Lords of Order, Lords of Chaos

There is a philosophy called Dualism which holds that there are only two kinds of people in this world: those who divide everything into two categories and those who don’t.

All right; so maybe that’s not exactly what Dualism teaches, but people have been perceiving the world as paired opposites ever since Marduk cleaved the body of Tiamat with his sword and fashioned the world from the two halves. The theme was old when Zoroaster first envisioned the universe as a cosmic struggle between Truth and Falsehood. And so we have Light and Darkness; Yin and Yang; Anima and Animus; Marvel and DC.

Order and Chaos.

I probably first encountered the theme of Order vs. Chaos through Dungeons and Dragons, where it forms one of the axes of it's system of Character Alignment. D&D lifted the idea from two influential fantasy writers. Poul Anderson used this theme in his fantasy novels, Three Hearts and Three Lions and Operation Chaos; as well as his Dominic Flandry series, about an agent of a declining Galactic Empire, working to prevent that Empire’s eventual fall.

Writing about the same time as Anderson, and to a certain extent borrowing from him, British SF writer Michael Moorcock wove Order and Chaos into to his stories about Elric of Melniboné. His tragic hero, Elric, finds himself caught in the struggle between the Gods of Chaos whom his family has served for centuries, and the Gods of Order. Roy Thomas brought Elric to comics in the early '70s, having him appear in a two-part story in Marvel's CONAN THE BARBARIAN. Since then there have been various comics adaptations of Elric published by different companies and drawn by artists such as Barry Windsor-Smith, Walt Simonson and P. Craig Russell.

Inspired by Elric, Jim Starlin created a pair of cosmic buttinskis called Master Order and Lord Chaos, who each manifested himself as a giant disembodied head. Although, they personified opposing principles, they were described as brothers and usually worked together. They understood the need for Balance between their two forces in the Universe, and to that end combined their powers to create an entity called the In-Betweener to embody Balance.

In the 1980s, the gods of Elirc worked their way into DC Comics, with a number of their mystic heroes recast as soldiers or pawns in this struggle. Dr. Fate was originally an archaeologist who gained magical powers by donning the "Helm of Nabu", an artifact created by an ancient Egyptian sorcerer. Nabu was rewritten as one of the Lords of Order and Dr. Fate became their sometimes rebellious servant in their eternal war against the Lords of Chaos. Other characters, such as the Phantom Stranger and Kid Eternity, also got redefined along the Order vs. Chaos axis.

At the time, the notion that Order and Good are not always congruent seemed reasonably profound to me. After all, the Nazis were all about Order, and they certainly were Evil. This theme came up again in the TV series  Babylon 5  in the conflict between the seraphic Vorlons and the malevolent Shadows, aliens which at first seemed to personify Good vs. Evil but later on were seen to embody an arbitrary moral Order vs. a Darwinian Chaos.

Now, I grew up in the wake of the ‘60s, which equated Order with Repression and Chaos with Freedom. There was nothing new about this; G.K. Chesterton, writing at the beginning of the century, began his surreal novel  The Man Who Was Thursday  with a debate between a poet claiming that all art is anarchy and another claiming to be a "poet of Order".

Chesterton’s near contemporary Rudyard Kipling wrote a famous line in his poem "Recessional" about "lesser breeds without the law." Despite the temptation to associate Kipling’s "lesser breeds" with the brown-skinned natives his empire subjugated, in the context of the poem he’s referring to peoples who worship power for its own sake, untempered by a respect for justice and honor. The militaristic Prussians of Kipling’s time and the Nazis who eventually followed them may have been rigid in terms of rules and regimentation, but lawless in their ethical codes.

Later on, I decided the idea of Law and Chaos not equaling Good and Evil wasn’t quite as deep as my comic books thought it was. If your only choices are Order and Chaos, any hero worth his spandex will have to side with Order, because heroes are all about helping people and saving them from destruction. Chaos  causes  destruction and doesn’t care about anybody. Poul Anderson knew this, which is why in his stories Chaos is always a force to be combated. He was an engineer at heart, I think, and associated Chaos with entropy and decay, and associated Order with preservation and building. And he knew his Kipling.

Alan Moore understood this too. In his revolutionary series, V for Vendetta, his hero, V, is certainly an anarchist, an agent of Chaos bringing down a corrupt Order. But once the repressive government has been overthrown, a new and better one must now be built. That is something V is incapable of doing. The anarchist must step back so that a new and hopefully better Order can be created. But anarchy remains waiting in the wings, just to keep Order honest.

Not everybody gets that point. About the time DC reprinted the original V FOR VENDETTA series, they introduced a character in BATMAN named “Anarky” inspired by V and intended to be a sort of libertarian hero out to smash Big Order. To me the character seemed simplistic and he never appealed to me.

Neil Gaiman gently mocked the eternal conflict between Order and Chaos in his graphic novel  Books of Magic. When Dr. Fate explains the struggle between the two forces, young Tim Hunter comments that it sounds like a series of rotten fantasy novels.

"Oh no," Fate replies; "It is the basis of Magic: the imposition of Order on formless Chaos, the release of Joyous Chaos into the Gray monotony of Order..."

To which Tim’s companion John Constantine mutters, "Chaos versus Order indeed. I thought Everyone had heard of Fractals these days. There’s no chaos, no order; just patterns of different levels of complexity."

Perhaps; but dualistic lenses like that of Law vs. Chaos are how we try to make sense of these patterns.

At least that’s what a person of Lawful Alignment would say.

We've Got Relevance

Recently a Marvel executive at a big sales summit caused a stir in the fan press when he said that their declining sales was the result of the company's push to add diversity to their comics. Well, that's not exactly what he said. He noted that sales were down, and specifically that sales of some of their more “diverse” titles were down, and that according to the feedback the company has been receiving from their retailers, that diversity is to blame for it.

In the past few years, Marvel has been making some drastic changes to some of it's iconic heroes. We've seen Captain America replaced by his black former partner Falcon; Thor, Iron Man and Wolverine replaced by women; Spider-Man by a black-Hispanic teen from an alternate universe and the Hulk by a Korean-American brainiac. And some fans have complained that this is all just Politically-Correct Social Justice Affirmative Reverse-Discrimination and want to go back to the Good Ol' Days when the Avengers line-up was whiter than the Moon Knight's underwear.

Personally, I can't say any of this bothers me much. I suppose I don't have that much emotional investment in the classic Marvel heroes. I'm sure the iconic characters will come back eventually – indeed, some of them already have – because that's the nature of the Comic Book Industry. To me the important thing is if the new versions are good characters and if they will have good stories. I was somewhat annoyed when DC killed of Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle several years ago, and dubious about his replacement, a Hispanic kid in an alien battle suit. But the new Beetle proved to be a likable, engaging character and a worthy successor to Ted, so I don't begrudge him taking on the venerable Beetle legacy.

But thinking about Diversity and Super-Heroes reminded me about another time when the comics tackled Big Social Issues. I'm talking about the legendary Relevance Era in DC Comics.

The late '60s and early '70s were a turbulent time in American culture, and comic books no less. Audience tastes were changing, and DC's solid, reliable heroes like Superman and Batman were looking bland and unexciting next to the comparatively complex and more sophisticated characters coming out of Marvel. In addition, a new generation of creators was coming into the comics industry that was more willing to challenge the old formulas and gimmicks. Overall, there was a sense that instead of simply punching out super-villains, super-heroes ought to be addressing real-world social problems.

Editor Julie Schwartz was an important mover behind the push for “relevance”. He had served as the godfather of the Silver Age back in the late 1950s, re-tooling characters like the Flash, Green Lantern and Hawkman into science-based heroes. In the mid-'60s he had been charged with updating Batman and was instrumental in creating the “New Look” Batman and refocusing the comic on mysteries and crime.

By 1970, the Green Lantern he had re-envisioned as an interplanetary lawman over a decade earlier was showing his age, so Schwartz brought in a new team to shake things up. Denny O'Neil was one of the new blood writers. A couple years earlier, O'Neil and Mike Sekowsky had done a controversial re-vamp of Wonder Woman, changing her iconic star-spangled costume into a more contemporary pants suit and making her a martial arts hero. The intent was to make her like Emma Peel from the TV series THE AVENGERS, although she wound up looking more like Kung Fu Mary Tyler Moore. Neal Adams was soon to become the superstar artist of the '70s.

They added Green Arrow to the title. Previously, Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow, had always been kind of a Batman knock-off, only with arrows as his gimmick instead of bats. He was secretly a millionaire playboy, he had a sidekick who was also an archer; he drove around in an Arrow-car and had an Arrow-plane; and he operated out of an Arrow-cave. O'Neil saw the character as a modern day Robin Hood and made him passionate about helping the poor and needy. This set up a character dynamic of the iconoclastic hippie liberal Oliver vs. the law 'n' order space cop Hal Jordan.

In GREEN LANTERN #76 “No Evil Will Escape My Sight”, Green Lantern rescues a guy being attacked on a city street, but is shocked when the bystanders take the attacker's side. Hal's fellow Justice League member Green Arrow shows up and explains that the guy Hal saved is a slum landlord and the people attacking him were tenants whom he was evicting so he could raze their homes.

As Ollie and Hal debate Law vs. Justice, a poor, elderly black man comes up and confronts Hal. There follows a striking three-panel sequence which has been often reprinted and sometimes parodied. It can be regarded as the start of the Relevance Era.

“I been readin' about you... how you work for the BLUE SKINS... and how on a planet somewhere you helped out the ORANGE SKINS...” he says. “...and you done considerable for the PURPLE SKINS ! Only there's SKINS you never bothered with...!”

We get a close-up panel of the old man, his face creased by misfortune but his eyes brimming with rage, looking up fearlessly. “...the black skins! I want to know... HOW COME ?! Answer me THAT, Mr. GREEN LANTERN !”

In the third panel, Hal lowers his head in shame, avoiding the old man's eyes as he admits, “I... can't”.

Hal decides to try to get justice for the landlord's tenants, which isn't easy, partially because the landlord hasn't technically done anything illegal, but mostly because Hal's bosses, the Guardians of the Universe, (the 'Blue Skins”) call him on the carpet to warn him that his job is to patrol his sector of space and not concern himself with piddly little details like Urban Blight on his own backwater planet. Hal defies the Guardians and tells them that they have been locked up in their ivory planet of Oa for too long and that they've been pondering the Big Picture of the Universe so much that they've lost sight of the lives of all those people living on the myriad worlds they oversee. He challenges them to leave Oa and take a look at how things are at ground level.

One of the Guardians, a guy that Hal calls “The Old-Timer”, takes him up on his offer, and together the three of them, Hal, Oliver and the Old-Timer, set out on a road trip to Discover America and face the burning issues of the day: racism, poverty, pollution, drugs...

Ah, drugs.

Probably the most famous, (or infamous), stories from this run, and an issue which some critics have called the start of the “Relevance Era”, was the 1971 two-parter beginning in GREEN LANTERN #85, “Snowbirds Don't Fly”. While rounding up a bunch of street thugs, Green Arrow discovers that they are armed with some familiar-looking technology: weapons from his own personal arsenal. He does some digging and learns that his former sidekick, Speedy has been pilfering gadgets and weapons from the Arrow-cave and selling them on the street. At first Ollie thinks that Speedy is doing this as a ruse to infiltrate a drug gang, but ultimately he must face the truth: Speedy has become addicted to heroin and has been stealing Ollie's stuff to support his habit.

It had only been a year or two earlier when Marvel had challenged the Comics Code Authority by publishing a Spider-Man story with an anti-drug message without their blessing, which had led to changes in the Comics Code. Whereas the Spidey tale had one of Peter Parker's friends with a drug problem, Denny O'Neil reasoned that showing one of the heroes dealing with addiction would pack a greater punch.(Later still, Speedy would father a child out of wedlock – with a villain, no less – making him that era's go-to-guy for questionable life choices).

Green Arrow and Speedy have it out, and Speedy does manage to shake his addiction, but Ollie comes off rather poorly in this story. For all his crusading for social problems, he's been totally oblivious to one right under his nose.

Other comics DC published around this time also tried to tackle social issues, with varying success. Even the best stories tended to be a bit preachy, and at worst they could be ludicrous. Perhaps the most notable example was an issue of SUPERMAN'S GIRLFRIEND, LOIS LANE published in 1970 titled – and I would not make this up – “I Am Curious, Black”. It was pretty obviously inspired by a 1961 book, Black Like Me, about a white reporter who disguises himself as a black man to learn how things look from the other side of the racial divide. In the comic, Lois wants to do a story about racism, but feels stymied because she is an outsider. So Superman helps her out by using a piece of weird Kryptonian technology to make her black for a day or two. He keeps the dangdest stuff in the Fortress of Solitude.

DC's Relevance Era only lasted a few years. Comics historian Ron Goulart recalls dropping in on Julie Schwartz once around 1973 and asking him how relevance was doing. “Relevance is dead,” Julie replied unhappily. Viewed strictly as a gimmick to boost sales, Social Relevance” turned out to be a failure, and the Powers That Be at DC Comics decided to go back to the tried-and-true gimmicks like putting a gorilla on the cover.

But although the Age of Relevance officially died with the Nixon Administration, the impulse of comics creators to make something Important still recurs from time to time. We saw it again with the creation of Black Lightning, and with the EL DIABLO revival of the late '80s, and the special one-shots both Marvel and DC published in the 80s about African Famine Relief. These comics don't change the world, but at their best they give us some good stories and maybe change a little bit of the comic book universe.

Nothing Ever Ends

It's been said that The Golden Age of Comics is Twelve, meaning that the comics you first read when you first got into reading comic books always seem to be more meaningful and more special than comic books today. For me, that era was about the time I graduated from college and finally had the disposable income to buy comic books for myself.

So maybe it is just nostalgia talking, but nevertheless I think that the mid-to-late 1980s was an incredible time in the comic book field, especially for fans of DC Comics. The company had just dismantled their long-standing multiverse in the CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS and every month readers could watch them rebuilding the universe, issue by issue. John Byrne was retooling the SUPERMAN titles; George Perez was breathing new life into WONDER WOMAN; Frank Miller was startling us with his dark violent take on Batman in THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS; new or re-vamped characters were being introduced into the DC Universe.

And then there was WATCHMEN.

To begin with, WATCHMEN was a completely radical rethinking of the most revered cliché of comics, the costumed crimefighter. The writer, Alan Moore, was already a rock star among comics creators for his dazzling work on the British comics MIRACLEMAN and V FOR VENDETTA and his reworking of DC Comics’ SWAMP THING. Moore wanted to totally re-think the super-hero and create a story about what would happen if super-heroes existed in the real world. 

The idea of realism in comics in itself was nothing new; Stan Lee had ushered in the Marvel Age of the 1960s by giving his heroes realistic characterizations. In the early ‘70s, Denny O’Neil brought "relevance" to comics by addressing social issues in GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW. But WATCHMEN took this trend much farther. It was part of a huge surge of "grim ‘n’ gritty" comics in the mid-to-late ‘80s that re-defined the genre.

WATCHMEN is set in a world in which Richard Nixon is still president and considering running for a fourth term in office; Vietnam has been admitted as the 51st state; most cars run on electricity and the world lies teetering on the brink of nuclear war. All this can be connected, directly or indirectly, to the superheroes who once operated in this world. Most of them have retired now, since the government ban on masked crimefighters several years past. One of them, a psychotic vigilante named Rorschach, never quit; and when a former hero turned government agent named the Comedian is found dead on the sidewalk beneath his penthouse apartment, Rorschach believes it is murder and that someone is out to kill his former associates.

As Rorschach investigates, he and the other heroes find themselves drawn into a plot to commit an act of violence that makes the 9/11 attacks look like a fraternity prank. But the purpose of the horrific crime is to prevent a worse one: nuclear Armageddon. The heroes fail to stop the plot; but as a result of their failure, the world is saved.

Dennis, the resident intellectual of our comic book club, insisted that the Ozmandias, the mastermind behind the plot, was the real hero of the series because, after all, he did save the world from nuclear destruction. (Although to be fair, a major element of his plot brought the world up to the brink). The central theme of the comic, Dennis said, was an inversion of the standard comic book plot. In comics, any problem can be solved by beating the snot out of a bad guy. WATCHMEN points out that the most serious problems in the world can’t be solved that way; and so it falls to the "bad guy" of the story to solve the problem of nuclear war.

I think, though, that Dennis was also being a bit simplistic in his analysis of the story. There is another moral in Watchmen that I think he missed. It comes near the end. After the climactic confrontation, there is a conversation between Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan, a super-hero with near omnipotent power who is frequently used in the story to symbolize God. Ozzy asks Manhattan if he did the right thing, if it all worked out in the end. 

Dr. Manhattan replies, "In the end?  Nothing ends, Adrian.  Nothing ever ends."

He then teleports out of the room; and we see Ozymandias looking puzzled and concerned. What the heck did he mean by that?

When Zach Snyder came out with his 2009 movie adaptation of WATCHMEN, I was interested to see if he retained that line. Snyder's version was remarkably close to the original comic, not only taking dialogue directly from the book, but often striving to re-create the comic panel by panel. He did use the line “Nothing ever ends,” but gave it to another character, the Silk Spectre, who quotes it to Ozzy as a something Manhattan liked to say. The way she delivers it, she makes the line sound hopeful and life-affirming; but that's not how Ozymandias took it in the graphic novel.

I think I know what Dr. Manhattan meant. In that scene, Ozymandias was really asking if the Ends Justify the Means. Here Ozymandias achieves achieves World Peace and the Cessation of the Arms Race … at the cost of half the population of New York City. Dr. Manhattan does not answer directly, but his remark gives us a clue. This is the moral I took from Watchmen:

The Means that we use to accomplish our Good and Noble Ends have consequences and repercussions that far outlast those Good and Noble Ends.

Call it the Law of Unintended Consequences. Or, alluding to another graphic novel, you can remember the Road to Perdition and consider how it is paved with Good Intentions.

WATCHMEN ends on an ambiguous note. A brighter day has dawned. The United States and the Soviet Union have joined together and a new era of optimism and peace is unfolding. But this peace is a fragile one; a chance action by a simpleton in the final panel may undo it all. And that situation, with the guy’s hand hovering over the diary that could reveal the whole plot, was indirectly the result of the murder which began the story in the first place.

There the story stops. It’s deliberately open-ended.

Because nothing ever ends.

The Legion of Substitute Bat-Men

Everybody knows that Batman is secretly millionaire Bruce Wayne. But who defends Gotham City when Bruce is out of town? Or suffering from a broken leg? Or when someday he just gets too old to sling a batarang?

Then it's time to call out the Substitute Bat-Men.

Superman and Batman have long had a kind of informal mutual aid pact where they would cover for each others Secret Identities. This goes back to the their very first meeting back in 1952. Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne happen to be on a cruise ship and wind up sharing the same cabin. When a crisis occurs on board, both heroes duck into their room to change into their costumes, but in the darkness they inadvertently don each others suit. And no, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense; but it does give them the opportunity to play some mind games on Lois.

There is an episode of SUPERMAN, THE ANIMATED SERIES in which the Man of Steel fills in for the Dark Knight. In “Knight Time”, Superman learns that Batman seems to have vanished and that the criminals of Gotham have been going wild. Robin has been left to man the fort as well as he can, and is frankly overwhelmed; so Supes agrees to put on the Bat-suit and help out. It turns out in the end that Superman's enemy, Brainiac has kidnapped Bruce Wayne; (it didn't involve Batman at all; Brainiac need Bruce for something); but the highlight of the episode came when Superman, disguised as Batman, raids a meeting of villains. Bane tries to beat the snot out of Batman and is dismayed to find him unexpected invulnerable.

In another memorable scene, Superman-as-Batman has a meeting with Commissioner Gordon. Superman is able to mimic Batman's voice perfectly; but he stands ramrod-straight with his jaw and chest protruding forward like a soldier at attention. Gordon looks at him curiously; he can tell something about him is off, but can't seem to put his finger on what it is; while Robin cringes at how un-Bat-like the performance is. Leave it to animators to think of how Batman and Superman differ in terms of body language.

During the the '90s there was an extended storyline in which Bruce Wayne was forced to relinquish his cape and cowl because he had his spine broken by the villain Bane. Instead of naming Dick Grayson as his replacement – the obvious choice – he selects a young man calling himself Azrael; a former member of a wacko religious order who has trained to be a holy assassin and is obsessed with vanquishing evil. Incredibly enough, this goes badly. For one thing, Az-bats, (as the fans took to calling him), adopted a suit of armor covered with blades and pointy things making him look like an ambulatory cheese-grater. More importantly, Azrael becomes increasingly violent and delusional and ultimately Bruce has to get off his butt, get his spine repaired and go through some extreme rehab to reclaim his cowl.

Dick Grayson, the original Robin and current Nightwing, does take over as Batman in a storyline from a few years ago in which Batman gets zapped by Darkseid and is presumed to be disintegrated. He actually has merely been displaced in Time, but until he get make his way back to the present day, Dick has to fill in for him. This storyline touches on the differences between Dick and Bruce and they way they approach crime-fighting. Although the Batman's mission remains the same, Dick has a different style. In addition to taking on Batman's job, Dick also has to prove himself to those who realize that he's not the “real Batman”. And he also has his hands full trying to mentor Damien, the son Bruce never knew he had, who showed up shortly before Bruce's disappearance.

Mention of the Son of Batman brings to mind “The Second Batman and Robin”, a classic Imaginary Story from the golden age. It tells how As Bruce Wayne gets older, he passes on the torch to the now grown-up Dick Grayson. Bruce is married now to Kathy Kane, the former Batwoman; and their son, Bruce Wayne Jr., becomes the new Robin. Both of these new incarnations wear a Roman numeral “II” on their costumes, to differentiate themselves from the originals. At the end of the tale, we learn that this whole story has been a fanfic written by Alfred, the Wayne's faithful butler. He knows he can never publish it – his story has too many secrets of the Wayne Family in it – but thought it would be fun to speculate what the future might bring. He muses that he just might write a sequel someday; and he does.

The animated series BATMAN BEYOND also plays with the idea of who would be the Batman when Bruce gets to be too old for the job. In this case his successor is Terry McGinnis, an angry youth with a strong sense of justice, who discovers the entrance to the Batcave in the home of that cranky old billionaire recluse who lives on the edge of town. He uses some of Batman's tech to try to bring his father's murderer to justice, and Old Bruce becomes his grudging mentor.

The clash between the impulsive Terry and the bitter, hardened Bruce forms the central chemistry of the series, brought out most memorably for me in the direct-to-video movie BATMAN BEYOND: RETURN OF THE JOKER. Although the Joker has been dead for years, it is revealed that he had created a digital copy of his personality which becomes activated. In the final battle, Joker 2.0 mocks Terry as an Imitation Batman. Old Bruce warns Terry not to let the Joker goad him into conversation; the Joker just wants to rattle him. But Terry wonders, why not? He is not Bruce. He has a different personality and a different style. So he taunts the Joker back; something the original Batman would never do; and finds that, like the Devil, Joker cannot abide being mocked. Terry is able to rattle the Joker and get the better of him.

One theme that comes up in almost every one of these stories is the Gotham City needs a Batman. And so, one way or another, it gets one.

ADDENDUM:  When I originally wrote this piece, I was writing largely from memory and neglected to double-check a couple things.  In the story where Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent met on a cruise ship, they did not accidentally put on each other's costumes; they just discovered each other's secret identities.  But they did switch places with each other to play mind games on Lois.

Quest In Show

The 1980s saw a swarm of small independent comic book companies. Many of them only lasted a year or two; some achieved an iconic status due to one or two innovative flagship titles; and a few are still going today. One aspect that many of these companies had in common was that many of them bought licenses to adapt popular TV series as comic books. The quality of these books varied with the talent the companies were able to bring to them. In some cases, the popularity of a licensed title might be the only thing keeping a struggling company afloat; but even in the case of a fairly well-established independent with decent-selling original titles in its stable, a popular licensed title added prestige and readers to the company.

For much of the '80s, Comico was one of the notable Independents. It came to prominence publishing original comics such as Mark Wagner's MAGE and GRENDEL and Bill Willingham's ELEMENTALS. Over the course of its run, Comico published licensed versions of the anime series ROBOTECH and STAR BLAZERS; but my favorite title from that company would have to be their version of JONNY QUEST.

JONNY QUEST was created by comics artist Doug Wildey, who started off drawing western comics for Atlas Comics, the successor to Timely Comics which later still became Marvel. He drew for a number of adventure anthology comics and for a time did a newspaper comic strip based on THE SAINT and a little ghosting for STEVE CANYON. He came to Hollywood to work briefly under Alex Toth on SPACE ANGEL, a semi-animated TV show legendary for superimposing actual footage of moving lips over static images of the characters to make it look like the characters were speaking. While in Hollywood, he visited Hanna-Barbara Studios looking for work. At the time, Joe Barbara was interested in developing a cartoon based on “Jack Armstrong: All-American Boy”, a radio adventure drama, and hired Wildey to work on it.

As it turned out, Joe was unable to get the rights to adapt Jack Armstrong, so he had Wildey re-work the material into an original character. Wildey used magazines such as “Popular Science”, “Popular Mechanics” and “Science Digest” as inspiration to give the technology used in the series a sense of being futuristic, but just around the corner. He also drew on classic movies featuring adventurous kids, and the comic strip TERRY AND THE PIRATES by one of his major artistic influences Milton Caniff. At Joe Barbara's request, he also stirred in a bit of James Bond; “Doctor No” had recently appeared in theaters, and spy stories were hot.

Jonny Quest, of course, was an adventurous boy who traveled the world with his father, a brilliant scientist along with his best friend and adopted brother Hadji, an ex-secret agent who acts as a bodyguard for Dr. Quest and his family, and Jonny's yappy dog Bandit. (Doug Wildey originally wanted to give Jonny a pet monkey, but Hanna-Barbara insisted on a more traditional pet drawn in a cartoony style). The series was full of exotic locations, exciting action and had one of the best opening themes of any cartoon ever. (“Tank!”, the opening theme music from the anime series COWBOY BEBOP is a close second, but I give the JQ theme an edge because it has a pterodactyl).

The animation on JONNY QUEST was extremely limited; not as bad as the animation from SPACE ANGEL, but you can still see every shortcut they used if you look for them. But the base character design, rendered with strong inks by Wildey, was so strong that the look carried the deficiencies in animation.

The artwork was something of a liability. Wildey drew in a realistic style and wanted the series to be as realistic as possible; but there were very few animators in Hollywood at that time who could draw like that. Wildey had to do much of the key animation himself. This made the show expensive to produce and it only ran for twenty-six episodes; but it had a long life in syndication.

The show was produced for an evening time slot rather than a Saturday Morning one. H-B had success running THE FLINTSTONES as an evening show, essentially a sitcom aimed at a grown up audience; and JQ was also aimed at the same audience that would enjoy a Bond movie or an adventure novel. There was a lot of action, and a fair amount of violence; although the show avoided explicit blood and gore, bad guys often met brutal and highly ironic fates. This became a problem in the '70s when people became more concerned with Violence in Children's Television and well-meaning watchdogs put us on the slippery slope to THE GET-ALONG GANG.

The Comico adaptation came about twenty years after the show went off the air, but they did it right. Doug Wildey was involved with the comic, doing promotional artwork for it and writing a story and doing the art for the first issue. He also wrote and illustrated a three-part limited series adapting three of his favorite episodes in his lush, painterly style.

The rest of the series was written by William Messner-Loebs, a writer who previous created and drew JOURNEY: THE ADVENTURES OF WOLVERINE MacALLISTAIR for Aardvark-Vanaheim, a quirky series set in frontier Michigan during the early 19^th Century.. Messner-Loebs wrote 31 issues of JONNY QUEST and went on to write respectable runs on THE FLASH and WONDER WOMAN. For about title's first year, several different artists worked on the book, including Wendi Pini, Adam Kubert, Dan Speigel and others, before it settled down to the regular artistic team of Marc Hempel and Mark Wheatley.

The series did a good job of capturing the spirit of adventure from the original series. Messner-Loebs built on some of the characters, giving Dr. Benton Quest more of a personality beyond the Serious Scientist, and exploring Race Bannon's background.

One interesting thing the comic established was that Race is not only a bodyguard, he also doubles as a tutor for the boys. Since he is primarily trained as a secret agent and not an educator, that means that much of the time he's only a few pages ahead of the boys in the lessons he's teaching them.

One of the interesting characters added to Team Quest's supporting cast is Kathy Martin, a social worker who shows up in issue #7 to demand to know why Jonny and Hadji haven't been in school, only to get swept up in one of the Quest's adventures. She becomes a recurring character and something of a romantic interest for Dr. Quest.

Some of the notable stories include #2, “Enter Race Bannon”, in which we get the story of how Race Bannon is first assigned to bodyguard the Quest family, at a time when Dr. Quest's wife is dying in a hospital. We get some lovely glimpses in flashback of Dr. Quest's romance with her that are sad but sweet. The scene in which Dr. Quest talks to the grieving Jonny about his mother and her passing is sensitive and I think true to the character.

Mrs. Quest appears again in #15, “The Sins of Zin”, another flashback story about Dr, Quest's first meeting with the sinister Dr. Zin when he and his wife are attending a science conference. The friendly verbal fencing between Zin and Mama Quest, the only one in the story who recognizes that Zin is more than he seems, shows that she may not be a brilliant scientist like her husband, but she has plenty of smarts herself.

Issue #5, “Jade, Incorporated”, brought back fan favorite Jezebel Jade, the bad girl from Race's past, in a tale of exotic intrigue reminiscent of TERRY AND THE PIRATES, and which paved the way for a later JEZEBEL JADE limited series.

Issues #23-24 are fun homage to The Prisoner of Zenda, in which Dr. Quest must impersonate the look-alike prince of a Ruritanian nation.

Bandit takes the spotlight in #25, “Butch”, as the dog gets separated from Jonny and wanders about a city alone.

Some of the stories were better than others. Issue #16, “Plague”, about a weird epidemic of lycanthropy, was I think supposed to be a parable about hysteria over the AIDS epidemic, but just seemed ham-handed to me. #22, “Vantage Point”, was an interesting idea: Dr. Quest agrees to participate in an experiment where a camera will record what goes on in his compound for a week; and hilarity ensues. The story is seen entirely from the camera's point of view, which is an interesting idea from the storytelling end, but is visually boring.

Overall, though, Comico's JONNY QUEST was a good series that more than did justice to the cartoon on which it was based.

Doctor Strange vs. The Christian Rocker

One of my good friends when I lived in Darkest Iowa was a big Doctor Strange fan. He and his wife are costumers and one of his favorite creations was a Doctor Strange costume he made, complete with an Eye of Aggamato that he crafted around a hologram of a human eye that he bought through a science supply shop. His wife and he would sometimes attend comics conventions as Doctor Strange and Clea. He told me once that when they bought their house, they persuaded the bank to accept his collection of DOCTOR STRANGE comics as collateral.

It was back when I knew my friend that Doctor Strange faced a threat even more intimidating than the Dread Dormammu or the Hoary Hosts of Hoggath: the Aggressive Attorneys of Amy.

But first, some backstory.

The 1970s were a boom time for horror comics. Movies like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby were big in the theaters, and DC Comics was putting out a slew of horror-themed anthologies. Marvel was also part of this trend, creating such characters as Morbius the Living Vampire, Werewolf by Night, and Brother Voodoo, and reviving Doctor Strange. Possibly the best comic Marvel produced during this era was TOMB OF DRACULA, written by Marv Wolfman (no relation) and drawn by Gene Colan. The title focused on a team of vampire hunters who fought Dracula and other supernatural menaces. TOMB OF DRACULA ran for a respectable seventy issues, making it the longest-running comic book ever to have a villain as its title character.

The series also integrated vampires into the Marvel Universe. Until about 1971, the Comics Code had banned vampires from appearing in Code-Approved Comics. Marvel had skirted the rules with Morbius, who was just sorta a vampire but not actually undead, (hence his tagline “the LIVING Vampire”), but a loosening of the Code rules in the early '70s allowed Marvel to run with the honest-to-Stoker real deal. Dracula fought with Spider-Man and Captain America fought a Nazi vampire named Baron Blood, created by Roy Thomas for THE INVADERS and brought back to fight Modern-Day Cap by Roger Stern and John Byrne.

But too much of anything, even the Fiendish Undead, is not necessarily a good thing. At one point, someone decided that the vampires had outstayed their welcome. Perhaps Someone from On High decided that Gothic creepiness did not fit the Mighty Marvel Manner. I'm guessing this was Jim Shooter, but then, fans of my era love blaming Shooter for everything bad Marvel did in the early '80s, so I could easily be mistaken. During Steve Engelhart's run on DOCTOR STRANGE, he did a storyline in which the Sorcerer Supreme sought a magic ritual called the Montressi Formula which would eliminate all vampires. He succeeded, and vampires were banished from the Marvel Universe.

But it takes more than a stake through the heart to keep a vampire down. In 1990, Marvel was running a new DOCTOR STRANGE comic, once again written by Roy Thomas. Roy has always loved incorporating literary characters and other bits history, lore and pop culture into his stories; and he did a five-issue story arc titled “The Vampiric Verses” which brought vampires back. A semi-immortal witch (and ex-girlfriend of Doctor Strange's) named Morgana Blessing needs the Blood of the Undead to maintain her unnaturally long life; and so she manages to bring the vampires back. Doctor Strange's brother becomes the first to fall victim to this new vampiric outbreak and becomes the new Baron Blood. Strange must team up with Morbius the Living Vampire (Not Really a Vampire, remember) and Brother Voodoo to fight this new menace.

And here's where things take a left turn. The second issue of the story line, DOCTOR STRANGE #15, featured a striking cover dominated by the face of a young woman starting intently out at the readers. The woman is meant to be Morgana Blessing, but the artist, Jackson Guice, used an existing photo for the image. From the looks of the image, I'd guess that he took a high-contrast photostat of the original photo, although he might have traced it by hand; but the face was definitely from a photograph, and people quickly identified it. Because the photo Guice used was from the cover of a record album.

I don't know what possessed Guice (if that is the appropriate verb to use in this situation) to use the face of a Christian Contemporary Pop singer to represent an occultist dabbling in vampiric rituals, but the earnest, haunted face staring out from the cover of DOCTOR STRANGE #15 was undoubtedly Amy Grant's, as it appeared on her 1986 platinum compilation album “The Collection”.

Grant's managers, Mike Blanton and Dan Harrell, filed a complaint against Marvel Comics for the cover. They weren't suing about copyright infringement, because the copyright on that particular photo was held by the commercial photographer who took it. Their argument was that having Amy's face appear on an occult-themed comic book would give her fans the impression that she endorsed it and would damage her reputation in the Christian music community.

In their complaint, the managers argued:

“...many fans of Christian music consider interest in witchcraft and the occult to be antithetical to their Christian beliefs and to the message of Christian music in general. Therefore, an association of Amy Grant or her likeness [with Doctor Strange] is likely to cause irreparable injury to Grant's reputation and good will.”

“They're calling Doctor Strange a Satanist” some comic fans sneered at the time; and I have to admit I was somewhat bemused by the story myself. I guess I've always drawn a distinction between real life occult practices and fantasy magic in fiction. A lot of Christians sincerely hold that any dabbling in mystic stuff is a short trip to Perdition, and so they condemn Dungeons & Dragons and Harry Potter and even look askance at J.R.R. Tolkien despite his friendship with C.S. Lewis. As the son of a Lutheran pastor who was also a SF fan, I kind of have a foot in both camps: while I can understand their reasoning, I don't think we have to regard all Fantasy as an Affront to Heaven.

But the bottom line in this instance was that Marvel used Amy Grant's likeness without her permission, to promote a comic book with which she did not ask to be associated, nor did she wish to. Putting her face on the cover was a dick move. The book's editor should have caught it and had the artist change it before going to print.

Marvel and Grant's people settled the matter out of court. The settlement was sealed, so we don't know what sort of agreement the two sides came to. Since Marvel was not required to admit any wrongdoing nor liability in the matter, I'm guessing that the settlement was a substantial one. Then again, perhaps Amy's people feared that a big public trial would only cement the public's association between her and Doctor Strange, and so might have been agreeable to a more modest settlement to bury the matter. By the time the settlement was reached, a year had passed and the issue was no longer on the shelves, so it is unlikely that there was any demand that it be recalled. DOCTOR STRANGE #15 had long ago either sold out or been filed away in the Back Issues bin where you can buy U.S.A. 1 and KICKERS, INC. for a dollar.

But the controversy lives on in comic book legend. In a weird sort of way, like poor Morgana, that cover achieved a kind of immortality.

Up And Atom

Charlton Comics has been called “the low-rent district of the comics industry”, having some of the cheapest rates in comics. But they granted their underpaid creators more creative freedom than their bigger competitors, and the company served as a proving grounds for new talent. During the 1960s they produced an innovative line of “Action Heroes” that were fondly remembered by fans of that generation: characters like the Blue Beetle, the Question, Peter Cannon – Thunderbolt, and Captain Atom.

The company dwindled in the '70s, and finally shut down its comic book division in the early '80s, selling most of its characters to DC Comics. Writer Alan Moore originally pitched his WATCHMEN series with the idea of using the Charlton heroes as characters, and the trivia-minded comics fan can easily see the inspiration Moore's characters took from the Action Hero originals. DC did not use the Charleton heroes much until CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, which re-booted the DC Universe and combined the myriad worlds of the Multiverse into a single, theoretically simpler, continuity. This gave DC the opportunity to fold the Charlton heroes into the Post-Crisis Universe.

Some of the characters, like Blue Beetle, were fairly easy to port over; but Captain Atom posed some special problems. His origin story was tied pretty closely to the Space Race era and difficult to update. He was a scientist named Allen Adam making last-minute adjustments to a rocket when he had to climb down into the rocket to retrieve a dropped wrench and found himself trapped inside when the rocket blasted off. The rocket exploded in the upper atmosphere, atomizing him. But he got better. He somehow re-assembled his atomic structure, gaining atomic powers in the process. (“Adam”, “Atom”. Geddit? Yeah, you got it.)

By the late '80s, rocket scientists were no longer as cutting-edge cool as they were in 1960 when Captain Atom premiered; and the US no longer performed atmospheric atomic tests. And I suspect that, a year after the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster, DC might have thought that giving a hero super-powers in a rocket explosion might have been a little tacky.

Whatever the reason, writer Cary Bates came up with a new origin for the re-tooled Captain Atom that was grounded in the present-day but also had ties to the 1960s era, and managed to incorporate the character's adventures as a Charlton Hero in a clever and unusual way.

In the new version, he was Captain Nathaniel Adam, a US Air Force pilot serving during the Vietnam War. Court-martialed for a crime he did not commit, Adam is sentenced to death, but is promised an unconditional presidential pardon if he volunteers for a dangerous experiment. The Military has recovered a crashed alien spaceship composed of a strange metal with weird properties; and they want to test the metal's durability by putting a human test subject in a shell made of the metal and detonating an atomic bomb on top of it. Makes sense to me. Unexpectedly, both the metal and the subject disappear.

Nearly twenty years later, Adam re-appears, the metal now fused with his body. The metal has the property of absorbing energy, but it has a limit as to how much it can absorb all at once. When that limit is exceeded, as it was in the bomb test, it becomes displaced in time and kicked forward. In addition to invulnerability, he has gained the power of flight and the ability to tap into the “Quantum Field” to shoot blasts of energy.

Dr. Megala, the scientist working on the “Captain Atom Project” has been studying the data from the initial test and figured all this out; so he and the Project's head, General Eiling, have been waiting for Nathaniel to pop up. They see this as an opportunity to create their own super-hero, working for the Pentagon and American Interests rather than abstract concepts like Truth and Justice and All That Jazz.

So Eiling and his people design a media roll-out to introduce their “Captain Atom” to the world, complete with a fake background claiming that he had been active as a super-hero in secret for many years. The character's adventures as a Charlton Action Hero were retconned to be this fictional backstory. Of course, the fact that Captain Atom would be working for the Government was not part of the press package. This bogus background was referred to in the comic as “The Big Lie”.

As far as the world is concerned, Nathaniel Adam died two decades ago, a dishonored traitor. Because he was presumed dead, his presidential pardon was never signed, and the current Administration does not acknowledge that the promise had ever been made. Adam's only hope to exonerate his name is to go along with Eiling's plan and become, essentially, a covert government agent whose cover is being a super-hero.

Eiling is a real piece of work. He had been Nathaniel Adam's commander during the War and presided over the court-marital. We also come to learn that Eiling was the true culprit in the crime for which Adam was convicted. What's more, after Adam's “death”, Eiling married his widow and raised his two children, now adult, to believe that he was a traitor. It's like Eiling went out of his way to make Adam's return to life a living hell.

It takes a while for Captain Atom to get the hang of being a hero, especially as he has all this other angst to juggle. About this time the Justice League was granted sanction by the United Nations, and the title of that series changed to JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL. As part of that deal, the Security Council, (well, okay; the United States and the Soviet Union), required that the US and the USSR be allowed to each appoint a hero to the team. The US-backed hero, (as if Batman and the others weren't America enough) was Captain Atom. So now Captain Atom is not only pretending to be a seasoned hero, he also has the job of spying on the Justice League.

(I suspect that part of the reason why he was placed on the Justice League was that the first issue established that he had a fondness for bad jokes, and that it perhaps was thought he might make a good fit in the lighter Giffen/DeMatties incarnation of the League. But apart from that first issue, where the jokes serve a plot function establishing his tension waiting for the bomb to go off, we never see him cracking any more. In fact, in the Justice League he acts more as a straight man; especially after he is appointed leader of the European branch of the JLI).

Captain Atom gains a rival in the form of Major Force, a second test subject for Megala's experiments: this one a brutish thug who instead of shooting energy blasts can create masses of “dark matter” out of the Quantum Field.”

Throughout the series, the Big Lie keeps resurfacing to complicate Captain Atom's life. Early on, an investigative reporter digging at Captain Atom's revealed history deduces the identity of one of his arch-enemies, Dr. Spectro. Actually, Dr. Spectro doesn't exist; but the reporter finds a scientist with expertise in the same fields as the fictitious Spectro and who has a shady criminal background. The guy she's found really is a crook, and faced with the prospect of being exposed for his true crimes by her mistaken allegations, he decides he might as well embrace the role that has been created for him. It ends up with Eiling having to put both the reporter and the imitation Spectro on the Project Captain Atom payroll in order to keep the secret.

Later on, Captain Atom tries to use the Big Lie for his own purposes. He tries to persuade JLI team-mate (and one-time fellow Charlton hero) Blue Beetle to help him with his investigations to clear Nathaniel Adam's name by claiming that he had previously worked with Beetle's predecessor, Dan Garret, (the Golden Age Blue Beetle). But this comes to bite him in his shiny silver butt. Beetle may be a goof in the JLI, but he's not stupid. He spots the holes in Atom's story and figures out he is lying. He then becomes obsessed with exposing his teammate, whom he now privately calls “Captain Traitor.”

Over the course of the series, Captain Atom is able to resolve many of his problems. He is able to re-connect with his children and earn their trust; he finds the evidence to exonerate him and expose Eiling's crimes; he confesses the truth about the Big Lie and he manages to grow into becoming the hero and the leader he was pretending to be. But although as a reader I appreciated this resolution, I have to admit that tying off these plot threads also lessened my interest in the series a bit. Partly, this was due to the loss of Pat Broderick, the artist for the early part of the run. I did not care much for his replacement.

Over the course of the series, it seemed to me that Captain Atom managed to pick up more girlfriends than most super-heroes. In an early issue he fought, and developed a romantic tension with, Plastique, a super-powered Quebec separatist terrorist, originally appearing in FIRESTORM. He encountered her a number of times and eventually married her, although the marriage did not work out.

He also met the fellow Charlton hero Nightshade, a super-powered government operative who allows the Captain Atom Project to borrow some of her cases to pad his fictional resume; and they develop a friendly, somewhat romantic relationship. She becomes a member of the Suicide Squad as one of the minders keeping the criminals on the team in line; and in one memorable crossover where the Squad battles the JLI, they pretend to fight, in order to preserve each other's cover, but are actually flirting.

Later on in the series, he briefly has a relationship with a woman who used to be a hippie war protestor during Vietnam and now runs a nostalgia shop. Although the pairing might seem odd, she actually has more in common with him than one might think, having lived through the same era. And in the pages of JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL and JUSTICE LEAGUE EUROPE, Captain Atom frequently found himself the object of romantic teasing from Catherine Colbert, the sexy UN liaison with the JLI's Paris embassy, and from the Crimson Fox, a flirtatious French crimefighter.

Near the end of the series, Captain Atom began exploring the nature of his powers, discovering that the alien ship whose metal now forms a part of his body is actually a sentient creature. One issue strongly suggested that through his “death” and “rebirth”, he might have become an Elemental Force, the way Alan Moore had re-defined Swamp Thing as a Plant Elemental and how Firestorm had been re-defined as a Fire Elemental and Red Tornado as an Air Elemental.

But as Captain Atom's series wound down, another crisis loomed. DC announced a cross-over series called ARMAGEDDON 2001 which would take place over that year's summer annuals. The premise was that a Time Traveler from the Future named Waverider reveals that in ten year's time (the year 2001), a villain calling himself Monarch would kill all the heroes and rule the world. Waverider does not know Monarch's identity, other than that he was once a hero himself; but he does have the power to see an individual's future timeline by touching him. So the idea was in each title's Annual, Waverider would meet a different hero and see what that hero would be doing ten years into the future. And that the readers would be kept in suspense as to who would ultimately turn evil and become the Monarch.

Problem was, there was no suspense. It was said at the time that the news was “leaked”, but anyone with access to DC's publishing schedule, available at any comic book shop, would see that only two titles were being canceled that summer: HAWK AND DOVE and CAPTAIN ATOM; and that the JUSTICE LEAGUE EUROPE ANNUAL, which had Captain Atom as a member, would be the last one published. It was pretty obvious that they were setting Captain Atom up to be this Monarch villain.

DC had to do some frantic re-writing to change the ending. They made Hawk, from HAWK AND DOVE be the villain instead. A lot of fans were upset by the slapdash inconsistency of this ending, especially fans of H&D, since this face-heel turn ripped up everything that had been established between the characters of Hawk and Dove in the preceding series.

Captain Atom kind of fell out of the DC Universe for a while after that. Oh, he headlined in a spin-off miniseries titled ARMAGEDDON: THE ALIEN AGENDA in which he battled Monarch through time, and he made other appearances; but I lost interest in them. And often when he did appear, his writers seemed to make him a two-dimensional “Gung-Ho Army Guy” and ignored Cary Bates's characterization.

He has gone through further re-boots; which I suppose is appropriate, since today is as distant from the Reagan Era as DC's CAPTAIN ATOM #1 was from the Vietnam Era. Still, CAPTAIN ATOM was an interesting series and I enjoyed it.

Wonder Woman's Lib

A fellow I know recently told me about a conversation he had with a lady who claimed that Wonder Woman was a Feminist Icon. He asked how Wonder Woman could be considered such when she runs around all the time in that skimpy outfit. After all, real Feminists get all huffy about objectifying women, right?

The lady didn't have an answer to that, so my friend counted that as a “win”. I'm not sure if I agree with him, though. A lot depends on your definition of what being a “feminist” means. But it occurred to me that I could probably get a column out of it.

To me the question of whether or not Wonder Woman is a feminist seems obvious. Of course she is. The fact that Feminist Icons consider her a Feminist Icon seems to me more relevant than what Wonder Woman wears. Second Wave Feminist Gloria Steinem grew up reading Wonder Woman comics and regarded her as powerful, woman-affirming figure; and when she co-founded, Ms. Magazine, in 1972, she featured the Amazing Amazon prominently on one of the first covers.

But more importantly, Wonder Woman is a feminist because that's what her creator intended.

William Moulton Marston was, to put it mildly, an interesting guy. He studied psychology at Harvard in the 1910s and became interested in the suffragette movement. He contributed to the DISC theory of behavior assessment and developed and heavily promoted an early version of the lie detector. He believed that in many ways women are emotionally and intellectually superior to men and that in time, they would come to be the dominant sex in society.

The two important women in his life were also feminists. His wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, was a strong-minded “New Woman” who had become a lawyer after graduating from one of the oldest woman’s colleges in the country. His mistress, Olive Byrne, a one-time student of his who officially became a kind of live-in housekeeper/nanny but was unofficially more of a co-wife, was the niece of the woman's health advocate Margaret Sanger and her mother, Sanger's sister, helped open the first birth control clinic in America.

Byrne was also a writer and would do pieces appearing in the magazine Family Circle in which she'd interview the famous Dr. William Moulton Marston on a variety of subjects. One of them was on comic books, which already were beginning to worry parents and professional thinking persons. Superman was a fascist; Bat-Man was a violent vigilante. Are they corrupting our children?

Dr. Marston said no: for the most part, comics were simple wish-fulfillment and perfectly healthy. Surely a character like Superman, whose motivations are to protect the innocent and to defeat evil, couldn't possibly be a bad influence on children. The bad comics out there, Marston insisted were rare.

M. C. Gaines, the publisher of All-American Publications, (the company that became known as DC Comics), was impressed by the article and decided it would be a good idea to have a consulting psychologist on staff. He hired Marston to sit on an Editorial Advisory Board which would evaluate and endorse the comics his company put out. Marston soon persuaded him that what his company really needed was a female hero.

“A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child's ideal become a superMAN who uses his extraordinary power to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing – LOVE. It's smart to be strong. It;s big to be generous. But it;s sissified, according to exclusively masculine rules, to be tender, loving, affectionate, and alluring. 'Aw, that's girl's stuff!' snorts our young comics reader. 'Who wants to be a GIRL?' And that's the point; not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, power. Not wanting to be girls they don't want to be tender, submissive, peaceloving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weak ones. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”

Gaines liked the idea of publishing a comic that would appeal to girls as well as boys, so he gave Marston the task of creating this new feminine hero. But Marston's idea wasn't just to create a role-model for girls; he also wanted to introduce boys to a heroic archetype of womanhood, who would embody what he saw as women's positive attributes. Initially Marston called his heroine “Superba the Wonder Woman”, but this was quickly abbreviated to “Wonder Woman.”

It went without saying that Wonder Woman would be beautiful – “As lovely as Aphrodite “ is how Marston described her. Although an ambassador for Peace, she would be willing to fight for Democracy. Captain America had recently debuted over at Timely Comics, and they wanted Wonder Woman to have a similar flag-based costume. And, recognizing that cheesecake always sells, Gaines wanted her to wear as little as the postal regulations prohibiting delivery of obscene material would permit. Marston suggested their artist, Henry Peter, take inspiration from Antonio Vargas, who was drawing luscious pin-ups of women draped in brief, revealing outfits for Esquire magazine. Marston also gave Wonder Woman her iconic bracelets, inspired by similar bracelets always worn by his companion Olive Byrne.

The bracelets bring up another weird quirk about Wonder Woman's creator. He had a thing about bondage. Hardly an issue went by without Wonder Woman being tied up, chained up or bound in one way or another. Which you could simply put down to the convention of the Damsel in Distress from Adventure Fiction, if not for Wonder Woman's earnest musings on the Amazonian doctrines of Willing Submission. And spanking games. The modern reader can be weirded out by the not-terribly-subtle kinkiness of these Golden Age stories... and to be fair, some of the readers back then were too.

Marston answered these critics by saying that these kinds of fantasies were perfectly healthy and that he was a consulting psychologist so he knew what he was doing. It's a matter of conjecture whether his interest in bondage grew out of his theories about submissive and dominant behavior or if his theories were justification for his unconventional personal tastes.

Yet on another level, the theme of bondage fits in with Wonder Woman's feminist themes as well. The image of the woman shackled in the chains of Society goes back to the very beginning of the movement, when the Suffragettes were a sister group to the Abolitionists and shared many of the same goals and much of the same rhetoric. Every time Wonder Woman found herself chained up and had to break free, she was in a sense re-enacting one of the central narratives of feminist thought: that women are enslaved by male-dominated culture and society and need to liberate themselves.

In most of those Golden Age adventures, Wonder Woman is helping women who are trapped, or being exploited, or just plain brow-beaten. She aids them, not just with her mighty Amazonian strength, but also with her heroic example and her inspirational words.

“Oh you stupid girls! When you let your men bind you – you let yourself be bound by war, hate, greed, and lust for power! Think! And free yourselves! CONTROL those who would oppress others! YOU CAN DO IT!”

In another story, she helps a community of women overthrow the male tyrants who have conquered them. “You've shown us, Princess, that clever women can conquer the STRONGEST men!” they tell her. “And don't you ever forget that, girls!” she replies.

She doesn't just give inspirational lessons to the women she meets. A big part of her mission is teaching men to treat women with respect. Her awkward dance with clueless love-interest Steve Trevor reflects this theme. She really feels attracted towards him, but she generally keeps him at arm's length, like an adorable puppy who needs to be taught where not to poop.

“You'll never get an Amazon THAT way –“ she says stiff-arming him as he impulsively tries to embrace her; “try your cave man style on MAN'S World girls!”

“You were superb, Angel!” Steve says in another story. “If only you'd marry me ---!”

“If I married you, Steve, I'd have to pretend I'm WEAKER than you to make you happy--” she replies, “and that, NO woman should do!”

I wonder, though, if the most feminist character in WONDER WOMAN might be her sidekick, Etta Candy. She was a student at Holliday College, a girl's school inspired by Mount Holyoke, Elizabeth Marston's alma mater and by the women's college at Tufts University, where Martson taught; and belonged to the Beeta Lambda sorority. In contrast to the leggy Amazonian Etta was short and pudgy with a fondness for sweets. She had once been sickly and malnourished, but Wonder Woman had encouraged her to embrace the things that brought her joy. Which happened to be candy. Lots of it. Etta was no marshmallow; she had an irrepressible confidence and was fully capable of beating the ever-living snot out of any jerk, crook or Nazi who gave her grief. She once stormed a Nazi concentration camp single-handed, armed only with a box of chocolates, and on multiple occasions rescued Wonder Woman when she had been captured by bad guys.

She liked to say that she owed all her success to candy, and had no patience for body-shaming. “You ought to cut down on the candy,” Wonder Woman once told her. “It will ruin your constitution.”

“Nuts, dearie! My constitution has room for lots of amendments.”
“But Etta, if you get too fat you can't catch a man --”
“Who wants to? When you've got a man, there's nothing you can do with him --- but candy you can EAT!”

Etta did not object to men on principle – she had one or two boyfriends over the years and even almost got married once (to a Hungarian prince who turned out to be a Nazi spy; so she decked him) – but she clearly knew her priorities.

Later writers made Etta shy and self-conscious about her weight, and maybe even a little envious of Wonder Woman. Marston's character had none of that. I like the fact that the Golden Age Etta had zero awe of Wonder Woman but that they regarded each other as equals and as friends. If Diana is a near-goddess and an unattainable ideal, Etta was more down-to-earth, yet still a strong, positive character.

Marston wrote WONDER WOMAN until his death in 1947. About this time, the popularity of super-hero comic books was waning, and one by one, the costumed crime-fighter comics of the Golden Age were being replaced by other genres, like westerns, science fiction, romance and funny animals. At National Comics, the only heroes to survive were their flagship characters, Superman and Batman, and also Wonder Woman. Under the agreement with Marston, the company was required to publish at least four Wonder Woman comics per year or the rights to the character would revert back to him. Even though her sales were not quite as high as those of her male colleagues, the company recognized that Wonder Woman was a valuable property and so they kept her in circulation.

Wonder Woman fell into the hands of writers who didn't get, or were uninterested in, Marston's vision of female empowerment. Robert Kanigher, perhaps best known for his war comics like SGT. ROCK, took over the book and wrote it for the next two decades. His Wonder Woman stories were sometimes imaginative, sometimes erratic, sometimes just weird, (he created the WW arch-foe Egg-Fu, a gigantic talking... uh... egg), but the Higher Purpose was missing.

Around 1968, artist Mike Sekowsky and writer Denny O'Neil undertook to revamp Wonder Woman for the Modern Era. They took her out of her skimpy star-spangled pinup girl outfit and into a mod Emma Peel jumpsuit and had her renounce her Amazon powers and train with an aged Kung-Fu master named I Ching. The idea was to make her more relevant for the Woman's Lib Era, but the Second Wave feminists who were embracing Wonder Woman at that time didn't see it that way. They argued that stripping Wonder Woman of her iconic costume and props diminished her identity; and stripping her of her super-powers diminished her as a hero. Eventually, Denny apologized for the re-vamp and Wonder Woman reverted to her old powers and costume.

DC tried re-booting her again, more successfully, in the late 1980s, following their CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS series. George Perez and Greg Potter combined elements of the Golden Age Wonder Woman with some of Robert Kanigher's additions and bits of Greek legend. This version emphasized her role as an ambassador from Themyscria, the Island of the Amazons, to the Man's World, with a mission to teach mankind to Give Peace a Chance. As part of this mission, she helps create a foundation devoted to helping young women develop their potential.

Since then other writers have offered their takes on the character, emphasizing different qualities. It's become more common in recent years to emphasize the Amazon's warrior culture, sometimes at the expense of her mission of Peace. For a time, recently, there was an attempt to have Superman and Wonder Woman date each other; a move which to me seemed more diminishing than the pants suit and the fortune-cookie oriental master.

And people are still ambivalent about the whole “feminist” label. A couple years ago, in an interview with writer Meredith Finch and her artist husband David, who were at the time taking over the creative duties on the comic, David Finch said: “We want her to be a strong – I don't want to say feminist, but a strong character. Beautiful,but strong”. Even back at the very beginning, when Wonder Woman was first becoming popular, her editor, acting on a reader survey, decreed that she be added to the JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA comic. The writer, Gardener Fox, had to comply, but he made her the group's recording secretary only and never had her go out on missions with the rest of the team.

Still, no matter who is writing her and no matter what kind of an outfits she's wearing, Wonder Woman will always be a gal making it on her own in a Man's World, acting and succeeding in a predominantly male profession.

Not a bad aspiration for a feminist.

Captain America for President !

This election cycle there has been a considerable amount of dissatisfaction with the choices for president. I suppose this is nothing new; we've griped about our choices before. Still, it would be nice to have an Ideal Candidate someday. But what would such an Ideal look like? I think it would have to be someone who represented our country and what is best about us; someone who looks like America.

Maybe even like Captain America.

In the early 1980s there was a “Draft Cap” movement chronicled in a story by Roger Stern and John Byrne and appearing in CAPTAIN AMERICA #250. “Cap For President!” begins with a group of terrorists seizing a political convention in downtown New York City. Captain America is on the scene and swiftly takes out the terrorists and frees the hostages.

The convention chairman, Samuel T. Underwood, a jolly fellow with a used-car-salesman manner and a smile almost as big as his cigar, enthusiastically thanks Cap and introduces him to the rest of his staff. His organization is called the New Popularist Party, a recent Third Party movement holding its first national convention. As Cap politely schmoozes with his admirers, one of the staff jokingly asks if he is considering running for office. Underwood seizes on the idea: “Sure, that would work ! It would work like a charm – a fifty million vote charm!”

At first, Cap laughs the suggestion off. After all, he's not a politician. “The people don't want a politician … they want a leader!” Underwood insists. “The people want a change, Cap … And you could be that change!”

Underwood's staff agrees. “Who could refuse to vote for Captain America?” “People wouldn't have to vote for the lesser of two evils – they'd actually have someone to vote FOR !”

Cap makes polite noises and promises to think about it; but he doesn't take the suggestion too seriously. Underwood, however, is not going to let the matter drop; and as soon as Cap has left the room he gets on the phone to leak a story to the Press that Captain America is considering a run for President. If Cap seems reluctant about running, then maybe Public Opinion will make him change his mind.

Cap spends much of that afternoon in his civilian identity as Steve Rogers, along with another friend helping his girlfriend, Bernie, move. After a couple hours of moving boxes and furniture, Steve and his pals are relaxing a bit and wind up talking about local races in the upcoming election. The conversation is fairly vague – I suspect the writer didn't really want to specify who Steve Roger's congressman was, or even his district – but before it gets terribly far, another friend breaks in with the big news: one of the local tabloids has reported that Captain America is running for President !

Steve is dismayed by this turn of events, and even more so that his friends seem to think it's a great idea. “You'd actually vote for a man who is basically anonymous … who wears a mask?” Steve asks. “Hey, better than voting for some crook who doesn't wear a mask!” Steve's girlfriend agrees: “Wouldn't it be great to have a president you knew you could trust?”

When Cap shows up at Avenger's Mansion the next day, he finds a mob of reporters outside the gate. Once inside, the Mansion's butler, Jarvis, hands him telegrams from both the Democratic and the Republican Parties asking him to consider running as their candidate. “Jarvis, has the whole world gone crazy? What next?!”

He had to ask. His teammate, Hank McCoy, the Beast, greets him with a song and dance. “I heard the good news, and I'm ready to hit the campaign trail ! I can guarantee that you’ll sweep the mutant vote! And then of course there are my lady friends ! Their votes alone should carry New York !”

It seems that everyone has an opinion. Iron Man asks if he's really serious about running. “You of all people should know better than to get mixed up in politics! You know the kind of red tape and corruption you'd be faced with!”

Wasp disagrees. “You're just the kind of man this country needs! People look up to you … respect you … trust you! When was the last time we had a president like that?”

The Vision addresses the issue in a coldly logical fashion. “The question is not one of respect, but of qualifications! You are a man out of time, Cap … 1940s solutions will not work for today's problems!”

As Cap ponders this conflicting advice, we get a series of one-panel vignettes showing the opinions of people on the street: the old guy who remembers Cap from the War Years; the black professional who wonders where Cap stands on the issues of minority rights, housing and education; the punk kid who thinks that Captain America is a hoax invented by the C.I.A. We get reactions from other super-heroes in the Greater New York Metro Area: Nick Fury, who worked with Cap during the War; Daredevil, Spider-Man, even Doctor Strange.

A full page is devoted to the offices of the Daily Bugle, where publisher J. Jonah Jameson discusses Cap's presidential run with his friend, City Editor “Robbie” Robeson. “Cap's a good man...” Jonah muses, “But you remember what happened when movie stars started running for office? It was like a flood gate! It seemed like they were all running for something. If Cap should run, Lord knows who else would! I can see it now … Iron Man for Governor … Mr. Fantastic for Senator!”

“Or even Spider-Man for Mayor?” Robbie teases.

That decides it. The Bugle will not be endorsing Cap.

As evening falls, Cap goes out patrolling the rooftops of the Lower East Side, trying to think through his situation. He comes across an old abandoned school, which has somehow avoided the wrecking ball, that he recognizes as the school he went to as a boy, back during the Great Depression. As he walks through the empty, dusty classroom, he recalls a teacher he had, Mrs. Crosley, who had tried to instill a sense of civic responsibility in her students.

“The United States offers its citizens more rights than any other nation in the world!” he remembers her saying. “But along with those rights come certain duties as well! It's the duty of each one of you to see that this land stays free … to see that Justice is extended to all!”

As he reminisces about Mrs. Crosley's Civics class, his course of action becomes clear to him. He will call Underwood. He has a speech to make.

A couple hours later, he is back at the convention center, standing at a podium in front of a gigantic poster of himself and addressing an enthusiastic crowd. He speaks of the decision he has been asked to make and of what that decision means:

“The presidency is one of the most important jobs in the world. The holder of that job must represent the best interests of the entire nation. He must be ready to negotiate – to compromise – 24 hours a day, to preserve the Republic at all costs!”

Against that responsibility, he sets his personal mission:

“I have worked and fought all my life for the growth and advancement of the American Dream. And I believe that my duty to the Dream would severely limit any abilities I might have to preserve the reality.”

I'm not sure if I buy Cap's rhetoric here. I think he could make a much better argument for refusing the call to run for office. But in the end, he decides that his mission as Captain America was important, and that he could not remain faithful to that mission and at the same time conscientiously fulfill the duties of President. If Captain America is going to represent America, he needs to remain above politics.

But although Cap pretty decisively rejects the idea of running for office, other writers have played with the idea. An issue of WHAT IF tells a story about what might have happened if Cap had taken up the New Populist Party's offer. It ends tragically, as the alternate histories in WHAT IF generally do. In Ben Dunn's manga-style re-imagining of the Marvel Universe, MARVEL MANGAVERSE, Steve Rogers is President and also leads the Avengers in his secret identity as Captain America. And in the universe of the MARVEL ULTIMATES titles, Captain America did run for President and won. Which is unfortunate, because Ultimate Captain America is something of a jerk.

But in this universe, Cap rejects the call to throw his hood into the ring. The convention-goers are disappointed and the final image of the comic is a discarded “Captain America for President” sign lying on the floor, as Cap walks past.

The rest is history. The N.P.P. Presumably went with John Anderson for their candidate. Ronald Reagan won in a landslide, confirming Jonah Jameson's worries about actors in politics.

More recently, Marvel had Steve Rogers step down as Captain America as his advanced age began to catch up with him. He passed on his mantle and his shield to his friend and long-time partner, Sam Wilson, the Falcon. And in the first issue of the new Captain America, Sam challenged Steve's stance on staying above politics:

In all these struggles, all these debates, and all these things tearing us apart -- I have a side. That's right. I have opinions. Strongly held beliefs, even. And here's the thing -- the more I saw the people I believed I was standing up for being walked on -- the more I heard a noise machine spouting intolerance and fear, drowning common sense out -- the more I wondered -- shouldn't Captain America be more than just a symbol? 

Steve always tried to stay above the fray, and I respected him for it. He took a stand when he had to, but as far as politics went -- he played it close to the vest. But if I really believed I could make a difference -- if I really believed I could change some minds, do some good -- then wasn't I obligated to try?

Perhaps if Marvel re-visited Cap for President today, he might make a different decision. But the original Stern & Byrne tale from 1980 is still an interesting read and touches on questions of why elections are important and what it means to run for public office that we don't often see in comics.