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The Passage of Hourman

I sometimes don't really need much of an excuse to talk about some things. These things frequently include cheesecake, customized Harleys (not that I really know more than the name "Arlen Ness"), the escapades of certain legendary figures from my hometown, the work of Neal Adams, and the much-lamented DC Comics title Hourman, a piece that died too soon in a world that, perhaps, did not deserve it.

From the remnants of an interesting but limited comics concept, the "DC One Million" books, Hourman came, a kind of spooky avatar with some foresight but a way perhaps borrowed from the same school of posturing that produced Marvel Comics' character the Watcher. However, Tom Peyer, Rags Morales, and a talented crowd of inkers, colorists, and occasional fill-in artists and writers, took what could have become another dull cosmic hero full of foreboding and flattering camera angles and knocked him off the high horse of pomposity, turning him into the kind of guy who would hang out with the likes of a slacker version of Snapper Carr and his cat Starro, babbling about life and meaning, dealing with trouble when it came their way, and finding time, now and then, to confront the occasional earth-threatening menace of the present or future.

A rare work, indeed, revels in the fundamental human perversity essential for characters neither too much above us for us to relate to nor too far below us for us to have any sympathy for. And, though the cast did not confine itself to human beings (as one might find them defined, perhaps, through biological criteria), this assemblage of robots, androids, mad scientists, demons, slackers, policemen, and Labrador retrievers provided a fresh breath of air about the essential qualities of humanness. In some ways, this series played a role like Confederacy of Dunces or Confessions of a Crap Artist ported into the milieu of superheroes.

Inverting the Pinocchio Quandary

Comics has done the theme of the robotic or semi-robotic hero attempting to validate his humanity to death, and done it again. Through years of increasingly tiresome angst on the part of the Vision (and inferior imitations like DC Comics' Red Tornado), through morbid self-pity on the part of Robotman and Cyborg, and tangent concepts involving various created or repaired beings, comics readers could get their fill of characters whose tenuous belief in their own humanity emoting for the camera.

Hourman, under Peyer and Morales' hands, entered a landscape where this cliche had taken decades of beating unto the point of losing most of its relevance. Yet, somehow - and I can't completely explain it even now after over two years of Hourman and the sad demise of that title - they made the concept fresh.

In one detail, however, I can guess that this talented duo made the concept work by beginning with a presumption of humanity understood, essentially, by everyone - readers included - except the new Hourman himself. Hourman, in this incarnation, sought for his humanity the way a man might with the sun to his face might look for his shadow; what he seeks remains clear from any vantage point where someone can see him, but clear mainly to everyone who can stand back from him a few steps.

He lacked not the core components of humanity (except, perhaps, on a superficial physical level) but the kind of life experience that would allow him to relate to human beings. Just as we do not deny someone the benefit of claim of humanity for lack of various parts of his body (appendages, internal organs, sense organs), we do not make claims of absence of humanity based on innocence, ignorance, or naivete; all of these traits, after all, do belong to some human beings throughout their lives and to the rest of us at various points in our lives.

Given the premise that Hourman has a human nature but does not necessarily understand human nature that well, furthermore, we can conclude that his quest for knowledge also represented a quest for self-knowledge through the mechanism of seeking in others pieces of personality (or personness) that might apply to himself.

The Waif Angle

Waifdom, as currently understood, has become a bogus value in people. The notion of virtue through a cultivated inner child fails, precisely because of the angle of cultivation; the self-congratulatory claims of vapid celebrities and the atrocious self-gossip of self-help flagellants waving their misery before a camera show us that fashionable waifdom simply provides another venue for the phony, the contrived, the insincere.

Innocence and self-delusion do not fit together well, since the latter tends to represent a kind of cynicism inherently at odds to innocence. A millionaire in a mansion in California who makes claims to the primacy of his inner child, after all, does not convince particularly well. And while a bona fide child may show off aspects of himself in an attempt to evoke gestures of approval from others - and adults do this, too - real kids do not make public displays attempting to prove their worth by proving their childishness. If anything, real children incline to inflated claims of their own maturity, recognizing that their youth, while it actually exists, does not play well as a credential, since adults generally use it to justify undermining their autonomy.

For our synthetic hero from the 853rd century, however, the innocence represents no MTV-era posture, no fabricated response to reading a few self-help books cashing in on the latest gimmick, nor a calculated attempt to side with innocence by imitating its style. Tyler enjoyed real innocence, one that created an intellectual, emotional, and ethical hunger; and this hunger drove Tyler to attempt to create (or, more correctly, reveal) his humanity.

Again, contrary to the contrived waifdom of the post-Baby Boom era, Tyler did not play on a fabricated inner child as a kind of socioethical credential. He wanted to mature this aspect of himself, not display it like some self-gossiping narcissist wanting to open up about the lurid details of his suffering on some morning talk show. Nor did he use it as some kind of standing justification for self-serving behaviors.

Snapper as Foil

In his earliest form, DC Comics' Snapper Carr stood as an emblem of innocence, enthusiasm, and goodwill. He could not and did not survive a 1960s that became too self-consciously hip for his enthusiasm, innocence, and optimism; and it would take almost thirty years for someone (naturally enough, our friend Tom Peyer) to show us what the story of his destruction really meant to the people who had to play in it.

Thus, in some ways Snapper represented an antithetical element to Ty's still-intact innocence. Snapper recalls his innocence and enthusiasm, but in viewing his own moral failure(s) from the inside, enjoys the beginnings of wisdom. His own corruption in some ways throws an untainted psyche into contrast; but, again, it also throws his own upbeat character into sharper relief, taking, through historical pain, the annoying and pollyannaish angle away from the character. Cynics, after all, sometimes despise innocence as ignorance, or refusal to know; Snapper's credentials undermine the principal skeptical claim about optimism, since Snapper knows about suffering but rises above it (at least occasionally) anyway.

Foils frequently lack the fundamental human perversity that makes people so unreplaceable and wonderful to observe. For instance, John Watson of the Sherlock Holmes stories plays a secondary role less due to his lack of raw ability and more due to his lack of quirks; Holmes, the sometime chemical-abuser who, in a fit of boredom, would shoot the letters "V.R." (Victoria Regina) into his apartment wall with a revolver, offers enough of the bizarre and incomprehensible to make for interesting reading even had Doyle considerably lessened his formidable intellectual powers. Turning to view something more in the domain of comics, we can also note that Green Lantern played a less fascinating foil in the O'Neil / Adams Green Lantern / Green Arrow than did Snapper Carr here; Lantern mainly stood baffled when reproached for his lack of enlightenment by the long-winded Green Arrow until he finally would resolve that Arrow had a point. He had some personality, but not enough to compromise his necessary function as a straw man.

Snapper could serve such a useful role here because Tom Peyer, in some epiphany the rest of us might never enjoy, saw that O'Neil, by destroying the character, had saved him. Without a necessary element of tragedy and corruption, Snapper acted more as archetype than as living, breathing, and soulful humanity.

And Snapper makes the chemistry work, simply by providing that piece of human contact many of us need but sometimes must forego in a world of perpetual worry and too much business that shrinks our time on the earth to one long work schedule. Snapper represents the uncritical warmth of the friend upon whom one may drop in with no particular pretext - to say hello, to go do something, or to sit on the sofa and watch "Red Dwarf" reruns with.

Peyer, however, does not overlook the significance of the central tragedy of the Snapper Carr character, based in the manner in which Dennis O'Neil managed to break him clear of the Justice League franchise by having him betray the League to the Joker. In the Hourman retelling of the fall of Snapper, no heartstring remained unplucked, no tragedy unplumbed, no true victim uncovered; and Black Canary's grief over the undoing of their friend - and she seemed quite willing to consign to the Devil with the whole superhero game if it stands in the way of friendship - made O'Neil's story something much greater than a pretext to dispense with a corny character and, incidentally, declare that suburban America represented little more than a whitewashed and soul-destroying indoctrination center.

Mad Scientists, Demons, and ... Cheesecake

A vein of weirdness and acausal causation permeated Hourman in a manner that evoked memories of the stranger Jack Kirby and Joe Simon (separately) pieces of the 1970s.

As examples, how might an archivist of comics attempt to classify the following threads that came and went in this series:

• a sequence in which Snapper convinces a demon (Torcher) to abandon his role in an upcoming attempted conquest of the earth by baiting him with cheesecake?
• a sequence with a hell-themed theme park?
• psychotic episodes and rampages that took place when Hourman failed to "just say no" and dabbled in recreational use of caffeine and/or Miraclo?
• sequences in which Hourman took the form of a teenager with an enormous head of curly hair and hung out in men's rooms attempting to make human contact?
• episodes where he improved his android-therapist relationship by aging his counsellor to a more benign period of her youth?

While we had, in Amazo, a recurring villain, nothing here followed the cliched pattern of chronic (and chronically boring) comic-book villains who come back, pull the same old stunts, and suffer the same old defeats. To my knowledge, no Superman or Batman villain has ever schemed to ruin his enemy's life by taking the form of a dog in order to endear himself to that hero's opposite-sex significant other.

The Love Polygon

The dynamics of a love triangle can, by themselves, become difficult to understand. But throughout Hourman, romantic options tended to take much more complicated forms.

Had Peyer stopped with a simple triangle - say, some friction between Snapper, his ex-wife Bethany, and our lovable sentient machine colony from the 853rd century, we could have had plenty enough potential trouble to drive a series. But throw in these complicating factors: Bethany falls for the new Hourman, later to begin to warm to a newcomer to the scene, this newcomer posing the role of the ultimate rival in the form of Hourman, but older, from a later future, after he had, somewhat, perfected his character. But, lest you think this scenario complicated enough, add into the equation that this future-future Hourman tended to prefer to worm his way into Bethany's better graces by appearing in the form of a Labrador retriever. Yet we can't really stop here; for, in fine form, this future-self Lothario proved not a product of Tyler geneware at all, but the dreaded Amazo, returned in disguise to wreak havoc, once again, on the life of his nemesis Hourman.

Our creators, however, did not pause at the whizzing sound made by the spinning heads of readers, instead, in the last months of the magazine, choosing to add additional complications, in a sequence where Hourman shows his companions the near future and Bethany finds out a likely future includes her marriage to Gary, the oily and cowardly policeman least favored by Bethany's mother, the police chief. And, although Bethany's mother despises Gary as a general rule, his flesh-and-blood-and-normal-timestream nature seem like a dream come true to a mother watching her daughter waste her self on Snapper Carrs and sentient machine colonies from the future.

The Promethean Angle

Like Prometheus, Hourman made a considerable sacrifice for humanity, although we somewhat stretch the meaning of the phrase to indicate "to achieve humanity" rather than "to serve humanity." Nonetheless, at the very earliest phase of the series, possibly for the concept and possibly because Peyer recognized that too much power can make a character duller than dishwater, Hourman sacrificed most of his power, a move that cost him on almost every level, including his apprentice relationship with the self-important Metron.

What began with sacrifice, furthermore, ends with another as Hourman flings himself into the tides of time in order to undertake a newer, nobler, mission: To undo Amazo, to reform him, to dedicate himself to remaking his fellow artificial life form in order to atone for the initial failure that made Amazo a first-class menace through that android's appropriation of some half part of Hourman's power.

The End

Peyer and Morales had sufficient warning about the impending doom that overshadowed this ill-fated title, and, had they wanted, could have continued some months past issue #25 (perhaps at the cost of an abrupt ending that could resolve in another title somewhere).

However, Peyer seems to have felt that he owed fans some resolution to the burning questions developing in the early twenties of the series. For instance, what would become of the budding romance between Ty and Bethany? What did the presence of Rex Tyler, the original Hourman, in the 853rd century, really mean - what role did he play, and had he cheated death to get there? What would ultimately come of the enmity between Hourman and his synthetic kinsman, Amazo, who stood somewhat as the Adam of a race of man-made beings? Where did that dog come from? And would the mad scientist revert to form and act out his anti-social impulses on the now woefully wary Starro the Cat?

With just a bit of abruptness - but not the slipshod kind one would expect of a writer asked to (say) dispose of a Green Lantern of 36 years' standing in a three-issue run - the various threads holding the Hourman concept closed, sealed, and resolved, although providing more a reason that Hourman might go away for an indefinite period with no particular constraint preventing his return, either in connection with the Justice League, the Justice Society, the Justice League of the 853rd century, or a title of his own. However, one can note a maudlin tone in the last pages as the introspective and essentially gentle machine colony from the future said his goodbyes to the various locals from our own century who had done most to contribute to his greater growth as a being. For, though we could expect to see some of these characters again - if only in some crossover event, either as casualties or to keep intellectual property rights viable - we can note the ending of something here.

I would contend that the end of Hourman represented an ending, not to particular characters, but to the magic of the flow of twenty-five more-or-less remarkable issues which, even should Peyer and Morales have the opportunity to work together again, they might never have just the right formula to recreate.

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Column 266. Completed 25-JUL-2001.