web hosting short URLs photo sharing

Capes, Masks, and Perdition

Not long ago, I made some miscellaneous purchases and came across the same concept in a superhero story not in two, but in three pieces I had picked out. When a semi-random grab elicits such results, I begin to suspect that noteworthy conceptual recycling has occurred, and that within my hands I can witness the cultivation or birth of another tiresome cliche.

You can begin to suspect the overuse of a theme when, in buying a not-completely-random sampling of nonetheless unrelated comics, you encounter the same absurd premise in no less than three places. While almost any idea may deserve its one shot in a superhero comic - after all, in general, no matter how bad the premise, something worse probably has appeared somewhere in another, similar piece already - sometimes a persistent reader might ache for something like an expiration date on story ideas. "Do not use after 01-JAN-1985" might save readers the resentment born of blowing three bucks on a silly book with an idea that didn't work the first ten or twenty times he saw it.

In one case, furthermore, two forces in comics collide: The tendency to flog an idea to death, to the detriment of the product and of the consumer, combines with the similarly negative tendency to inflate scopes, scales, and consequences in superhero books unto the point of meaninglessness when such pieces choose to thrust their heroes into hell.

Perhaps the occasional superhero deserves to go to hell, as far as such may appear in a comic-book universe. But how many times can spandexed superheroes wake up in hell and clobber-and-finesse their way back to the world of light before the concept embarrasses writers into never using it again? And how often should decency allow writers to rehash this idea?

Precedents in Folklore

Those who dabble in the study of folklore might run across the role of the hero as Harrower of Hell. A number of mythological and religious figures have, to their credit, tales of traveling into the gloomy underworld for a variety of purposes. Orpheus did it, as did Jason, and, by some interpretations, the Arthur of legend; and even Christendom has propagated tales of its central figure as having gone into hell itself to rescue the patriarchs, though those tales do not necessarily occupy a place in the contemporary canon of modern Christian churches.

One might, however, point out an important contrast here. Where the hero or prophet descended into the local version of hell in a mythical or religious story cycle, this event had some kind of symbolic meaning, often tied to seasonal events like the death and rebirth of the world with the passing of winter into spring. Purposes and effects could reach highs sublime enough for the pickiest nitpicker; for instance, in Christianity, the whole business centers around themes of vicarious atonement and rescue of mankind entire.

In a comic-book, however, the whole business amounts to simple hype. The storyteller busies himself in trying to create unpleasant situations from which heroes can escape. In superhero comics, then, the whole hell business just represents this pattern, taken to an absurd extreme, and detached from any semblance of scale or scope. Should we really expect men who fight crime by swinging on ropes and flinging hamlike fists to have what it takes to breach the very walls of death itself?

Hell and The Spectre

Given the theological bent of the recent Spectre concept - a fusion of two aging DC concepts such that the introduction of one (Hal Jordan) inverts the other (the Spectre) - we might expect a few of the classic religious events to occur within the new Spectre series. Hopefully, it will avoid heavy-handed and offensive material like the crucifixion of Adam Warlock, but we can nonetheless expect events like the temptation of the various saints and, as this example attests, the trip to, and escape from, hell.

We can, then, perhaps, forgive Spectre somewhat for exploring a trail with so many footprints upon it. With an essence in comic-book theology, the inevitability, and possibly necessity, of explorations of the hell concept become certainly more clear.

By some admittedly human judgments, after all, Hal Jordan, the new human component for the Spectre, might belong in some place of punishment, whether finite or eternal; a man who killed his friends and peers by the thousands then went on to arrogate to himself the role of cosmurge - creator of the universe - does not differ in too many important essentials from the JudeoChristian Satan, except in that he drew the power to fuel his hubris from non-divine sources and seems to have gotten away with it.

Though the stage settings tend to derive from the theological traditions of western Europe, a strong undercurrent of the new Spectre stories seems to follow a pattern typical of a kind of Buddhist tale where dim-witted and unenlightened men would demand of the Buddha that he prove his awareness by demonstrating his ability to achieve Nirvana (an effort which probably would involve his own cessation of existence). In such tales, the Buddha generally refuses, arguing that he must aid the rest of humanity in achieving the nirvanic state before he enjoys it himself.

The current mission of the new Spectre follows a logic much like this, though in some ways writers present this as a punishment or a curse rather than, as in the Buddha's case, a calling. Whether J. M DeMatteis has a background in various belief systems, his treatment of the Spectre nonetheless suggests that similar insights direct his treatments.

Thus, we have the case of the Spectre traveling to hell in the first issue of his new title, as part of a general overall testing by an angel representing itself variously, including hints suggesting an identity with Satan. As a kind of test, challenge, or punishment for the Spectre's somewhat sadistic tendencies as Cosmic Punisher, this angel invites the Spectre to test himself against hell.

In this case, we see less of the usual literalist Bosch and Dante cliche and more clever interpretive hell-symbolism, and a resolution follows that somewhat suggests Dante, in that the Spectre escapes from hell by descending into it and coming out the other end.

Hell and Nighthawk

Nighthawk's fairly recent trip into the inferno - in the Nighthawk mini from 1998 - explores a staple of pieces like television's "Night Gallery," the tricked-into-hell story.

This miniseries moved from logical implausibility to the next, with Nighthawk awakening from a death editorially commuted to a coma, with a new set of eyes that gave him a precognitive ability to see evil before it occurred. However, this gift had the taint of demonic origins, and the visions misled Nighthawk into self-righteous preemptive counterstrikes against targets not necessarily dedicated to evildoing; indeed, before long, the chronic Marvel demon Mephisto revealed himself as the key player in this particular silly morality play.

Nighthawk, guided by a moral arrogance and the demands of a script, kills Daredevil when that red-clad stalwart attempts to talk some sense into him, resulting in Nighthawk's banishment to hell with the mortal remains of the more interesting superhero. There, he confronted a number of flimsy illusions aimed at guiding him further into sinfulness.

However, by his persistence, his refusal to abandon the body of Daredevil, and the limitations inherent in a three-issue miniseries, Nighthawk manages to drag Daredevil through and out of hell, even restoring him to life by means of some piece of Daredevil's soul left in a previous (and probably bad) sequence when Daredevil himself traveled to hell.

Hell and Adventures of Superman

Superman, during his trip into the underworld, visited a somewhat faux hell (which begs the question of the "real" and "unreal" in the context of a printed comic dedicated to thoroughly unreal concepts) simulated by his sometime nemesis "Lord Satanus," a rather silly demonic mind-warper perhaps better described by the last two syllables of his name.

The recent emphasis in Superman books puts more credence on the "man" than the "super," and we begin to detect some great wrongness very early in the tale as Clark Kent mouths off to Lois (not his typical deferential behavior) and cruises for young women around the newsroom. Yet between these vignettes in an obviously-wrong Metropolis, we see sequences of a demonic presence arguing with a child about the events going on in the deformed Metropolis; and, ultimately, a confused but clever Lois receives a vision that enables her to enter the hell-scape where Superman awaits, strapped to a wall in the crucified position, for Lord Satanus to play out his own drama inside his head.

Ultimately, the moral boundaries of the young man in the wheelchair come to the rescue, even as Superman bursts free to rescue Lois from the consequences of her intervention.

More to the Iceberg?

I would postulate that, if a consumer can pull two issues of current titles and back issue material and come up with three versions of the same tale, that superhero comics in general must teem with the redundant elements. And, indeed, one might consider the recent events connecting Hawkeye and the Thunderbolts to a rescue of the seventies third-stringer Hellcat from another hell; to the understood history of Daredevil in having gone to hell at some point prior to the Nighthawk limited series; and to crossover events like Day of Judgment, which take superheroes en masse into some four-color version of the underside of the afterlife.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 218. Completed 04-FEB-2001.