Tag Archives: Marv Wolfman

Born This Way

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“Who’s your favorite mutant, professor?”

If you’re going to teach a college course on superheroes, it’s a question you should be ready to answer. I wasn’t. My first thought was Lady Gaga. Artpop wasn’t out yet, so I must have been thinking about the human-motorbike cyborg of Born This Way. But instead I rattled off something about Magneto (his rare, bookworm incarnation adorns my blog). Now I’ve got a better answer. My favorite mutant was the first of them all:

The Night Wind.
 

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Never heard of him? You’re in good company. He stopped adventuring in 1919, three years before his out-of-work creator shot himself. He premiered forty years before Stan Lee first and most famously attached the biological term (already an evolutionary staple of post-Hiroshima scifi) to the world of superheroes.

In fact, “mutant” is so Marvel, I’m hesitant to use it outside their multiverse. I remember the narrative nausea my adolescent self felt when DC buckled under the popularity of X-Men and shoehorned their first “mutant” into Teen Titans. It was 1984, and Ex-Marvel writer-editor Marv Wolfman must have forgotten he’d switched employers (again). It didn’t help that the character was a joke, a mute mutant (is that a pun?). I had to google his name (Jericho) and his powers (mind control?), but remembered his dorky blonde curls all too well.

Not that Stan Lee’s first use of the term was impressive either. Two years cranking out his silver age pantheon (Fantastic Four, Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, Dr. Strange), he hit his limit for origin stories. So the 1963 X-Men, “The Strangest Super-heroes of All!,” were all Born That Way like Lady Gaga.

As Professor Xavier professed in the first issue: “You, Miss Grey, like the other four students at this most exclusive school, are a MUTANT! You possess an EXTRA power . . . one which ordinary humans do NOT! That is why I call my students . . . X-MEN, for EX-tra power!”(Lee had one more origin story in him: Daredevil was hit by a radioactive truck the following year. Which pretty much proves the point about creative exhaustion.)

Alias “The Night Wind” crawled out of the primordial pulp goo of The Cavalier magazine way back in 1913, six months after Tarzan of the Apes set the new standard for superhuman adventuring. Like Superman, Bing Harvard, A.K.A. the Night Wind, had no problem tying “bow-knots in crowbars.” But instead of crashlanding from Krypton to be reared by mid-western farmers, or shipwrecked from aristocratic England to be reared by anthropoid apes, Bing was a foundling reared by an American banker.

He also possesses “a wonderful, God-given strength,” which was his “birthright,” what “his unknown father and mother had bestowed upon him as an inheritance.”

Peter Coogan terms him an “anomaly.” That’s a pretty good synonym for “mutant,” but the superhero scholar is talking genre tropes, few of which the character fits. I photocopied an excerpt for my class, and someone said it read like a supervillain origin story. Hard-working orphan framed for embezzlement turns his powers against the powers that be.

It’s true, Bing breaks the wrists of any cop who tries to arrest him, but after he clears his name (with the help of a lady cop who later marries him), he settles happily into law-abiding domesticity. The truly anomalous gene in the series is the never-solved mystery introduced in its opening chapters:

Who are Bing’s parents?

Jericho, it turns out, is the son of the villainous Deathstroke, his powers the product of biological experimentation done on his father. All those Marvel mutants can be traced back to Celestial tampering in the gene pool millions of years ago. But Bing? Frederick Van Rensselaer Dey (writing as his alter ego Varick Vanardy) didn’t care. Dey had cranked out Nick Carter dime novels for decades, but the Night Wind peters at four. The fact is frustrating, but even if I could sit down with Frederick over coffee in Dr. Doom’s time-travel machine, I’m not sure I would steer him any differently.

Bing’s real superheroism is only visible when you step out of the time machine and wander the nineteen-teens awhile. As a historical researcher, my first mistake is always the same. I assume past cultures are just like us, only in funny clothes. But immerse yourself in the period (I recommend the New York Times online database) and you realize you’re looking at a planet more alien than Krypton.

I always give my Superhero students a crash course in eugenics, a term, for those who’ve ever heard it, they associate with Nazi Germany not homegrown America. Where did the idea of killing the genetically unfit come from? Forget Auschwitz. The American Breeders Association of Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island recommended installing a gas chamber in every town in America.

This was 1911. Two years before the Night Wind started snapping police wrists. The Breeders’ other recommendations (immigration restrictions, racial segregation, interracial marriage ban, sterilization) became law as Dey was writing. Back then everyone simply knew the human race would devolve if Aryan supremacy wasn’t maintained. That was just common sense. That was the alien air everyone was breathing.

So if you were a recent immigrant, if your parents weren’t Anglo-Saxon, if you weren’t from good reliable Protestant stock, you were probably unfit. Genetic traits in those days included just about anything: poverty, promiscuity, feeblemindedness, criminality. Your parentage defined you. The cop who frames Bing says it all:

“Who are you, anyhow, I’d like to know? It ain’t nothin’ out uh the way that you should be a thief. I guess you inherited it all right. It’s more’n likely that his dad is doin’ time right now, in one uh the prisons, an’ his mother, too, maybe. It’s the way uh that sort. He don’t know who his antecedents was.”

Who was Bing? Who were his parents? Dey didn’t care. His hero was just born that way. And Dey blesses him for it. Literally. He declares his powers “God-given.” They’re not the result of eugenics movement’s so-called scientific breeding. He’s an accident, a genetic anomaly. He’s homo superior. Not the well-born superman eugenicists were obsessed with, but an up-from-the-muck mutant, defying the prejudices all of America was inhaling.

Dey was singing “Born This Way” a hundred years before Lady Gaga:

“I’m on the right track baby,
I was born to be brave.”

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Spider-Dove

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This first appeared on Comixology
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Spider-Man’s origin story, as most everybody knows, hinges on a moment of moral turpitude. In Amazing Fantasy #15 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, nerdy, put upon Peter Parker, having been bitten by that pesky radioactive spider, gains (dum ta da!) super powers, and starts a successful career as a professional wrestler. Basking in his newfound fame and bucks, Peter (in Spidey costume) is standing in some random corridor when he sees some random schmo fleeing from a cop. Cop yells to Peter to stop schmo, but Peter refuses ; schmo gets onto high-speed elevator and escapes.

The cop chews Peter out, “All you hadda do was trip him”! Peter, though, is unrepentant: “Sorry, Pal! That’s your job! I’m through being pushed around!” Peter walks off and then on the next page his uncle is murdered! And two pages later, Peter learns that the guy who shot his uncle is the same guy he allowed to escape! Oh, the irony! Peter has learned too late that “with great power there must also come — great responsibility!”

Anyway, back to that moment of moral turpitude. What exactly is Peter’s failure here? The cop says that Peter should have tripped the guy or stopped him somehow. He even threatens to arrest Peter for failing to help. But… arrest him for what? Do citizens really have a legal obligation to throw themselves in the way of fleeing criminals? Do cops even really want citizens to throw themselves in the way of fleeing criminals?

On the contrary, if you’re a cop chasing a perp, the last thing you want is for some civilian in goofy red tights to get in the way. What if the perp has a concealed weapon (and in this case, we know that the villain did have a gun by the next page)? What if the civilian tackles the perp and then gets shot? What if the civilian tackles the perp and somebody else gets shot? At the very, very least, from a police perspective, that’s an exponential increase in paperwork.

Of course, we know that Spidey could have taken down the baddy without anyone getting killed or even hurt. We know this in part because he’s got super powers. Mostly though, we know it because — Duh! — he’s a super-hero, or even just a hero. Heroes like Spider-man or Batman or Dirty Harry leap into action and save people. That’s what they do. And if they didn’t do that, there wouldn’t be much of a story, would there?

Indeed, Spiderman’s real sin here is not against morality or society, but against the tropes that keep the genre afloat. Super-heroes have to act. They’ve got to fight crime. If they don’t, you don’ t have a narrative. Super-heroes have “great responsibility,” but it’s always the responsibility to do something. You could conceivably have an origin story in which Wombat-Man decked a baddy, the gun went off, Cousin Joe got shot, and the hero decided “With great power comes great responsibility!” And so Wombat-Man decides never to mess with crime again, and instead uses his phenomenal digging powers solely to aid with infrastructure projects! Again, you could have such an origin – but what you’d end up with would not exactly be a super-hero comic.

In real life, of course, and as this suggests, the responsible, way to use your “great power” might conceivably in many circumstances be to sit on your ass and do nothing in particular. Certainly, if George W. Bush had done that in 2003, America and Iraq would both be a good bit better off today.

What I’m talking about here is essentially pacifism. Pacifism is about as massively discredited as a major philosophy can be. Pacifism is appeasement, or it’s treason, or, (more kindly) it’s a nice idea but not really practicable. You can’t just sit by and watch that guy escape, Spidey! Hit him! He’s got weapons of mass destruction!

I can’t say that I’m a pacifist myself, exactly. But I think that people can be way too quick to dismiss it, essentially because reality is rigged just like that Spidey origin story. For whatever reason, probably having to do with our reptile hind-brains and/or a steady consumption of revenge narratives, the negative consequences of inaction tend to seem to us infinitely more insupportable than the negative consequences of action. If we step aside and something bad happens, we say, “Oh no! I should have done more!” On the other hand, if you wade in and things get completely fucked up, you often feel like, “Well, at least I tried. And think how bad it would have been if we’d done nothing!”

Which brings me to Amazing Spider-Man #184, published way back there in September 1978. My friendly neighborhood Internet tells me this was written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Ross Andru. I must have read this when I was 8 or so; and I don’t think I even liked it all that much at the time. But I’ve remembered it all this time, in part because it is, rather bizarrely, one of the only super-hero comics I’ve ever seen that makes any effort to address either pacifism or the anti-pacifist assumptions at the core of super-hero comics. (The alternate-world Amish Superman in The Nail does not count. We will not speak of him again.)
 

 
Anyway, I haven’t seen ASM#184 in probably twenty years, but if memory (and a Web capsule summary) serves, the plot was a Bruce Lee rip off. Phil Chang is an awesome martial arts master, but he’s taken a vow of non-violence. Inevitably the evil Chinese gang wants him to join them. Their leader is the White Dragon, who is not only a martial artist extraordinaire, but also wears a white (natch) costume with a Chinese dragon style mask that looks staggeringly impractical, even by super-hero costume standards. Despite said mask, though, the Dragon is fully able to beat the tar out of the non-resisting Chang, and so he does – until Spidey comes to the rescue. Thank God someone is willing to fight, huh kiddies?!

That’s what you’d think the message would be anyway. In fact, though, Marv Wolfman’s script is surprisingly subtle. One exchange in particular has really stuck with me. I can’t quote exactly, alas, but to paraphrase, it went something like this:

Spidey: What in tarnation are you doing, anyway? The White Dragon is beating you to a pulp! He’s going to kill your family, you dope! Show me some of that kung-fu everyone’s been on about, won’t you? Are you a man or an amoeba? Come on, Phil! With great power comes great responsibility!

Phil: (and this I remember much better) There are failures in non-violence just as there are failures in violence.

I think that’s pretty profound. Yes, pacifism won’t necessarily solve all your problems. But then, fighting often doesn’t solve your problems either. Indeed, fighting can quite easily make things worse. You wouldn’t know that necessarily from reading super-hero comic books, of course — nor, perhaps, from public discourse in general. Which is why it might be worthwhile, sometimes, to remember that the power to right the world’s wrongs is given to neither man nor spider, and that we are all every bit as responsible for what we do as for what we don’t.
 

So what is pacifism? It is the uncompromising realization that we as humans are incapable of bringing about justice through violent retaliation. Hence, we relinquish all such acts to God in his sovereign and eschatological plan of judgment, justice, and mercy. Indeed, God have mercy on us.
—Mark Moore

Beneath the Hacks

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Somehow, I have a collection of some of Geoff Jones’ work on the Teen Titans sitting on my shelf. It’s called “The Future Is Now”, and includes Teen Titans 15-23 from 2005, according to the copyright page. Honestly, I don’t know how it got here. I didn’t buy it; I know my wife didn’t buy it. Maybe somebody who thinks comics are still for kids gave it to us for the boy? I don’t know; I’m stumped.

In any case, Matt Brady’s epic Johns takedown from September, and some of the defenses of Johns which resulted, made me wonder if I should check him out (especially since, for whatever mysterious reason, I can do so for free.) In particular, I have to admit that I find this sequence from (I think?) some Blackest Night bit really hilarious.
 

 
Zombie mothers vomiting rage bile on their zombie offspring — that’s solid, goofy entertainment. I’d read a whole book of that for free.

Alas, “Teen Titans: The Future Is Now”, does not include any rage-bile vomiting, nor any zombie babies. Still, the first couple pages are kind of enjoyable. Superboy (who is a clone of Superman with telekinetic powers) is going on his first date with Wonder Girl (a new one named Cassie Sandmark, not Donna Troy — just in case anyone cares.) Anyway, she shows up late because, as she said, she wasn’t sure which skirt to wear, he tells her she looks amazing, they flirt and talk about taking it slow, and then Superboy (who isn’t totally in control of his powers yet, I guess) accidentally uses his X-ray vision and sees through his clothes, which he obviously finds super-embarrassing, albeit not entirely unpleasurable.
 

 
Not that this is great comics or anything, but it’s competent, low-key, teen superdrama in the tradition of Chris Claremont and Marv Wolfman. The art by Mike McKone and Mario Alquiza isn’t especially notable either, but it is at least marginally competent in conveying spatial relationships and expressions. Superboy covering his face with his hand is cute, for example. I could read a whole trade of this without too much pain or suffering.

Unfortunately, I don’t get a full trade of Claremont-Wolfmanesque teen super soap opera. I only get about four pages. Then Superboy is pulled into a dimensional vortex and Superboy from the future appears, and then there’s a crossover in the 31st century with the Legion of Superheroes, and then we’re back in the near future meeting the Teen Titans’ future selves who have all gone to the bad, along with a raft of other future-selves of guest stars…and then there’s a crossover with what I guess is the Identity Crisis event, which involves Dr. Light and Green Arrow and again about 50 gajillion guest heroes.

Luckily, I’ve been wasting my life reading DC comics for 30 years plus, so I know who all the guest heroes are, more or less. I know who the Terminator is, even though no one bothers to tell me; I know what the Flash treadmill is, even though it’s really not explained especially well. I even know why Captain Marvel Jr. can be defeated by a video-recording that shows him saying “Captain Marvel.” And if that last sentence made no sense to you, consider yourself fucking lucky.

So, yes, I can figure out what’s going on. But why exactly do I want to spend several hundred pages watching Johns move toys from my childhood from one side of the page to the other and then back again? I’d much rather find out more about Superboy and Cassie Sandmark. They seemed like smart and maybe interesting kids. But whether they are or not, I’ll never know. Johns is so busy throwing the entire DC universe at his readers that we never get to learn much about the characters who the book is ostensibly about. Honestly, I had to look at the opening credits page of the book when I was done to even figure out who’s supposed to be in this version of the Teen Titans. The team virtually never even fights as a team, much less slows down long enough to engage in even perfunctory character development. Cassie and Superboy’s romance is barely mentioned again; instead, the big subplot/emotional touchstone is Robin dealing with the death of his father — a death which appears to come out of nowhere, presumably because it was part of some crossover in some other title.

In a spirited defense of Geoff Johns, Matt Seneca argued that Johns sincerely believed in hope and bravery, and was “creating a fictional universe with no relation to ours whatsoever but using it to address the most basic (or hell, base, i’ll say it, who cares) human emotional concerns.” Maybe I’m reading the wrong Geoff Johns comic, but I have to say that there’s precious little of hope, or bravery, or of human emotional concern, base or otherwise, in these pages. Mostly there’s just a commitment to continuity porn so intense that even the most rudimentary genre pleasures are drowned in a backwash of extraneous bullshit.

Maybe Johns could tell a decent story if he had an issue or two to himself without some half-baked company-wide storyline to incorporate. But since it’s pretty clear from his career that he lives for those company-wide storylines, I’m not inclined to cut him much slack. As it is, I picked this up hoping to get a nostalgic recreation of the mediocre genre pulp of my youth. “Nearly as good as the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans” — that doesn’t seem like it should be such a difficult hurdle. And yet there’s Johns, flopping about in the dust, the bottom-feeder burrowing beneath the hacks in the turgid swill of the mainstream.