinguishing characteristic.

In a brief coda, the disfigured Circe visits the jail where Black Mask is confined, but does not see her former lover. She leaves behind the mask he crafted to hide her disfigurement, implicitly rejecting Roman's obsession with drawing power from concealing one's face. She also invokes the properties of the classical Circe by referring to herself as a "witch," but unlike the sorceress this Circe would seem to be rejecting all forms of false transformation. (Though this was a good send-off for this minor support-character, regrettably Moench brought her back for a second appearance before he finished his BATMAN tenure.) In this initial appearance Black Mask is meant to be the obverse of Batman, using masks to conceal, rather than reveal, the truth of his own nature. I have the general impression that subsequent versions of the character abandon his specific obsession with masks, making him more of an all-around gang-boss, as he is in the UNDER THE RED HOOD continuity. Moench's version is more psychologically intriguing.

I should note that this is a rare mythcomic with an uncanny phenomenality. Neither Batman nor Robin use any special weapons, and Black Mask's only diabolical device is his corrosive cosmetic, which registers at the level of the uncanny.

VERTICAL VEHICLES

I've talked a bit about early iterations of my myth-theory in various posts, such as 2021's RHETORICAL FLOURISHES PT. 2, but usually I've confined such reminiscences to the last ten to twenty years. This is the period during which I feel that I brought to bear the full focus of my readings in philosophy-- Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer-- in line with the proto-theory I'd evolved in the seventies and eighties, a.k.a. "The JOURNAL years." I was by no means ill-informed in those days, having drawn a lot of my early observations from such diverse scholars as Jung, Frye, Eliade, Campbell and Fiedler. But a greater emphasis on philosophical rigor was necessary for a detailed analysis of what "myth" is in fictional narrative and how it contrasts with any and all other elements of narrative.

Yet in the early days of "Gene's Theories," I don't think I was entirely discriminating about what fictional icons did or did not possess "symbolic complexity." Case in point: while going through some old papers I found a list I'd tossed together of "mythopoeic serial concepts," by which I meant serials that showed the greatest mythopoeic values. I didn't date the list but the 2004 TV show LOST has the latest date of any of my selections. I didn't write down any criteria for inclusion, but I must not have been thinking of mythicity in terms of "epistemological patterns," since I included on that list a serial that's damn close to being anti-epistemological: that red-headed step-child of Henry Aldrich, ARCHIE.

So, assuming the near-total absence of epistemology in ARCHIE, what might have impressed me about the long-lived teen humor series? The only thing ARCHIE had going for it was that its creators cobbled together an ensemble cast made up of clearly defined "types"-- the Average Guy, the Mean Guy, the Rich Girl, the Poor Girl, and the Sardonic Cynic. (On a side note, I've sometimes thought that Jughead and his "what fools these mortals be" attitude might be the one thing that kept the Riverdale kids distinct from their many competitors.) 

Now, I'm also of the opinion that whenever pundits speak of a movie or a comic book as being "mythic," they're really funneling the idea that the work's characters and situations are popular with a wide audience because they're broadly conceived and probably rather simplistic next to "the fine arts." The word "types," though, is rather pejorative. The literary term "tropes" functions better to describe either characters or situations that become well-traveled for the very reason that they communicate their content quickly and efficiently, fulfilling the audience's expectations and yet allowing for a certain amount of free play.

Now I wouldn't have brought up this matter if I didn't have a way of bringing it into line with current theories, and as it happens, the aforementioned post RHETORICAL FLOURISHES 2 is also the first time I explored in detail the division of the mythopoeic trope into a "tenor" and a "vehicle," in line with the insights of I.A. Richards. I mentioned in FLOURISHES that the epistemological pattern would be the tenor, since it is a pattern partly conceived from the creator's experience in the real world, while a familiar trope used to communicate the pattern would be the vehicle.

My standard for excellence for "the tenor" is that of concrescence; the sense that an author has managed to bring several disparate elements into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Vehicle-excellence, though, would rely more on sheer frenetic creativity, the the author's (or authors') ability to produce a fascinating variety of tropes, what Edmund Burke called "the richness and profusion of images." These days I might not allow that the characters of ARCHIE function on any conceptual level, that they remain staunchly lateral and thus non-vertical in most of their adventures. But I can think of a few comedy-romance serials that would qualify, one being Rumiko Takahashi's ONE POUND GOSPEL-- a series which, like the majority of ARCHIE stories, contains no fantasy-SF content. 

Thus I might say that from the POV of "tenor-excellence" alone, the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR excels the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, because I've detected more concrescent stories in the former than in the latter. But in terms of "vehicle-excellence," they are equals. for both generated an impressive array of icons fraught with mythopoeic POTENTIAL, even if the FF is somewhat ahead in terms of mythopoeic ACTUALITY.

NEAR-MYTHS: THE NOCTURNA LEITMOTIF (1983-85)

 The early 1980s was an odd transitional time for Batman. Though the character had gained some cachet in the 1970s, the crusader was not even close to being the financial juggernaut he became later, partly though not solely thanks to the 1986 DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and the 1989 Tim Burton opus. At some point in the 1980s, either before or during the hiring of Doug Moench as sole scripter of Batman in both his titular book and in DETECTIVE COMICS, DC Comics attempted to goose the sales of both titles by having the stories interconnected. That is, if one story with a villain (say, the subject of my essay, Nocturna) began in BATMAN #363, that story's conclusion would appear in the subsequent issue of DETECTIVE COMICS, and the next story in BATMAN might begin a new narrative. This editorial ploy was spectacularly unsuccessful, for most regular consumers resented being forced to buy two titles a month to make sense of the stories. Sales went down and the idea was dropped, though not before Moench left the series in 1985.

At the time he accepted the DC assignment, Moench's last major opus had been on Marvel Comics' MASTER OF KUNG FU. That series had garnered high praise from fans, particularly for Moench's ability to weave a diverse group of characters, male and female, into a bracing melodrama, and one far more intricate than most Marvel comics of the early eighties. Given that Moench had been given the chance to be the main arbiter of the mainstream Batman continuity, he may have approached the assignment with the idea of repeating some of his fan-pleasing tropes from MASTER OF KUNG FU. That series had focused upon a group of heroic individuals bound by a common code rather than by family bonds, while the only familial relation of the series was the inimical one between Shang-Chi and his father Fu Manchu.

In contrast, prior to Moench's assignment, DC had just taken the first steps to introduce Second Robin Jason Todd to take the place of Dick Grayson, who was in the process of transitioning away from the Robin identity. Thus Batman had just gained a new surrogate son to share his adventures. In addition, during the pre-Moench period an old Bruce Wayne girlfriend, Vicky Vale, had been re-introduced, and another potential romantic interest for Wayne, Julia Pennyworth, had debuted. However, Moench injected two new characters, first seen to share a loose sibling-like history: Nocturna and the Night-Thief (a.k.a. "Night Slayer.") Whereas there were no mothers of significance in the MASTER OF KUNG FU series, Nocturna was soon defined by her taking the place of Jason Todd's recently deceased mother, just as Batman had taken the place of the orphan's late father.

Nocturna comes very close to rivaling Catwoman in the BATMAN mythos as the essence of a "dangerous yet desirable femme fatale," but in my estimation she never rises above the level of a near-myth. Possibly the character's many poetic ramblings about the beauties of darkness (she's an albino who avoids the sun) are meant to sell her as the embodiment of feminine mystery, of the principle of "Yin" perhaps. However, Moench rides the metaphor like a hobby horse, thus diluting its effect. However, where Catwoman had little or nothing to do with Dick Gayson, Nocturna inserts herself into Jason Todd's life in the second part of her first story, in DETECTIVE #530. Moench is a little vague about the sequence of events, but in the first part, Batman catches the Night-Thief but fails to capture Nocturna. She then apparently just happens to use a high-powered telescope to check out stately Wayne Manor, which eventually leads to her discovery of Bruce Wayne's double identity. At this point Jason has not yet donned a Robin costume, and he's decided to desert Wayne's charity because Batman won't let him become a junior birdman yet. For no rational reason, Nocturna sees Jason leave the manor, seeks him out, and talks him into returning to Wayne's tutelage, despite the fact that she should know nothing about him at this time. 

Moench then allows Nocturna and Night-Thief to recede from the picture for several issues, until DETECTIVE #543. She then appears to Jason again, acting very mysterioso, and laying some vague maternal claim upon him. By issue's end, she files a suit to legally adopt Jason, which Wayne has neglected to do. Presumably she knows that Wayne is Batman by this time, though she does not say so until a later issue. But the reader may well assume that knowledge, for when she first meets Wayne, she proposes solving their rival claims on the boy by getting married. 

Jason's reaction to the lawsuit makes Wayne's case harder, for he claims he wants Nocturna to be his new mother. His motive, though, is loyalty to Batman, for by this time he does know that the mysterioso woman is a thief, and he abets her adoption with the idea of getting the goods on her crimes. This leads to the strangest scene in the entire Moench run, in BATMAN #379. I should note here that Jason is drawn to look about fifteen, even though some sources claim he was supposed to be twelve. Yet, on one of his first nights under Nocturna's roof, she comes to his room to tell him a "bedtime story," an activity one associates with much smaller children. I'm sure Moench's main motive was to provide yet another poetic reflection on darkness, but the "bedtime story" ends with some puzzling dialogue about whether or not Jason would be susceptible to Nocturna's charms if he were just a little older. Moench doesn't pursue the concept of hebephilic sexuality in later issues, so I assume he was just playing around with Oedipal imagery as a side-issue to his main theme, the blossoming romance between Batman and yet another "forbidden femme fatale."

Most of the ensuing issues are more concerned with the triangular romantic conflict between Batman, Nocturna and Night-Thief, but the alluring albino makes a conquest in Jason Todd, who toward the end of Moench's run goes so far as to forget legal impropriety and to refer to the enchantress as "Mom." By this time Moench may have planned to leave the series, for he arranges a send-off for Nocturna in the form of an ambivalent death. But unlike so many other comics-characters, Nocturna did not get revived in continuity with her original form-- for in the last Nocturna-arc, the Earth is suffering the first signs of the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Thus once DC-reality was rewritten by the Crisis, any version of Nocturna that returned would exist out of continuity with the original-- and indeed, another Nocturna did pop up somewhere later, though I've not endeavored to check out this later character. I should also note that in the last arc Catwoman returns to challenge Nocturna for Batman's affections, and Catwoman more or less "wins" the bout. I imagine Moench had Catwoman somewhat in mind when he created his seductive lady crook, and maybe he was gratified that no other author would ever "lay hands" on his character, thanks to the exigencies of DC Comics' total reboot of their cosmos.

PATIENT ZERO PONDERINGS

In my previous post I cited a 2008 essay in which I argued that "big events" in commercial comics were nothing new; that the industry had started using such events at least in the 1960s. I associated this old essay with one subject covered by the YouTube link I provided, in which author Yellow Flash argued that the Big Two companies in the US had become dependent upon rebooting their franchises in order to boost sales. Yellow Flash offers an interesting parallel to the 2008 jeremiad of one Dick Hyacinth, in which the latter was arguing that "story values" were being neglected in favor of "big events." But the new version of the old argument is that because of the dominance of Modern Progressive values in the Big Two comics, those comics have lost their readership, principally though not exclusively to American reprints of Japanese manga-- which presumably appeal to their audience thanks to the aforementioned "story values."

This line of thought got me wondering, though: when do fan-writers say that the Progressive Era of American comics got started? It's of personal interest to me since, as I stated in the previous essay, I feel that I was "cancelled" because of a Progressive author (little though the cancellation mattered to my overall welfare). But it also bears upon the history of this blog. Unlike, say, the defunct HOODED UTILITARIAN, the ARCHIVE has never been primarily political. But I like to think that even in the late 2000s I took a lot of shots at flawed thinking both liberal and conservative, even if it often took the form of picking at the statements of Heidi McDonald. However, I'll freely admit that since I stopped buying a lot of comics in the middle 2000s, I didn't personally witness the rise of the Progressive Wave in American comics.

So where did it start, the "patient zero" of Comics Progressivism? I found two distinct answers on YouTube.

The podcaster Thinking Critically focuses in this essay on the 2007 rise of the website Comics Alliance. It's a good if biased examination of the Progressive mindset of the period. However, Comics Alliance was just a bunch of vocal fans, with no real power to change things, unless people in the industry chose to regard them as a bellwether. Liberal ideology had come to dominate comic book fandom since the Silver Age, and a lot of liberal fans continually stumped for more diverse racial representation, more equitable treatment of female characters, and so on. But the industry did not change from the impact of fans alone.

Probably more on target is this essay from The Fourth Age. The author cites Joe Quesada as his "patient zero," though I would somewhat fault the essay for not providing more context for Quesada's career from 2000, when he became Marvel editor-in-chief, to 2009, when Quesada took the fatal step that bound his star to that of the Progressives. This act, according to Fourth Age, was the "diversity hire" of Muslim-American writer Sana Amanat, still best known today for her co-creation in 2014 of the Kamala Khan Ms. Marvel. In this Wikipedia quote, Amanat herself mentions that she was hired to bring a "different voice" to Marvel Comics:

According to Amanat, an executive at Marvel approached her for the job because she was different from their average employee. She said that the executive told her she had "something different to offer than the regular fanboy who has read comics since he was a kid. She has a different voice, and they need her voice in order to change Marvel."

Fourth Age extensively quotes Quesada in support of the thesis that Quesada, believing that the hardcore comics-audience was not enough to sustain his company's fortunes, sought to enhance Marvel's reputation for diversity with a "non-fanboy" readership. Roughly twelve years later, there's no evidence that Progressive comics wooed a new readership to the medium, and that despite what might have been a vital cross-fertilization from the MCU movies, beginning with the 2008 IRON MAN. Quesada's hiring of Amanat might not be quite as consequential in itself as Fourth Age asserts, but there can be little doubt that Marvel Comics, and possibly DC to a lesser extent, became very concerned with projecting the image of diversity in many if not all of their projects. What I see happening is that established hardcore fans who already held Progressive sympathies became emboldened by the diversity agenda, while others reacted against the politicization, one reaction being the somewhat later Comicsgate conflict of the late 2010s. 

Of course all of these things happened within the greater context of American political events, and perhaps Sana Amanat's hiring mirrors in a small way the ascension of Barack Obama to the Presidency that same year. As yet I have not found a good overall history of the rise of Progressive Liberals, but I would imagine that their agenda too was given an ideological boost by Obama's election, particularly their endorsement of intersectional representationalism. Quesada was clearly seeking to be intersectional by hiring a Muslim-American woman who in 2009 had little experience in writing commercial comics. That said, her early issues of MS. MARVEL (the only ones I read) are at least pleasant and not infected with the fanatical righteousness I've found in the few Progressive comics-writers I've encountered. 

I should also stress that under the right circumstances, a "diversity hire" can be a good thing. Prior to Gail Simone being hired by DC Comics, she was best known for launching the 1999 website WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS and for a Comic Book Resources column. She may or may not have been a diversity hire, though there were so few female creators at Marvel and DC in the early 2000s that her hiring would have had the same effect, regardless of intention. However, in contrast to Sana Amanat, Simone showed with her long run on DC's BIRDS OF PREY (2003-07) that she was fully engaged with superhero mythology and the expectations of its "fanboys." I disputed WOMEN IN REFRIGATORS' flawed logic in my essay NEGATIVE I.D., but I found BIRDS OF PREY to be more engaging than its author's ideology, and unlike MS. MARVEL I followed the former to Simone's final issues (and a little beyond). Though PREY focused on boosting the reputations of DC's female characters from a POV of a female author, I recall none of the viciously divisive ideology of the Progressive feminists, no harping on toxic masculinity and the like. 

In conclusion, I'm now of the opinion that a lot of the Progressive measures of the 21st century were a politicized version of "big events"-- the Falcon becomes the new Captain America, Carol Danvers takes on both the name of Captain Marvel and assumes the status of "The Marvel Comics Wonder Woman." Most of these I admit I have not read, so that I can't be entirely sure that they lack all "story values." But the comics-reading audience certainly favors the story values of Japanese manga-- some of which may not even be all that remarkable, like (say) the popular NARUTO-- and it would appear that the comics industry's link to cinema is the only thing that keeps Patient Zero on life-support.

QUICK LINK TO SOGGY MELTDOWN

 Though I frequent a lot of YouTube sites that detail the devolution of commercial comics, I couldn't resist mentioning this one, the hyperbolically titled CAPTAIN MARVEL WRITER HAS A TOTAL MELTDOWN.

Years ago, I had a public argument with said writer Kelly Thompson, while I wrote (unpaid-for) online essays for a company I'm now ashamed to have dealt with. Thompson had authored for Comic Book Resources a highly politicized reading of the role of female characters in comics. I, a man, had the temerity to disagree. I'm not going to link to my own posts regarding that exchange. Any interested party can find them via Google, but the upshot was that the company "cancelled" me in deciding that they didn't want any more of my reactionary essays. 

Thompson went on to get hired by Marvel editors, who wanted, then as now, to virtue signal about how liberal and forward-thinking they are. I naturally have read none of Thompson's work, and the YouTube site is only of interest to me in that the site Yellow Flash tags her as one of the many comics-writers to attack fans for their desire to be entertained rather than lectured to.

Her "meltdown," to be sure, isn't much of anything in itself; hence my rating of it as "soggy." Its only significance in the social sense is that it prompted Yellow Flash to break down just how well her heavily touted run (close to fifty issues) on the Current Captain Marvel is doing in terms of making money. Yellow Flash concludes that the only way Current Marvel manages to keep its numbers high is to regularly cancel and reboot comics-titles, which may mean that the allegedly long run of Current Captain Marvel is due for such a reboot.

I noted in a 2008 essay, EARTH-SHATTERING CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE, that comic books frequently have used "events" to goose their sales in one way or another, and I used a Silver Age "death of Superman" storyline as an example. I noted that the "story values" defended in another writer's essay might be somewhat deceptive when seen through the lens of what I then called "game theory." I won't rehash those observations now, but I did speak of a "shadow of didacticism" that made it possible for fictional narratives to take on the appearance of being "useful" rather than pure recreation.

I also found it interesting that Thompson follows the thinking of most SJW comics writers in claiming that if readers don't like their progressive ideals, they must be purblind reactionaries. "The more things change," eh?

STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS ON STATURE

 In my essay PROTO CROSSOVERS AND SUCH PT. 2, I reversed myself on the determination as to whether "spinoff" characters who didn't get their own features in a timely fashion could be deemed "proto crossovers." In the case of Marvel's Black Panther, I decided that the period separating the Panther's introduction in 1965 and his joining an ensemble-team in 1968 did not invalidate either his first appearance or all appearances in between from proto crossover status. Since all of the Panther's appearances indicate that editor Stan Lee was trying to find some way to work the character into a regular berth, through the Panther's guest-shots in FANTASTIC FOUR and CAPTAIN AMERICA, that counts as an "intent toward centricity" in a major way.

However, it's a little harder to draw as straight a line with many other characters. Also spawned in the pages of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR was the character called "Him." This artificially created man-god disappeared after two 1967 issues of the FF comic, with no suggestion that he had any special destiny to work out (unlike the Panther in FF). Him didn't show up again until two years later, in THOR #165-166, wherein the character battled the Thunder God for the hand of Lady Sif. The end of that story, too, did not suggest that he was going on to any feature-status, either alone or in an ensemble.

So there's no clear indication that either Lee or Kirby had any particular intent to give Him starring-status. Kirby's main focus was on using his original story to dispute a philosophical point, but having done that, there's no strong sense in the THOR story that the King saw Him as anything but a convenient menace for a one-off tale. Since it was editor Stan Lee's job to keep his eyes peeled for promising franchises, and since he'd already made a few efforts to conceive of a spin-off series for the not dissimilar FF-character The Silver Surfer, Lee might have mulled over the possibility of using Him somewhere, but never really pursued it. Yet as Marvel fandom knows, Him was duly given a face-lift by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane, and rechristened with the more marketable name of Warlock, in 1972.

So five years expired before Him graduated from a Sub to a Prime, with no real evidence in between that anyone meant to spin the Original Orange Man off into his own feature. On the basis of that apparent lack of intent, I would tend to say that those five years are enough to invalidate Him's original appearances as "proto-crossovers." He's just a Sub character who's eventually given Prime stature long after his debut, simply because someone conceived of a way to rework the original concept. One may see a parallel to the television character Frasier Crane. In all the years that Frasier was a support-character on the series CHEERS, I saw no effort by the writers to suggest that they might want to spin him off until CHEERS came to an end, and the writers realized that the character of Frasier could sustain his own series. So neither Warlock nor Frasier Crane, within the period of their subordinate status, are proto-crossovers just by virtue of graduating to featured status.

Are there exceptions to my five-year "statute of stature limitations?" Probably, and I'll record them as I think of them. I tend to think that charisma of support-characters is even more limited. I've mentioned that in the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN the teamup of The Enforcers and The Green Goblin counts as a proto-crossover, because the Goblin was clearly intended to be a major continuing villain. Yet the later interaction of competing villains Green Goblin and Crime-Master was a null-crossover, because in his one and only story, the Crime-Master is killed and never comes back, meaning that he was never intended to be a regular recurring Spider-foe. But it's not necessary to kill off a character to show that the author doesn't mean to keep doing things with the support-character. 

A minor villain-mashup appears in BATMAN #62 (1950), wherein established villain Catwoman interacts with new crook-on-the-block Mister X. Had Mister X made even one more appearance in the BATMAN series, his appearance with Catwoman might be deemed a "proto"-- but since he never appeared again, X comes up "null." Note: any Bat-mavens reading this will remember that this 1950 opus is the one where Catwoman temporarily reforms. However, this has little effect on her overall persona, since she starts out the story in villain-mode and in future stories drops her uninteresting pose of "good girl" pretty quickly.

However, I wouldn't set any statute of limitations on charisma-crossovers resulting from the cross-alignment of Sub characters showing up in the "universes" of Primes wherein those Subs did not originally appear. A particularly nugatory character is the 1962 ANT MAN villain, The Hijacker, who was so lame that no one bothered to even reference his existence for the next fifteen years. Then it appears that Bill Mantlo, desiring a forgettable villain for a toss-off issue of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE, revived Hijacker to fight The Thing and Black Goliath in 1977. Lame though The Hijacker was, he still counts as an Ant-Man villain, and whatever little charisma he had does get somewhat enhanced by his meeting with one major Marvel hero and one bush-leaguer (who at least had his own short-lived series).

MYTHCOMICS: THE SANDMAN OVERTURE (2015)

 

Some million years ago, I wrote some essay for THE COMICS JOURNAL which included observations on the conflict between what I then called "altruism vs. selfhood." I'm reminded of that sense of conflict-- the need for community with others versus the need for a conviction of one's own stand-alone importance-- as I read SANDMAN OVERTURE for the first time. This work by SANDMAN creator Neil Gaiman and PROMETHEA artist J.H. Williams III was originally published in six continuing issues in 2015, but I first encountered in a huge, coffee-table reprint replete with essays about all of the creators (even celebrated SANDMAN letterer Todd Klein) and with a supplementary reprint of the six issues' art sans coloring, the better to show off Williams' consummate sense of design.

OVERTURE is in one sense a "continuity catch-up" work, in which an author returns to an earlier concept and reveals things he either left out or hadn't thought of earlier, not unlike H. Rider Haggard's WISDOM'S DAUGHTER, a quasi-revision of SHE. In 1989 Neil Gaiman began the saga of his main character Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming, by showing him weakened by some undisclosed conflict, so that he was captured by a mere human sorcerer. This imprisonment was principally a device by which Gaiman could allow the reader to learn about Morpheus' world once he broke free of his confinement, sought to regain control of his dream-dimension once more, and became acquainted with all the ways his world and others had changed in his absence. The reader thus also was painlessly introduced to the other members of Morpheus' family, who were also incarnations of cosmic principles-- such as Desire and Destiny, who alone play crucial support roles in OVERTURE. 

Within his dream-dimension, Morpheus is supreme, but he is inevitably tied to the community of mortal beings-- both Earth-humans and all other species who dream. This makes for a dichotomy that's less one of "selfhood vs. altruism" that of "solipsism vs. universalism." Morpheus is always conscious of his connectedness to the rest of the cosmos, and yet his persona is aloof and haughty, as of one who's seen it all. OVERTURE gives Gaiman the chance not simply to tie up some loose ends from the original SANDMAN series, but to examine the dichotomy at the heart of his best-known character.

Also, btw: end-of-story SPOILERS.

Very little of Earth, even DC-Earth, is seen in OVERTURE. The original comic series established that Morpheus's sovereignty extended to the dream-worlds of other species, but this is without question The Sandman at his most "cosmic." The first page gives us an alien world inhabited by three species, one of whom is humanoid "who believed that their planet was alone in the universe" (which POV will seem like a form of naive solipsism by the time the epic's over). But it's not any of the humanoids who witness the Death of a Dream-Lord, but an intelligent plant.

We never meet any inhabitants of this planet again, but we see the impact of the death on Morpheus, for the death of the Dream-Lord-- an "aspect" of Morpheus' own identity-- instantly draws him from his familiar haunts to a convocation of a few dozen other Dream-Lords, all deeply concerned that one of their own has died. I actually don't recall the regular comic book giving us anything like this "multiversal Morpheus"-- seen at the center of the two-page spread wearing his finest Wesley Dodds helmet; I thought Morpheus himself just "morphed" into an alien Dream-Lord whenever he encountered an alien. But even at this point in the story it's a better use of multiversality than I got from the MCU series LOKI, so I can roll with it.

What follows is structured less like a whodunnit than a "Meetings with Remarkable Beings." After conferring with his other selves, Morpheus eventually finds his way to an entity called "Glory," possibly in some way related to God. Glory informs Morpheus that a star has gone mad, creating the chaos that not only destroyed the Dead Dream-Lord but also several inhabited worlds. Morpheus more or less tells Glory "that ain't my department," but Glory spurs him on in the quest by saying that the chaos is occurring "because a child lived and a world died, long ago." 

After the conversation with Glory, Morpheus is joined by one of his other Dream-selves, whom for the time being I'll call the Dream-Cat. Morpheus and Dream-Cat consult with the Kindly Ones, a version of the Greek Moirai. And then, as if to give the series just a little more grounding in common humanity, Morpheus and Dream-Cat pick up an orphan girl named Hope, whose cognomen is sort of a "call-forward" to one of Gaiman's first stories for the regular series, issue #4's "A Hope in Hell." 

Morpheus and Dream-Cat undertake other meetings-- with a city of sentient stars, and with both Time and Night, the respective father and mother of Morpheus, but they serve more to illustrate the cosmos in which the Sandman moves than anything else. In essence, Morpheus is no longer seeking to solve a mystery, for he knew as soon as Glory spoke of a "child spared" that he Morpheus was responsible for the chaos of the mad star. The madness was created by a woman on an alien world who, through no fault of her own, was born a "dream-vortex," a concept Gaiman had dealt with in a "later" story in A DOLL'S HOUSE. Morpheus sought out the unnamed woman long before she began to create any chaos, but he declined to act because, as his present-self says, "I thought myself too wise, too noble, too gentle, to murder."

This forbearance, then, is what costs Dream one of his dream-selves and lots of collateral damage to boot. Upon confronting the mad star Fomalhaut, the star subjects Morpheus to the ultimate solipsism, propelling him into a black hole, in which there is "no light, no information, no dreams." Morpheus is only "rescued," if one can call it that, by his conceptual brother Destiny, who pulls Morpheus from the black hole because Destiny's own garden has been invaded by a mysterious ship. Morpheus does not recognize the ship, but he acknowledges Destiny's intuition: that the ship belongs to him. Boarding the ship, Morpheus finds it inhabited by Dream-Cat, a ghost-like version of Hope, and a few thousand alien beings, whose purpose is to erase the chaos of Morpheus's mistake by "re-dreaming" the cosmos into a "new continuity." Morpheus succeeds in getting his "do-over," but he's so exhausted by his efforts that-- wait for it-- he's weak enough to be captured by a mere mortal sorcerer, thus setting the entire continuity of the original comic into motion. Then there's a coda, a little on the confusing side, revealing that "Dream-Cat" never existed, for "he" was Morpheus's sister, the aforementioned Desire, who assumed the masquerade because she knew that he was too self-absorbed to accept help except from a being who seemed to be another version of himself.

OVERTURE is a good metaphysical romp. Both writer and artist deliver a breadth of extraterrestrial manifestations that suggests the prose works of Olaf Stapleton, albeit one tied to a previously established continuity, as much as any other "DC crisis." I don't think a reader not acquainted with the SANDMAN mythology would get a lot out of OVERTURE, though.

A small personal digression: as I was reading the section in which the multiversal Dream-Lords confront Morpheus, for some reason I thought of the encounter between Superboy's dog Krypto and "the Space Canine Patrol Agents" from a few of the goofier issues of SUPERBOY in the sixties. There was no literal resemblance between the depictions of Dream's other selves and Krypto's encounter with other anthropomorphic superhero dogs, and yet, that's where my mind took me-- a little before reading the page in OVERTURE #3 in which Gaiman and William humorously depicts the SCPA as a viable entity. I suppose it's possible that I either saw the OVERTURE page if I flipped through the book-- though I don't think I did-- or that on some occasion I read about the SCPA's appearance in some online essay. Or maybe I just-- dreamed it all?