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The Jekyll and Hyde Concept in Superhero Comics

Previously in this feature we examined the use, reuse, and, perhaps, overuse of the notion of characters working out some internal crisis of character or morals through a direct physical confrontation with a proxy representing some aspect of himself (here). While the cliche had passed into the hackneyed before the Quarter Bin ever chose to examine it, it nonetheless owed to a more solid notion: that of the divided personality, perhaps manifested in another flesh, which provided a concrete target for confrontation.

Perhaps, though, this ran backwards in terms of derived ideas. Did some previous archetype for the divided-man concept, much less abstract in form, predate these "My Enemy, Myself"-type stories? As Lee and Kirby described the process of inventing what would become the Marvel Universe, various heroes had certain concepts behind them. The model of matter that divided everything into four elements - understood in a sense that predates chemistry - gave templates for the Fantastic Four (a notion explored here); and, in the case of the Hulk, Marvel's architects admitted the origins of the notion in Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll-and-Hyde concept as developed in "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and subsequent theatrical and cinematic treatments of that work.

Something in the notion of a divided man - in a sense antecedent to the various stories about superheroes working out psychological problems by slugging it out with proxies invested with some particular aspects of their character in need of integration or containment - has a strong mnemonic appeal, as well as providing a springboard for various stories about troubled men struggling with some unfortunate aspect or aspects of their personality given free rein via some fantastic cause. Marvel Comics, in particular, seems inclined to return to this idea more than once, and an examination of the original idea, as Stevenson presented it, might illuminate why. For, though the Jekyll-and-Hyde notion had, by the sixties, somewhat appeared among a canon of black-and-white movie monsters, not altogether apart from the lot from Universal films, including Dracula (a product of author Bram Stoker), Frankenstein's monster (Mary Shelley's creation), mummies, werewolves, and invisible men, the hook of the story played uniquely to the imagination of viewers or readers.

Stevenson's Creation

While some aspects of the concepts from "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" might have sunk into a general popular cultural awareness, principally through cinema and television, and, perhaps, remember scenes from a black-and-white film where fade-in scenes showed an actor acquiring more and more spirit-gum-attached theatrical hair components, Stevenson presented a work with more to it than the simple notion of a man changing his face by drinking a chemical solution.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a story that began as a mystery. After making himself infamous to concerned persons in London, an Edward Hyde revealed a connection to Dr. Henry Jekyll by paying off 100 pounds of hush money to keep a family from taking him to court over his injury of their daughter in an act of malicious negligence. Soon the friends of Dr. Jekyll, a figure of some esteem in London, came to recognize that despite the man's fine reputation, he somehow had begun to live in the shadow of the monstrous Edward Hyde, to whom Jekyll had left his worldly wealth and allowed the run of his home. An attorney named Upperton - who prepared the Hyde will - and a peer, Dr. Lanyon - speculated that, somewhere, Hyde must have some piece of information with which to blackmail funds and privileges from the doctor.

Hyde, after small offenses against the peace, murdered a member of the House of Lords in front of witnesses, revealing at one moment the character which Upperton and other mutual friends of Jekyll and forcing Jekyll to resolve to have no more to do with this disturbing and sociopathic figure. However, soon enough Jekyll returned to his reclusive ways indicative of Hyde's shadow on his life; and, after finding Jekyll altogether missing and Hyde in the doctor's laboratory trying to pass for the owner of the house, Upperton and the servants forced their way into the sealed wing of the house to find Hyde dead by poison at his own hand.

Going through the effects of the missing Jekyll, whom all expected to find dead in the laboratory, Upperton found letters explaining the situation, including the bizarre essence of the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde. Jekyll, these say, came to a realization early in his medical career that within a human being two contradictory and contending natures pull in opposing directions; furthermore, his research suggested that aspects of the human form rooted not to solid (and theoretically unchanging) matter, but to personality. Since Jekyll's own early life showed a consistent tension between the doctor's conscience-driven activities and his desire to achieve small thrills through misdeeds. And, we come to what the story pointed towards all along: the identity of Jekyll, one form of a man whom, concentrated into the malign half of his being, did not differ from Hyde, the latter hosting a subset of the doctor's personality in an objectively different form.

The thrill of crime and raw evil, sanitized through the proxy of Jekyll's Hyde form, came to lure the doctor like a drug into longer and longer jags in the latter form until, horribly, the transformation began to occur without the original means of changing shape through carefully crafted solutions. Towards the end, indeed, Hyde would appear each time Jekyll slept, and had, through much exercise, become the dominant personality. And, justly but tragically, the Jekyll-Hyde entity spent its last days, trapped in the Hyde form, attempting to reformulate the potion that effected the change but doomed to failure by the inability to acquire any more of one of the original ingredients. Faced with the prospect of living out the rest of his life as Hyde - and that life's inevitable path would have led to the gallows - Jekyll, naturally enough, took his own life.

But beyond the essential plot, other themes come in through the resolution of this story. Begin with the notion that a human self represents a balance between a drive to do good and a drive to do evil. The Jekyll-self did not emanate from the polar good side of the man, but from the balanced good-and-evil-in-equilibrium fusion of the two halves of human nature. Furthermore, one can see the attributes of goodness defined in a very 19th-century manner. The Jekyll aspect of this dual being enjoyed height, beauty, charm, fairness of skin, absence of unsightly body hair, and a position on a higher rung of the primate evolutionary ladder. Hyde's evil, contrariwise, suffered from ugliness, simian features, and a spotted and hairy skin. A kind of evolutionary teleology and social hygiene thinking mark the differences between Jekyll's aspects.

Some Not-Quite-Matches

Some characters suffer transformation into monstrous forms which do not quite make the cut because they divide the character not along axes of extremes of the human character but between human and inhuman natures. For instance, the early Spider-Man villain the Lizard does undergo a transformation from the benign Dr. Curtis Connors to the destructive and megalomaniacal Lizard, but this represents an imposition of a foreign personality and physical aspect on the mortal substance of the much-troubled scientist. Similarly, werewolf characters seem to play on themes such as the contrast between human attributes and an extreme version of a chaser-type carnivore; they don't say a great deal about the far ends of human nature. Possessed characters, as well, such as the Silver Age footnote Eclipso (who later became part of the Spectre mythos), play more to themes of possession, where an outside and malign personality imposes itself upon a person otherwise of goodwill.

Furthermore, comics teem with dual-personality characters, though not all of these represent opposing characters. For instance, the Rose and the Thorn concept divides into two benign aspects, one reactive and the other active. Thor, as envisioned in the early Silver Age, paired two halves of good character and mutually aware, but as Donald Blake he enjoyed the benefits of learning and deliberate self-improvement and as Thor enjoyed innate properties - qualities of his divine nature - that make him formidable. Blake trained to his abilities, and Thor's came to him from birth, except for certain qualities of character, the unreplaceable aspects of heroism, which both identities shared. And sometimes the dual quality comes out in a much more subtle form, as in the post-Ordway Black Adam, who represents a fused personality half composed of a Pharoanic-era magical hero inclined to arrogance and half of an opportunistic murderer of 20th-century vintage.

The Hulk and the Wounded Inner Child

After-the-fact analysis by the principals involved in the creation of the early Marvel Comics superhero concepts - including the inevitable Stan Lee himself - cite sources for some of these works in inspirations available to a moderately-well educated person in the middle of the 20th century. Some may see, for instance, in Victor von Doom some echo of The Man in the Iron Mask; and Lee acknowledges the Jekyll-and-Hyde component central to the Hulk. Read Stevenson's novella and one finds themes that made the leap into four-color treatment, such as the scientist destroyed by science; the divided personality, which constrains dangerous traits that the right cascade of events could loosen, to the detriment of all; and the man held captive to a fearful transformation which becomes increasingly uncontrollable. Turning this notion into a superhero somewhat inverts the ethical/moral aspect of the story (inasmuch as Dr. Jekyll actually brought it all on himself by dabbling in things best left alone, and, furthermore, ruined himself by attempts to elude the consequences of his sick hobbies through the proxy of Edward Hyde, another aspect of his self). Therefore certain changes occurred, of necessity, in the adaptation from prose to comics: Dr. Bruce Banner fell victim to a terrible scientific accident, rather than causing his transformation to pursue decadent and forbidden pastimes in a disguise made of his own flesh.

Jekyll and Hyde divided along the notion that the complete man remained in control by mustering the powers of his higher aspect against his lower, and came to a bad end for unleashing an incomplete self composed of desires and drives but little practical or moral sense. The Hulk notion splits in a similar, but not identical, axis, divorcing the self-controlled man from the man who lets his rage drive him, and similarly groups abilities where they seem most potent. Thus, in the classical synthesis, one aspect of the character appears as Doctor Bruce Banner, a brilliant and motivated physicist somewhat deficient in qualities of physical force and (sometimes) courage. The diametrical aspect, the Hulk, follows where his rage leads him; and rage works with force, not reason, so the investment of this alternate form with improbable physical strength nonetheless fits conceptually with the kernel of his half of the concept.

In such a form the precise proceeded from the 1960s to the 1980s, with minor changes in detail at various points. For example, the Hulk concept made minor adaptations in its early days through having the monstrous form turn green from a gray original; changing the method of transformation from an automatic shift at sundown (an element very similar to one stage of Jekyll's uncontrollable nighttime transformations into Hyde) to a response to temper; and from having a secret identity into which to disappear (again, precisely the way Jekyll used his "normal" form). But such a concept, particularly combined with the pseudo-imbecility attached to the Thing with the Awful Purple Pants, had limitations, and later experimentation would bring in other elements, like the rage of the Hulk owing to early childhood abuse by a disturbed father.

And, eventually, late in Peter David's tenure and prominently in that of Jenkins on the Incredible Hulk title, writers would explore a personality fragmented even further, into created selves such as the David-era gray Hulk ("Joe Fixit") and the pseudo-blended Hulk thought to represent a balanced fusion of personality elements but subsequently revealed as no more than another constructed personality. Such represents an accretion rather than an element inherent in the original premise, so we can leave to other columns an exploration of the gothic psychology of late-1990s Hulk stories.

Pym and the Freudian Segments of Self

As the Hulk concept mutated in Peter David's hands, and, subsequently, Jenkins', it sometimes explored a territory of greater fragmentation of personality, not necessarily along polar divides. But the Hulk did not own this territory to the exclusion of other heroes. For example, Kurt Busiek, in one of his many phases attempting to clean up the stained inheritance of established canon that attaches to many of the Avengers, explored the psychological troubles that recurrently afflicted one of Marvel's early Silver Age figures, Henry Pym, who began as Ant-Man and cycled through handles and schticks such as Giant-Man/Goliath and Yellowjacket.

Yellowjacket first appeared as a kind of hoodlum wanting to play a hero's role during Roy Thomas' first tenure on Avengers. Though Yellowjacket claimed to have done away with Goliath - as Pym then called himself in one of his gigantic incarnations - a bizarre resolution revealed him as Pym in some kind of psychological fugue state. These personality shifts and psychological episodes would recur at various points until the early 1980s, manifesting themselves as amnesia in one case where he remembered nothing after his Ant-Man identity, and would become the pretext for the ruination of the character around the early 200s of the title, when Yellowjacket became a wife-beating thug and ultimately landed in jail. In this aspect, he abandoned the long-underwear-hero angle of his life altogether, and spent many years in an ugly purple coverall as "Dr. Pym," using such abilities as he had explored in the one or two stories in Marvel's fantasy comics before he became a superhero.

However, when Marvel Comics brought the Avengers book back into print in the late 1990s, after the generally pointless "Heroes Reborn" experiment, writer Kurt Busiek took the responsibility for cleaning up much of the ugly and messy that had come to pollute the Avengers franchise after the 1970s. Thus, he brought the outstanding personality problem angles to the forefront in a number of stories, revealing in one piece the damage done to Pym's self-esteem by the revelation that his creation, Ultron, owned a personality derived from his own, but minus an ethical side. And, later, Pym would collapse after dividing into two physical forms as a side-effect of an enchantment. In this state, the Yellowjacket-self (the obnoxious but fearless side) and the Goliath-self (the ethical but often wishy-washy side) confronted one another within Pym's head for the right to control, or own, the remaining self, contending to no effect until they realized a third piece existed, the "Dr. Pym" personality that characterized him during the 1980s and 1990s.

So redefined, this troubled hero enjoyed three aspects that, in some ways, paralleled Sigmund Freud's constructs of personality, the Ego, the Superego, and the Id. Described briefly (and perhaps somewhat distorted by simple definitions), these pieces owned different territories of the self. The id, for instance, contained or explored basic impulses uninformed by logic or morals, such as the desire for physical pleasures, anger, and certain raw emotional states. The Superego, for its part, imposed a moral self on the other elements, resembling in some ways the conscience. The Ego played a role akin to common sense and reconciled the id to the superego, often through mechanisms like self-delusion that allow desires of the id to pass the approval of the superego via disguises provided by the ego. Freudian theory often belongs as an article of faith rather than a workable system of psychology, but it nonetheless has an aesthetic appeal for human minds inclined to seek out three-way divisions of things; and, furthermore, Busiek used this notion to provide a semi-plausible way to reconcile the two feuding Pym-selves, in the id-like Yellowjacket and the superego-like Goliath, through the ego-like Dr. Pym.

The Sentry and Moral Thermodynamics

Readers may, with some justice, criticize the weak scene that revealed the secret of the Sentry's dual nature, much in the same manner as they might derisively point to the hoax and hype that centered around this work, whose premise presumed a forgotten earliest Stan Lee superhero that never saw print but nonetheless predated the beginnings of Marvel's reinvention of the superhero genre. With the divided-man notion as the payoff, rather than the obvious core kept at the forefront, we can, as self-taught critics, note technical failures such as Jenkins' omission of certain elements necessary to build up to this big revelation. Nonetheless, dressed in the trappings of the superhero and suggested by some kind of moral principle of the cosmos (a Law of Conservation of Goodness, perhaps), we have in the Sentry enough fundamental baggage of the Jekyll and Hyde notion to justify its inclusion here.

The Sentry, in spite of some disappointment in readers (sometimes an inevitable consequence of overenthusiastic hype and bombast) plays a very interesting variant of the man in two poles. Begin with the iconic comics hero, one who not only does good himself but brings about the heroic aspects of others; one who banishes fear and, by his nature, implies a benevolent order of the universe; and one in whom the higher human virtues all find a home, and you have a type often cited in the Age of Waid. However, when this idea connects with theJekylll and Hyde concept, of the opposing natures in one flesh contending for control, it takes on a new depth, for the opposite of such a hero much becomes something terrifying. Indeed, such an evil inversion of the heroic and Messianic would provide an excellent description of the Devil in his aspect as the Adversary as a being who can corrupt and destroy anything by his own polluting effect on the human soul.

The nature of the Sentry implies such an antithesis by a kind of inferred Moral Thermodynamics which require net influences to zero out. In physics, Laws of Conservation deny the ability of matter or energy to appear from nowhere, but do permit that opposing sums able to mutually annihilate can appear, seemingly from nothingness, as long as the balance sheet records no net gain or loss. While the notion of human forces of good and evil existing in a balance seems to drive the Stevenson original concept, in the case of the Sentry properties like charisma and moral authority seem to require balancing in his universe. If the Sentry possesses almost unmeasurable power for good, so must his antithesis the Void own a similar magnitude of power to direct towards evil. And each salient feature of the Sentry finds its parallel in each dreadful trait of the Void. If the Sentry inspires men to goodness and greater effort, the Void poisons them with despair and fatalistic resignation to their own destruction. If the Sentry can heal wounded souls by his influence - through good faith in even the debased among his fellows - the Void must similarly have a power to sicken.

While the parallel-but-inverse character of the Void and the Sentry do not require these properties to invest in or derive from a single person, their identity nonetheless perfects the relationship. And the understood conservation principle that bound the two of them together perpetually increased the stakes: As the Sentry grew to the task of answering to the menace of the Void, so, too, must the Void grow, to a logical conclusion where the violence between these forces attempting to reestablish equilibrium by nullifying each other could destroy cities, nations, worlds - a destruction limited only by the stage of growth of power of the poles, and nothing suggested this growth would ever end.

Use, Misuse, or Overuse?

At first moan, one might wonder how often Marvel Comics can strip-mine the same idea for multiple presentations, but the similarity in each of these three cases does not penetrate to the deeper ideas involved. For instance, Yellowjacket developed his own psychological syndromes somewhat piecemeal, originally developing a second personality as a kind of throwaway storytelling gimmick to shakeup the Avengers lineup without actually shaking it up; later writers would make an episode which could have occurred once into a piece of an accretion of mental illness that would attach to the character in the seventies and eighties until Kurt Busiek had to contrive a means to clean up Pym's fragmented psyche. The Hulk appeared as a somewhat direct interpretation of the Jekyll-Hyde notion in superheroic form; Sentry, on the other hand, appeared in a tale which opted for the division of a personality as a resolution to the central mystery of the story, that of the Sentry's disappearance through a broad-reaching conspiracy to conceal his existence. And, furthermore, the Sentry piece played a great deal to notions of charisma, moral capital, and the metaphysics of iconic heroes - angles Stevenson did not explore in his work but which have a central importance in Jenkins'.

Here, we may have to judge whether Marvel has run the particular storytelling mine dry or not by a test I frequently apply to recurring phenomena, including the presence of superheroes in comics: Count one boring story as too many, or a million as not enough. In other words, the justification comes in the delivery. Where individual stories seem to offer little more than the last vapors of a borrowed notion, we can rightly condemn them as both unoriginal and pointless. Where tales add to the concept and stand in other ways on their own merits from elements that orbit around the appropriated element, we can consider a revocable amnesty for dabblers in borrowed material.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@yahoo.com.

Column 291. Completed 11-DEC-2001.