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We Have Met the Enemy

Outside of superhero comics - and, in general, in any place where the resolution of problems can conceivably occur through other devices than the deft application of a hamlike fist in the kisser of Evil Itself, or some suitable proxy - flawed human beings have problems. We attempt to ignore or deny them, we attempt to solve them; other human beings intrude into the matter with what we call "interventions" these days; we resort to confessionals; we withdraw into substance abuse to hide from these problems; or, sometimes, we enter various kinds of therapy, from among a number of psychological and / or religious schools and disciplines, including options such as Twelve Steps, psychoanalysis, neurotherapy, hormone replacement, or whatever.

Superheroes, for all the negatives that attach to that role - consider, for example, the burdens attendant on maintaining a chiseled six-pack of abdominal muscles over a sixty-year time span - have another option for ridding themselves of lures, urges, desires, fetishes, inappropriate emotive states, hallucinations, and most of the bill of fare presented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), revision whatever.

They can simply butt heads with a personification of their problems and work it out that way. And who would turn such a therapeutic option down, if it ever became available? The time and expense required to maintain a regular diet of antidepressants might seem justified if we compare them to our own options, but presented with the ability to just duke it out with some smart-alecky doppelganger, either within the "real" world or some kind of Ditkoesque swirly-space tableau of the imagination, most of us would opt for one short and sweet drag-down slug fest.

Which brings us, once again, to the Wonderful World of Comics Cliches, where the idea that yesterday held us, fascinated, in its grip, comes, through reusage, to incline us less to sit spellbound at the edges of our seats and more to groan for mercy from writers. An early Recycle Bin column dealt with Evil Future Selves; but even as once-innovative writers explored that possibility, they set up the machinery for a related chestnut-in-waiting, the War with the Personified Character Flaw.

Warlock

In round one of the great confrontation between heroes and the physical manifestations of their personality defects, we return to sometime around 1977 and enter the troubled life of Adam Warlock. While attempting to deal with the embarrassing problem of an evil future self who threatened to take over everything and then make it all into a big pile atop which he might perch and laugh dramatically, he came to a point where a botched brainwashing attempt sent him off on a hallucinatory fugue of introspection.

At first blink, one might not note that the Madness Monster, the purple goober with the bad body hair problem, represented an aspect of Warlock's personality. As with the Magus earlier in the story, the question of identity served as a revelation. Yet the Madness Monster's confession to occupying a place within Warlock's own increasingly-twisted personality convincingly implicates him as an evil present self to overcome.

If, these days, Warlock seems like a nuisance, we can plead extenuating circumstances, since he always had a lot on his mind. The comics never made it perfectly clear, but experience inclines me to believe that the events of the mid-seventies Warlock saga all happened on one particularly long Monday. After all, on what other day of the week would you expect to have to overcome an evil present self, destroy an evil future self, and euthanize a near-future present morally compromised self?

This particular type of narcissistic interlude on the part of superheroes tends to end either in reconciliation or in a kind of identity-divorce, and Warlock chose the reintegration of that big, purple, unsightly-body-haired piece of himself at that time because he knew it would come in handy when it finally came time for him to kick his own future butt.

Silver Surfer

The saying that not knowing history dooms us to repeat it becomes inverted in superhero comics sometimes. Knowing comics history, maybe, dooms us to repeat it. And the same things often creep up elsewhere in the same franchise, as the war-with-self bit recurred within Silver Surfer, part of Marvel's cosmic characters stable, which currently owe collectively a great deal to Jim Starlin.

In such a context, then, we see the same stuff in the same franchise when the Silver Surfer, directed by Ron Marz, confronted his own inner blackness. The pretext for this particular blow-out of morbid self-examination comes from the deeds of the Collector, who had infected the Silver Surfer with a "madness virus," hoping that the Surfer's peculiar abilities would allow him to host and carry it to deliver it from world to world for whatever arcane purpose he sought to accomplish. So, at some point prior to the opening splash of Silver Surfer #64, we encounter our hero facing a shiny black doppelganger of himself, and they soon begin to cast energy-bolts, throw fists around, and talk relationship.

In all truth, this example from Silver Surfer #64 provides a nearly-perfect specimen of this kind of conflict. The hero's evil aspects appear in a personified form; this form takes a very near-exact imitation of the hero's own form; the hero and his antithesis argue long-windedly about right and wrong and the differences that separate them, with the evil side claiming little or no difference exists and the original hero denying that his viler aspects control him; and the duplicate, because of the Silver Surfer's peculiar coloration (a white or chromium kind of sheen), assumes a photo-negative version of his color scheme.

With all the key pieces in place, one would almost expect that Marz' interpretation of the self-as-enemy chestnut represented the original, seminal version, if not for the ability of the amateur comics cultural historian to dredge up examples from the 1970s, over a decade prior to this piece's publication date.

Culminating the perfection of the cliche, indeed, Surfer realizes that a) his methods of resisting his other-self do not work and b) perhaps he should attempt to integrate rather than resist the Tarnished Silver Surfer (my own nomenclature), so he reabsorbs his negative image, in spite of that ersatz being's protests that the Surfer can't win, can't break even, and can't get out of the game.

Solar

A context of dangerously erratic behavior and a campaign of attempts at mind control ultimately drove Solar, willing or not, to resort to the manifestation of an incarnation of his aggression and violence as another version of himself. Not initially evil - in some ways, the alternate self took with it some of the heroic aspects of Solar's personality - this doppelganger nonetheless fit the mold for containing traits with which the original blended Solar wanted to dispense.

From the context of Solar #23, a reader can glean that Solar had thrown a fright into his friends and significant others through maneuvers like a mass eradication of spider aliens from the moon (which evidently represented an unjustifiably extreme use of force) and a generally incomprehensible rampage of troublemaking.

With the reader in on the gag - Darque, behind the scenes, performs a ceremony that gives him control over the red-stockinged superhero - Solar proceeded to sabotage a nuclear reactor, threatening in the process to render the earth ultimately uninhabitable. With the conventions of superhero comics, we could assume insanity or mind control based on the huge smile Solar sported while creating a big radioactive mess on a lark.

Yet, just as this refugee from Gold Key comics came near the culmination of his plan, something happened to make Darque's machinations fail altogether. The other Solar split from our hero's person just as one expected the boot to drop and some significant portion of the surface of the earth to become a glowing and radioactive monument to the human folly of splitting the atom.

Initially, the division involved mostly a kind of "good cop - bad cop" relationship, with the "normal" Solar retaining the endearing traits that would allow him to maintain a girlfriend and to provide character anchors from which readers could relate to him. The "new" Solar, on the other hand, possessed the district attorney attributes, such as the belief in punishing one's enemies and the ability to condemn, with remarkable casualness, an entire species to death.

My knowledge of Valiant / Acclaim comics of this era remains notoriously incomplete, and where (and if) this matter came to the logical head - Solar and Solar: The Sequel contending for control of a shared soul and ultimate victory or reconciliation for one of the derivative Solars. Perhaps the story appeared, perhaps it didn't before Valiant Comics would die the final death of nonviable publishing concerns. The situation, however far along it got, implies the confrontation scenario, and it matters little whether the Solar stories actually achieved that point before cancellation made much of the detail of the Valiant universe irrelevant.

Spectre

In today's comics (which we might call "postmodern" but for the fact that the definition of "postmodern" changes too often for it to retain much meaning), one often finds works of considerable intellectual weight. The occasional book delves into dense conceptual territory, as does Spectre with its comic-book analyses of comic-book theology.

However, regardless of how thoroughly a comic book may explore a theological debate (generally one owing to a set of New Age-y assumptions not common to all theologies), we ultimately must return to the necessity of the fistfight. This occurs in intelligent superhero comics as well, with the more intellectual material offering the distinction of having and using a generally superior vocabulary.

We might consider as a mitigating factor the character definition of the Spectre even as we sadly look on familiar territory within the pages of that venerable superhero's eponymous title. The Spectre, after all, appeared as an angel of wrath grafted to the soul of a murdered policeman, and this notion, with minimal tweaking, provided a coherent focus for the character (if not a great deal of fan appeal) in a number of treatments between the forties and the seventies.

With the introduction of Hal Jordan rather than Jim Corrigan as the Spectre's human aspect, elements of the equation changed a bit, but the divine aspect - now pretentiously promoted to the Wrath of God itself - remained firmly attached to a mortal element. Where the new Spectre treads, the new arrives in the relationship of the elements. For, unlike previous treatments, the current Spectre does not have much faith in wrath as a redeeming virtue, and therefore this semidivine entity often seeks to sublimate or even banish the wrathful aspects of his nature.

This understood, we nonetheless recognize beneath the theological doubletalk precisely the kind of conflict typical of the tales described in the previous sections (above). The Spectre has a benign component - currently the soul of the decadent failed hero Hal Jordan - and a malign component - the Wrath. The fundamental struggle of the new Spectre concept involves the very struggle against the dark half of the self.

Therefore we can expect sequences like the accompanying scan, where the Jordan-Spectre and the Wrath-Spectre agree, for a few panels, to a gentleman's agreement allowing them both to cohabit the one Spectre-form. Yet things happen in a way the relatively benign scene does not suggest, as the Wrath overwhelms the Spectre and becomes the dominant component. So here we do have one deviation from cliche: The evil self wins (for long enough, at least, to contribute to the cliffhanger that ends Spectre #2)

A Look at the Odds

Comics must teem with this stuff, because in my own rather puny collection I encountered no less than four occasions with the same scenario. How many times, I have to wonder, have comics rehashed this routine?

Granted, characterization serves as a motive force in superhero comics, often more so than the more traditional elements of wanton yet non-lethal violence and bad wardrobes. And writers may wish, occasionally, to deviate from the conventional and more literary ways of reaching into characters for insight about them; the comics form, after all, allows and encourages explorations of the impossible and the surreal.

Nonetheless, when a semi-random grab of new and preowned comics produces three occurrences of the same theme, which itself reminds the reader of a piece from the canon of comics classics, we can confidently assign the onus of the overused cliche to it.

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

Column 228. Completed 19-FEB-2001.