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Miraculous Births in Comics

First, a question: How many of you out there in Webland, reading this, ever said to yourselves "I want to read a story where a superhero gets pregnant with no logical male parent involved and parthenogenetically gives birth?" Anyone?

I think I hear crickets chirping in the auditorium.

Comics writers, an overwhelmingly male crowd, often enter a strange territory of speculation, and sometimes feel they must feed us such stories, regardless of our tastes or desires. Perhaps excessive exposure to images of the Virgin Mary combined with a tendency to imitate brings it about. The resulting bedlam seldom endures aesthetic or logical scrutiny. Writers, however, seem indifferent to the extremely grotesque stories that this theme delivers.

Ms. Marvel

Marvel Comics, in the pages of Avengers, pulled a truly rare howler when this magazine depicted the disturbing story of the pregnancy of Ms. Marvel. One day, she just realized she had become pregnant when biology suggested that the preconditions for pregnancy did not exist. Skipping the details, Ms. Marvel confirmed the absence of details.

Once she delivered this child after only a month or two of worrying about it, this one-month infant rapidly grew to adulthood and admitted that it, the child, had brought about the pregnancy.

No, more awful material follows.

Said infant, now dubbed "Marcus," admitted to originating in another dimension, where his most likely means of escape involved taking a human form; therefore, he caused Ms. Marvel to gestate, and became the infant she delivered. However, seeing the desireability of anyone with the refined senses necessary to dub oneself "Ms. Marvel," Marcus revealed his passionate love for the woman, and became her lover.

Then, admitting to having used some small mind-control trick to pursuade her to agree, Marcus walked said Ms. Marvel, his incestuous concubine and mother, into the extradimensional sunset that probably belonged in precisely the dimension Marcus had created an unforgiveable story to create.

Siskel and Ebert may not read comics, so we can't rely on them to review this story so far, although it shows all the marks of already having earned considerable panning; we can protect ourselves somewhat from troubled dreams by refusing to speculate about what kind of reader would have given this dreadful piece a "thumb's up."

Chris Claremont got to attempt damage control for this truly horrid tale in Avengers Annual #10, which detailed the aftermath of these events. If his story induced nausea, well, some medicine must ever taste bad. But Claremont did attempt to tie off the loose threads remaining from the earlier atrocity. He played on the element of Marcus mind-controlling Ms. Marvel to force her into concubinage and emigration. Once said couple embarked on its partnership of dubious foundation, Marcus discovered that he had done something wrong in the process of assuming the flesh and, in the dimensional otherworld, rapidly aged and died, stranding Ms. Marvel in an unfamiliar universe.

She found her way back to her original reality, regretfully, since she represented a poorly-planned and superfluous character Marvel did not need and had not known how to use (they wouldn't have sent her away to serve as Marcus' unwilling sex slave if they had enjoyed a single decent idea about what to do with her).

There, broken in spirit, abandoned by smirking friends who had found some off-color humor in her new role as an expatriate white slave, without her own book, and, hopefully, vowing to avenge her ill-treatment at the hands of editorial hacks who really must have known better, she wandered around until the newly penned mutant villaness Rogue appeared to steal her powers and memories.

This much happened in the story's exposition, whereupon another superfluous Marvel character, the original Spider-Woman, appeared to rescue Ms. Marvel's helpless, depowered, amnesiac alter ego Carol Danvers from falling (or jumping) to her death from a bridge.

The balance of the story deals with the Avengers capturing and containing another incarnation of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, a Kirby-era supervillain team ocassionally retrofitted with one or two stylish contemporary villains in whatever mode appears in current X-books. Between sessions of roughhouse, clues about what brought Ms. Marvel to this sorry state (hint: bad writing) surface, and in the end of the tale, Carol gets the rare privelege of slapping and telling off the big guns of the Avengers for abandoning her to Marcus. The accusation seems to affect only the male Avengers, even though the Wasp and Scarlet Witch evidently stood and smirked even as had their male peers in this event, but the ill-delivered portrayal of Ms. Marvel as a pop feminist procluded her taking her female peers to account about this.

Scarlet Witch

When the Scarlet Witch became a mother, she enjoyed certain elements typical of the conventional marriage-model of motherhood. She had a husband, whom she loved, and produced twin sons unto him.

However, consider these details. The Scarlet Witch belongs among Marvel's mutant characters, who derive their improbable abilities to an even more improbable accidental error in transcribing genes. By Marvel's definition, she belongs to the species "homo superior," a descendant of homo sapiens that has advanced enough to earn consideration as an altogether new species (yes, this involves some bad science-fiction biology). This, by itself, does not make her an improbable mother.

The nature of the sire of the children does, however. Somehow, the Vision, a "synthezoid," which sometimes means "synthetic human" and sometimes means "synthetic humanoid robot," depending upon the whim of the auteur du jour, fathered these sons. Prior to the pregnancy, Marvel had not established important questions like "Does the Vision bleed?" and "Does he possess the full complement of human organs and apparati?" With the Comics Code Authority not yet dead in those days, and perhaps a merciful group of editors who wished to spare us diagrams of a synthezoid's machinery that mimicked the functioning of a vas deferens, comics readers managed to miss things that only the Vision's urologist would know about.

The improbable pregnancy and subsequent live birth enjoyed a cultivated air of strangeness, with characters quietly acknowledging its miraculous nature; hints suggested that the Scarlet Witch's ability to manipulate improbability with her "hex power" made the entire pregnancy possible. Owing to the pseudobiological or mechanical (ask today's writer) nature of the Vision's original body, we may legitimately qualify this as a prodigious comic book birth without a father.

If other writers wished to avoid the touchy subject of the Scarlet Witch gestating children without benefit of a father's genetic contribution, the sometimes-contraversial John Byrne, during his days on the Avengers West Coast title decided to explain the entire messy business.

He began with problems with governesses assigned to the Maximoff-Shade children. Stories mentioned that the Scarlet Witch fired several babysitters and governesses for claiming that her children sometimes disappeared, as if turned off with a switch, when the Witch spent time away from them. The Scarlet Witch, however, refused to credit such statements until her onetime mentor, Agatha Harkness, made her notice the matter. Overall, the tale implied that these children represented constructs of Wanda's power rather than true flesh-and-blood infants; and before anyone could do anything about this, the demonic villain Pandemonium had stolen both infants to replace missing pieces of his fractured soul. Said theft accomplished, Pandemonium replaced his demonic limbs with the "bodies" of the babies, appearing with flesh-colored arms that disturbingly bore baby heads instead of hands.

We can suspect that Byrne enjoyed his horror films in those days.

Power Girl

In the middle of DC's redundant Zero Hour: Crisis in Time mega-crossover event (which honesty in advertising would have renamed Zero Hour: Crisis in Editing), the second-tier character and onetime Supergirl doppelganger Power Girl became great with child. Newsgroup rumors implicate the departed Hal Jordan as the infant's father, but the mother's comments during the actual story ascribe the pregnancy to a mystical source.

While the universe itself promised to end (again) in the pages of Zero Hour: Crisis in Time, Power Girl went through an incredibly accelerated pregnancy, not too different from that Ms. Marvel went through about twelve years previously, and gave birth roughly on a schedule to coincide of the victory of Virtue against Evil.

One may suspect poorly-planned gimmickry here for a number of reasons. Firstly, when DC revised the Power Girl concept (Superman's female cousin) after Crisis on Infinite Earths, they left a character connected to an obscure second-tier DC comic of the seventies rather than to a first-tier character like Superman, and most of the revision served to scrape away anything interesting about her. Secondly, left in this sad state, she had failed to support her own title in the aftermath of DC's housecleaning and needed to pop up occasionally somewhere, in something, to remind readers that the DC stable included her.

Why DC chose this venue and this plotline to include another silly comics virgin birth eludes speculation. Perhaps the whole business only occurred to provide an annoying scene where Captain Atom, who claimed to have midwifed his children, attempted to assist in the delivery only to receive a perfunctory rebuff from Wonder Woman, who sneered at the notion of the male Captain Atom serving any other function than Extant-fodder on the interchronal battlefield. Such arrogant rudeness, after all, passes for cutting edge feminism in uncritical corners of the real world, and therefore must seem deep and heroic in the naive confines of comic book reality.

At the time of this writing (Mar. 1999), my sources have yet to produce any information on this Power-Girl spawned child beyond some speculation about its parentage (some observers suspect Hal Jordan somehow, possibly owing to some earlier scene between the two of them prior to Jordan's assumption of a villainous role). However, if form holds consistent, said child will likely become some great future destroyer (as Donna Troy's spawn, the future "Lord Chaos") or a threatening godlike being (like Franklin Richards, child of Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman), unless someone considers having said child represent a refugee from limbo who impregnated Power Girl to escape his extradimensional confinement and take her for his concubine.

Comics, after all, returns to its folly....

Some Questions

All of this comic-book parthenogenesis raises some questions.

1. If at least three Superheroines can produce offspring without benefit of fertilization, why couldn't Superman do this back in the sixties? He could do anything else.
2. Do all these pseudoimmaculate conceptions reflect the same sort of sacreligious pretention that DC sometimes demonstrates in its occasional efforts to promote Superman to the role of Supreme Being in the far future? Or do they simply represent another improbable ability manifested by the super- and metahumans who populate their respective universes in numbers adequately to form a permanently dominant voting bloc in any modern democracy?
3. Does something disturbing and lurid lie behind writers' desire to make these characters pregnant? While some demented comics fans take a perverse glee in a vice called "erotic fan fiction," in which their pens and keyboards allow them to couple with their favorite four-color comics goddesses, do writers similarly feel themselves satisfied by actually knocking up female superheroes?
4. Do these stories represent an attempt to make the characters seem more real by allowing them the very human privelege of giving birth? If so, the attempt fails miserably, since the only widely accepted instance of parthenogenesis still defies recognition by scientific minds, representing a matter of theological rather than scientific import.
5. Do these writers realize how truly awful these stories get? Do they care?

And, most importantly,

6. Why do they write this stuff?

If writers wish to remind readers of the humanity of their superheroines, they would do well to allow said heroines the luxury of the occasional normal birth, through means proven to work in the real world (like, for instance, conventional impregnation and in vitro fertilization). Some heroines got away with this during their tenures in various titles; for instance, the second Spider-Woman already had a child (the normal way) before becoming a super-heroine, neatly sidestepping the necessity of making her child into some future destroyer-god or cosmic(k) messiah.

If writers wish to experiment with bizarre births as a theme unto itself, they have a considerable body of material to work with in things like the DC labs that produced Dubbilex, the Guardian, Auron, and the new Superboy. Similarly, writers could dabble to their hearts' content with things like the Inhumans and their evolutionary enhancement gas-treatments or the weird creations of the High Evolutionary.

If the attempt represents an approach to female readers, writers should consider letting some female writer (even one who has given birth) occasionally write or consult on such a tale in order to see if it produces anything at all to which a prospective or accomplished mother can relate.

One can detect something wrong with the material when the question "Who did they write this for?" doesn't produce any kind of an answer.