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The Passion of Adam Warlock

To mention Marvel Comics' character Adam Warlock sometimes invites a colorful litany of criticism, frequently evoking themes that center around the specifics of what Jim Starlin brought to the character in the mid-seventies. Such a conversation might contain words like "pretentious" and "overblown," since such accusations color most complaint about the seminal cosmic pieces Starlin produced in the 1970s.

However, such argument requires loss of context. The pretensions involved with the "Strange Death of Adam Warlock" predated Starlin's involvement with the character; rather than investing the character with inflated claims of divinity, Starlin deflated the ludicrous aggrandizement of the character begun in Power of Warlock, a short-lived series from years before.

Before Starlin, Marvel attempted to sell Adam Warlock as Marvel Comics' answer to Jesus. In a short and lesser-known run of books, in the title Power of Warlock, Adam Warlock would face and resist the temptation of the personified essence of evil; would die, affixed to a cross; and would rise again after three days. The audacity of this appropriation of the central story of Christendom for a superheroic adventure still resounds today.

Pretensions and Derivations

To speak of Adam Warlock today, one might forget that Jack Kirby, not Jim Starlin, created the character. However, two generations of drastic transformation had stripped much of the original fell of Kirby's "Him" and replaced it with other material and other themes.

Kirby first incarnated the character; Starlin laid him to rest (for a while); but in between appeared a version of Adam Warlock derived mainly from portions of the Gospels. Marvel Comics had their orange-skinned cosmic redeemer go through many of the incidents of the story we refer to as the Passion.

A Prodigious Birth

Adam Warlock first burst into life in Fantastic Four, around 1968, as the product of advanced research into creating life; the scientists that made him sought, in him, to build a perfect man without having to wade through all the slow process of trial-and-error that evolution would involve. Lee and Kirby, in writing this story, perhaps owed more inspiration to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein than to the New Testament.

Nonetheless, this prodigious birth of a being meant to advance beyond the constrained domains of ordinary men did have features that would serve well in later attempts to make the character resonate as messianic rather than monstrous. As "Him," Warlock came into life from a monstrous chrysalis that would serve him both as hospital and tomb in later stories; said apparatus of pupation often repeatedly served him as the womb from which he would emerge, reborn, after apparent defeats and destructions at the hands of powerful rivals.

Naming and the Mission

Adam received his role as a savior from Marvel Comics' perennial demiurge, a character called the High Evolutionary, whose talents center around the ability to accelerate the development of life into more advanced and more sentient forms. This character had, at one stage of his history, created a world of his own, based on the earth but subject to his control; the Evolutionary may have intended this creation as a means of fixing the mistakes of the earth by perfecting it in copy. At one stage, the High Evolutionary had specialized in making various mammals manlike, thereby creating his own Praetorian Guard; but later experiments went further, and he ultimately created his own world.

Just as Satan invaded Eden in the form of a serpent, a similar figure entered the High Evolutionary's creation "Counter-Earth;" a devious and corrupting being, the Man-Beast, brought evil to this place. The Man-Beast's purposes neatly parallel those of Satan.

The High Evolutionary, however, only marginally fits the role of God in this particular drama. Marvel did not go so far, inclined by the logic of continuity, the sense of editors, and probably good taste, to limit his role to something like that of the Gnostic demiurge, a being that, according to their theology, created our flawed world in an ignorance that did not allow him to produce a perfect creation. Nonetheless, unlike the often petulant and antagonistic demiurge, the High Evolutionary hoped to rid his hoped-for Utopia of the being that seeded it with evil.

Thus, the Evolutionary chose "Him" as his instrument to rid the created world of its woes. He renamed "Him" Adam Warlock and gave him the powerful soul gem as a tool to use against the walking embodiment of evil. This naming sequence bears, in itself, some interpretation; it suggests certain theological notions itself, even if they do not confine themselves to New Testament events or the text of the Bible.

While the sound and feel of the name Adam readily suggests itself for the occasional superhero - said moniker enjoys both a virile feel and a quietly patriarchal undertone useful to creating a heroic image - its Biblical overtones probably commended it for Warlock in the scenes where the High Evolutionary gave him his name and soul gem.

Adam Warlock, like Adam the first man, did not originate through a normal process of gestation. Adam Warlock, like Adam the first man, represented the first of his kind and (hopefully) a matrix for a new kind of being of great metaphysical import. Since Jesus of the Gospels shared these traits with Adam the first man, Cabalists would sometimes cast Adam and Jesus as reflections, oriented in time in opposite directions (for example, Adam came forth from Eden after finding death in a tree; Jesus would find, then cheat death on a tree, and ascend into heaven).

One could make a coincidence of any single detail in this Adam Warlock story cycle. In a body, however, each so-called coincidence becomes exponentially less likely. Marvel would tip its hand in a later stage of this story, when Adam would play the role of redeemer for a whole world.

The Temptation of Adam

As Jesus went into the desert for forty days and forty nights in order to meet and resist the temptations of Satan, so, too, did Warlock enjoy his own episode of temptation.

Counter-earth's manifestation of evil, the Man-Beast, served as Warlock's adversary throughout the Warlock passion cycle. Said Man-Beast bore the responsibility for the corruption of a world; and the High Evolutionary, demiurge of the Counter-Earth, had endowed Warlock with his name and mission to save his creation.

Marvel dumbed down the confrontation somewhat from its prototype in the Bible. The Man-Beast directly posed Warlock a question about his nature: Did good or evil control Warlock's inner being? Warlock argued for his own goodness.

Soon, however, Warlock found himself denounced and attacked by the Counter-Earthlings he had come to protect. Provoked into rage by ingratitude, Warlock began a typical superheroic rampage, flying around and inducing great property damage, and repelling the occasional missile attack. Four of the locals who had seemed like friends denounced him in his rampage, labeling Adam and his actions as manifestations of evil. However, Warlock declined to destroy them.

Then everything faded, and the Man-Beast revealed the entire rampage sequence as a vision he had induced. Had Warlock given in to the temptation to destroy his onetime friends, the Man-Beast revealed, he would have gone over to evil (and, therefore, the service of the Man-Beast).

The superheroic idiom may not have suggested a more precise interpretation of the scenario where Satan offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world in exchange for his loyalty, but the resemblance, in context, still persists. Neither figure gave in, and each would subsequently wage a campaign against his tempter.

Dying to Save a World

When Marvel put Adam Warlock on an ankh-shaped cross, had him die and had him return three days later, did they think they could pass this off as an original story? Furthermore, did they feel no one cared about the original material enough to object to their recasting the Passion as a fable starring one of their disposable second-string heroes?

Fictional works can appropriate New Testament themes without bringing dishonor either to the source or the target, as certain of Philip K. Dick's pieces plausibly demonstrate. However, in the case of The Power of Warlock, one suspects that talent or editors suspected they had found a good story that no one would recognize if they redressed it in spandex and monsters. Adam Warlock would not make the last superheroic claim on some kind of Redeemer role - such stories will not become truly obsolescent until the concept of redemption ceases to mean anything - but we can hope that future explorations of the theme will borrow with a lighter touch and a less obvious chain of appropriation.