Super Bad Fanboy

Somewhere in the process of writing Infinite Crisis, Prime seems to have become a favorite of Johns.  Something about a super-powered, immature toxic fanboy clearly resonated with a writer who started as a fan and acolyte (mentored by Superman director Richard Donner), had a meteoric rise in DC that leveraged his encyclopedic knowledge of, and emotional engagement to, DC lore, and became a target for online vitriol as his influence over DC comics, film, and television became hegemonic.  So many of his signature projects are not just in the DC Universe, but about it, with continuity, reboots, and restoration all taking center stage.  If, as I have asserted, Flashpoint was an incoherent failure, and if his scattershot reboot of DC in the New 52 grew increasingly disappointing to readers, Rebirth, the more commercially and critical project for reconciling the New 52 and the the company's past, was also masterminded by him.  Johns's growing comics output and outsize role in the company's direction made him identifiable to DC fans as both the cause of the company's problem and its solution.  With Superboy Prime, Johns weaponized both positive and negative fan response in a perfectly Johns way:  he dug deep into DC continuity in order to add dimension to a character in manner consistent with the character's roots.  Initially a denizen of Earth Prime, this particular Superboy was meta from start to finish, the project of "our" world's fannish desires into an imaginary universe that already existed as fans' and creators' fictive projections. 

Prime is a particular kind of bad fan:  nothing new makes him happy, and every attempt to restore or revisit the old only leaves him more unsatisfied.  His reflexive nostalgia is sterile at best, toxic at worst. He also proves the argument some creators have made about critics for ages: it's easier to tear something down than build it up.  Tearing down is all Prime can do.  After he breaks free and does a brief stint in the Sinestro Corps, Prime returns in the weekly series Countdown to Infinite Crisis (which Johns did not write), where he destroys not one, but two earths, out of frustration with their persistent imperfections.  As of this writing, Prime has managed to come back every few years, but Johns had already given him his defining moments in two of the last Prime storylines he has written to date. In Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds, Prime is appalled to discover that, by the 31st century, he is barely a footnote in the history of Superman. At the end of a very complicated plot involving a future version of Prime who has become the Time Trapper, Superboy Prime is catapulted back to Earth Prime.  His status as ultimate fanboy stereotype is now complete: he literally lives in his parents' basement and spends most of his time trolling DC fans online.  He has also alienated everyone around him, because they have read about his exploits in the DC comics that featured him.

Yeah, we’re not thrilled either, Prime

Appropriately Johns' made his next statement on Prime in a line-wide event that was all about deadly nostalgia: Blackest Night confronted the DC heroes with the malevolent, reanimated corpses of their loved ones, comrades, and enemies.  The current volume of Adventure Comics had been devoted to the exploits of the Conner Kent Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes (each getting half the book); Issue 4 ("He Primed Me, Part One: Spoiler Alert," written by Johns and Sterling Gates, with art by Jerry Ordway and Bob Wiaceck, January, 2010) ironically gives Prime what he always wanted: he has displaced Conner Kent as the Superboy headlining the series.  It opens where we left him, in his parents' basement, annoyed by the realization that DC has involved him in this latest crossover (in a nice touch, that realization hits him simultaneously on two fronts: he is holding Adventure Comics 4 in his hands while looking directly at the reader he knows is watching him).

Though the metafictional storytelling is rather postmodern, it is also a restoration of Prime's (and Earth Prime's) historical roots: Earth Prime is precisely the world in which a superhero visiting from a fictional Earth can meet his creators and make demands. He forces his terrorized parents to drive him to the local comic book store (while they plot yet another attempt to escape from their monstrous offspring), where he demands to find out what happens in Adventure Comics 5. Of course, the staff can't help, but they do direct him to the Internet (which is also useless).  But this is a Blackest Night tie-in, and suddenly a zombified Alexander Luthor appears in the shop, restores Prime to his full power and Anti-Monitor-inspired costume, and trashes the store, reminding Prime that everyone (the readers, the staff at the story) hates him because he is a bad character.

Like all comics readers, Prime had to wait until the next issue to find out what happens next. In "He Primed Me: Part Two: Flame War" (Adventure Comics 5, February 2010, by Johns, Gates, Ordway, and Wiaceck), Johns doubles down on the metafiction, with Prime fighting the Black Lanterns in DC offices as he yells at Editor-in-Chief Dan DeDio and other DC staffers that "These aren't just stories you're making up!/ Somewhere out there, they're all happening!"  But even from his privileged vantage point as an Earth-Prime resident who has travelled the multiverse, he has neither control nor perspective. Instead, it is the undead Alexander Luthor who serves as Johns' and Gages' mouthpiece, telling Prime that his comics are his kryptonite:

Others find hope and inspiration between these pages. They find a community to belong to.

But you're not like the others.  You claim ownership, but you have no control.

And you hate what you can't control.

Including the things you love.

You know things are bad when the voice of wisdom is a zombie villain from a vanished evil Earth

The emotionally-stunted fan is forced to confront the entire emotional spectrum that happens to be the macguffin for Blackest Night: will, fear, love, compassion, avarice, rage, and hope. Surprisingly, Johns and Gates send Prime on a superficially positive note, but one that still fits the book's judgement of this most toxic of fans.  Having purged himself of the various Lantern energies, Prime whines that "I never get what I want.  The don't want me to h-have it. They made me into their puppet. " He admits that he does hate himself, but clings to his grievance that "they" turned him into a villain: "Why don't they give me a happy ending?"

As if on cue, Laurie, his girlfriend whom (it has been strongly hinted) Prime killed in a fit of rage at some point after Legion of 3 Worlds, shows up in his ruined basement:

"They heard you, Clark. They're sorry.

They know what they did was wrong.

They sent me to say that. To tell you that they're going to leave you alone.

Everything's all right, Clark.

I'm here. I'm right here."

Super-Incel wins the prize

The last panel closes in on a black lantern ring on her finger, with the word "hope" representing the emotion she is presumably channeling. This "Laurie ex machina" makes little sense on the level of plot, but adds a great deal to the story's themes.  Prime is still the entitled, immature child he always was, with Laurie's primary function in his life reinforced: she is more a reward than a person (indeed, she is apparently an animated corpse).  In a superhero world that casually "fridges" girlfriends in order to give the hero something to get upset about, Laurie has been defrosted and offered up to a bitter fanboy who has never really learned his lesson.  Only a troll like Superboy Prime would see a reunion with his dead girlfriend ins his parents basement as a "happy ending."

Next: Fixing the Unfixable

Violence Really Does Solve All Our Problems!

While in limbo, the four Crisis refugees repeatedly encounter odd, crystalline walls that display the present and past of New Earth. This is how they grow disappointed in the world they inadvertently helped create (with Alexander stacking the deck by making sure they see the worst possible moments).  At some point, Alexander notices that if Superman or Superboy-Prime hit one of these walls in anger, it somehow triggers a transformation in post-Crisis reality.  Soon Alexander encourages Prime to hit the wall again and again (before its eventual, final destruction).  Each one of these blows turns out to be responsible for a unique, longstanding continuity problem:  one punch leads to the Hawkman mess, another to the resurrection of Jason Todd, a third to the complete reboot of the Doom Patrol, and a fourth to a bizarre revamp of the origin of the Metal Men. 

That's right: all the various glitches in DC continuity happened because Superboy Prime literally punched the walls of reality.  An elegant solution to a complex web of problems while also a sublimely stupid idea, the Superboy Punch is a hilarious parody of the problem of justice in a superhero universe.  Crime, inequality, and racism cannot simply be punched in the face, but it turns out that, in modern DC comics, reality is eminently punchable.  Infinite Crisis flirts with the possibility that physical violence on the part of a self-righteous, empowered vigilante may actually be the solution to the world's problems. It's just a matter of finding the right way to punch.

This represents Infinite Crisis in a nutshell.  Infinite Crisis is steeped in the continuity wonkiness of its predecessor while also exemplifying something from every age of DC comics, all converging on Superboy Prime.  Superboy aligns himself with Kal-L, the original Superman, who embodies the good-natured naivete of the Golden Age, while Prime's reality punch and rearrangement of entire planets to give the universe a new center is Silver Age nonsense at its finest.  The death and dismemberment he doles out in the last few issues are everything about the post-Crisis DCU that he purports to loathe. Infinite Crisis has it's geek and eats it, too.

At this point, it should come as little surprise that so much of Infinite Crisis is about reading DC comics.  The four refugees in limbo represent three critical takes on the post-Crisis era: for the Earth-2 Superman (and presumably, Lois, though she doesn't comment very much), this new world is too cynical. For Alexander Luthor, it's a missed opportunity.  For Superboy Prime, though, the contemporary DCU tarnishes his dreams.  When he repeatedly watches his happy life on Earth Prime get erased by the first Crisis, one can almost hear the lament of the conservative fanboy:  this new material is "raping his childhood."

As written by Johns, Superboy Prime is the apotheosis of the bad fan.  A caricature of the teenage fanboy, he's an opinionated bully who stutters every time anyone challenges his judgments.  He may have superpowers, but he is still engaged in cosplay, trying out new looks for his audience. Indeed,  the back-up story in his first appearance in a Crisis tie-in ("The Origin of Superboy-Prime," DC Comics Presents 87, by Elliott S. Maggin, Curt Swan, and Al Williamson, November 1985) shows him dressing up in a Superboy costume for a beach party, when his powers first manifest themselves. After his heel-turn halfway through Infinite Crisis, he returns to New Earth in a new costume inspired by the Anti-Monitor; finally, in prison on Oa, he cultivates a more extreme look by burning the Superman shield onto his bare chest. His aesthetic starts in the 1950s, morphs into the 1980s, and ends in the 1990s.

Dude. Not cool.

By the time Infinite Crisis is over, Prime has wracked up an impressive death count. Before killing dozens of Green Lanterns and the Golden Age Superman in the final issue, he's left a lasting impression on the Teen Titans:  accidentally murdering the obscure heroine Pantha (punching her head off), tearing off Risk's right arm, and killing Connor Kent, the current Superboy. Though the main villain of Infinite Crisis is technically Alexander Luthor, Prime has proven himself a one-man Crisis, taking out characters from multiple DC eras and franchises.  He has destroyed the very origin of DC comics (as Alexander puts it: "The Superman of Earth-Two is the key to the return of the rest of the multiverse./ For some reason I can't explain or understand, and probably ever will..../ everything comes from Superman.")

Alexander, who comes as close to DC godhood as anyone can (replacing the hands of creation with his own) can't understand Superman's role, but certainly Prime can: he is, after all, from "our" Earth, and spent his childhood reading DC comics.  By the end of Infinite Crisis, Prime has assumed one of the roles previously played by the Psycho-Pirate:  he seems to be aware that he is living in a comic book.  Indeed, that is the whole point of Prime:  he was a seemingly ordinary comics fan (who happened to share Clark Kent's name) who gets to live out the wish fulfillment fantasy of becoming super, though at the expense of every aspect of his previous, ordinary life.  Prime is a cautionary tale, so immersed in comics that he has lost the ability to treat those around him as real people rather than characters. 

Next: Super Bad Fanboy

Crisis of Infinite Memberberries

As we have already seen, the two decades between these two Crises witnessed a bit of formal experimentation with crossover events, including limiting them to annuals, containing them within shorter miniseries along with intruding into single issues of various ongoing titles. Infinite Crisis might be considered a serious formal innovation in the structure of the Event. Not only was the way to Infinite Crisis prepared by multiple plotlines developing over the previous year, it was kicked off by a single issue "Prelude" that in turn launched four different miniseries (Villains United, The Rann-Thanagar War, Day of Judgment, and The Omac Project) as well as the tie-in miniseries DC Special: The Return of Donna Troy. Only when these series were concluded was the true nature of Infinite Crisis revealed: Alexander Luthor, the Golden Age Superman and Lois, and Superboy-Prime were back, with Prime and Luthor as the primary antagonists for a seven-issue miniseries.

As is typical of a Johns project, however, the novelty of his approach was eclipsed by a less commercial comics event masterminded by a more celebrated author: at roughly the same time, Grant Morrison was publishing Seven Soldiers,which also happened to be a revamp of a Silver Age storyline whose roots stretched back to the DC's Golden Age. Morrison crafted a convoluted story about a team of obscure characters who never actually come together as a team. Seven Soldiers launched with a zero issue featuring yet another set of obscure characters who die before the final page, followed by seven different miniseries fearing each of the "Soldiers," and wrapped up in a one-shot called Seven Soldiers 1.  Seven Soldiers did not deliver many of the usual pleasures of a DC event (and Morrison's subsequent contribution to the "Crisis" genre, Final Crisis, offered even fewer), but they made the complexity of Infinite Crisis look like child's play.

Again, Infinite Crisis was a response to a different challenge.  As the commemoration of an event that mined DC's decades-long past in order to chart a new future, Infinite Crisis may as well have been named "Infinite Regress":  if there were any doubts that DC was going to put an end to regular apocalyptic revisions of its storyworld, Infinite Crisisset them to rest.  Like Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis addressed the incongruities that Crisis on Infinite Earths left in its wake, while addressing the ethics and ramifications of nostalgia head-on.   DC's cleverest move here was to double down on Infinite Crisis's derivative nature: an unabashed sequel turned out to be just the thing to justify another Crisis-like revision of continuity.  Until the year leading up to Infinite Crisis, the status of Crisis on Infinite Earths within the DC storyworld was muddled.  Morrison had taken the opportunity to revisit it just a few years afterwards in Animal Man, but using metaphysical and metafictional devices that allowed the storyline to go wholly unnoticed by everyone else in the DCU. 

Apparently, Superman’s real Kryptonite is constipation

Only three of the characters associated with the Monitor remained in play after the original Crisis: Pariah, who was immediately forgotten until he was murdered by Alexander Luthor in one of the Infinite Crisis preliminary miniseries; Lady Quark, the only surviving hero of Earth-Six, who, after a brief appearance in Starman,  joined L.E.G.I.O.N. (a twentieth-century precursor the Legion of Superheroes) and wa killed in the line of duty; and Harbinger, the Monitor's assistant who could split herself into multiple bodies. Harbinger has a few guest appearances among the Amazons of Themiscyra before sacrificing herself in 2004 to save the most recent incarnation of Supergirl.  Otherwise, the Crisiswould only be briefly referenced in a manner suggesting that some of the characters remembered something momentous had happened, but that none of them remembered the multiverse.

Infinite Crisis, then, worked with memory and history on two levels:  for the readers, the nostalgia factor was undeniable: who had really expected the four Crisis refugees to return from the limbo "paradise" into which they had escaped at the end of the maxiseries?  Was it possible that the Multiverse would return? Were Alexander Luthor and Superboy Prime correct in their dismissal of the post-Crisis DCU as miserable and tainted?

Within the DC storyworld, the situation was more complicated, and also more potentially gratifying:  rather than nostalgia, the characters underwent anamnesia: one by one, some of them began to remember both the Crisis and the multiverse that replaced it.  The puppets had started to see behind the curtain (though not in as blatantly metafictional a manner as in Grant Morrison's Animal Man).  Certainly seeing Power Girl, originally the cousin of Earth-2's Superman before having her origin repeatedly muddled post-Crisis, confront several different possible "real origins" over the course of her own four-issue Infinite Crisis prequel storyline, eventually to discover that she was exactly who readers always new her to be (the Earth-2 equivalent of Supergirl), was intensely gratifying.  All of this suggested a possibility of measured restoration: even if the DC multiverse failed to return, the memory of the DC multiverse was back.

This was an event that impinged on every corner of the DC Universe, with prequel miniseries focusing on the DC outer space characters (The Rann-Thanagar War), Alexander Luthor's efforts to get all of the villains under his control (Villains United), the world of magic (Day of Judgment), and a conflict among Trinity (Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman) that breaks their trust in each other and undermines public confidence in the Justice League), Yet despite all that, the overall plot is rather simple, since the prequel series were not all that significant in the grand scheme of things.  Alexander Luthor, Superboy-Prime, and the Earth 2 Superman and Lois had spent the years since Crisis watching Post-Crisis Earth from their perch in a timeless, boring limbo.  Lois was aging and dying; Superboy-Prime was aimless and frustrated, and Alexander Luthor was scheming.  Alexander exploited his comrades' horror at the cynicism and darkness of the new continuity (the rape and murder in Identity Crisis, the crippling of Barbara Gordon, the constant infighting among the heroes) in order to convince them to help him change reality once again.  He told them he would recreate Earth-2 which would somehow save Lois's life, though his real plan was reminiscent of Zero Hour where Parallax wanted to build the perfect timeline, Alexander would construct the perfect Earth. 

All in all, it made for a compelling story:  Power Girl's reunion with her cousin and Lois after years of not even remembering them;  the Golden Age Superman's grief over Lois's death partway through the series; the brief return of the Golden Age Wonder Woman and her meeting with her current counterpart; the death of Conner Kent (the post-Crisis Superboy)-- like Wolfman and Perez, Johns and his collaborators made sure to ground their cosmic, universe-altering saga in emotional moments and interpersonal connections. But Infinite Crisis will always be remembered for one sublimely ridiculous element: the Superboy punch.

Next: Violence Really Does Solve All Our Problems!

Crisis of Infinite Geoffs

Zero Hour unintentionally highlighted the limitations of the Crisis Event in only the second iteration of genre: when the cosmic continuity and the characters' affect are not aligned, the results are unlikely to satisfy.  Curiously, the DC writer who was best able to resolve these contradictions would also eventually be responsible for the disastrous misfire of Flashpoint: Geoff Johns.

In his first years at DC (staring with his 1999 Golden Age legacy series, Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E), Johns made a name for himself through his ability to mine the company's past for something greater than mere nostalgia and for his ingenious solutions to the storytelling dead-ends perpetrated by previous creative and editorial teams.  It was Johns who used clever, well-thought out retcons rather than reboots to rescue two of the characters most damaged by the Post-Crisis era:  Hal Jordan and Hawkman. 

Instead of sweeping the past under the rug or claiming a crucial plot point never happened, Johns developed stories that insulated the characters from the worst decisions of their recent past by leaning into narrative complexity.  Hal Jordan did not simply go insane with grief; he was possessed by the Fear Entity that powered Sinestro's ring and was responsible for the Green Lanterns' vulnerability to the color yellow.  That entity was called Parallax, which is why Hal chose this word as his villain name.  Not only did this allow for the reset and resurrection of Jordan (who had given his life in an intervening, minor line-wide event called Final Night and even taken on the mantle of the Spectre), but it opened up a whole range of storytelling possibilities for the now-revived Green Lantern franchise (the multiple, different-colored Corps, each with its own supernatural entity as a power source). 

Dear God, please don’t ask me to explain Hawkman

As for Hawkman, Johns decided that every iteration of the Hawkman story was essentially true. Using the framework of the Golden Age Hawkman's backstory as a resurrected Egyptian prince, Johns "revealed" that Hawkman and Hawkwoman (Hawkgirl) had been resurrected numerous times throughout the ages, and even the Thanagarian versions from Silver Age were iterations of the same characters. Johns accomplished all of these feats of franchise redemption with amazing dexterity, deploying all of the fanboy wonkiness of a Mark Gruenwald or Peter Sanderson in the service of elegant storytelling.

At the same time, we should be recognize what this is not: the importation of an arthouse/indy/British invasion sensibility into corporate comics.  Johns' reconstructive approach would prove to be quintessential 21st century DC  storytelling.  In form and ingenuity, Johns weaves the disparate strands of past comics in a manner that recalls the accomplishments of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, both of whom excelled at reviving moribund intellectual property.  In Moore's case, this was largely through pioneering the now familiar trick "Everything You Thought You Knew About this Character is Wrong," which managed to radically transform existing characters at little cost to their established continuity. [1]  But in doing so, Moore would also establish connections between previously-unrelated characters (Swamp Thing, Cain and Abel, the Demon, the Spectre) and thereby start the process of rebuilding the supernatural corner of DC's fictional universe.

Here and elsewhere, Gaiman followed in Moore's footsteps, but with a much greater enthusiasm for worldbuilding.  He followed through on Moore's reinterpretation of Cain and Abel to reinforce the role of  his newly-created Lord of Dreams, Morpheus,  as the shaper of stories.  Surely, as he developed Morpheus's connection with Greek myth, it was a felicitous realization on his part that one of the previous Sandmen (Hank Hall) had married and impregnated Lyta Trevor Hall, who had previously fought supervillans as a member of Infinity, Inc. under the name "Fury."  The result was a 75-issue series that achieved the unheard-of feat of employing the mechanisms of tragedy in a best-selling and critically acclaimed suphero-adjacent comic book.

This is decidedly not what Geoff Johns did with Hawkman, Green Lantern, and the Justice Society of America. Instead, he used the tools of Moore and Gaiman to make better superhero comics, full-stop.[2]  Who better, then, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Crisis on Infinite Earths than Geoff Johns?  Fresh off his successes with these previously moribund properties, Johns became the driving force behind Infinite Crisis.

Notes

[1] Moore's revelation that Swamp Thing was never actually the biochemist Alec Holland, but rather a creature made of vegetable matter infected by the scientist's consciousness who mistakenly believed he was Alec Holland, invalidates a few prior stories in which Swamp Thing reverts back to human form, but these were minor entires in a poorly-selling series that could eventually be explained away through the general handwaving following Crisis on Infinite Earths (should anyone care enough).

[6] Johns' debt to Alan Moore is too vexed question to treat here.   Much of his Green Lantern work is based on turning Moore's throwaway ideas from various eight-page "Tales of the Green Lantern Corps" into multi-part storylines (Sodam Yat, Mogo the Green Lantern Planet, the Darkest Night), while his Doomsday Clock does a great deal of damage to Watchmen and its characters while replicating the book's most distinctive formal innovations.

Next: Crisis of Infinite Memberberries

Zero Hour: Why, Exactly?

The remit for Crisis on Infinite Earths was to fix something that was not broken (the DC multiverse) in the interest of clarity and consistency. Zero Hour's goals are more mixed: on the one hand, it had to clean up the worst messes of DC post-crisis continuity that had gotten to the point of being barely functional (the Legion, Hawkman), but on the other, it tantalized readers with the prospect of reversing every editorial decision to change the status quo in the years since Crisis: could Batgirl regain the use of her legs?  Could Jason Todd still be alive? Could Hal Jordan redeem himself, and the destruction of Coast City be reversed?  The answer to all of these questions (at least as of the end of Zero Hour) was no. [1]

The inclusion of a Batgirl from a parallel timeline is particularly troubling, and not just because of her paper-thin characterization ("Look, I just stop crooks. Most of this so...well, it's beyond me" (Zero Hour 1).  Her self-sacrifice in the final issue is presumably supposed to echo the death of Supergirl  (whom Batgirl even eulogizes at the end of Crisis), but it is undercut by the fact that, in the main universe, Barbara Gordon is alive and well and operating in her new identity as Oracle, an information broker and uber hacker working with and for the superhuman community. She is also paralyzed from the waist down, and the presence of Batgirl in Zero Hour all but equates her disability with death. The Joker's assault on Barbara Gordon in The Killing Joke is a prime example of the violent excesses of 1980s superhero comics, a bloody, gratuitous maiming with overtones of sexual assault. Alan Moore, who wrote the story, apparently had not thought it would become part of DC continuity. But her subsequent career as Oracle transformed a questionable editorial decision into a mature, adult take on an underused character. By comparison to Oracle, Jurgens' Batgirl is the one-dimensional embodiment of naivete. Decades later, DC would, in fact, restore Barbara's mobility and Batgirl identity, but without erasing her years of disability or scaling back her character development.

Batgirl's role in Zero Hour is to be a one-woman, waffling Greek chorus ruminating over the actions of Hal Jordan. Could Hal be right?  But is this how a hero behaves?  The last decision of her life will be to oppose Hal's plans, but always in the least subtle formulations imaginable ("This is wrong!").  When she sacrifices herself to save Damage (and the entire universe) from Hal, she is a casually fridged Little Nell, emoting helplessly: "Only...wanted...to live..."

In accidentally killing Batgirl, Hal proves that he is on the wrong side of the metaphysical debate that stands in for Zero Hour's plot by reminding the reader of the emotional stakes. The clumsy, rushed three-issue sequence of Hal's descent into villainy in his former comic (Green Lantern 48-50) had only one thing going for it:  a focus on Hal's affective state.  His home city annihilated, Hal Jordan is driven by grief and rage to rebel against the Guardians of the Universe, who refused to help him undo Coast City's destruction.  Hal's readiness to casually wipe out the entire Green Lantern Corps and destroy the Guardians' home planet of Oa is, to put it mildly, out of character, but at least the readers cannot doubt that they are watching the actions of a man who, initially selected to wear the Green Lantern ring for his absence of fear, has completely lost control of his emotions.

Now calling himself Parallax, the Hal Jordan of Zero Hour makes the case for rebooting reality with all the passion of a jaded real estate broker shilling for a proposed new subdivision: "Watch all these fledging globules of plasma energy--/--will soon solidify and become planets filled with life" (Zero Hour 0). Indeed, despite the occasional fights and explosions that punctuate the issue, the final chapter of this crossover is basically a series of Power Point presentations, first by Hal, then by Waverider (a superhero charged with maintaining the integrity of the the timeline).  Waverider and his allies succeed in their goal, but only after a massive failure:  Parallax's actions have necessitated a massive reboot of the DC Universe, but not on Hal Jordan's terms.  Waverider explains:  "We defeated Parallax and Extant, restarting time by initiating our own Big Bang--/--letting nature guide it, not someone like Parallax."  "Nature," of course, is a stand-in for "DC Editorial," with Parallax's defeat putting the "Bad Fan" in his proper place. 

Damage, narrating the origin of the universe as if he were in a porn video

Parallax was the result of Hal Jordan's descent into insanity (or at least that is how it was understood before a twenty-first century retcon exonerated Jordan of all responsibility for Parallax's actions).  But it was an insanity based on a particular mental state: melancholy.  Hal could not move on from the destruction of Central City (fair enough; he was given no time to process the event), projecting his inability to properly mourn his losses onto the entire DC cosmos (starting with his mentors, the Guardians of the Universe, whom he casually slaughters).  What began as grief becomes the generalized rejection of forward-looking change as such; Parallax was engaging in nostalgia on a cosmic scale. Some of the changes in the DCU resulting from the new Big Bang did constitute a move forward (sidelining the ancient Justice Society in favor of characters such as Jack Knight, the new Starman; turning Batman into a Gotham "urban legend" rather than a known hero), but most of them were simply attempts to clean up the incomprehensible messes that Hawkman and the Legion of Superheroes had become.  This may look like what was accomplished in Crisis on Infinite Earths, but Wolfman and Perez had created a story with high stakes and drama whose eventual result may have been a streamlined continuity, but could stand on its own as a dramatic event.  Zero Hour brought in its cosmic custodians, interrupted or relaunched existing series with a special zero issue, and then promptly faded into the background.

Note

[1] Inevitably, with the passage of (real) time, the answer to all these questions would eventually become "yes" after all.

Next: Crisis of Infinite Geoffs

Continuity as Obsessive Compulsion

Four decades later, Crisis need no longer be judged according to its original remit, especially since so much of its most significant plot points have been subsequently reversed:  the DC multiverse is back (albeit in a different form), Barry Allen, the second Flash, is alive again, and even if the rebooted Supergirl currently published by DC has no memory of her pre-Crisis incarnation, she is once again Kara Zor-El (after numerous "new" Supergirls with different origins). Crisis has proven to be the inaugural work in a particular genre of comics, a genre that shares its name: "Crisis" comics.  Primarily a DC phenomenon (though Hickman's Secret Wars, Steve Orlando and Davide Tinto's Commanders in Crisis, and Deniz Camp and Eric Zawadzki's Assorted Crisis Events also fit the bill), this genre puts the destruction and recreation of the storyworld front and center. A DC Crisis is a pure event, with the rupture and reconfiguration of reality as the entire raison d'etre.  Yet at the same time, the iterative nature of the subsequent crises (Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Zero Hour: Crisis in Time, Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths) drains them of import.

This does not mean that subsequent Crises lack character drama:  heroes must always die, and new heroes are always born.  But the heroes are no longer the protagonists of the Crisis; the protagonist is continuity itself. The reason to read Zero Hour, or Infinite Crisis, or Convergence, is to see what happens to the DC universe.

As it repeated the noteworthy story beats of Crisis (the apparent death and disappearance of The Flash, the gathering of the heroes by a cosmic force for good), Zero Hour: Crisis in Time set a dismal pattern for subsequent reality-altering DC events:  huge chunks of exposition to clarify cosmic changes the art does not, or cannot convey, and a clunky, metafictional agenda whose primary goal is to clean up after the messes left behind by previous crises and poor editorial decisions.

In the eight years since Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC's continuity problems (and their various solutions) had once again rendered the storyworld needlessly complex, but with diminishing returns.  DC's Legion of Super-Heroes, initially rooted in Silver Age Superman stories, had its history revised twice in response to the Man of Steel's post-Crisis reboot, eventually drifting fatally from its originally premise:  first Earth's moon, then the Earth itself were destroyed, while the adult Legion discovered an entire set of teenage versions of themselves whose origins were as murky as the storytelling.  Meanwhile, Hawkman had become the poster child for bad continuity, with a history so convoluted that the ability to explain it could serve as a shibboleth for the hardcore fan.  And, most recently, Hal Jordan, the original Silver Age Green Lantern, had been driven mad by the destruction of his beloved Coast City, even going as far as destroying the Guardians of the Universe and the entire Green Lantern Corps. Zero Hour was an attempt to fix some of these problems (Hawkman, the Legion) while doubling down on others (Hal Jordan).

Zero Hour is not, however, a complete failure. Or rather, the very elements that seem to argue against its aesthetic success are the foundation of an ideological triumph, however inadvertent. Zero Hour has a message about continuity and fannish desire, and its very plot and form recapitulate that message precisely by being so unsatisfying.  Like Crisis, Zero Hour presents an allegorical clash between the sensibility of the editor and affective attachments of the fan, but with a different outcome. Where Crisis sided emotionally with fans (the tragic deaths of beloved heroes and the mourning over the loss of infinite earths), the resolution of its plot was just a few steps short of achieving the dreams of the story's villain (the Anti-Monitor) through the destruction of the multiverse.  Zero Hour is a multipart indictment of the fan's desire for the familiar and nostalgia for the past by turning it into the villain's motivation. Witness the fate of the surviving original members of the Justice Society of America: Extant (the villain who seems to be behind all the heroes' woes, before the revelation that he was Hal Jordan's pawn) has reversed the various spells and time paradoxes that had kept them young.  Suddenly old and frail, they solemnly walk off stage when the story is only half over. (Zero Hour 2). By the end of the series, the message is clear: some of our beloved toys are past their prime, and it is time to put them away. This is no guarantee that their replacements will be an improvement (on the contrary, their replacements are DC's largely dismal mid-1990s output), but, even as it repeats Crisis beat for beat, it is a rejection of the very backwards-looking, fannish ethos it spends five issues entertaining.

Next: Zero Hour: Why, Exactly?

Crisis: The Play-by-Play

Consider the death of Supergirl: only the demise of the Flash (Barry Allen) rivals it in significance for the plot, emotional resonance, and sheer novelty. Wolfman uses Supergirl's dialogue (or, more often than not, monologue) to simultaneously increase her importance (giving her more characterization in a single issue than she had shown in the past decade) and emphasize the secondary nature of her character (she willingly gives up her own life to ensure that her more powerful, and more marketable cousin survives).  Meanwhile, the new Dr. Light (a Japanese woman who obtained the classic villain's powers and costume earlier in the series), not only describes Supergirl's death, but also relates how it affects her:

"Supergirl doesn't stop.../She keeps hitting him...fighting him.../ ....as if she doesn't care about herself at all."

"Sh-she is a hero...totally selfless and concerned only with others.

While I have wasted away my life with selfishness."

"No more, Supergirl--no more! Whatever happens here, you've shown me the truth!"

Dr. Light functions as the ideal hybrid of reader and hero.  As a reader/observer, she cannot help but be inspired by Supergirl's heroism. Contrary to all the handwringing during the 1950s moral panic over the malign influence of comic books, Dr. Light becomes a better person before our very eyes.  At the same time, both she and her narration are a part of the action.  In the last moments of the battle with the Anti-Monitor, Dr. Light shouts:

"By the stars!  They're locked in combat!

"He is killing her!

"I have to help!"

Supergirl turns around telling her to go (and bring an injured Superman to safety), which the Anti-Monitor calls a "fatal mistake" before landing his killing blow.  Now Dr. Light, the product of DC's line-wide plot machinations, has an origin worthy of Spider-Man:  guilty over her role in Supergirl's death, she resolves to use her great power with great responsibility. [1]

Dr. Light exemplifies Wolfman's clever approach to in-story narration.  A project on the scale of Crisis was always going to require huge, frequent infodumps, which, if done improperly, could bring the action to a standstill. But Wolfman elevates the technique by wedding it to affect:  the characters narrate and emote at the same time. In so doing, they also help avoid another potential pitfall that would become familiar once large-scale crossovers became the norm.  When the cosmos is threatened in a story with a huge cast, the twists and turns of the plot can come at the expense of characterization and emotional resonance.  Crisis is a master class in balancing events and emotion.  As in their work on The New Teen Titans, Wolfman's and Perez's characters never stop feeling.

No wonder, then, that the Psycho-Pirate, a minor, half-forgotten villain, maintains a notable supporting role throughout the series. Roger Hayden, the second owner of the emotion-manipulating medusa mask, was initially recruited by the Monitor before being abducted by the Anti-Monitor in order to control a set of alternate earths.  Yet his persistent presence in the already-overstuffed Crisis is difficult to explain in terms of plot alone; nearly ever intervention he makes could have been dispensed with rather easily.  Instead, his importance is thematic: the heroes' feelings are integral to the series' impact.  At the same time, his abilities are also a cheat, since he induces affective states with virtually no effort. Were he responsible for all the emotions felt by the characters, he could stand in for lazy writing.  But instead, closer examination shows him to be an imperfect fan.  All he wants is to collect a world that he can have to himself, using it as a playground for his emotional fantasies.  By the end of the series, he is not just one of the few (perhaps the only) characters to remember the multiverse before the Crisis, he suffers from a nostalgia that verges on psychosis.  Straightjacketed in Arkham Asylum, he cannot stop talking about the way the DC Universe used to be:

"You see, I like to remember the past because those were better times than now.

"I mean, I'd rather live in the past than now, wouldn't you?

"I mean, nothing's ever certain anymore...nothing's ever predictable like it used to be."

Wolfman stacks the deck by choosing the Psycho-Pirate as a vehicle for what is essentially a negative judgment on everything that happened in the twelve-issue series. Not only is his mind fractured, but Hayden has been confined to a cell giving him virtually no sensory input. He has nothing to watch, nothing to read, and is hardly in a position to asses whether things are better than they "used to be." The Psycho-Pirate is a figure we have seen again and again, and one that will become a regular player in DC Events:  he is the bad fan.

Crisis on Infinite Earths, after all, was as much about habits of reading as it was about multiversal annihilation. The Monitor gave his life trying to preserve his comics collection, while the Anti-Monitor threatened the entire medium with destruction.  Wolfman and Perez's resolution (streamlining all of DC into a single continuity that promised to be consistent) was supposed to give the casual consumer an easier comics reading experience, but it ultimately reinforced a tendency in the opposite direction, threatening to eliminate the casual reader as if they were some alternate earth slated for destruction.  Continuity became king.

Note

[1] Later she learns that Kara was near death already, and that this last killing blow mercifully prevented extended suffering.

Continuity as Obsesive Compulsion

The Cassandras of Infinite Earths

Jor-El  was Cassandra as Silver Age scientist: his repeated warnings that Krypton was doomed fell on deaf ears; of the planet's entire population, the only person he could save was his infant son. Like Krona, Jor-El lives and dies in a story heavy with Biblical parallels.  The difference, of course, is that, where both Jor-El and Krona's detractors accuse them of hubris, it is only Krona who is truly guilty as charged.  Jor-El cares more about his son than he does about himself, rocketing his baby off into space like Moses in his basket on the Nile.

Both Krona and Jor-El are doubled in Crisis: Jor-El by the selfless Alexander Luthor of Earth-3, who sends his infant son to another Earth before his is consumed by anti-matter (thus handing the heroes the eventual key to victory), and Krona by Pariah, a scientist on yet another alternate Earth who tried to replicate Krona's experiment.  In his own words, Pariah was vain and overly ambitious, ignoring all his colleague's warnings about the danger of his actions.  Naturally, his experiment is a disaster, but, unlike Krona's (which did not lead to any direct body count) or Jor-El's (which saved his child), Pariah's destroys his entire world, leaving him (rather than a baby) as the sole survivor.

All four of these characters can be defined in terms of their relationship with both the ongoing narrative and the particular cataclysmic event that sets the narrative in motion. Alexander Luthor, Sr. and Jor-El are fundamentally paternal, fathers both to their sons and to the story.  In each case, they "father" in the traditional sense of the verb:  that is, they engage in a one time action that forms the entirety of their role (as opposed to "mothering," which is understood as an ongoing process).  They embody a deist model of creation, ceasing their involvement with the narrative process immediately after initiating it.

Krona and Pariah are a different story, a twist on Marvel's Uatu archetype: they intervene in events simply by watching them.  The taboo on viewing the origin of the universe (in Krona's case) or the multiverse (in Pariah's) turns observation into an intervention, with devastating consequences: creating and then awakening the Anti-Monitor and Monitor, thereby setting the Crisis on Infinite Earths in motion.  Krona's punishment by his fellow Oans is discorporation (the opposite of his inadvertent act of creation), while Pariah's is condemned (by karma?) to an eternal, fruitless witnessing. Each of them is reenacting the Freudian Primal Scene on a cosmic scale:  no one should see the act (or repetition of the act) that led to their own creation.

Remind me not to invite Pariah to my next party

Also like Uatu, when Krona and Pariah observe the unfolding events, the reader, in turn, observes Krona and Pariah in the act of observation (as they had also been doing with the Monitor's cameos in every DC series in the months leading up to Crisis).  They may not be the best models of observation one could ask for; Krona and Pariah are like the casual reader who, when given a copy of a precious comic book by a fan, fold back the spine, rip the cover, and leave a mess in their wake. Or perhaps like Frederic Wertham's Innocent adolescent, seduced and driven mad by something they would have been better off not not seeing.

Diegetic and semi-diegetic witnessing is nothing new to narrative entertainment. Pariah functions as a Greek chorus, albeit one that is whiny and guilt-ridden.  North American comics are no stranger to personalized narrators, from EC Cryptkeeper to DC's Phantom Stranger to Uatu the Watcher himself.  These narrators exist as both a storytelling device and a style, taking the opportunity afforded by skaz to develop a sense of immediacy. 

But just as the various Earths infinitely multiply (before their eradication by the Anti-Monitor), so too does the faculty of witnessing and narrating in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Crisis moves from event to event, killing characters and destroying worlds while confronting the heroes with personal and ethical dilemmas.  One might imagine that the sheer novelty of the plot would be enough, but Crisis demands each act of destruction be doubly witnessed: in prose, via Wolfman's dialogue, and in the art, via Perez's repeated focus on the eyes of the characters doing the witnessing. The pattern is established in stunning two-page spread following the very first page of issue 1: an earth is gradually erased by the white wall of anti-matter in the top panels, parallelled by a series of panels immediately below them featuring a series of increasingly close shots of Pariah, ending with the image of a tear flowing out of  one wide-open eye. Pariah's monologue, which begins in this row, continues over the next two: "So much longer must I suffer for my sins.../ before I may be spared the witnessing of these horrors?..../I'm disappearing again.../Another earth is to be swallowed by the dark..."

Pariah's incessant verbalization of the tragedies unfolding before him could be dismissed as mere exposition.  Certainly, the mainstream superhero comics of the previous two decades have no shortage of characters explaining what the readers can already see and filling in the details on what they can't.  Crisis is a comic with a cast of thousands, and clumsy exposition was inevitable.  But there is much more at work here.  The characters in Crisis appear to be under an injunction to endlessly report. In the second issue, Earth-1's Batman and the Joker are confronted by a vision of a dying Flash (Barry Allen), who speaks of a reality they cannot yet see ("Please...can't you see the world?/ I-it's dying all around me") while Batman helplessly describes what both he and the readers see: "The Flash.../ ....disintegrating before my eyes!").  Here the Flash is a ghost from the future--we finally see what he is talking about seven issues later.  Traveling through time, he can foreshadow like no other, ensuring in advance that the upcoming event will accrue significance. Batman's words are less explicable: who, after all, is he talking to? The Joker?

As is the case with most clumsy exposition, he is speaking to the reader. And while the reader may not need the details of these particular panels explained, it is the act of verbally registering the event that is crucial. It is not so much that Wolfman does not trust his reader to pare what is happening on the page; he does not necessarily trust his reader to appreciate the importance of what is depicted. Despite the grandeur of George Perez's art, what is depicted must be turned into language in recognition of the very immensity Perez handles so well.

Next: Crisis: The Play-by-Play

What Crisis Did Well

By virtually every metric except the one dictated by its original remit (simplifying DC continuity), Crisis on Infinite Earths was a triumph.  True,  parts of it aged poorly; twenty-first century readers tend to have less tolerance for expository dialogue, and for the continual reintroduction of characters to each other and to the reader.  But George Perez's art is as stunning now as it was then, while the scope and ambition of Wolfman's script were unprecedented.  The sales figures speak for themselves, as does DC's repeated return to both the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths and the paradigm it helped establish.  For DC fans, Crisis was a must read, not necessarily because they were invested in making the DC universe "simpler," but because they desperately wanted to know what was going to happen to the characters they knew (who, for once, were actually at risk of permanent, or at least long-term death}, and needed to know what the DCU was going to look like in the event's wake.

Crisis on Infinite Earths was a shocking rupture in the conventional flow of DC storytelling, and not just because its creators had so successfully brought a Marvel feel to the company's biggest competitor (a process begun with their work on The New Teen Titans).  Its very status as an event was important because of how un-eventful DC had been.  It was only in the four years leading up to Crisis that the stories had started to matter even after they were finished, thanks to the flood of Marvel refugees DC had been hiring, as well as the very beginnings of the "British Invasion" (in the figure of Alan Moore). 

In creating the DC Event, Crisis managed to be both restorative and archeological at the same time that it destroyed the DC Multiverse as readers knew it.  Wolfman and Perez brought a sense of lasting, serious consequence to a cosmos that lacked it while identifying the pre-existing elements of DC's cosmology that could be drafted into the service of meaning-making.  The multiverse itself appeared to be the epitome of randomness: an infinite number of worlds existed with an infinite number of differences, even if the ones the comics visited tended to be the ones with the greatest dramatic potential (such as Earth X, where the Axis won World War II).  But the only reason for the multiverse's existence was its publishing rationale: DC could continue to exploit IP that might otherwise contradict itself. As far as the heroes themselves were concerned, the alternate earths may as well have been the hidden kingdoms, distant planets, and secret societies they encountered as a matter of course. Only in the last years of the DC multiverse did the characters contemplate the significance of their own doppelgangers' existence (such as the Earth-1 Batman's emotional confusion upon learning that his Earth-2 counterpart had died). 

Wolfman and Perez made the multiverse intrinsically important by linking it to an obscure Silver Age team-up between the Green Lanterns of Earth-1 and Earth-2 ("Secret Origin of the Guardians!" by John Broome, Gil Kane and Side Greene, Green Lantern vol 2, 40). This is where we first learn that, ten billion years ago, one of the ancestors of the Guardians of the Universe broke one of his society's fundamental laws, using technology to look back at the formation of the universe. When he sees a giant hand cradling a cluster of stars, he is struck by lightning.  Krona survives, but evil is loosed into the world.

Yes, it’s blue, but it’s not Dr. Manhattan’s hand (thankfully)

In revisiting the story, Wolfman and Perez play down the simplistic morality tale in favor of a myth of gnostic rupture:  Krona's crime broke the universe.  The evil it unleashed was connected to the creation of the anti-matter universe of Qward (also a pre-existing, Silver Age concept).  At the same time, Krona's actions gave rise to the positive-matter multiverse currently endangered by the Anti-Monitor, who is himself (like his counterpart, the Monitor) the direct result of Krona's interference.

Given the scope, it's an economical origin story, binding together ready-made bits of DC lore in a manner that was intrinsically rewarding to hardcore readers, whose deep knowledge of the DCU was yielding a real narrative payoff. But this was only the most visible of Wolfman and Perez's clever, if perhaps not always deliberate, constructions made out of DC universe ready-mades.  Even before Crisis, Krona's tale of cosmological hubris had distinct Biblical overtones; his experiment is the sci-fi equivalent of both eating of the Tree of Knowledge and building the Tower of Babel.  But Crisis adds to its significance by repeating it, this time with the scientist who would eventually be known as Pariah.  He, too, is warned by his people not to try to discover the origins of the universe, and he, too, ignores their pleas.  But rather than creating a multiverse, his actions start the process of destroying it:  his experiment releases the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor from a hibernation that had lasted billions of years.

Reading what is essentially the same scenario twice reveals precisely how unoriginal this premise is, at the same time reminding us that it is (appropriately enough for a search for cosmological origins) generative.  In twice telling us the story of disastrous attempts to discover the beginnings of the DC multiverse, it uses the story that would (retroactively) serve as the origin of DC comics as we know it. Indeed, it is a story that is replicated in a third variation at the very beginning of the series, when the Lex Luthor of Earth-3 sends his son to another Earth to avoid the Anti-Monitor's destruction of their home universe.  It is the story of Superman’s father, Jor-El.

Next: The Cassandras of Infinite Earths

Crisis Management

In comics, the Event raises expectations and doubt at the same time:  will this event really follow through on its implicit promise to shatter the status quo?  In other words, will it be worthy of the designation "Event" with a capital "E"?  Marvel's Civil War II, for example, labored under the burden of its derivative status from the moment it was announced, and nearly all its consequences proved inconsequential:  Miles Morales did not end up killing Captain America, as prophesied; War Machine's death and She-Hulk's incapacitation did not last long; and the entire predictive justice apparatus that was at the heart of the conflict disappeared not long after the storyline's Inhuman Maguffin, the clairvoyant Ulysses, conveniently left the mortal plane. Others, like DC's Convergence, are so incoherent that they end with the promise of enormous consequences (undoing Crisis on Infinite Earths) that are immediately ignored upon the series' conclusion.

The relationship between the Event and the comics that spawn them is paradoxical-- both antagonistic and parasitic. In his 1972 essay 'The Myth of Superman," Umberto Eco famously described the world of the superhero comic as an "oneiric climate" set in a "continuous present," allowing time to pass in a strange, untrackable way: events would happen, information would accrue, but the narrative of Superman would never "consume itself" by heading towards its inevitable ending. Eco's assessment was more or less accurate for the comics of his time, especially those published by DC.  But less than fifteen years later,  the Event comic, more specifically, the DC "Crisis," would reestablish the conditions of a continuous present first by disrupting its flow. 

The publishing rationale behind Crisis on Infinite Earths is a well-known, often-recounted story. In the nearly three decades since the reinvention of The Flash launched the Silver Age of Comics, DC had established and developed a mechanism for explaining the simultaneous existence of multiple versions of the same character, as well as, eventually, contextualizing a publishing line that included stories and characters that could not possibly take place in the same world as Hal Jordan or the Justice League of America.  The very first appearance of Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, acknowledged the existence of his Golden Age predecessor as a comic book character. Barry had read the adventures of Jay Garrick as a child.  Just five years after Barry's introduction to readers in Showcase 4, "Flash of Two Worlds" (Flash 123, by Gardner Fox, Carmine Infantino, and Joe Giella, September 1961) revealed that Jay was just as "real" as Barry.  Jay (and, by extension, all the other Golden Age National/DC heroes) lived on Earth-Two,  located in a parallel universe that vibrated at a difference frequency from Barry's (Earth-One). Just two years later the Earth One Justice League would meet the Earth Two Justice Society in "Crisis on Earth One"(Justice League of America 21, by Fox, Mike Seowsky, and Bernie Sachs, August 1963).

Calm down, it’s only the end of the world(s)

Soon the two teams would meet on a semi-regular basis, and their Earths were joined by a growing collection of variations on the familiar DC status quo: Earth-Three (where the evil counterparts to the JLA formed the Crime Syndicate of America), Earth C (populated by talking animals, such as Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew), and, in a winking metafictional touch, Earth Prime, "our" world where the DC team produced all the comics about the rest of the multiverse. This allowed for the inclusion of Carey Bates and other DC staffers in the comics themselves, a trick that Marvel had been doing from the beginning  as a throwaway gag, without the need to establish a different Marvel earth. The inclusion of Earth Prime was also a nod in the direction of the utility of the DC multiverse for DC as a corporation. When DC acquired the characters formerly owned by Fawcett, Quality, and Charlton, they were initially settled on Earths S, X, and Four, respectively.

The architects of Crisis on Infinite Earths were looking for the opportunity to modernize the staid, underwhelming DC Universe,  jettisoning the ballast that had accumulated over the previous decades and opening up the possibility for more contemporary storytelling approaches. But they also repeatedly justified their project as one of simplification:  DC's multiple Earths had become too confusing for new readers to follow.  This was an assertion that always seemed questionable: after all, the average DC comic that featured more than one Earth was at great pains to explain the premise to readers old and new.  Certainly, with the multiverse now on everyone's lips thanks to its deployment in the MCU, the success of Everything Everywhere All at Once, and the persistent fandom of Rick & Morty, it is difficult to see why DC's cosmos might be considered confusing. But even without an anachronistic backward glance, there were reasons to wonder just how confusing the DC multiverse actually was.

At the same time that DC was "simplifying" its storyworld, Marvel was busy adding increasing layers of complexity to its own.  The X-Men's Days of Future Passedstoryline began a years-long infatuation with multiple timelines and conflicting futures, eventually featuring characters who would turn out to be the unborn (and even impossible) adult offspring of long-established Marvel stalwarts.  Even before the X-Men made the alternate future a commonplace, Marvel in the 1970s had used alternate timelines to powerful effect (Jim Starlin's Warlock, for example).  And Marvel was a sales juggernaut.   Was confusion really such a problem?

If it was, then Crisis was a poor solution.  Rather than rebooting all of DC continuity (as Wolfman would have preferred), the follow-through to Crisis was inconsistent:  Wonder Woman was completely rebooted almost immediately; Superman limped along for half a year before doing the same.  Jason Todd, the second Robin, was revamped over a year after Crisis ended, and the removal of Superboy from DC continuity was close to fatal for the Legion of Super-Heroes [2].  But complaining about these continuity problems is to fall into the same interpretive habits used to justify Crisis in the first place:  why should continuity be the metric for judging the success or pleasure of a given corporate superhero comic?

Next: What Crisis Did Well

Events and Their Horizons

"Event" is a word that holds a promise:  what happens in these pages will be significant.  In the case of a crisis, that significance is self-referential, turning onto the very premise of the company's storyworld.    But no matter the scale, an event promises change. Secret Wars delivered on that promise immediately, but superficially:  For a while, Spider-Man had a new costume (one which would literally take on a life of its own, as half of the antihero Venom), She-Hulk replaced the Thing on the Fantastic Four, Colossus broke up with Kitty Pryde, and Marvel got its second in what would prove to be a long line of Spider-Women. Crisis on Infinite Earths resulted not just in change, but in change on a metextual level:  continuity-threatening disasters became one of the company's most recognizable genres.

Calling a story an "event" is first and foremost a question of marketing, one that, with enough repetition, becomes a question of genre: what constitutes a comics "event"?  Readers' and critics' reactions take into account more than just the quality of the storytelling; fans want to know if an event truly matters, and for how long.  As a thought experiment in an imaginary (and therefore controllable) universe, superhero comics events have philosophical ramifications, not just about the apparently unstable nature of (fictional) reality, but also about the very nature of an event as a concept.   In addition to the metaphysical questions, these events also raise concerns about ethics, returning us to the the themes raised in this book's introduction: do I dare disturb the universe? Who gets to intervene, and when?

Addressing these questions turns out to be a job for...French philosopher Alain Badiou.  This is not to suggest that Badiou, a towering figure in the study of ontology, has ever turned his attention to the ins and outs of DC's Sinestro Corps War, or investigated the status of being in Marvel's Avengers vs. X-Men. Instead, Badiou has had to content himself with the much less flashy pleasures of trying to make peace between the implacable enemies known as continental philosophy and analytic philosophy.  One of his most important works, Being and Event, came out in 1988, coincidentally just a few years into the comics industry's love affair with the crossover event.  By no means do I wish to suggest that this coincidence is, in itself, significant, nor do I want to bring in Badiou just because he wrote a book with "event" in its title. [1] Badiou is useful here because his approach to the event is based on multiplicity, rupture, intervention, and ethics.

Come on, Alain, admit you’re a fanboy at heart

In writing about the Event, Badiou targets the usually unquestioned dominance of a sociopolitical system (and its often invisible ideology) at a point when the illusion of its permanence or inevitability is dispelled.   Badiou's model of the event is the revolution, when that which has been denied or excluded by the dominant paradigm erupts onto the scene.  But this is not Marx's revolution; rather than being the inevitable product of the logic of history, an Event is radically contingent. It could just as easily happen at the moment it occurs as at many other possible moments. Events disrupt the old order and begin the construction of the new. 

His four examples of such historical Events (the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the Maoist Revolution, and May 1968) are undeniable momentous (although 1968 looks likely to recede in historical importance along with the generation that drove it).  Certainly, nothing in corporate comics could be commensurate with these undeniable sociopolitical upheavals. And yet...

Badiou's Events are momentous and portentious at the same time, promising an irrevocable break with the reigning order. At the time of an Event, it may seem to be part of the current situation, rather than the thing that will bring that situation to an end.  Part of the "eventness" of the Event come with the moment of recognition, or decision: naming the Event as an Event, declaring its import through nomenclature. The Event is the public recognition of the finitude of the current order, with an entirely new model emerging from the rupture. Reality as we know it is reorganized.

Badiou, of course, is talking about the social order, ideology, and socioeconomic systems, even if he he is using language more suggestive of metaphysics.  The laws of nature (however we define them) remain untouched, while the laws of the social are rewritten.  The Event in comics resonates with Badiou on the level of rhetoric and of consequence. Badiou writes as if he is talking about the cosmos, but is actually describing the sociopolitical.  The ComIcs Event literalizes Badiou's rhetoric:  the world itself (that is, the comics storyworld) is put in jeopardy, transformed, and even superseded by the new order that the Event creates. The Event in comics replaces the social with the cosmological, effecting a rupture that is both more spectacular and more total than anything that could take place in a brief time outside of fiction. Where Badiou's Event reveals "hidden multiplicities" and brings forth that which has been "excluded," the comics Event often, though not always, confronts the inconsistencies and flaws that the storyworld has tried, and ultimately failed, to conceal.  Superhero comics, with their flexible continuity and lack of real-world consequence, are close to the Platonic ideal of the Event:  their creators (and marketers) can boldly claim that "nothing will ever be the same again."  This claim is correct in the affirmation of radical change, but is also suspect within the skeptical framework that sees revolution and reaction as cyclical:  yesterday's rejected status quo will come back after the next Event or two.

Note

[1] Actually, he wrote three, including Logics of Worlds (2006) and The Immanence of Truth (2018),  which are subtitled Being and Event 2 and 3, respectively.  But only the first is relevant to the present study.

Next: Crisis Management

Crossing Over

Chapter 4:

Crisis and Event, or, Punching Reality in the Face

Crossing Over

Something strange happened to the superhero comic in its middle age.  The depredations of midlife were not as obvious on the comics as they were on the readers of roughly the same vintage;  comics are blessedly immune to paunches, hair loss, and all varieties of sagging.  For stereotypical straight men, midlife crisis means having an affair or buying a sports car.  For DC comics, it meant a Crisis of Infinite Earths, while Marvel opted to skip right to second childhood, hooking up with a toy company and playing with all its action figures in Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars (more commonly referred to as just "Secret Wars"). 

The Eighties inaugurated what looks to be a never-ending cycle of comics crossovers that rope some or all of a company's titles into servicing a plot that usually manages to disappoint before the story is over. Starting with Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC would lean into continuity-shuffling crossovers, sometimes including reboots, while Marvel, with one notable exception, generally avoids turning its own continuity into the subject of drama. Instead, and with no particular connection to the original Secret Wars event, Marvel would become preoccupied with its own potential, in the form of alternate futures that left the present mostly intact.

"Crossover" has turned out to be too bland a term for most of the stories we are talking about; after all, comics had been crossing over with each other for years, with a story starting in one character's title and concluding in another. Such crossovers (which still happen) are fairly self-contained. They are a slightly more convoluted variation on business as usual.  The line-wide crossover (involving either an entire company, such as DC, or a recognizable set of related books, such as all of Marvel's mutant titles or all of DC's Bat titles) has come to be called an event.

Yes, I’ve read all of these. Sigh.

For individual comics titles, events can be unwelcome interruptions in the ongoing plots that might have little to do with the crossover.  They are in the service of the larger story.   But events do more than simply develop a grand plot involving most of a company's characters; they  define the company's comics for months or even years to come, articulating the comics' overall mission (sometimes well, sometimes poorly).  They also establish or reconfigure the relationship between the comics, their creators, and their readers. These events model the interpretive behavior of "good" and "bad" readers, often through characters who function not as figures of reader identification, but as representations of the act of reading itself.  Crossover events are a more mainstream iteration of what is otherwise an avant-garde approach to comics--comics as metafiction that does not demand a great deal of philosophical engagement on the reader's part.  The modern comics event, particularly as exemplified by DC's multiple "Crisis" crossovers, is predicated on a great deal of reflexivity and self-referentiality masked as superhero plots.  The promise is that a given comics universe will be changed irrevocably, but it is a change that is also to be experience by the reader, of whom the event demands a realignment of perspective.

Crossover events, and, in particular, DC's Crises, are typically overstuffed with protagonists and plot; there has yet to be a line-wide event that could in any way be called "minimalist."  The scale is the point, and the aesthetics are usually monumental, if not bombastic. But that is the thing about excess:  there can never be too much of it.  Or rather, there can appear to be too much of it from the point of view of aesthetics or reader satisfaction, but not because of any inherent value in restraint.  The end of this chapter introduces what might be called the decadent phase of the DC Crisis, when the self-reflexive concerns of continuity combined with the demands for greater spectacle and scope lead to comic that revel in their capaciousness, high-concept, and increasingly baroque world-building.

Next: Events and Their Horizons

The Underground (Super)Man

Superheroes are easy to critique, especially the superheroes of yore. The common Marxist complaint that these characters are the blinkered defenders of an unfair, capitalist status quo (with protecting property and money as the prime objectives) is valid, even as it has been incorporated into the more self-aware superhero revamps from the 1980s and later.  But it does not tell the whole story. In this chapter, we have seen what haunts the modern superhero.  More often than not, the superhero breaks or bends the law in the name of achieving justice. Not only does this undermine institutions (or presume that the institutions have already been undermined), but it can put an ethical, psychological, and political strain on the individual superhero and the entire superhero concept. The Bendis-era Daredevil forces us to confront the essential conundrum of most superheroes:  in maintaining their secret identities, they are not only protecting their loved ones and avoiding legal and extralegal persecution.  They are constant, habitual liars.

Men (and it's usually men) who conceal their secrets behind masks are a puzzling choice for a supposedly uncomplicated American hero.  Even setting aside the glaring negative example of the Ku Klux Klan, secret identities and double lives are an odd fit with America's Protestant (if not Puritan) morality, which may be one of the reasons they are irresistible for a kind of storytelling that turns ethical breaches and moral compromise into compelling plots.  Mystery and detective readers love stories of double lives; soap opera and melodrama thrive on them.  Prestige dramas and cable television about anti-heroes turned double lives and secret identities into their master trope:  Breaking Bad, Nurse Jackie, Dexter,The Americans, and Mad Men, just to name the most obvious examples. These stories are appealing because of how fundamentally their protagonists violate one of the primary demands that a (secularized) Protestant culture places on individuals:  that they live a life of integrity.  By "integrity" I mean not simply virtue, but consistency--you are the same man at work and at home, in public and in private.   Failures of integrity, particularly when they can be parsed as hypocrisy, are the engine of public scandal.

Yeah, like that’s gonna last

Until recently, however, superheroes had gotten a free pass.  They had all the narrative complications of a double life without suffering the opprobrium of moral scolds.  At its worst, secret identities were a logistical difficulty rather than an ethical dilemma (let alone failing). Again, this makes sense for a genre developed primarily for children and adolescents:  secret identities embody and understandable kind of wish fulfillment, and the escapist stories that depend on them were not interested in the deceptive hero's comeuppance.

When the comics push harder at the secret identity concept, they end up highlighting the contradictions inherent in the superhero concept. Bendis' "Deny! Deny! Deny!" is a particularly shocking response to Daredevil's unmasking, but it also reveals what is virtually the only way the genre ultimately addresses the issue. [10]. Again and again, the revelation is magically undone, and the superhero goes back into hiding (Daredevil, Spider-Man, Captain America (the first time), Superman (twice)).  The stories we've examined in this chapter show a fascinating reflex on the part of the outed hero (or antihero):  often, they retreat underground (Batman, the Foolkiller).  They cannot function in public as integral, authentic selves, so their personal lives (their secret, true identities) must be sacrificed.

Note

[1] There are exceptions of course.  Though Iron Man's identity had been revealed more than once, the last time  ("Embeddied, Part One," Civil War Front Line 1, by Paul Jenkins, Ramon Bachs, and John Lucas, August 2006) has remained in force ever since, probably because the public acknowledgment fits Tony Stark's arrogant persona, and also to remain consistent with the films. She-Hulk's secret identity barely survives the first volume of her series; one of the things that makes her refreshing is that being a hulk allows her to express herself more fully that she can as a human.  Her cousin, Bruce Banner, also cannot maintain his secret for all that long, which adds to the drama of his inability to settle in any one place and avoid persecution. Captain America has functioned without a secret identity for years, which works for the opposite reason: it is consistent with his persona as a straightforward, honest broker and fundamentally earnest person.

Next: Chapter 4: Crisis and Event, or, Punching Reality in the Face

Foolkiller: The Dark Nutcase Returns

By 1990, interrogating vigilantism is no longer new to superhero comics, a fact of which Gerber must have been perfectly aware.  He had, in fact, been a bit ahead of the curve with his first two incarnations of the Foolkiller.  Returning to the character after the developments of 1980s comics could well have been redundant.  But Gerber was not haunted by the anxiety of influence.  He embraced this redundancy by doing what he had always done: bringing his comics into dialogue with their predecessors.

Though the artistic style, series format, and tone are completely different, Foolkiller proves to be an ironic recapitulation of Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.  The commonalities are glaring once you start to look for them.  The vigilante (or a version of the vigilante) reappears after an extended absence.  The urban environment has bred an amoral, criminal youth underclass that the vigilante must address.  The vigilante's actions are continually commented upon by television media personalities, with each side of the debate given weight by the narrative itself. Psychaitric interventions into the problem of criminality prove ineffectual and ridiculous. The Foolkiller, like the Joker, appears on a popular television program, though the resulting body count is lower.  The comics are driven by a first-person narrative that, while central to the book, is occasionally absent in favor of featuring other characters.  The vigilante transcends partisan politics, but ultimately becomes public enemy number one, and fakes his own death. 

The only convincing argument against seeing Foolkiller as a response to The Dark Knight Returns is that this would be an unusually subtle response on Gerber's part.  From his early Howard the Duck days in the 1970s through his brief return to the character in a 2001 miniseries, Gerber's critique of other comics was usually packaged as part of a very broad parody.  In the 1970s, the targets included Killraven and Shang-Chi; thirty years later, it was Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan and the grotesquely oversexualized heroines published by Image Comics. Fookiller, though broad an blunt in its caricature of late twentieth-century excess, never actually becomes a superhero parody.  This is fortunate, and there are a few plausible explanations.  At this point, the Foolkiller is a legacy character, even if that legacy is primarily the creation of Gerber and his collaborators; he was not designed to parody a specific character, but rather to critique a set of attitudes.  Certainly, by the time Gerber revived him for the 1990 series, the Foolkiller was a concept that could stand alone, with no particular antecedent as the target.  Instead, the Foolkiller is a walking, murdering critique of an entire set of societal trends that Gerber saw as toxic.

It is entirely possible that Gerber was not conscious of his repetition of so many of Miller's story beats, but was simply stepping into a space that Miller had held open. Certainly, the two men (who respected each other enough to have pitched their own revamp over Superman before John Byrne got the job) were using similar motifs to make different arguments. As writer and penciler, Miller had the advantage of near-complete control of the material, while Gerber always had to rely on an artistic collaborator. Each of them insisted on considering the vigilante character within the context of the broader media ecosystem that conditions our understanding of law, criminality, and deviance.  Ultimately, even as it points in the direction of fascism, Miller's vision is more optimistic.  The lone vigilante can inspire entire groups of people to take justice in their own hands when institutions fail them. 

Kids, don’t try this at home

For adherents to liberal democracy, it is a frightening vision, but to those who can see themselves in both Batman and his followers, it can look like a better alternative.  Gerber also allows for the Foolkiller to act as a kind of social contagion (after all, Kurt is the third man to use the name), one facilitated by old media (television) and new (the modems that Greg and Kurt learn to use in the early issues).  But even as his dismissal of partisan politics and potentially sincere ideological differences could potentially be instrumentalized by cynical authoritarians, Gerber never approaches fascism, if only because of an innate distrust of groups of any kind.  In his commitment to an individualistic, atomized understanding of the self and society, Gerber refrains from gesturing in any practical political direction. Even as he demonstrates the violence and contradiction inherent to the superhero comic, Gerber's Foolkiller remains committed to the the individualism that spawned the superhero.  Were he ever asked, this Foolkiller would not for a moment considering joining Justice League or the Avengers.  HIs only path is to go it alone.

Despite the structural connections to Miller's now classic Batman story, the Foolkiller's vigilantism is truly one of a kind.  Most vigilantes we have seen so far have, when confronted with the choice between law and justice, choose justice as an abstract ideal that cannot be brought about by the law alone.  Some of them, like Daredevil, grapple with the implications of their choices; others like Batman, seem completely untroubled by doubt.  The three iterations of the Foolkiller move from religion (a received framework for justice seen as its own law), aesthetics (an artistic judgment that becomes a proxy for morality) to....what, exactly?  Kurt Gerhard is certainly flouting the law, but justice does not appear to be his goal.  Nor is he motivated by Greg Salinger's "poetic" sensibility. Though Kurt kills people he thinks are a plague on society, there is no evidence that he is trying to build a better world.  His killings are the manifestation of his fundamental objection to the behavior of the people around him.  Kurt is not trying to actually accomplish anything other than homicide.  If Gerber is continuing the critique of vigilantism that was apparent in the first Foolkiller and implied in the second, it is only to show the vigilante as entirely directionless.  Ultimately, the Fookiller's actions become a kind of reflex.  The resulting comic does not constitute a coherent argument against the Foolkiller, even as it does not make a persuasive case for him.  Gerber's satirical target is the same as the Foolkiller's actual target: the people whose actions and behavior make the world a worse and more ridiculous place.  No amount of vigilantism can solve these problems; the vigilante merely uses the conventions of the superhero genre to draw our attention to them before slipping away to continue his ideologically motivated, but practically fruitless, actions in another story.

Next: The Underground (Super)Man

The Cultural Logic of Misanthropy

Fookiller is a conundrum of a comic book. It is a perfect fit for its time, not only because of the very contemporary objects of its satire, but because its grim outlook and excess violence make it the missing link between Miller's exploration of vigilante violence in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and the Grand Gruignol of 1990s Image comics.  In 1992, Image would give the world Shadowhawk, who, after mobsters infect him with HIV-positive blood, becomes a vigilante whose signature move is breaking criminals' spines.

But Foolkiller is also very much an outlier. It may well be the most pessimistic comic Marvel ever published.  This is not a Campbell-inflected hero's journey; no one is enlightened, and the world is not a better place in the last issue than it was in the first.  Instead, Foolkiller is the story of Kurt Gerhard's increasing alienation and cynicism, framed in a critique that offers no indication of any possibility for positive change.  Kurt's extrapolation from is own suffering deadens his sympathy for others rather than developing empathy; wherever he goes, he sees new variations on the "Fool."  A self-described Reagan-voter who was a happy cog in the system until it failed him, he makes political decisions that he sees as apolitical.  The fault with society is that people no longer make any real effort, chasing simple pleasures and blindly following demagogs.  Gerber tries to make Kurt look like an equal-opportunity slaughterer of fools, someone who is above everyday politics. 

The comic takes a remarkable, almost certainly unplanned turn in issue 8, which is devoted in its entirety to the run-up to Operation Desert Storm. To my knowledge, this was the only Marvel comic to respond to these events in close to real time, and it was an opportunity for very pointed political commentary. Instead, Gerber doubled-down on a politics that pretends to rise above partisanship, calling down a plague on both houses. The morning after war breaks out, "the peaceniks and the warniks have taken to the streets."  Both sides feature idiots who spout "the wisdom of the bumper sticker" ("You don't deserve to live in this country!" ("Why? 'Cause I don't think the troops should die for oil company profits?!") A disguised Foolkiller confronts two protesters mid-scuffle:

Foolkiller Pardon me.  Do you always demonstrate for peace by grabibing other people's property and kicking them in the face?

Hippie: Get off my case. Geek. 

There's nothing wrong with using force to resist repression.  That's what King George is doing--right?

Foolkiler: I see. 

He can't achieve peace through violence, but you can. 

You're a fool.

I kill fools.

He disintegrates the hippie, leaving the warmonger speechless:

Foolkiller: Why so upset over a few ashes? Didn't you want to nuke Saddam?

Which raises another question: Why haven't you enlisted? 

Or does your support for the troops only extend to fighting peace marchers, not Iraqis? 

Whereupon the Foolkiller fires again.  By this point in the narrative, homicide no longer bothers him.  He walks away, thinking to himself that "liberals suffer from vicarious compassion, " while conservatives "are afflicted with vicarious courage."

In case the reader misses the message, Kurt also slaughters a man selling "Support Our Troops" flags at $5 a pop, and an anti-war protester  encouraging his audience to destroy war toys because "the toy companies are to blame for the war in the Gulf!" Kurt has particularly harsh words in this case: "In China, the protesters have to stand in front of realtanks....Real people are dying, and you're protesting toys. You're a toy protester."

Two important points emerge from these particular killings:  first, that Kurt (and, by extension, Gerber) is completely uninterested in engaging in the substance of these political disputes.  He is so outraged by the conduct of the "fools" he targets that the actual ideas that ostensibly motivate them are irrelevant.  This indirectly links him to his predecessor, Greg Salinger, whose targets lacked "poetry."  The Foolkiller's objections are based on distaste and disgust. He, too, is guided by his aesthetic judgments in order to make conclusions about morality and worth. This, combined with his refusal to address politics, underscores the essential misanthropy of the Foolkiller concept.  There are simply too many people who are a worthless waste of space.

The other point is also about the confluence of aeshetics and morality.  The "toy protester" embodies a longtime Gerber bete noire:  critics and "concerned parents" with a naive, simplistic understanding of texts and audiences that falls in line with the mid-twentieth-century "Media Effects" school.  This approach assumed that audiences are helpless before media inputs, incorporating messages exactly as they are intended and imitating the actions they see on television or read in comics.  Gerber, as always, is arguing for personal responsibility, as well as for a different understanding of media.  He opposed all forms of censorship, particularly the insistence on non-naturalistic representations of violence.  His earlier mouthpiece, Howard the Duck, argued that violence should be depicted in as much bloody and unpleasant detail as possible in order to avoid romanticizing it.  This is where Birch's matches Gerber's violent aesthetic:  Kurt's victims have their flesh stripped from their bones; at one point, the purity gun accidentally chops a child in half.  Kurt rolls around in garbage to inure himself against his own disgust, but the Foolkiller comic insists on exposing the reader to grotesque depictions of violence in order to wake the reader up.

Next: Foolkiller: The Dark Nutcase Returns

The Foolkiller vs the Culture

In 1990, Gerber revives the character in a surprising ten-issue miniseries. Why surprising? First, the mere fact that Marvel was committing to this project with a writer whose history with the company was tumultuous (he sued Marvel throughout the 1980s over ownership of Howard the Duck.  Second, it is a safe bet that fans were not bombarding Marvel with letters asking for a Foolkiller series.  There is little evidence to suggest that the character had a significant fan following, and, in any case, his infrequent and uninspired appearances since Gerber's departure were unlikely to have helped lay the groundwork for a ten-issue commitment. 

But the biggest surprises were contained within the comic itself. Certainly, Gerber's familiar irony, facility with narration, and complex characterization were evident and expected.  The series' violence and high body count also had ample precedent by this point, not only thanks to the various Punisher series, but also because of the "grim and gritty" trend that had begun to dominate the mainstream since Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. [1]  Marvel's willingness to let Gerber sustain such a dark critique not only of contemporary culture, but contemporary vigilante comics was rather startling.  Gerber's new Foolkiller combined Bernie Goetz, the antiheroes of the Great Recession, and the Punisher in a compelling pathology that was unlike anything the company had ever published.

This does not mean that the series is fondly remembered as a classic.  Despite being self-contained, the Foolkiller series had little hope of becoming the next Watchmen.  Gerber bears some of the responsibility: the series lacked subtlety and left itself open to accusations of racial stereotyping.  The art may also have been a barrier. J.J. Birch's angular, grim pencils certainly fit the book's themes, and his subsequent work on Mileston's Xombi shows an impressive imaginative range. But Birch's largely realist art, rather than reinforcing Gerber's prose, pushed the grimness to unintentional self-parody:  the scenes of an underwear-clad Kurt Gerhard exercising while surrounding himself with garbage are difficult to take seriously, at least as visuals, while the Foolkiller's redesigned costume (all leather, with an open zipper baring his chest and a gimp mask covering his face, is laughable enough, but when that cover of issue seven is a close up of the Foolkiller shedding tears through the leather masks eyeholes illustrating the phrase "Tears of Torment!" we are veering into camp territory.  One can appreciate the boldness with which Birch embodies Gerber's longstanding attitude towards the depiction of violence (it must be explicit, graphic, and disgusting enough not to seem admirable), but this is not art that is likely to draw the reader in.  In hindsight, Gerber's grim satire might have been better matched with art that was more deliberately cartoony (in the mode of Mike Allred).

Nonetheless, the Foolkiller series has much to recommend it. Even more than Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, it reflects a very specific historical moment. While this moment certainly involves violent crime and urban blight, the driving force is economic: serialized in 1990 and 1991, Fookiller unfolds in the aftermath of the 1987 stock market crash (and its smaller 1989 echo).  Appropriately enough for a vigilante story, Kurt Gerhardt's transformation from low-level savings-and-loan officer to multiple murderer is tied to the collapse of most of the institutions that propped up his life.  First, his father is killed by muggers disappointed that their haul consists of the six dollars he carried in his wallet; then he is fired from his job.  Kurt explodes when his wife gently suggests that he might have been in some way at fault, a scene that manages to convey both Kurt's own instability and the pernicious neoliberal ethos that ignores structural flaws in favor of personal responsibility.  Reduced to working the counter at Burger Clown, his attempt to stop the fast food restaurant's robbery only earns him a concussion.

But Kurt's transformation would not have been possible without a parallel set of institutional failures. The first issue ("Mad...as in Angry" by Gerber, Birch, and Tony Dezuniga, October 1999) begins not with Kurt but with Greg Salinger, the previous Foolkiller, who is well into the process of duping his psychiatrist at the Central Indiana State Medical Institution.  Greg  has written a short manifesto about the fools responsible for the sorry state of the world, and is quickly mastering the modern technology that will allow his words to go viral.  First he learns to use the mail merge function on the hospital computer, and then realizes his best bet is to get the attention of Runyan Moody, the shock jock host of a tv talk show  that recalls the heyday of Jerry Springer. Greg has inadvertently discovered the vulnerabilities in the (then-contemporary media ecosystem.  The issue ends as Kurt, recently abandoned by his wife, turns on the tv:

"Tonight--live from Indiana--is this the collapse of Western Civilization?

Are liberals and criminals destroying our way of life?

Runyan Moody asks---

--the Foolkiller!"

To be fair, this goes better than when the Joker went on Letterman

This first issue efficiently introduces the characters and establishes just how damaged their world is, setting the stage for a rethinking of the Foolkiller concept. The first two Foolkillers, however different their moral frameworks might have been, were limited by the very individualism that so often defines vigilantes.  The Foolkillers look for specific fools, and kill them, as if targeted assassination could solve any important problem.  But Kurt's story immediately moves into more complicated territory, particularly when he rejects his wife's implication that he is somehow responsible for what happened to him.  Kurt is a passive aggressive sad sack, certainly, but he did not fire himself.  A casualty of a devastating recession, Kurt knows that he has been failed by a system (a system that we might now call neoliberalism).  Neither of the previous Foolkillers had a developed sense of the political, at least in their earlier appearances; Salinger seems to have spent his years of compulsory psychiatric hospitalization on his own education (perhaps he had more sophisticated interlocutors than Richard Rory in his prison days).  Now Kurt will encounter Salinger as that now painfully familiar phenomenon, the disembodied, ranting voice on the Internet. Together with Runyan Moody, one of the most incendiary voices in an inflammatory old media genre, they give Kurt intellectual mentorship and a public platform as he embarks on his career as the third Foolkiller.

Kurt will rack up a disturbingly high body count over the course of his ten issues, establishing one of the intellectual and ethical conflicts that will animate the series:  what is the role of individual retribution in the struggle against an entire system? 

Note

[1] Still, this was only a few years after the graphic violence in Gerber and Val Mayerik's abortive Void Indigo series outraged retailers throughout North America (and another few years before Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon would go much, much further in DC/Vertigo's Preacher.

Next: The Cultural Logic of Misanthropy

Live a Poem, Die a Fool

Gerber wrote three different incarnations of the Foolkiller: the religious fanatic who briefly fought Man-Thing; the ex-con social crusader against urban blight who just as briefly appeared in Omega the Unknown before being brought into the wider Marvel universe by subsequent writers, and the former corporate shark brought low by predatory capitalism in Gerber's 1990s Foolkiller series. In the Foolkiller, Gerber uncovered a formula that was useful in its generality:  anyone could become the Fookiller if he (and it was always he) had been kicked around enough by contemporary life, and anyone could be labeled a fool as each iteration of the character adopted a new definition of foolishness.  The Foolkiller, then, was just the sort of device that Gerber needed for his more personal storytelling:  he was a universal machine for satire.

This was not the only way that the Foolkiller was an anomaly in the serialized Marvel Universe.  Linked primarily to his creator until just before Gerber's death in 2008, the Foolkiller came and went along with Gerber.  The first two incarnations were from the writer's longest stint at Marvel (1972-1978), while the third was part of Gerber's intermittent freelancing with the company from 1983 to 1991.  When Gerber and co-creator Mary Skrenes introduced the second Foolkiller in Omega the Unknown, they weren't just brining a new incarnation of an old character to Gerber's latest (and strangest) Marvel book;  They were  importing the character to Hell's Kitchen, where the story was set.  Gerber had been living in Hell's Kitchen, which at the time was a notorious site of urban blight. [1] Now he is Greg Salinger, former cellmate to longtime Gerber supporting character Richard Rory, who has just arrived in Hell's Kitchen to share an apartment with the book's main characters. Rory has just received one of the Fookiller's calling cards, convinced that Everbest has somehow miraculously survived  ("See? Same cheap paper--same pedestrian design--same clumsy syntax--!" (Gerber & Skrenes, and Jim Mooney, "Fightin' Fools!," Omega the Unknown 9, July 1977). Rory is initially relieved, though quickly unsettled, to discover that this new Foolkiller was inspired by his jail-time storytelling:

"I know, Rich--the original Foolkiller was insane, but I realized I could carry out his mission correctly--by secularizingit! [.] --but my criteria differ somewhat. You see...I'm a poet."

Rory is convinced that Greg has lost his mind, but James-Michael Starling, the primary viewpoint character in Omega the Unknown, imparts the wisdom that he has gathered since his arrival in the neighborhood seven issue ago: "I think you may be judging your friend too harshly, Mr. Rory...an' too hastily. / You're...new to Hell's Kitchen."  Where the first Foolkiller was a one-note religious fanatic, the broad satire of a phenomenon Gerber clearly despised, and where Conway established the Punisher as the embodiment of a reactionary vigilante impulse that deserved condemnation, the second Foolkiller presents a greater challenge to both readerly and authorial sensibilities.  If, to paraphrase Irving Kristol, the conservative is "a liberal who has been mugged by reality," Gerber's characters (James-Michael included) have lost their patience with procedural liberalism because they have been mugged by actual muggers.

The rest of this issue drives the point home. When the Foolkiller disintegrates two young men engaging in a knife fight, Omega's friend Gramps voices his approval of "blasting the human vermin."  Two issues previously, Omega (who shares a mysterious psychic link with young James-Michael) had fought a criminal called Blockbuster, whose explanation that he robbed banks in order to provide for his son was enough to convince Omega to let him go (much to the consternation of the crowd). Now he has had a chance to reconsider, as now he is the one who needs to get money to protect his "son," James-Michael. When he sees Blockbuster robbing a jewelry store, he is only motivated to fight by the owner's offer of a thousand dollars--his morality has become depressingly transactional. But the Foolkiller disintegrates Blockbuster before Omega can claim any reward, a move that appears consistent with "blasting the human vermin." Gerber holds out the possibility that the Foolkiller, if not exactly right, is not exactly wrong, either.

Oh, sure. No pressure or anything

There is, however, a mismatch between the Foolkiller as exterminator of pests to the urban ecosystem, and the Foolkiller's own conception of his mission.  Yes, he targets criminals, but lawbreaking is not the only criterion.  The Foolkiller dismisses Blockbuster on aesthetic grounds ("never a poetic thought or word or deed--!"). It is a strange combination, one that is difficult to justify without a broader familiarity with Gerber's work.  Every the disenchanted satirist, Gerber, particularly in Howard the Duck, filters everything through a sensibility consisting of a profound moral disappointment that often expresses itself through a judgment somewhere between the aesthetic and the philosophical. Gerber's characters cannot stand bullies or villains, but they have just as little tolerance for frauds, posers, and the followers of the day's trends.  The targets of Gerber's ire tend to exhibits failure in not just morality, but imagination.  At the end of the second story arc of Matt Wagner's Grendel (also about a murderous antihero/villain), the narrator describes Hunter Rose (the titular Grender) as "the demon of society's mediocrity"). To the say the same of Greg Salinger, the second Foolkiller, during his earliest appearances would be to overestimate him; "the demon of society's mediocrity" is what this Foolkiller aspires to be.

Note

[1] And so it remains to this day in both the Marvel Comics and Marvel Cinematic Universes, despite the fact that in real life, it has been gentrified for decades.

Next: The Foolkiller vs. the Culture

God's Executioner

The first Foolkiller, retroactively named Ross G. Everbest when Roger Stern included the second Foolkiller in Amazing Spider-Man, was a religious fanatic who died in his second (and final) appearance in a Marvel comic. [7] As a young boy, Everbest was cured of paralysis by a faith healer named Mike, joining his savior in a new career as an evangelist. After catching a drunken Mike with his arm around a woman, Everbest killed him and became the Foolkiller. Targeting particularly egregious "fools" (such as the rapacious industrialist F.A. Schist and Ted Sallis, whose research inadvertently turned him into the monstrous Man-Thing), Everbest warned his victims with a card one day before attaching them:

And well you might “Ooh!”

Foolkiller

- e pluribus unum- 

You have 24 hours to live. Use them to repent or be forever damned to the pits of hell where goeth all fools. Today is the last day of the rest of your life. Use it wisely or die a fool!

Everbest is not exaggerating:  somehow, this former child evangelist gained access to a great deal of mad scientist tech, from the stasis tube preserving Mike's dead body to his weapon of choice: a white-light-emitting laser that instantaneously reduces its target to ashes.  Naturally, he calls it his "Purification Gun."

In his original incarnation, the Foolkiller satirizes the world that created him more than he does the genre in which he functions.  True, he wears a form-fitting costume, but he is not trying to right wrongs or rid the world of crime.  The fool, unlike the criminal, is not a legal or civic category; for Everbest, the fool's failings are moral. At this early moment in Gerber's career, the Foolkiller was one of the first example's of the writer's broadsides against religious fanaticism and moral superiority; just a year later, the Man-Thing would be helpless against the onslaught of book-burning provincial fundamentalists who aligned themselves with a murderous "Mad Viking" on a crusade to restore true American "manhood."

What makes the Foolkiller different from Gerber's other moralists is that he is not entirely wrong; all of his initial chosen targets are fools of one kind or another (more on this in the next post). The problem is that offenders in so elastic a category are subject to only one punishment: disintegration.  Here the Foolkiller partakes of the same maximalist logic as the Punisher, one that can implicitly critique vigilantism with a story that celebrates it.   The tools at their disposal are as limited and lacking in nuance as is the moral imagination of those who wield them. Superhero comics tend to deploy these vigilantes as foils for the conventional superhero in order to put the hero in a better light.  But really, such vigilantes are only the superhero reduced to his most absurd avatar.  With few exceptions, superheroes are equipped to solve every problem with violence; if violence is not the solution, then the problem remains invisible.  Recall how laughable it was that Superboy Prime changed continuity by literally punching the walls of reality in Infinite Crisis; for this to work, reality itself had to be reorganized into something susceptible to punching. Had the Foolkiller or the Punisher been in Superboy Prime's place, they would have shot reality into submission.

Next: Live a Poem, Die a Fool

What a Fool Believes

Well before Miller's revitalization of Daredevil and Batman, Marvel Comics was already interrogating the status of the four-color vigilante.  In a curious coincidence, the company introduced The Punisher, a character who would become the most successful fictional murderous vigilante in the medium just one month before  the first appearance of The Foolkiller, who functioned as an unintentional parody of what appeared to be a one-off character. The Punisher made his debut in The Amazing Spider-Man 129 (by Gerry Conway, John Romita Sr, and Ross Andru) (February 1974), right before The Foolkiller in Man-Thing 3 (by Steve Gerber, Val Mayerik, and Jack Abel) (March 1974). As usually happens with corporate-owned characters, their psychological development, ideological framework, and even biographies would veer far away from their creators' original intent. When Mort Weisinger and George Papp created Green Arrow in 1941, he was a generic, square-jawed, blond variation on Batman.  Nothing in Oliver Queen original appearances (or even those of the early Silver Age version) would have suggested that he would turn into an anticapitalist hippie in the 1970s, a mayor of his hometown in the twenty-first century, or, for that matter, a serial philanderer whose infidelities would continue to complicate one of DC most enduring love stories.

Nonetheless, Oliver Queen followed a path that is familiar to longtime superhero comics readers:  initially a blank slate, Green Arrow would have to be given some measure of complexity for him to function as the genre matured.  If anything, his leftward turn demonstrates just how malleable these characters can be when confronted with changing times. [1] But the Punisher and the Foolkiller are different, because each was, to widely varying degrees, initially rooted in social commentary.  Each character would, like Oliver Queen, change with the times, but these changes would reflect reader reactions and the evolution of popular attitudes about crime and justice.  Both the Foolkiller and the Punisher frequently blur the lines between satire and sincerity years before the slippage between irony and political extremism would wreak havoc with America's political culture.

The basic contours of the Punisher's evolution are well-known: a response to the vigilantism of Dirty Harry, the urban decay featured in the daily news, and Don Pendleton's popular paperback hero The Executioner,  the Punisher was introduced as a new Spider-Man antagonist with no anticipation that the character would ever achieve anything remotely like the popularity he has enjoyed for nearly five decades. The following year, Conway gave the Punisher his canonical origin in Marvel Preview 2 ("Death Sentence," with Tony DeZuniga on art): Vietnam veteran Frank Castle takes justice into his own hands after his wife and children are murdered by the mob.  As Kent Worcester so skillfully demonstrates in A Cultural History of the Punisher, Castle becomes both a right-wing symbol and an object of left-wing parody, each interpretation somehow coexisting with the other.  Worcester's readings of the Punisher are brilliant, and have minimized the need for discussing the Punisher at great length here. 

Though much less consequential as a pop cultural figure, the Foolkiller stands out for being less a cultural barometer than the outward manifestation of a particular writer's evolving sensibilities. Before his departure from Marvel, Steve Gerber was virtually the only writer to script Fookiller stories, probably because he was the only one who had any interest in doing so.  The character was briefly mangled by Steve Grant as part of an assignment to wrap up Gerber's dangling Omega the Unknown plot threads in a few issues of Defenders, and then again by Roger Stern in a forgettable issue of The Amazing Spider-Man (#225, "Fools ...like us!" by Stern, John Romita, Jr. and Bob Wiaceck), before Gerber's return to the company in 1990. After Gerber, the Foolkiller would make occasional appearances before Greg Hurtwtiz 2007 and Max Bemis' 2017 revamps of the character in successive adult-oriented miniseries.

The Foolkiller’s first victim really should have been his tailor

The Foolkiller and the Punisher are both killers with a code; the difference lies within the code itself. As an exaggerated response to popular panic over crime and urban decay, the Punisher is an extralegal remedy for ills that are clearly defined by his country's laws.  The Punisher may be judge, jury, and executioner, but what he is not is a legislator:  just as the traditional superhero is inevitably committed to upholding the (capitalist, legal) status quo, so too is the Punisher unconcerned with the nature of crime. Crime is an essentialized phenomenon that exists before the Punisher ever appears on the scene.

The Foolkiller, on the other hand, is interested in a different category of social ill, as his name suggests: fools.  Being a fool is not a crime; indeed, the entirely legal authority held by many a fool spurs the Foolkiller on to increasingly spectacular executions. Nor is there a commonly accepted definition of a fool that would allow a citizen (or a reader) to predict who might be the Foolkiller's next target. Other versions of the Punisher have popped up now and then, whether in different timelines, alternate dimensions, or even as a short-term replacement of the main continuity's character.  None of these have had the resonance of Frank Castle, because it is Frank's history, character, and perspective that define this particular variation on the vigilante theme. The Foolkiller, however, is a more malleable concept, and the multiple iterations of the character each rests upon his own understanding of what constitutes a fool.

Note

[1] Green Arrow is also an example of a successful revamp that fundamentally defines perceptions of the character from that day forward.  When Geoff Johns and the DC editorial staff were laboring to undo the mistakes of the New 52 (which, in Oliver Queen's case, rendered him nearly unrecognizable to comics fans even as he was more closely alligned with the hero of the CW's hit show, Arrow), he engaged his colleagues in a group exercise to define the basic features common to virtually every successful version of a DC character.  For Green Arrow, that was his van dyke beard, his abrasiveness, his politics, and his relationship with Black Canary.

Next: God's Executioner

Too Big to Fail

Who, after all, are the Mutants?  In addition to being a comics industry in-joke,  the name also reminds us of the metaphorical power that Marvel's mutants have always had:  as a non-existent minority, they can stand in for any marginalized population.  Of course, Marvel's early approach to this question was typical:  the X-Men and other mutants were open to metaphorical interpretation precisely because they were white. Without any of the baggage of a real, existing ethnic group, they were a means for the white reader to cosplay oppression.  Miller's mutants are something else entirely:  not white, not Black, Latino or Asian, but strangely almost beige. 

Street gang racial harmony, brought to you by Disney

It's an interesting, if unsatisfying, solution to a longstanding representational problem: my elementary school books in the 1970s featured children with an astounding range of skin colors (blue, orange, maroon), but none found in nature, while the 1990s hit adventure cartoon Gargoyles featured multiracial street gangs that resembled a downscale Benetton ad or a human resources dream team (one Black, one white, and one Latino gang member joining in harmony to threaten passersby).  Miller's approach was to drain all the gang members of color, and yet give them a slang that was heavily inflected by African American Vernacular English.   It's a clever dodge:  Miller can gesture towards blackness, but any assertion that the Mutants are meant to be Black must be made by the reader, not the author.

It also avoids the cringe-inducing visual of a giant white man (Batman) leading an army of young men of color.  Once the Mutants cosplay as the Sons of the Batman, they blend in with his color palette.  The result is a literalization of the theory that young men go feral without a father figure: no racial diversity will call Batman's paternity into question.  Meanwhile, decades of discomfort and cultural criticism about Batman and his relationship to the young boy(s) who follow him are put to rest.  First, he has a new, female Robin, with whom his dynamic is obviously paternal.  Second, Batman's closeness with young Dick Grayson or any of his successors facilitated Wertham's thesis that Batman and Robin were a "homosexual fantasy" (as do numerous hilarious old comics panels frequently shared online), but Batman in charge of an army of young men looks completely different.   His is both father and general, the central figure in a network of homosocial group bonding.  As a positive male role model, Batman lifts the Mutants up. In the words of the military recruitment slogan that was ubiquitous when Miller published the book, Batman inspires his "sons" to be all that they can be.

Iconography? What iconography?

How does Miller get both his skeptical characters and potentially skeptical readers to support this particular model of Batman(hood)?  The same way zombie movies require their viewers to (temporarily) approve of widely available firearms, or 24 establishes ticking-clock scenarios in which torture is justifiable and effective: developing a plot that becomes a fascist Batman's natural habitat.  No matter how dystopian Gotham City may have become, it is still a place where the virtues and vices of vigilantism are up for debate.  But after an electromagnetic pulse disables all of Gotham's technology, the city is reduced to the Hobbesian nightmare that has always lurked just beneath the surface.  The only force for order left is Batman and his teenage army. Miller draws a two-page spread of Batman and the former Mutants literally riding into town on horseback to save the city, recapitulating a cowboy trope that lies deep within American mass culture.  The appropriate response is modeled by the chief Batman skeptic in law enforcement: Ellen Yindel, Jim Gordon's replacement as police commissioner.  Asked by a cop if they should fire at him, an awestruck Yindel reponds: "No...he's too big" (check).

Phrasing!

Batman is, indeed, too big: larger than life, he is also larger than any of the city's now totally dysfunctional institutions. This is where vigilantism and fascism meet:  institutions are fundamentally inadequate for solving social problems. Only a big man (and his followers) can save the day. Batman further proves his point by fighting Superman to a virtual standstill, before interrupting the fight by faking his own death. In The Dark Knight Returns, Superman ("the big blue boyscout") is both the embodiment of a romantic heroic ideal (he even comes with his own idyllic scenery when he meets Bruce in his secret identity) and a government stooge.  The president (somehow Ronald Reagan is still alive and in office) is addled and under-informed, but Superman, being Superman, follows his orders. When he is nearly killed by the electromagnetic pulse, he restores his vitality by absorbing the life force of the natural world around him; Batman powers his exoskeleton to fight Superman by syphoning off most of the remaining electricity from Gotham's power grid.  Batman's natural environment is the city, but without much respect for its institutions. He drains the very infrastructure to get his way.

News alert! Rich white guy privatizes power grid

Despite his apparent death, the book gives Bruce Wayne a perfectly Batman happy ending:  with all the trappings of his civilian life destroyed, he and the Sons of the Batman can retreat deep within the batcaves, near the city but not of it.  To borrow Agamben's terms, Batman has ended his civil life (zoe) in favor of what, for him, is the sheer, unrestrainable power of bare life (bios).  He and his sons (and Carrie) have opted out of civilization, in a home base from which they can work to make Gotham better. Batman has abandoned government in favor of a militia.

Next: What a Fool Believes