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My Enemy, Myself

Back in the mid-to-late seventies, Marvel Comics let Jim Starlin work on an old property of theirs that hadn't really gone anywhere in his previous stories (and certainly had never been able to support his own book in any real sense). That property was the now-venerable Adam Warlock, one of the first "Cosmick Messiah" characters.

The Case of the Magus

During Starlin's run on the titles which enclosed the definitive Warlock saga, Adam pursues a rapacious universal church and discovers that it was created by an evil being called the Magus. The Magus, it turns out, was the future self of none other than Adam Warlock himself, gone mad and amoral sometime in the future, and returned to the past, where he has had thousands of years to prepare his Evil Master Plan.

Adam, noble unto nihilism, therefore destroys the Magus' evil master plan by doing himself in (so that no future version of himself can exist to become the Magus). He does this by traveling into the short-term future and stealing his near-future self's soul with his patented Soul Gem.

All right, this story was a good story when it first ran. While prone to the sort of pretentiousness suggested by spelling "cosmic" as "cosmick," it had a clear beginning, development, and resolution; it had ongoing subplots; it had quirks and twists; and the reader hadn't seen it two thousand times already.

Of course, that was 1977, and the world has moved on since then.

The Case of the Monarch

Sometime during the stretch when I had stopped reading comics--a long span between 1983 and 1997, easily as long as the stretch when I had read them-- DC did a story in which a villain from the future must be destroyed. His name was the Monarch (or maybe Monarch).

The kicker was that he was some superhero who had gone bad, and the superheroes involved in the Monarch storylines had to figure out who was to become the Monarch. Does this begin to sound familiar? However, the big surprise wasn't that Monarch had been a superhero; the twist was to be which hero was to become him.

To add to the confusion of a poorly recycled story concept, DC did not complete the story as they had planned because of a breach in security. As the Monarch stories had been planned, DC had intended their property Captain Atom to become the Monarch. Hyped as a senses-shattering blow to the DC universe as readers knew it, this blockbuster, even if they had followed through, wouldn't have been more than a fizzle. Captain Atom was a purchased property from another comics company, and not a long-time DC regular at all. I don't think he even had a DC title at the time of the Monarch stories.

All right, then; we know that Monarch is from the future, like the Magus. We know that Monarch used to be a superhero, like the Magus. We found out through leaks that Captain Atom, a poor-seller, was to become the Monarch, like Adam Warlock. But to add a twist of surprise to this predictable business, DC switched gears and it turned out that Monarch used to be...

Monarch had been, of all people...

DC was going to make a villain out of their popular and immortal...

(WARNING! SPOILER AHEAD!)

Hawk.

No light bulbs bursting in your head? If you don't know who DC's Hawk was, it probably doesn't matter. He was part of an early "relevant" superhero duo of the late 1960s, called the "Hawk and the Dove," who went around superheroing in between debates about jingoism versus pacifism. Hawk appeared once in a while in Teen Titans and reappeared from the limbo of obscurity during Crisis on Infinite Earths, but hardly qualifies as a major DC character. Before Crisis, it's debatable if anyone but comics trivia experts could pick him out of a lineup.

But anyway, there's the twist. The Monarch was...Hawk!

The Case of the Maestro

Another supervillain that appeared while I wasn't reading comics was a scary supervillain from the future called the Maestro. He used to be a superhero. That superhero was the Hulk.

I haven't read the story, so I can't say if it was a big revelation or not. I suspect that this one wasn't a twist surprise ending thing like the Magus and the Monarch, but the third emm-lettered Ex-Hero Megavillain did, at least, end the career of a major Marvel Comics property. Maybe the Maestro was from an alternate future, and not our own future at all.

Can you hear the assembled armies of comics fandom yawning in terror for the future of their hero?

The Case of the Time Trapper

The Time Trapper is a time-travel bad guy who has tormented the Legion of Superheroes at least since Mike Grell was drawing the magazine back in the early-mid 1970s. I had seen the Trapper before, but not in any really impressive story.

Then, out of a mistaken sense of curiosity about the presumably major events of the DC comics universe, I bought the Zero Hour series. In a conversation between some version of Cosmic Boy and the Time Trapper, TT reveals...

Are you sure you're ready for this? Positive?

Don't blame me if your hat blows off the top of your head, now...

...the Time Trapper reveals that he is the future self of Cosmic Boy! In other words, Time Trapper used to be a superhero, and is now a bad guy. While Cosmic Boy is mildly obscure, that's not from being out of print. It's from being in comic books where there are dozens and dozens of other superheroes. Cosmic Boy has been in fairly constant print since the late sixties and was created during the earliest days of DC's Silver Age, somewhere between 1959 and 1961 (if my Fact-o-meter is working right).

The Case of Extant

Oh, by the way, in the same Zero Hour series that showed that Cosmic Boy was to become Time Trapper, we also had Extant. Extant used to be the Monarch (see above). Before that, he had been a DC universe superhero called Hawk. Sound familiar? That's two in one book. Oh, yeah, he also used to be Waverider, a time-travel superhero from when I wasn't reading. Is that three in one book?

The Case of Parallax

Oh, yes, and it turns out that the real real mastermind in Zero Hour wasn't actually Extant-Waverider-Monarch-Hawk. It was really Parallax, who used to be a superhero called Green Lantern.

At least Parallax wasn't Hal Jordan's future self. Then that would be four in one book.

The Sad Truth

I picked these four examples off the top of my head without being a dedicated reader of the titles involved. I was doing research on other things--mainly the weird complex of events that resulted from the Death of Superman--and started seeing this stuff as footnotes. How many times has the Dedicated Reader seen these same things recycled?

Those who lament the sad state of the cutting edge "new" comics might look to the indolence of such blatant rehashing as one thing driving readers away from the mainstream. Perhaps they should listen to Stan Lee, whose wisdom these days boils down to "It's the characterization, stupid!"

Without self-reproach, I can say that in the age of the $2-to-6$ comic book, fans deserve better.

Post Script

No one still seems to have done the Hero-gone-villain from the future as well as Starlin did. Frown on him if you will, Starlin does know one thing that some in the industry don't: He knows how to tell a story and make it interesting.

However, I don't think that he's done another story where the superhero finds he must confront a villain who is his own future self.