The Fractal Hall Journal

Harry Grant was a Scottish television producer, who started his career working on popular dramas during the 1970s. He had scripts filmed for episodes of Hammer House of Horror and The Professionals, and was briefly a producer on Doctor Who. In the early 90s, Grant started a production company, White Ship Films, with a view to producing low-to-mid budget horror movies.

Grant’s plan was to create a movie based on Daniel Morgan’s Uni-Mortal strip, anticipating that it would be a straightforward matter to secure funding for a superhero film in the wake of the worldwide success of Batman and Batman Returns. With Uni-Mortal, he would also be able to explore the subject matter via weird fiction, a genre he was fascinated with.

The initial attempts to buy the film rights were a disaster. Believing that White Ship were clear to begin production after paying a fairly large sum to an American media conglomerate, Grant sank a substantial amount of time and money into developing the Uni-Mortal feature. He was forced to put his plans on hold after a Swedish company claimed they held the rights to the character outside of the US. As soon as the first matter was put to rest, it became clear that the legal issues were far more complex than initially suspected. A competing interest was declared by “Universal Adventure Holdings”, causing Grant’s production to once again come to a halt. Facing the possibility of having to wait for the outcome of years of litigation, Grant pulled the plug, almost bankrupting himself and his company in the process.

His last-ditch plan was to make a minimal-budget feature out of what could be salvaged from the Uni-Mortal debacle, using Morgan’s early pulp stories as a source. In the course of the legal maneuverings, White Ship had ended up owning the copyright to a fair amount of Morgan’s prose work when it became easier to buy them outright rather than negotiate a licencing fee. Grant saw an opportunity to avoid ruin.

Instead, he sailed right into it.

Additional filming was never started due to the small crew Grant had hired all falling ill with food poisoning. No other crew could be hired due to the union dispute that followed, and much of the material that Grant hoped to re-use was rendered useless after being stored incorrectly at the office facility where White Ship were based.

Deciding to cut his losses, Grant licenced the property to the BBC. Though Daniel Morgan’s work was not widely known outside of cult fiction devotees, Grant still had friends at the corporation willing to help him who saw potential in the pre-production work already work, and the possibility of an accompanying documentary series that would illuminate an otherwise obscure individual.

The events that followed are a tale for another time, at the next of the spirit nights. For the moment, it’s worth noting that despite the failures to bring Morgan’s stories to the screen, it would have been a medium that the writer would have been more than happy to see his work translated to. And when we consider the global reach of the cinema, perhaps we also see the form which Morgan’s final prophecy will take. Perhaps this is how Morgan will finally open the doors between worlds.

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Daniel Morgan found himself unable to find further work after Universal Adventure Press ceased publishing. The stories he wanted to tell had become too lurid and obscure to be used in other comic titles, and he had long since burned his bridges with previous employers such as Weird Tales.

During his time working as a comic creator, he had been involved in several drunken altercations with other pulp writers. His mental state had declined sharply during 1940 and 1941, evidenced by long rambling letters he would send to people he barely knew, and incidents where he would turn up at the homes of magazine editors to rant at them about the state of the publishing industry. Police records show that they had been informed of Morgan’s behaviour, though they considered him harmless.

In Morgan’s view, pulp magazines had fallen from the lofty pedestal he had once elevated them to. Comic books had replaced them as the medium that held the key to unearthly power, should the stories reach a wide enough audience.

Needless to say, following a period of near-destitution, Morgan was committed to psychiatric care, where he remained for the rest of the decade. Accounts suggest that he was released in the early 50s, although many records from that period have since been lost. It is likely that Morgan had suffered from a post-traumatic disorder for a long time, his illness rooted in survivors guilt from not one but two incidents: the accident at the Windsor Colliery, and the sinking of the ship that brought him to America.

During the voyage to New York, Morgan was once again the victim of the hideous luck that plagued him throughout his life. He travelled aboard the SS Zennor, which sank in rough seas  fifty miles off the coast of Massachusetts and a hundred miles off-course. Dangerous weather conditions, including severely limited visibility caused by thick fog, delayed the rescue attempt. Morgan was one of several dozen people who escaped the shipwreck in the Zennor’s lifeboats, and following treatment for dehydration and exhaustion suffered no further ill effects from his ordeal. Of the others rescued, a high proportion later reported an unusually high incidence of bad dreams, dark moods, and other symptoms identified at the time with a marked similarity to shell shock.

The cause of the wreck is still unclear. Many of the surviving passengers reported that the Zennor had been struck by another ship, though no other vessel was known to be in the area at the time and has never been subsequently identified.

Morgan died on April 23, 1952, during a fire at his apartment building. He was the only fatality, with the other residents escaping easily. The reason he did nothing to save himself is unknown. Of all his previous acquaintances, only Jacob Hoffeman attended his funeral.

In the years following his death, there have been many reports of individuals passing around copies of the original artwork for the final Uni-Mortal story, despite Hoffeman’s claim that work was never started on it. From time to time, reports have surfaced of instanced of vandalism at the site of Morgan’s grave, and at the office building that stands in the place of the building where Morgan lived.

Most intriguing of all is the curse attributed to Morgan’s work, in particular the incidents that occurred during the filming of a BBC series based on his stories.

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Daniel Morgan was born in the town of Rhydaman, Carmarthenshire, on June 30th, 1908. He was born into a large family, the fifth of seven children. Little is known about his parents, William and Rose, or what became of his siblings. His father was known locally as Bill Pengam, the meaning behind the nickname unclear. It could indicate he was originally from the village of the same name, or it could be derived from the Welsh word for “wrong-headed”. Some sources have claimed that Daniel was in fact the product of an affair between Bill and an unknown woman, and that his father forced his wife to raise Daniel as her own.

At the age of 13, Morgan moved to Abertridwr, in the South Wales Valleys, to work underground at the Windsor Colliery where several of his cousins were already employed. Some time later, on January 3rd, 1925, Morgan was trapped by a cave-in following a localised gas explosion. Five other miners were killed instantly, with Morgan and one Thomas Jones the only survivors. Jones later died of his injuries.

In 1926, Morgan was involved in industrial action related to the General Strike, but along with his comrades was forced back to work in November of the same year. This event provided the impetus for him to leave Wales for good, emigrating to the United States in January 1927. America wasn’t an unusual destination for the Welsh during that era, or for any other nationality for that matter. But Morgan’s motives were fairly unique.

During 1925, the barely-educated collier began what became a long series of correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft, author of some of the most influential ‘Weird Fiction’ of the 20th Century. How exactly Morgan discovered Lovecraft’s work is unclear. Contemporary records from the Abertridwr Miner’s Institute Library, where Morgan was known to spend the bulk of his free time, show that they stocked little if any of the pulp magazines that carried Lovecraft’s writing. Lovecraft’s biographers frequently disagree on whether Morgan could be considered one of the author’s inner circle; the former was famous for the amount of letters he sent to various people, and despite Morgan’s later claims there is no convincing evidence that Lovecraft placed any special weight on the Welshman’s communication with him.

After several years of living and working in New York, Morgan had gained a reputation as a solid, though not particularly brilliant writer. Despite a series of humble day jobs, he spent the rest of his time creating short stories for pulp magazines. He became known for lurid, grotesque tales with a distinctive, pessimistic tone, though he was employed more for his ability to meet deadlines than storytelling skill. As with many of his contemporaries, his work has been better appreciated by later readers than audiences of the time.

Perhaps his most influential work, however, wasn’t anything he had published, but a kind of manifesto that circulated amongst the pulp community. It was unclear if it was purely a deliberate work of fiction, or whether Morgan honestly believed what he had written. The document set out a belief that should enough people become exposed to the ideas and themes of power and horror in the tales writers like Morgan told, a doorway would be opened between this world, and the world that lay beyond.

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The end of October approaches, bringing us closer to the day the Welsh call “Noson Calan Gaeaf,” the night before the first day of winter. It’s traditionally remembered as a Celtic spirit night, a time of ghosts and visitations, of lighting fires to ward off the coming darkness.

In short, it’s an appropriate time to speak of a controversial but little known Welshman who had a small role in the development of modern popular genre fiction, first during the pulp era, and later at the dawn of the superheroes.

By the end of the 30s the early superhero comic books were selling at a rate unthinkable by today’s standards. Within a short space of time following the introduction of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman, the market was flooded with dozens of different titles published by companies eager for a piece of the profits. In many cases, publishers turned to the writers of pulp magazines in order to keep up with the demand for new material.

Comic books owed a lot to the inexpensive, disposable form of entertainment they would later replace. Many of the pulp sensibilities of characters like Zorro and Doc Savage were transplanted to the likes of Batman and Green Lantern. Comics were easy to dismiss as children’s entertainment, but even so some people saw a great potential in them. Daniel Morgan was one of them.

Morgan had emigrated to the United States in the late 1920s. He worked various menial jobs, never holding one down for any long period of time. He was a fairly nondescript individual, and researchers would later find very few people who remembered working with him. Those that could recalled him only as a quiet man of low intelligence. He showed no sign of literary skill or ambition.

Yet during his free time, he wrote for several different magazines and publishers. His work was exceptionally dark, with many editors turning down some of his more grotesque stories. He was known to be in contact with various creators of ‘weird’ fiction, although it’s telling that even they weren’t overly keen on him.

Universal Adventure Press was one of the many short-lived ventures that were birthed by the initial comics boom. Jacob Hoffeman was employed as Editor-in-Chief, following decades-long experience in the pulps. He had worked with Morgan in the past, and offered the Welshman work on the new company’s titles. Morgan jumped at the chance.

It transpired that Morgan had become obsessed with these superheroes, collecting every single comic he could find since buying a copy of More Fun Comics at random from a newsstand. Despite never showing any previous interest in illustration, Morgan created, wrote and drew the character “Uni-Mortal” for Hoffeman, starting in Universal Adventure Comics #6. Morgan became preoccupied with Superman, idolising his creators, and poring over all the stories that featured the character. In later interviews, Hoffeman would recall that Morgan was particularly interested in his mysterious origin, of powers derived from elsewhere, and of parents and civilisations that, at that point, had never been shown.

His Uni-Mortal work followed the same template, with a child discovered in unfortunate circumstances (in this case, discovered adrift in a boat in icy seas by an Antarctic expedition) who grew up to develop superpowers. His adventures became increasingly odd, and less than altruistic. Morgan decided to finish the series once and for all with a sinister, down-beat ending, with Uni-Mortal driven mad and turning evil upon the return of his monstrous father from a distant plane of existence. It was a direction Hoffeman attempted to talk him out of, and according to the editor’s account Morgan never started work on it. The matter was made irrelevant when the company folded in 1942, leaving the character’s story unfinished and the rights tied up in various legal complications.

These stories are of considerable interest to scholars of the period, though Uni-Mortal has over time faded into the background as one of many heroes whose adventures never continued past the 40s. Morgan’s odd, atmospheric style has proved more influential in terms of technique, with the horror titles of the 50s and 70s and the work of the ‘British Invasion’ in the 80s following in the footsteps of both his comic and prose stories.

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Halloween’s a-coming, and it’s getting a little creepy here at the Hall. So today’s subject is appropriate to the season.

Core Genre: Horror

In some ways, Ghost Rider represents one part of a triumvirate that emerged from Marvel’s horror titles in the 70s. The most enduring, maybe, iconic enough to see interest in him renewed every few years before it ebbs once more. Ghost Rider’s tales were based around themes of hellfire and damnation, an overtly religious (or, perhaps, Christian mythological) approach also seen in companion titles such as Son of Satan. While still under the horror banner, Tomb of Dracula took a more classic, Gothic approach, overlapping with Werewolf by Night and other traditional monsters, while the final corner held the archetypical shambling nightmare of Man-Thing.

The hell-based Marvel titles were edgy by the standards of the time. In some ways, they’re still controversial today; after all, Essential Son of Satan was marketed as Essential Marvel Horror, presumably from fear of offending people’s delicate sensibilities with the smallest mention of Old Scratch.

Well, I say edgy. They really aren’t. The liberal use of satanism and satanic imagery is perhaps a little jarring to see in a (for want of a better word) ‘mainstream’ comic book, particularly a 70s superhero title, but overall it does come across as tame after the video horror boom of the 80s. The 70s Ghost Rider really hasn’t aged well, with his origin as a daredevil biker dating him badly. There’s a lot here that’s cheesy as hell. While other comic book films can be criticised for straying too far from the original material, the biggest mistake in Nic Cage’s Ghost Rider was in staying too close to a story that just didn’t hold a lot of water.

That said, there are still some fantastic ideas here, and an iconography far stronger than the stories that initially delineated them. There’s something intriguing about supernatural Westerns (just look at Ennis and Dillon’s Preacher), in the image of a modern-day cowboy with a flaming skull and a motorbike. Or maybe I’m mixing up ’story-worthy imagery’ with ‘makes a cool belt buckle’.

Let’s not discount the elements that came later, during the 90s revamp. We can disparage the Image era for a lot (a whoooooooole lot) of crap, but the Danny Ketch Ghost Rider had a far better design than the somewhat odd jumpsuit they stuck Johnny Blaze in, even if it was a little overly spikey. And having said that, it wasn’t until Garth Ennis and Clayton Crane’s recent miniseries that they finally gave him a decent bike. Even so, we should remember that 90s Ghost Rider was hugely popular.

We can see how the Rider is a constantly updated, imperfect character. A title with a hell of a lot of unfulfilled potential, a protagonist who gets dragged to viability by a series of increments over a long period of time.

The nuts and bolts:

A) The Spirit of Vengeance
B) Supernatural powers (hellfire/chain weapon/penance stare)
C) Flaming skull
D) A bike with flaming tyres

A bit of explanation may be required here, the character’s popularity being what it is. For a character with a relatively simple initial origin (son sells his soul to save his adoptive father, father dies anyway and he’s stuck with the curse), Ghost Rider’s story arc has become enormously convoluted over the various series. The reasons for his transformation have changed, the specific demon that empowered him has changed, the specific spirit his soul was bonded to has changed; he’s even had more than one host, and seen more than one host die. And with a supporting cast that includes Johnny Blaze, Noble Kale, Crash and Roxanne Simpson, the book has some of the stupidest names devised for a Marvel comic. I hope the purists will pardon me if I generalise a little here, because while (despite everything) I’m quite a big fan of the guy I don’t quite understand all the ins and outs myself. It’s probably best to highlight all the best bits from the various incarnations.

Factor A is important to understand, in particular should we chose to differentiate between vengeance and revenge. An odd thing to do, maybe, if we consider them synonyms, but in general usage (and feel free to argue against if you think I’m barking up the wrong tree) ‘revenge’ suggests spite and vindictiveness, which isn’t quite right as applied to the Rider. By the same token, he isn’t the Spirit of Justice, either, as that suggests a more balanced approach. To see justice done does not mean someone has to be punished, and Ghost Rider is most certainly all about the punishment.

Take the penance stare, one of the best ideas to come out of the 90s run. A way of inflicting the pain of innocent victims on those who prey on them. A perfect way to contextualise villains by their own actions. The theme of fire, of burning, but also of cleansing, is obvious in Factor C and D, with C also a mark of death and mortality. As far as locating his enemies goes, it’s interesting to see in the original series how the transformation was initially governed by the arbitrary change of day into night and back, but later became triggered by the presence of evil.

Personally, I prefer Danny Ketch as the Rider’s host rather than Johnny Blaze. The teenager-with-secret-powers is a little derivative, certainly, but it’s hard to see what there is left to do with the original host. His history has become a little tangled, and God knows what’s happening in the current run. And speaking of God, while I enjoyed Ennis’ miniseries, the ongoing took its lead from his brand of Heaven-bashing, full of corrupt angels and both sides being as bad as each other. Which is all very well, but it’s a tired angle these days. It’s one thing to be a pale imitation of Ennis, another to be a pale imitation of Spawn. I don’t know, maybe I’m just a little tired with comics writers working out their Magic Invisible Sky Daddy upbringing in print.

Short version: angels are boring. If anything, Ghost Rider is more interesting in a corrupt kind of world where heaven is irrelevant if non-existent, as he’s better defined by demons and hellfire. A little bleak, perhaps, but more faithful to the few decent elements of his 70s origins. One approach he may well benefit from would be an ongoing theme to tie him to Lovecraftian horror. That was one of the best angles taken in Ennis’ series, and come on, who doesn’t want to read a story where Ghost Rider comes to Arkham? Not as a complete redefinition of the title, but certainly a limited run that owes something to Boom! Studios’ Fall of Cthulhu.

Click here for the Delineation Archive.

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Frank Miller’s Daredevil run is a classic work, defining the character so well that creators still follow his lead almost 30 years after his debut on the title. This isn’t a bad thing, at all, because Miller crafted one of the most efficient storytelling engines ever with his take on Matt Murdock. Daredevil as initially conceived had some great hooks; a blind lawyer with every other sense enhanced, with the background of a street fighter and the skill of an acrobat. But the character was unfairly considered a Spider-Man take off, and never made the A-list until Miller. As I mentioned earlier this week, it wouldn’t be that difficult to define the character differently pre- and post-1980.

Core genre: Now this is interesting, because here we see a way to reconcile both eras, in a way. Miller places the character very clearly within “crime”. That’s where his interest was, that’s the direction he wanted to take the character in. It’s probably fair to say he was more interested in the Kingpin and his henchfolks that in Murdock. The earlier Daredevil was more of a swashbuckler and adventurer. And as with Green Arrow, it’s easy to see the overlap between pulp-adventurers and noir-type crime stories. I think Daredevil lies somewhere within that overlap.

A) A blind man with super-senses
B) Radar sense
C) The skills of a street brawler and an acrobat
D) A devil costume
E) Lawyer alter-ego.
F) A contradictory inner-conflict

It’s a fairly long list of factors, all essential. It’s a testament both to his creators and to Miller that Daredevil’s engineering is so simple, obvious and elegant, yet is the foundation of so much conflict and complexity.

I’ll get the psychology out of the way first. This is maybe Miller’s most important addition, a recognition of contradiction in a Catholic who dresses as a devil while engaged in good works. He’s a blind man who’s more aware than any around him, a wealthy man in a white-collar job with working class origins in a dangerous neighbourhood, a lawyer who breaks the law every single night.

From a pulp-adventurer standpoint, it doesn’t matter that Daredevil hasn’t got particularly supervillainy bad guys. A largely faceless set of common crooks, organised criminals and ninjas are in keeping with a protagonist who needs a lot of cannon-fodder to prove his mettle. Personally, I’m not keep on Daredevil’s ninja stuff, but it’s in keeping with his genre. I suppose the reason I question it is that I prefer Daredevil to be more of a brawling street fighter than a Batman-type martial artist, Murdock being the son of his father, a working class boxer. And I think Daredevil would be comfortable with playing dirty if he had to. Again, we see another contrast within the character: a graceful acrobat but a brutal fighter.

Because of his enhanced senses, he’s one of the characters who can locate and contextualise his villains most easily. One perspective the film took that I thought was quite interesting was the way he fought one battle in the courtroom every day, and continued it at night if justice wasn’t done. Of course, he’s not really meant to be a prosecutor, so it doesn’t quite work as a status quo, but it’s an interesting take. It’s better in the comics, I think, because as a defender, it gives him the chance to rehabilitate these villains, to mitigate their circumstances. There’s the good works again, and yet another contradiction: the very same man who hunts and maims them so brutally is responsible for dusting them off the next day. His day job becomes essental as a way of placing his villains, of understanding his villains, in a context beyond the hunt/fight/tie them up for the police pattern of most heroes.

The radar sense is an important element, mostly because it’s really cool. Seriously, it’s one of the all-time great powers. I can see why it’s sometimes played down, in particular when writers want to make him more of a skilled ninja who senses his environment via sound and the movement of air (see Miller and JR Jr’s Man Without Fear miniseries), but I think it serves a good purpose as part of Murdock’s power set and his story themes. It means he sees nothing, and everything.

Addendum: After writing the above, plok mentioned a few things in regard to Daredevil in the comments of another post. There are a few things in there that made me think (and if you’ve been following these delineation posts without taking a look at the comments, you’re missing some excellent points and counter-points from plok, Will and Will). One thing that is obvious is that this post has been almost entirely about post-Miller DD, unavoidable generally because his take has become the dominant one, and specifically because I haven’t read that much of the 70s Daredevil. That’s something I need to remedy, and I suspect will lead to a post in the near future that addresses this.

1) “The very most topmost important thing about DD is that he’s blind.” Absolutely. Not least because it drains colour from Murdock’s viewpoint, setting up yet another contrast. The Marvel U is a colourful world, even in the noir-corner Daredevil inhabits. The use of colour (red in particular, of course) is very important in Miller’s run, and even in the blurry murk of the Bendis/Maleev stories (I really need to start introducing examples to back some of this up. Bear with me, these follow-ups are coming). But colour, and light, are things Murdock hasn’t seen since he was a child.

2) “I maintain the difference between him and Batman is… he enjoys his crimefighting life.” I haven’t touched on this, but I certainly should underline that just because I think Matt Murdock is contradictory and conflicted, it doesn’t mean I think he has to be particularly grim. To play him straight down the line miserable is a mistake, I think, and something that takes subtlety from the character. I think it’s interesting that even though he gets shat on more than almost any other hero, the writers still aren’t able to go all the way and portray him as bloody and merciless. He isn’t, after all, the Punisher.

3) “DD isn’t driven (he caught his Joe Chill in issue #1).” Which ties in to the above. If he’s at all compelled in his adventuring, it’s because he loves to do it. This character loves conflict, thrives on it. He has to, considering what the writers usually inflict on him. Murdock takes pleasure in these contradictions.

Lawyer and criminal, hunter and defender, grinning adventurer and tortured Catholic. Matt Murdock and Daredevil.

Click here for the Delineation Archive.

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Marvel’s big gun, and hugely important to both companies in that it was with Thor that Jack Kirby started to cut loose with concepts that would end up shaping both respective universes.

Core Genre: Fantasy. Very much so. There are always the SFish cosmic overtones you get with Kirby’s work, but the bottom line is he’s a magical viking.

Anyone remember the Books of Magic ongoing, the one that followed Neil Gaiman’s initial miniseries? Great little title, with a very spooky atmosphere. It managed to have a distinctive voice that wasn’t a slavish recreation of Gaiman’s style.

Tim Hunter, the main character, was a kid with great magical power who would create creatures without realising it. One of these creatures was the Wobbly, a squiggly monster with a bird’s skull, an imaginary creation that lurked in a disused plot of land and disposed of things that Tim threw away. The Wobbly’s trapped there, but when Tim needs it to take away the broken-down car that his mother died in, he gives him permission to leave. “You can always come back, you know,” says Tim. “I’d just as soon you did.”

But this isn’t possible. “To go from a small here to a greater,” says the Wobbly. “That is to be living. But to go from the great to the small? That is death.” It’s a great little bit, in a great standalone issue (#14). John Ney Rieber wrote a lot of good stuff in the course of his run, and Peter Gross after him. The minis that followed the end of the ongoing series were a little ropey, but that’s more due to DC’s need to take the character in a less than ideal direction after Harry Potter pissed in the Bespectacled Young Wizard pot than any fault on the part of the talent.

To go from the great to the small; that’s what Marvel’s Thor is all about. To be diminished, to be humiliated, to die a little. And then to learn from it.

There’s an obvious Christ metaphor here, but it’s one I’m not keen on. Partly it’s because the motivations are completely different, but also because Norse mythology doesn’t need any bed-wetting hippy shit to prop it up. We’re not talking about aspects of a single god, we’re talking about an army of the fuckers, dead-set on getting arseholed and thumping people.

Controlling factors:

A) Big hammer
B) Elemental powers (specifically storm/weather based)
C) Humbled human alter-ego (medical background preferable)
D) An accompanying pantheon

There are a few elements to this character that aren’t really common to other superheroes. Firstly, he’s probably the most popular superhero taken from pre-existing myth. I mean, there’s not a Robin Hood title that’s run for several hundred issues, and is currently bothering the top of the sales lists. The creator credit for this character’s going to be interesting when they get round to making the film, because while he’s undeniably Jack Kirby’s baby, you can’t exactly say he’s created by the King.

His special powers are self-evident. There’s probably room to define his weather abilities, but he’s meant to be an all-powerful storm god so it’s best not to get too hung up on his limits. More important is an alter-ego that humbles him, that both raises and diminishes him. With Donald Blake’s recent return, it’s probably safe to suggest it has to be him, although I have to say I liked the Jake Olson EMT identity in the early days of Dan Jurgens’ revamp, and thought it was quite an elegant modern twist. Unfortunately then it got a bit silly and a lot confusing, and I’m certain there must have been some behind the scenes shenanigans because the first 12 issues were intriguing and consistant and the ones after just seemed to contradict things that had been set-up.

Also, JR Jr’s art was gorgeous.

I think the medical background is essential. First of all, it’s a contrast to the more barbaric image we have of viking berserkers, a civilising influence. Secondly, it suggests Thor would have to have spent a long, long time in the Blake guise, learning and training in a field that is, shall we say, somewhat tricky, requiring not a small amount of sacrifice. Thirdly, it’s seen as a selfless, humanitarian vocation (to which, considering some doctors I’ve dealt with, I say ho ho). It’s a deliberate role meant to inform the thunder god’s character, to give him a reason to protect humanity instead of the more attractive pursuit of pillaging his way across the cosmos in a goat-drawn shagwagon.

I think Thor is also unique in that the context that defines him isn’t as dependent on his rogue’s gallery. Instead, the facets of his character become illuminated by his relation to the other gods that surround him. His supporting cast are largely made up from the mythical Norse pantheon, with a few invented gods thrown in for good measure. There’s scope for decent stories in his search for them when they go missing (which seems to happen a fair bit), but a Thor series with them completely absent would be unthinkable, or at least so divergent from the average that it wouldn’t really be a Marvel Comics’ Thor story anymore. It would, however, still be a Thor story, in that the character has existed for a very long time prior to Marvel’s take, and it’s worth noting here that obviously there is a distinct difference between the two.

By incorporating the mythological pantheon, a different spin is given to the usual superhero template. It makes the non-mythical rogue’s gallery less important (which is good, because that side of things tends to be weak), but gives the character a strong supporting cast, and some absolutely cracking mythological bad guys. I mean, elsewhere in comics we see a lot of myth-based evildoers, but are any of them as good as Loki? Surely Thor’s arch-enemy is up there in the list of all-time great comic book baddies. The practical result of the pantheon’s existance is that there’s less of a need for the comic to deal with Thor locating these antagonists. At the simplest level, he knows them because myth tells us he’s been engaged in battle with them for centuries. Thor didn’t need to ‘discover’ Loki, or the frost giants, and neither does the audience, because of the pre-existing literature (which isn’t to say the writer shouldn’t still define them within the context of the Marvel U, of course).

Finally, one aspect of the character that always interests me is how, considering his all-powerful nature, Thor is the Marvel character best suited to deal with the theme of death. A lot of that is inherited from the mythology, of course. Norse culture was very clear that all stories had to have an ending, and that a hero’s tale wasn’t complete without his or her death. With Ragnarok, the people of the north made it very clear that not even the gods could escape from this. What’s fascinating is how the Marvel version of the character embraces these themes. As I said at the beginning of this post, to diminish Thor from god to human is in one sense to kill him. The Marvel U not only incorporates Ragnarok, but has inflicted it on its characters several times (and not even the vikings were that cruel to their gods). Death becomes just another element of a cycle, a reflection of an overarching superheroic theme: our heroes die, but they always come back. And Thor becomes Donald Blake, yet always returns to godhood.

Click here for the Delineation Archive.

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I didn’t want to head back to DC quite so soon, but the Thor and Daredevil posts aren’t quite ready yet and I’m already late.

So here we descend into politics.

The idea of a ‘political’ superhero is a great one. The problem is it takes a certain intellectual maturity to deal with the subject adequately. Intellectual maturity isn’t exactly the foundation of a character who fires green boxing gloves on pointy sticks at his enemies, but to be fair intellectual maturity isn’t exactly the foundation of political discourse fucking anywhere.

Case in point: How many times have you seen Oliver Queen described as a ’socialist’, or ‘practically socialist’ hero? The very first superhero message board argument I ever read (back when I accessed the internet via a P75 and a 36.6 kbps modem) was about whether or not Queen could be described as a socialist, and if so did that make him only a few degrees away from being a Nazi. I think now what I thought then: 1) of course he isn’t a fucking socialist, and 2) even if he was, it in no way makes him anywhere close to being a Nazi. In fact, it would put him on the opposite end of the scale entirely.

The thing is, people have a hard time understanding exactly what we mean when we talk about ’socialism’. It’s problematic enough here in the Fair Country, but my experience of conversations on this matter with Americans tends to err on the side of being utterly bugshit nuts. The heart of the problem is the cartoonish argument that anyone further to the left of, I don’t know, Mussolini, is essentially a stinkin’ commie. Flash Fact: Just because Green Arrow has a thing about social improvement, doesn’t make him a socialist. Flash Fact: Nor Barack Obama.

You see what just happened? I went to talk about Green Arrow, and instead spent a couple of hundred words giving you all my viewpoint on the political spectrum. And that’s a problem, because this isn’t unusual where this character’s concerned. The politics swamp the character, and make him difficult to deal with.

So let’s clear the politics thing up. To my knowledge, Oliver Queen has never recommended nationalisation of any industry, espoused the virtues of syndicate collectives, or any specific point of view regarding the redistribution of wealth. His criticism of the demands of capital stretches about as far as an undirected dislike of corrupt corporate fat cats. He’s a liberal, not a socialist.

But what kind of liberal is he? He’s written as a blowhard a lot. I’m not sure exactly where that came from. Well, I do, it came from the O’Neal/Adams GL/GA run. The thing is, the point of those tales is that both characters had faults in their worldview, and learned from each other. But while Hal Jordan has been allowed to grow, Oliver Queen is the same prick he’s always been, because it’s just easier that way. I suspect that writers, even liberal writers, prefer the caricature of a gasbag lefty. Oliver Queen, the PC Police incarnate! It makes the character a frustrating read sometimes. Nuance, it would appear, is a little too much like hard work.

I suppose my point is, yes, the guy’s a prick. But he’s a prick because he keeps cheating on his partner, not because he’s a little left-wing in his politics. It would be nice to see the two things distinguished, once in a while.

Right, with that out the way, let’s take a look at function.

Core Genre: Hm, a difficult one. Broadly ‘Crime’, inasmuch as the character’s a rip-off of Batman. Broadly ‘Science Fiction’, because how else is a boxing glove even vaguely aerodynamic? Broadly ‘Fantasy’, because he turned his back on wealth and industry to help the common man (kidding! Kidding!).

No, I think here I may have to add a new category: ‘Adventure Fiction’. It’s an old-fashioned kind of genre that overlaps a little with certain areas of crime fiction. It was far more popular in the heyday of the pulps, but is pretty niche now, the itch that it scratched now largely taken care of by action cinema. It encompasses Robin Hood (the most direct inspiration for the character, obviously), Hawkeye, Doc Savage; indeed, Indiana Jones, the most popular modern character derived from old adventure serials. This kind of fiction’s still around, but it tends to either be an exercise in nostalgia (as with the McSweeney anthology from a number of years ago) or to hide in plain sight with the rest of ‘General Fiction’ (Clive Cussler, perhaps?)

It’s interesting, really. Batman was also directly influenced by the pulps, and Green Arrow was a rip-off of Batman, but while Batman developed into something that doesn’t fit comfortably in that category anymore, Green Arrow is perhaps (with Daredevil) the character to remain closest to these roots. But we don’t really see that very much, do we? No, for some reason we instead see the character made mayor of his home city. Very strange.

A) Bow and Arrows (regular and trick)
B) Left-wing politics
C) Reckless

The further away from the so-called ‘A-list’ characters we get, the more difficult the analysis becomes. Batman and Superman are easy to take apart, because they have a very clear set of operating principles. The further down the list we get, the more the characters become copies of the more popular ones. Green Arrow, just another derivative of Batman. And this is a problem, because it means we have no clear definition of how he locates his villains, or the context he finds them in. He’s not really a hunter like Wonder Woman, he’s not really a detective, and he certainly doesn’t have any special powers. What does he actually do? Stand around on a rooftop waiting for someone to get mugged?

Unfortunately, yes. That’s exactly what he does. Does anyone have any example of Oliver Queen being a bit more proactive than just waiting for trouble?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a perfectly good motivation if deliberately chosen by a writer. James Robinson’s Starman didn’t go on patrol. That was a specific choice by the writer, and told us a lot about Jack Knight’s character. What does it tell us about Queen? Nothing. On one hand, we’re meant to believe he has a passion for social issues and change. On the other, we’re meant to believe he doesn’t do much more than stand around waiting for Crime. It just doesn’t seem consistant to me, and makes me wonder if we’re actually dealing with a character with flawed engineering. How on earth do we use this character to reveal anything about his villains, or his surroundings? What mechanism does he use beyond pointy bits of wood? Is he just a walking gimmick?

In looking for the character’s controlling factors, aside from the arrows all I find are his politics (yawn) and a lack of self-possession that should make him a great adventurer but a lousy significant other.

Conclusion: This post makes it sound like I don’t like Green Arrow. Which isn’t true at all, I think he could be a great character. I just think he’s never really been utilised effectively. Regardless of what you may think of the Kevin Smith run, it gave the character a new lease of life. Unfortunately, the new direction was squandered by some very poor writing and story choices. I’d wager that the answer is in understanding the flaws in the engine, giving the character a more fully realised raison d’etre, and embracing the pulp adventure roots of superhero tales. Green Arrow is the perfect character to use to comment on masked adventurers as a whole. Oliver Queen needs his own James Robinson, or Neil Gaiman, to better define him.

You know what he should be? The concept should better embrace the Robin Hood iconography. He should be a legend to the oppressed everywhere, an urban myth within social activist circles. He should appear in places of strife and inequality, his enemies located and contextualised by a distributed global network of individuals. Not the Shadow’s network of servants, but a grassroots collective that opposes injustice.

Yeah, that would work. That would work nicely.

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If you haven’t read Marc Singer’s excellent take on All-Star Superman, then you should do so now. Brother Paul in particular, because it links in to something we were talking about the other day.

In short, I take back what I said about the final issue. I understand where Morrison was coming from, now, and it’s brilliant. And if Cole Odell’s theory on Luthor being Quintum isn’t correct, then it should be because it makes so much sense.

Bloody awesome.

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Core Genre: Science Fiction. Duh.

If superhero stories really are ultimately the interactions between heroes and villains, then Iron Man’s tale is all about how Tony Stark reconciles or contradicts the different aspects of himself.

The Bad: The alcoholism storyline did the character’s storyline a huge favour by adding relevance and realism (ho ho), as well as a theme (his own worst enemy) to focus an otherwise rudderless character. Before that point Iron Man, the adventure capitalist, was nothing more than Marvel’s least subtle anti-Red hero (and this is 60s Marvel we’re talking about, so that’s saying something).

The problem is that, like Batman-the-psycho, this has been taken to it’s logical conclusion and back so many times there’s really nowhere else to go with it. His story arc is more of a story ECG reading, where he’s had more ups and downs than a kangaroo with a speeding ticket*. First it’s crime-fighting whilst shitfaced, then it’s having your designs stolen and used to kill people, before topping it all by cloning a close mate and letting the resultant abomination murder another hero. I’m not sure you can top this without having Stark exterminate the world as he buggers children (which, incidentally, would have been Warren Ellis’ second arc on his reboot).

The Good: Millionaire industrialist superhero? There is just so much to say with a character like this. I’ve got a post coming up where I get a little irate at the way Green Arrow-as-lefty descends into caricature. Well, Iron Man seems of late to be even more prone to political caricature, to become a cartoonish Republican supervillain. First of all, of course he’s going to be a little more right-wing and a little more authoritarian than other characters. But have the writers really thought that through? Wouldn’t he more likely be the kind of person who opposes governmental interference, who believes citizens are better placed to take their safety into their own hands? He bootstrapped himself to power and influence; wouldn’t he at a minimum expect this from others? I don’t know, controlling the superheroes of the world as the Director of SHIELD doesn’t seem very neo-liberal to me. Underfunding and understaffing them into obsolescence, I could probably buy that.

My point is that there are some fascinating elements to play with here. They shouldn’t be so quickly bulldozed just to mould Tony Stark into a bad guy.

These delineations are going to get a little tougher the further away from the A-list we get. We could perhaps say that a lower-tier hero has lower-tier villains, but I suspect it’s the lack of quality in the villains that shapes the hero; if our central argument is that all superhero stories are at their core interactions between the two, then a fault in one side of the equation will effect the other. This makes a definition of our heroes difficult because it becomes more difficult to find the villain’s context. Batman’s bad guys are superb, of course. Plenty of layers and gimmicks for the Dark Knight to immerse himself in. But Whiplash and the Living Laser? Yeah, good luck with those two.

By necessity, the further away from the A-list we get, the more we may have to resort to projecting what a character’s contextualising factors should be, rather than what we can extrapolate from the evidence. I don’t really see a way round this, as it comes down to the mathematics of the thing. The fact that Batman has so many more stories in so many different media than Iron Man has means that the simple weight of numbers will skew towards a higher proportion of decent stories. There are always going to be exceptions that buck the trend, but I suspect they will be few and far between, and will rely on very specific circumstances.

Anyway, back to Stark:

A) The armour
B) Scientific curiosity and creation
C) Analysis (the converse being any weakness resulting from a lack of analysis)
D) Super-rich.

I think Iron Man’s major sub-theme is responsibility/irresponsibility, but I suspect that this is more a derivation of the other factors than a factor on its own.

Tony is saved from a fairly lacklustre set of rogues by the hypothesis that he himself is his own arch-enemy. But I don’t think that excuses us from ignoring his external world quite yet. The armour is his interaction with his world, and his enemies. His way of locating them, of placing them in their context, is by a combination of analysis and curiosity. Essentially, the Iron Man armour is also used as a way of extracting data from the world and displaying it in a way that allows Stark to quickly analyse it. Internally, this is enabled by Stark’s own ability to create, which is in turn enabled by his own sense of curiosity and experimentation. Externally, it is enabled by the fortune Stark has amassed almost as a by-product of his other skills.

By the same token, his interaction with the various aspects of his own psyche are also governed by his ability to self-analyse. In short, he’s not very good at it. Whether it’s his alcoholism, his inability to safeguard his own weapons designs, or his monumental idiocy in cloning Thor (although frankly, that’s more of an awful plot point than a decent use of Stark’s character), Stark shows time and again that he has trouble turning his analytical skills inward. I know I try to stay away from commenting on psychological motivation in these delineations (er, except for yesterday, when I spent a whole post on it), but when the character’s biggest bad guy’s himself, it’s really unavoidable.

Conclusion: Politically dodgy, but probably due to mischaracterising the conservative mindset rather than an error in assigning Tony Stark that inclination. Iron Man’s greatest challenge is in analysing himself, and his greatest skill is in analysing the external world. An Iron Man story should embrace creation, but not dismiss its consequences.

[*^ Who would, of course, be hopping mad.]

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