Are We All Ants in a Meaningless Cosmos?

As the Blake references make clear, Moonshadow is about childhood and maturation to adulthood (and even to old age).  But, just as the narrative skips about through time, so too does it oscillate between innocence and maturity in ever issue.  As the life story of its eponymous hero, Moonshadow asks if growing older means growing cynical, and uses this question as a proxy for the larger issues with which DeMatteis frames the entire graphic novel:  is life random and absurd, or is there a larger meaning?  By this point, anyone who has read the rest of DeMatteis' work (not to mention this chapter) will suspect what his answer will be, but one of the book's strengths is that, even as it inevitably comes down on the side of a (for once) understated New Age spirituality, Moonshadow revels in the absurdity that makes belief in a Grand Plan so difficult.

This theme is present from the very beginning; indeed, it even precedes the first appearance of the protagonist (besides the narrator): Moonshadow begins without Moonshadow. Instead, the comic establishes the world that produces him, introducing the reader to the G'l-Doses, golden "grinning balls of light" whose "actions seem totally without motivation."  We see the all-powerful G'l-Doses intervene to stop a genocidal war on the planet Bazoom, leaving its inhabitants in a "true, lasting peace."  But as a counter-example, the G'l-Doses also visited the happy, prosperous planet of Kvell, letting loose a plague that wipes out almost the entire population. To top it all off, they are in the habit of picking a seemingly random person, inducing fits of giggles, and whisking them away to an interstellar zoo. While some look at the G'l-Doses benevolent acts as proof of a benevolent God, others come to a different conclusion. In his bestselling book We Are All Ants in a Meaningless Cosmos, Ragstone Phillit argues that the G'l-Doses are motivated entirely by whim, and therefore "to label these beings, to find in their actions proof of any divine intelligence or the basis of any philosophical thought, is absurd." At least, this is what he writes before the G'l-Doses snatch him away to join the zoo.

As already mentioned above, DeMatteis is unabashedly stealing from Adams and Vonnegut here, with the G'l-Doses as spherical stand-ins for the latter's plunger-shaped Tralfamadorians and their casual genocide reminiscent of the bureaucratic destruction of the Earth at the very beginning of the Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy.  In all these cases, however, absurdity and humor are a mask for horror; they may be entertaining, but they are not innocent.  Moonshadow is an innocent not only by virtue of his age (born in the interstellar zoo, he is literally a baby at the beginning of the story), but also by contrast with his absurd environment.  Nothing about his world makes sense, but because his G'l-Dose father grants his human mother's request that their child have a vast library, he is raised on a diet of adventure novels and nineteenth-century classics.  We can never know why the G'l-Doses conceived him, but everything about his upbringing has made him a seeker of meaning:

Homer, Cervantes, Bradbury, and Baum; Shelley, Keats, Byron and Blake; the Brontes, the Brownings, the Three Musketeers Peter Pan and Wendy; Siddhartha and Govinda; Prince Myshkin, King Richard, and Captain Blood!

Considering the influences, is it any wonder my world-view was that of the rose-tinted Romantic?

Note that Cervantes is name-checked early here, and for good reason: Moonshadow is not just a reader, but a reader of books about readers.   He is comfortable living in a world of quotations; when he asks his father why he is being sent out of the Zoo, their dialogue immediately settles into something out of The Wizard of Oz: "Because" "Because?" "Because" "Because." [1] And, naturally, he sets off on his quest with a quote from Peter Pan: "Second to the Right-- -- and straight on 'till morning."  DeMatteis always undercuts the romanticism with bathos: the invocation of the great Romantic writers is followed by the infamous passage about Moonshadow's masturbation, while the Peter Pan quote precedes our hero "puk[ing his] guts out and faint[ing] dead away"

As we can see, the oppositions between innocence and experience, pathos and bathos, romanticism or spirituality and absurdism or cynicism are not just the path on which Moonshadow's life develops. Not only will Moonshadow himself will oscillate between extremes at various points in his development, the book is built on the ongoing interplay between these contrasting modes.  If Moonshadow works, it is because DeMatteis and Muth have found a balance. 

Note

[1] Moonshadow's father is himself something of a Wizard of Oz figure--mostly offstage, and unpredictable force that can sometimes be convinced to grant a boon.

Next: Westward Ho the Perverts!

Words and Pictures

There is a deceptive air of simplicity about Moonshadow that allows it to play fast and loose with the conventions of time.  The narrator's somewhat old-fashioned, quasi-Victorian diction does not exactly scream "avant-garde," nor does the straightforward division of each issue into chapters.  The chapters, however, are the comic's primary vehicle for narrative time travel. For one, they often (but not always) represent a re-start of the narration from a different moment in time. For another, their titles usually announce their theme, in turn reminding the reader that it is theme rather than action that holds a given issue together.  This is not so apparent in the first issue, where the need for background on both worldbuilding (the aliens, the zoo) and character (the hipppy Sunflower, her abduction, Moonshadow's birth, and the beginning of his journey) make the transitions from chapter to chapter rather straightforward. They are also in a simple chronological order.

By issue two, however, after the initial one-page literary allusion announcing the issue's overall theme (more on these allusions below), the first three-page chapter is a restatement of the theme specifically in terms of the main characters. "I Encounter Death" starts with nine-year-old Sheila Fay Birnbaum (the future Sunshine) lying in bed, terrified of death and dreaming of the ghost of her crazy Aunt Ettie, who wants her eyes back (when Sheila was born, her father sadly noted that she had "Ettie's eyes"). The story then jumps to four-year-old Moonshadow as his mother bathes him; he, too, is visited by a vision of death, and Sunshine's words of comfort are no less inadequate than her own mother's similar reassurances.  Chapter Two ("A Birthday Surprise") rejoins the present-day narrative with Moonhadow, Sunshine, and Ira (the sex-obsessed furry alien) boarding a plague ship to rescue its last inhabitants, only to have Sunshine mortally wounded by the newborn baby monster she has just helped deliver (at the beginning of Chapter Three, "I Encounter Death Again"). In Chapter Four ("I Pray for a Miracle"), Moonshadow can't bring himself to part with his mother's dead body; in Chapter Five ("Arrangements Are Made") and Chapter Six ("Rabbis and Rats"), Sunshine's grotesque funeral ends with Moonshadow's arrest and confinement to a mental hospital.  All of this take place in 32 pages:  melancholy reminiscence, family history, the detailed exploration of a theme, and what turns out to have been a great deal of plot.  This is how virtually all  of the "books" of Moonshadow develop: at a pace that is at once leisurely and hurried.

It is also a chapter with very little dialogue, most of it in word balloons, but some reported with quotations marks in narrative boxes.  Like many comics from the 1980s, it is much wordier than the average comic from the early 21st century, but this is not the wordiness of an Alan Moore (or, worse, an Alan Moore wannabe). It helps that the words are all "uttered" by the adult Moonshadow, creating the feeling that the reader is listening to someone speak rather than reading endless description.  The narration is not attempting to be a moody prose-poem, nor does it simply restate the action depicted in the panels.  Instead, Moonshadow successfully embodies what DeMatteis attempted with varying results throughout his 1980s work:  a careful synthesis of words and art. We have seen this work fairly well with Zeck in Kraven's Last Hunt, and less elegantly with Perlin in The Defenders.  In Muth, DeMatteis has found his ideal collaborator, at least for this project:  the lush, painted art demands sustained attention. It manages to hit the sweet spot between illustration and the conventional comics page: some of his layouts have panels with borders, some do not; sometimes, they have action-to-action transitions,  and yet they always have attractive, subtle coloring, careful draftsmanship (that nonetheless leaves room for him to move from the realistic to the cartoony ends of the comics spectrum when called for).  Part of the pleasure in reading (and, particularly, viewing) Moonshadow is in witnessing the steady physical maturation of the character. He does not simply grow taller, but his facial features become more angular and defined.  Even visually, it is a Bildungsroman.

The critic Tom Shapira is not alone in considering Moonshadow more of an "illustrated novel than a comic book,”but this characterization is not exactly fair.  There are plenty of comics out there that are largely text boxes with illustrations, particularly comics that are adaptations of fiction. Twenty years after Moonshadow, DeMatteis would in fact, experiment with a hybrid comics mode that looked more like an illustrated book, but this was at the request of his editors at Disney, who were interested in reviving his and MIke Ploog's Crossgen comic Abadazadas something closer to a conventional, non-comics publication.   But this is not the case with Moonshadow, whose combination of words and pictures is, if anything, more immediately legible than it was forty years ago.  Allison Bechdel's Fun Home, along with nearly all the comics work of Lynda Barry, demonstrate the multiple strategies for balancing word and image. 

One important difference is that they are writer/artists, so any critique of their choice cannot be reduced to the differing priorities of a prolix writer and a put-upon artist. It is true that, when not working in a primarily humorous mode, DeMatteis's writing is on the wordy side, especially when compared to the next generations of  mainstream comics writers, who tend to minimize  or even eliminate narrative captions.  Yet his captions neither overwhelm the page not over-describe it; nor do they take the place of action and dialogue. DeMatteis and Muth alternate between dialogue-free pages that illustrate Moonshadow's monologue and extended sequences of comics and action that would not be out of place in the most conventional mainstream comic. In the first issue, during the description of the galactic zoo,  they even break the frame by having older Moonshadow's monologue briefly continued by a few of the zoo's denizens, before the narrative baton is passed back to its original owner.  Moonshadow's voiceover sets the pace and tone for graphic novel, and that pace includes the recognition that the narration can and should be have a rhythm sustained by the intermittent eruption of conventional comics pages.

Finally, there are the literary quotations that introduce eleven of the twelve books (the final one opens in silence, but ends with a repetition of the poem from the first issue).  The writers and texts are a veritable who's who of classic literature and children's entertainment: in order, they are William Blake, L. Frank Baum, W.B. Yeats, J.R.R Tolkien,  Percy Bysshe Shelley, J.M. Barrie, Robert Louis Stevenson, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, John Keats, Henry Miller, and Samuel Beckett.  Again, critical and reader reactions can (and do) vary, and the narrator's occasional rhapsodizing over a great writer's words can be hard to take.  But they are aptly chosen signposts for each book's themes, with Blake's "Piping down the valleys wild" serving the same overall introductory function for Moonshadow as it did for his Songs of Innocence and Experience (and also a perhaps on-the-nose reference to the pipe that Moonshadow plays at various points during the book).  Indeed, the title of Blake's collection could easy serve as a subtitle to DeMatteis' and Muth's graphic novel, were that spot not already taken by "A Fairy Tale for Grownups." [1]

Here, too, Moonshadow prefigures an element of Bechdel's Fun Home. Each chapter of Fun Home gets its title from a classic literary work, though the intertextual connections play out differently.  Whether it be Proust, Joyce, or Oscar Wilde, Bechdel reflects on each author's texts within the chapter itself.  DeMatteis and Muth usually do not engage with a given text over the course of an issue, instead using an extended literary quote as both the beginning of older Moonshadow's monologue and as a kind of visual soundtrack:  the first page typically features the older Moonshadow walking, dancing, or painting in a field, followed by a splash page with his reflections on what we have just read, and a nondiegetic depiction of the hero at the age he will be for the rest of the chapter.

Note

[1] "A Fairy Tale for Grownups" made its first appearance on the cover of the second issue of Moonshadow, presumably as a belated content warning after outcry by some retailers and readers over the first issue's reference to Moonshadow's teenage masturbation ("This Dante-like belief in a pure and perfect Beatrice didn't prevent me from shooting semen high and low once puberty came a'knocking.""

Next: Are We All Ants in a Meaningless Cosmos?

With Joy to Hear

If Kraven's Last Hunt is something of a mixed bag, with melodrama and emotionality at times overwhelming a well-wrought story, its place in DeMatteis' comics career is therefore a bit surprising, in that the 6-part Spider-Man story began its publication half a year after the conclusion of his 1980s masterpiece, Moonshadow.  A broader look at DeMatteis' decades in the comic field show that he is not a creator whose work can be charted on a single line: he has long demonstrated great facility in moving from carefully-crafted, challenging work to raucous humor to quirky superheroes, while also proving to be game for contributing to much more straightforward superhero storytelling as part of a team.

Moonshadow is the first of several DeMatteis-authored comics that refract his personal experience, family lore, and outlook on life through the prism of fantasy and children's literature; these would eventually include  Abadazad  (2004) and Stardust Kid (2006) (both with art by Mike Ploog), The Adventures of Augusta Wind (2013 & 2016, with art by Vassilis GogtzIlas), Brooklyn Dreams (1995, though with minimal to no fantasy, with art by Glenn Barr).  Based on an idea he had been developing for a decade, Moonshadow was first serialized by Marvel's Epic Comics imprint (about which more in another chapter) in 12 issues from 1985 through 1987, with fully-painted art primarily by Jon J. Muth (and an assist from  Kent Williams and George Pratt in the last three issues). A coming-of-age story with echoes of William Blake, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Charles Dickens, and Lewis Carroll, Moonshadow was accurately marketed as a "fairy tale for adults."

A quick glance at Moonshadow shows why this book really shouldn't work. It is absolutely overstuffed with plot, character, genre tropes, and literary allusions, held together by a narrator who is only too happy to indulge an abrupt change of tone, setting, or theme.  There are mysterious, all-powerful, absurdist aliens; a burnt-out Jewish hippy impregnated by one of said aliens, giving birth to the protagonist; an interstellar zoo; an intergalactic war; a family-owned network of corrupt and corrupting social and commercial institutions; religious and philosophical movements ranging from nihilism to mysticism;  a porn-obsessed,  cigar-smoking Wookie knockoff, sidekick ghosts, a multi-generational family saga of creativity, insanity, and loss, a vaguely magical flute passed along as a family heirloom, a space brothel, an insufferably underdeveloped ethereal love interest, a burlesque of Jewish rites in an alien funeral home, not to mention escapes from prisons, mental hospitals, plague ships, and concentration camps.

Yet work it does, and brilliantly. Four features hold Moonshadow together. First, the narrator, who is an aged version of the main character, and is recollecting his past as he tells the story. This gives a "double-voicedness" to the action, playing off the contrast between his youthful and mature perspectives. As a first-person oral narrative, it also justifies the frequent digressions throughout the series (digressions that work quite well thematically).  Second, the series' structure is divided not just into its component issues (here called "books"), but also shorter chapters, which, again, facilitate the movements back and forth in time and space.  Third, the painted art is stunning, and functions somewhere in between the standard role of art in a mainstream comic and the illustrative status that art holds in a children's picture book (thereby conditioning the reader to a different pace and a different kind of attention). Finally, the literary quotations that launch each book set the theme and tone, providing unity to what might otherwise seem unconnected.

An elderly narrator recollecting his childhood is not, in itself, a sign of literary or artistic innovation.  Nor is it unusual in the Bildungsroman, one of the many genres to which Moonshadow belongs.  Even the frequent physical depiction of elderly Moonshadow has ample precedent in Anglo-American comics, which have often featured storyteller figures who stand in front of the reader and draw attention to their narrative role.  What is different, however, is the combination of all of these familiar elements:  elderly version of hero as narrator, physically present and visually rendered comic book storyteller, hero growing from child to adulthood--all on the comics page.  Though the drawings are in two dimensions, comics are a uniquely four-dimensional storytelling medium, as most cleverly demonstrated in Watchmen (which, by coincidence is more or less contemporaneous with Moonshadow): not only does the arrangement of panels on the page allow the reader to jump back and forth through time with little cognitive strain, the very act of flipping through a physical comic book can work as an instance of storytelling because the combination of words and pictures is, at any moment, legible and recognizable in a way that flipping through a prose novel is not (it takes time to reorient oneself on the printed, pictureless page). Jumping around in a film or television episode is now much more technologically feasible than it was in the 1980s, but the experience can still be jarring and difficult (in part because of the additional feature of sound). Moonshadow as a verbal and visual Bildungsroman that regularly depicts its main character at markedly different ages on a single page, makes four-dimensional storytelling comprehensible and unforced.

Next: Words and Pictures

One-Sided Symmetry

Only by the fifth chapter do we see that the "fearful symmetry" of the title extends to Kraven's shocking move at the end of the first: shooting Spider-Man in the face.  Four chapter later, Kraven turns the gun on himself.  Peter spends half the story fighting his way out of the grave; Kraven turns out to have spent the same time inexorably heading towards his own.

Attitudes towards suicide have changed dramatically in the intervening decades.  Fears of social contagion have circumscribed its representation in recent years, out of concern that younger and more vulnerable audiences might copy a character's actions.   Arguments about social contagion are particularly fraught for the comics industry, which was nearly destroyed by a 1950s moral panic about the effects of comics on at-risk youth.  The research that helped inspire the panic (primarily Dr. Frederic Wertham's 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent) is highly suspect; not only did it not conform to standards of objective research, the very categories of deviancy with which Wertham operated are no longer recognized (most famously, he was concerned about superhero comics' somehow promoting homosexuality among its readers).  While one cannot claim complete scholarly consensus about suicide contagion, the stakes are high enough that media producers now err on the side of caution. By the early twenty-first century, adding a notice about resources for those contemplating suicide is a commonplace practice.

Marvel did get letters accusing the company of encouraging suicide, which bothered DeMatteis enough for him to reunite with Zeck and revisit the Kraven story in the 1992 short graphic novel Soul of the Hunter (inks by Bob McLeod). Even if this did not violate the current study's time frame, I would be reluctant to include this book in an analysis of Kraven's Last Hunt.  It represents a later rethinking of the story, abandoning the original's ambiguity about any supernatural elements. Here, Spider-Man is haunted by the ghost of Kraven, told by a mysterious entity that he has a "spiritual bond" with the now-dead villain, and ultimately moved to release Kraven's soul from limbo (even going as far as hugging it out with his ghost). [1] While Soul of the Hunter revisits many of its predecessors story beats and motifs, it completely surrenders to the sentimentality that DeMatteis managed to hold at bay in Kraven's Last Hunt. [2]

It is completely reasonable to postulate some sort of "spiritual bond" between Peter and Kraven, given the apparent echoes in their thoughts and delirious ravings at various points in the story. But leaving this connection ambiguous opened up Kraven's Last Hunt in a way that helps make sense of the Hunter's actions in the penultimate issue.  Kraven, we should recall, was a bottom-of-the-barrel  villain.  If readers at the time were asked to name Spider-Man's archnemesis, they would surely have started with the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus, moving through the Hobgoblin, the Scorpion, the Lizard, and the Shocker before remembering Kraven.  Before DeMatteis brought him back, Kraven had fought Spider-Man only six times in twenty-three years of publication; Kraven's Last Hunt was such a breakthrough that the character has actually appeared more times after his death than he did before he killed himself (a sentence that only makes sense in superhero comics).  DeMatteis introduces a Kraven who is absolutely obsessed with Spider-Man, and a Peter Parker for whom Kraven was always an afterthought.

DeMatteis conveys the simultaneous similarities and distance between their perspectives through a technique commonly associate with Watchmen:  parallel narration from multiple sources. [3]  In any given panel, we might see Kraven's, Spider-Man's, Vermin's, or Mary Jane's thoughts represented in their own caption boxes.  Spider-Man's tend to be yellow, while Kraven's are orange (and in a different font). DeMatteis does not go as far with this as Moore; he does not have narrative lines whose connection to the images in the panel is thematic rather than diegetic.   Rather, DeMatteis wants us to remain in his characters' heads whenever possible. Mary Jane's thoughts are about her search for Peter, and at times they make a nice counterpoint to the visuals; in the second issue, she frets about her missing husband while chasing after a rat she finds in her apartment. As she repeats to herself that Peter is not dead, she smashes the rat into a pulp with her boot.  Vermin thinks about food, tries to remember his former life, and rallies enough courage to venture out of the sewers. Before his burial, Peter uses the captions to give voice to his anxieties; once he is underground and hallucinating, his narration grows more intense (and more like Kraven's). Kraven's narration is nearly always poetic, and, while still maintaining a connection to the action on the page, more abstract.

The intensity of Kraven's voice is so compelling that it is easy to forget how odd his obsession with Spider-Man actually is. Kraven's delusions are multiple, starting with his identification of Peter Parker with a primal spider totem that, at least at this point in Spider-Man's adventures, has never been in evidence.  But he also has an inflated sense of his own importance.  Given the infrequency of their encounters, it is as though Kraven were existing in another comics universe entirely, one in which he was recognized as Spider-Man's arch-nemesis.  Kraven acts on his firm belief in their primal bond that is central to his head canon, and, at least for the duration of Fearful Symmetry, he makes his fan fiction real by tramping on the rules that usually govern a Spider-Man story. From Peter's perspective, he comes out of left field, ranting about things that make no sense, and, rather than monologue or set up a complicated death trap, simply shoots him and buries him.

When DeMatteis reintroduces Kraven in the opening pages of the first issue, it is with a full-page spread of a naked hunter staring at the reader.  An arresting image, it is a perfect with Kraven's monologue, a poetic, self-aggrandizing  and melancholy aria about Kraven himself.  We learn of his intense self-regard, his disdain for the modern world, but, most of all, his fixation on Spider-Man:

For years the Spider has thwarted me. Mocked me. Humiliated me.

In the beginning, I was naive. I thoguht he was a man. But he couldn't possibly be a man. No man could do to Kraven what the Spider has.

No Man.

So black. So inhuman. So beautiful.

You exist to test me, don't you? To taunt and challenge me?

And I cannot rest until I have proven myself. Until I have destroyed you---

I cannot rest.

In other words, his focus on Spider-Man is a function of his unassailable belief in his own importance. He attributes a supernatural significance to his opponent based entirely on the otherwise incomprehensible fact of Kraven's repeated defeats (No man could do to Kraven what the Spider has). Even the font used for his narration reinforces Kraven's sense of drama; using lower case-lettering years before Ultimate Marvel would make this a standard, the font reveals the capitalization of "Spider" that would otherwise be invisible.  Hopped up on a cocktail of herbs and drugs, Kraven launches into the what may be the worst abuse of William Blake's poetry of the last half-century ("Spyder! Spyder! /Burning bright/In the forest of the night").

Even with such stylistic excesses, living inside Kraven's consciousness is one of the highlights of the comic.  And, despite the momentary overlaps of their hallucinatory visions, this is an experience that is never really available to Peter--only to the readers.  The fifth chapter, which features the extended, final struggle between Kraven and Spider-Man followed by Kraven's suicide, is a masterclass in miscommunication.  Spider-Man had been ambushed in the first chapter by a man he didn't even know he was fighting; four issues later, he pummels Kraven with his fists, but the Hunter offers no resistance. Peter is in no position to realize that, as far as Kraven is concerned, the fight is over. The two of them are talking and acting at cross-purposes, to an extent of which only Kraven is aware.   Spider-Man attacks an enemy wearing his costume, not realizing that his real function is to punctuate and interrupt Kraven's ongoing internal monologue. The issue begins with Kraven's oft-repeated, bitter declaration "They said my mother was insane" (in keeping with the story's emphasis on symmetry, this will also be the issue's last line). His mother, we are told, was a noble women driven out of Russia by the Revolution, worn down by America's vulgarity:

"Her life was stolen from her.

Stolen

by

The Spider.

Oh, I see now: I understand in a way that I never could before.  This costumed adventurer called Spider-Man is just that: a man.

And yet within him is something more: something great, something awful.

The essence of the demon that brought Russia to ruin.

The demon that destroyed my father; consumed my mother.

The demon I have at long last---

--defeated."

Again, Spider-Man understands none of this--how could he?  He spends the entire issue in confusion, either silent or asking questions, while Kraven tells himself a story that only nominally has anything to do with Peter Parker: "And tonight I finally see that even the man inhabited [by] the Spider--/--is ignorant--/of its devious ways!/ Poor man: possessed by the entity responsible for human suffering...world chaos...and he doesn't even know it!" His capacity to misread Spider-Man seems limitless, attributing a "sadness" to him that moves him to a surprising gesture of affection from which Peter recoils.

The entire exercise has been a catharsis for Kraven using Spider-Man as a puppet.  Kraven "kills" Spider-Man, replaces him, defeats an enemy (Vermin) whom Spider-Man allegedly could not beat, arranges a rematch between Spider-Man and Vermin, and then lets Vermin go:

My Spider is gone. Now...there's only a man.

A good man, I think. How strange that I haven't been able to see that till now.

[...] And there's one final thing I see: something. I don't think I was capable of seeing 'till now:  every man has his Spider. And perhaps I--

-- I have been yours.

By the end, Kraven's Last Hunt has proven to be less about a mystic bond than about the illusion of connection. Kraven has undoubtedly had a huge (and deleterious) effect on Spider-Man, but in a process that, for Peter Parker, is as random as a natural disaster. Were the "relationship" between the two romantic rather than violent (a possibility indirectly alluded to when Kraven strokes Spider-Man's chin), we would see Kraven for what he is: not a hunter, but a stalker. Spider-Man survives the experience because Kraven lets him, but he recovers because of the real connection he has with Mary Jane.  When the two are reunited, Peter's feverish internal monologue stops, or at least pauses: with Mary Jane, Peter can get outside his own head.  Kraven, no matter how much he has learned from the process of torturing his imagined nemesis, is still trapped: the only way he can get out of his own head is by putting a bullet through it.

The dueling subjectivities provide the main symmetries alluded to in the original title, and also remind us that Kraven's Last Hunt is both a very 1980s approach to mainstream comics sophistication and a continuation of Marvel's best comics of the 1970s, which used the give readers insight into the characters' inner lives. The beauty of Kraven's Last Hunt lies in more than just its symmetry, though, fearful or otherwise, symmetry is deployed with commendable consistency and inventiveness.  Kraven's Last Hunt is best read as a palimpsest of subjectivities:  Peter's and Kraven's, but also Mary Jane's and Vermin's, all telling the same story in way so different as to make them different stories.   Only a few months late, in Amazing Spider-Man 297, our hero will have to foil Doctor Octopus scheme to use launch a crop duster to destroy the entire population of New York just to defeat Spider-Man.  For two months, DeMatteis and Zeck managed to elevate a franchise and engage the reader with complexity.

Notes

[1] "...one of the things that was very clear in that story was that Kraven was suffering from mental illness. ....In Kraven's own head, ]he was thinking], 'Yes, now I have completed my question and I will die with honor.  But this was not an a ct of honor. It was an act of insanity.....Tom had gotten a bunch of letters from people saying, 'Oh, you're glorifying suicide!" Normally, I would dismiss that as the usual rantings, except it really disturbed me that people would think the purpose of the story was to glorify suicide."  (Dan Johnson,  "In Our SIghts Pro2Pro: Kraven's Last Hunt" [Interview with J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Zeck." Back Issue  35, 2009: 9

[2] Nor is there any need to address the fact that Kraven has since been resurrected, an inevitability in corporate superhero comics.

[3] Alaniz puts it best: “Yet, for all its bathetic overreach and its painful puns on William Blake, “Kraven’s Last Hunt” touches on the dark subconscious of the genre, how death structures it, so that the villain’s forthright, extreme causa-sui self-destruction comes to bear a tinge of nobility.”

Next: With Joy to Hear

Bringing Up the Bodies

No wonder that Spider-Man's first scene in "Fearful Symmetry" involves the death of a character so minor that readers could be forgiven for assuming he had never actually appeared in a comic before: the two-bit thug and informer Joseph Facello, whom DeMatteis had introduced five years before in an issue of Marvel Team-Up [1]. Even Spider-Man cannot initially understand with this man's death has moved him so, to the extent that his apparition will even haunt Peter later in the same issue.  There is, however, one minor point about Joseph Facello: in this comic, he is only referred to by his nickname: Joe Face. "Fearful Symmetry" is haunted by Faces (named Joe or otherwise), faces that serve as screens for the protagonists's projections.  Joe Face reminds Peter of his mortality, in a way that Peter connects with the recent death of his friend Ned Leeds (who at that point may or may not have also fought Spider-Man while wearing the mask of the Hobgoblin). [2]  When Spider-Man first stares down the barrel of Kraven's gun, a four panel-sequence shows him in the first and third, Joe Face in the second, and Kraven in the fourth.  They are framed by two sets of narrative boxes, the upper in red, the lower in yellow. The bottom row reads:

Yesterday, Ned Leeds

Today, Joe Face.

Tomorrow

Aunt May? Mary Jane?

If it were not for the deaths of Joe and Ned, Spider-Man's confrontation with mortality in Fearful Symmetry would be entirely dependent on external factors (Kraven's hunt), but DeMatteis has primed Peter to brood about own death before he is even aware of Kraven's actions.  Like his totemic reinterpretation of both Kraven and Spider-Man, DeMatteis's focus on death brings into focus something that has long been a fundamental feature of Spider-Man's world.  Batman's origin may be rooted in the psychological trauma caused by witnessing his parents' murder, but for Spider-Man, the deaths and near deaths of his loved ones verge on a narrative repetition compulsion.  The (off-panel) trauma of his own parents' deaths is repeated and compounded by his indirect culpability in the death of his beloved Uncle Ben and further deepened by the murder of his girlfriend, Gwen Stacy. Moreover, his Aunt May's almost monthly brushes with death heighten his tragic sense of object impermanence.

This preoccupation with death frames the story's "Fearful Symmetry" (well, that, and DeMatteis' embarrassing rewrite of William Blake's "The Tyger" as "Spyder Spyder, burning bright, in the forests of the night").  Peter fears it, Kraven welcomes it, and, in his role as the third element balancing the other two, Vermin hungrily makes and consumes the dead.  Indeed, Kraven's obsession and psychic link with the "Spyder" is not only about death and rebirth (a favorite DeMatteis theme), but about body and soul, or rather, the body as corpse that once housed the soul (and may house it yet again).  Corpses and spirits abound in "Kraven's Last Hunt:" in Joe's case, we see both; in Ned's and Uncle Ben's, the spirit (that always points back to the corpse), Peter's seemingly dead and buried body, and the actual corpse and burial of Kraven the Hunter.

The distribution of these bodies and souls is facilitated by the story's outstanding layouts, which slow the action down when necessary, often to focus on the bodies, and to reinforce the parallels among the three protagonists. Many of these panels are unusually vertical, in the service of the primary motif of "Kraven's Last Hunt":  the continual movements below and above ground as the visual representation of death and rebirth.  It all begins with Spider-Man's burial at the end of the first chapter. The second installment has Vermin dragging a victim into the sewers and climbing out on the last page. The third shows Kraven in Spider-Man's costume, leaping from high buildings, then fighting Vermin in the sewers and carrying him out.  Peter's return is teased throughout both issue, with still shots of his grave and the occasional words "Mary Jane," until the fourth chapter, when Peter imagines himself inside a spider underground, then as his human self breaking out of the spider's carapace, climbing up a long tunnel and seeing Kraven shooting him in the face, until finally, Spider-Man himself, in full costume, breaks out of his grave.

Notes

[1] "Small Miracles (Marvel Team-Up 127, March 1983, with art by Kerry Gammill and Mike Esposito).  This special Christmas story showcases DeMatteis at the height of his sentimentality, with the Watcher silently guiding Spider-Man to save the life of a young woman.  The story actually ends with Uatu shedding a single tear of joy at this brief moment of fellowship with humanity.

[2] The Hobgoblin's true identity was a convoluted saga. Ultimately, Ned was posthumously revealed to have been one of the men who wore the villain's costume.

Next: One-Sided Symmetry

Death and the Spider

Kraven's insistence on symbolism (an insistence that will also affect Peter's own consciousness, thanks to psychotropic drugs, torture and trauma) is at the crux of a drama about mistaken identity. Though long the stuff of comedy (and, occasionally, tragedy), mistaken identity is a hoary superhero trope, with the heroes' masks and secrets lending themselves to endless speculation about their true name and face. Kraven has never seen  Peter Parker's face, nor does he need to: for him, Peter Parker is irrelevant.  This, in fact, is his mistake:  until the very end, he does not realize that the Spider is just a man.

Mary Jane, on the other hand, should make no such mistake.  Indeed, thanks to a 1980s retcon, her entire relationship with Peter Parker has been shaped by the fact that she knew he was Spider-Man before they were every introduced to each other.  His mask and costume had been an intermittent obstacle for her; this was not the life that she had sought.  But she had married Peter, and stayed with him even as he continued to wear the black costume that already frightened her.  But when Kraven adopts the Spider-Man uniform after "killing" the Spider, she is confronted by the sudden realization that the man behind the mask is not the man she knows as her husband.  Desperate, she pays an impromptu visit to Robbie Robertson, Editor of the Daily Bugle:

Why did I come here?

Because Joe Roberston is editor of the Daily Bugle? Because he's known Peter for years? Because he's a man of intelligence and integrity?

Or because...

There's someone out there. And either he's not Peter--or Peter's gone insane. Either way I---

--I can't tell him.

Her bond of trust with Peter had been strengthened by their (really, his) shared secret, but now it proves isolating.  Here, too, we are faced with symmetry:  the Kraven/Spider connection has become painfully, even lethally intense, and yet it is based on ignorance and misprision--Kraven neither knows not cares that Peter Parker is Spider-Man.  Mary Jane know all about Peter in both his identities, but remains trapped in a now-perplexing dyad because she can't reveal the very secret that an indifferent Kraven has put in jeapordy.

Mary Jane is handling this just fine, thank you

Kraven has no idea what he is doing to Mary Jane by adopting Peter's costume, but his deception of Vermin is deliberate.  By attacking the poor, tortured monster while wearing the Spider-Man costume, he has guaranteed that Vermin will not only be spurred to violence every time he sees the costume; he also gets Vermin to see the "Spider" as the same sort of horrific, superhuman totem that Kraven has created in his own mind.  "Fearful Symmetry" now verges on "Folie a deux."

Next: Bringing Up the Bodies

Hunting the Spider

Much of DeMatteis' best Marvel work can be viewed as a kind of excavation:  what lies beneath the surface of these sketchily-rendered characters? What secrets from their past can be dug up in order to reveal their greater depth?  With Fearful Symmetry: Kraven's Last Hunt, DeMatteis and Mike Zeck render this metaphor literal, by burying and exhuming its heroes multiple times, journeying to and from the underworld of the New York City sewer system, all in a plot motivated by a symbolic framework that may or may not only be entirely in the villain's head.

Kraven's Last Hunt has its own history, buried under layers of rejected pitches and rewrites.  Two separate story ideas eventually coalesced into this six-part Spider-Man sequence, one centered on the image of a character digging his way out of his own grave, and the other exploring the psychodynamics of a hero/villain relationship.  First DeMatteis wanted to do a miniseries about the Avengers character Wonder Man, whose own history with death and rebirth is one of the most notable features of an otherwise underdeveloped character. [1]. Then he had an idea involving the psychodynamics of the Batman/Joker relationship, but the pitch was rejected because of its similarity to another story DC had in the works. He retooled it to involve a different Batman villain, only to have it rejected again. Eventually, he reworked it for Spider-Man, with plans for creating an entirely new antagonist.  But then DeMatteis stumbled on the entry for Kraven the Hunter in the Marvel Universe Handbook, and he was hooked:

...they mentioned that Kraven was Russian.  For me, a total Dostoyevsky fanatic, the idea that Kraven was Russian and had the same tortured, Russian soul that the great Dostoyevsky characters had, unlocked this door in my head and suddenly I had a new understanding of this character.

DeMatteis' explanation encapsulates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the storyline that would eventually become Kraven's Last Hunt. His familiarity and engagement with  the Russian literary canon inspired him to give Kraven a particular type of emotional depth, even as that inspiration was rooted in a rather facile notion of both Dostoyevsky and the "Russian soul."  It works, but with an asterisk.

Other factors also played a role in the success of Kraven's Last Hunt:  when he was developing the idea, DeMatteis was in the throes of both divorce and depression, a bit of extratextual information that makes his depiction of newlyweds Peter and Mary Jane all the more poignant.  And, though he denies any suggestion that Kraven's Last Hunt is a response to the "darkness" of mainstream comics in the wake of Watchmen, in an interview years later DeMatteis does make the connection between his artistic collaboration with Mike Zeck and the Moore and Gibbon's powerful sense of silence and pacing in their visual storytelling.  As we've already seen, DeMatteis had already been using silent panels for dramatic and emotional effect in The Defenders, but Don Perlin's pencils were arguably not the best fit for this particular visual device.  In Zeck, DeMatteis found an artistic partner capable of both a broader range of facial expressions and a more dynamic approach to action and panel transitions. Finally, his silent panels and voice-over narration had a visual vehicle that served them well.

Previously, on What Not to Wear…

Kraven's Last Hunt did more than simply elevate a D-list villain (Zeck said that as soon as he saw the plot, he knew this would be the definitive Kraven story), but the antagonist's previously marginal status gave the story a particular resonance that a Batman/Joker comic could not have had.  DeMatteis and Zeck crafted a comic that was built on relationships, connections, and intersubjectivity. 

First, a quick recap for those who may not know or remember the story that well:  Fresh from his honeymoon, Peter Parker receives bad news about the death of an acquaintance (after worse news about the death of a friend), and is plagued by visions he shares with his old enemy, Kraven the Hunter. Kraven stalks Spider-Man, drugs him, shoots him in the face, and buries him in a grave at a cemetery. Meanwhile, the monstrous cannibal Vermin is loose in New York, stalking victims whenever he leaves is lair in the sewers.  Kraven and Vermin seem to be sharing hallucinatory nightmares. Distraught that she can't find her husband, Mary Jane searches for him on the streets of New York. When she is attacked, she is saved by a man in a Spider-Man costume who is uncharacteristically brutal and uncommunicative: either Peter has gone insane, or he has been replaced. An increasingly unhinged Kraven captures Vermin.  Peter turns out not to be dead, but is having visions of spiders and dead people as he claws his way out of the grave, horrified to learn that he has been underground for two weeks. After reuniting with Mary Jane, he confronts Kraven (both are dressed in the black Spider-Man costume). Kraven sets Vermin against Spider-Man, but then lets  both of them go.  Alone in his mansion, Kraven puts a rifle in his mouth and kill himself.  In the final issue, Spider-Man confronts Vermin in a vicious battle, eventually turning him over the police.  Peter and Mary Jane are reunited yet again, and Kraven is buried by his henchmen.

This six-parter, serialized over two months in three different Spider-Man titles, was the first to explore Mary Jane's and Peter's emotional connection now that they were married, with Spider-Man's costume (and particularly his mask) continually threatening to disrupt their relationship. Not only is the black costume threatening, and not only does it literally prevent Mary Jane and Peter from seeing eye to eye, but it also, inadvertently, causes a terrifying betrayal:  Mary Jane cannot assume that the man behind the mask is her husband. [2]

The second, and central, relationship the story explores is the one between Spider-Man and Kraven.  In a comic originally entitled "Fearful Symmetry," their connection is profoundly asymmetrical, at least in the beginning.  Kraven is cultivating an almost mystical bond with Spider-Man, but it is based on an understanding of their mutual roles that exists entirely in his own head.  For Kraven, Peter is not Spider-Man, but "the Spider," his natural enemy who represents every obstacle and setback in his unnaturally long life. 

The third set of relationships involves Vermin, a young man turned into a human rat hybird by the Nazi villain Baron Zemo in DeMatteis and Zeck's Captain America run.  A cannibalistic denizen of the sewers, Vermin would prove an excellent fit to a story of burials, deaths, and resurrections.  Even more important, as an unwitting pawn in Kraven's hunt of the "Spider," he repeatedly attacks Spider-Man and evinces a visceral repulsion that, along with his experience at Kraven's hands, pushes the hero into dangerously violent territory.  Vermin's involvement raises the stakes, threatening Peter's sense of his own humanity.

And it is his humanity that is at issue throughout all six parts of Kraven's Last Hunt.  From his early days, Spider-Man's cast of characters was something of a bestiary: his villains included a Vulture, a (Doctor) Octopus, a Rhino, a Lizard, a Chameleon, and a Scorpion, with the eventual addition of the Black Cat.  It is in this context that a hunter like Kraven starts to make sense, with DeMatteis taking things a step further:  in Kraven's mind, when he hunts Spider-Man, he is engaging with a primal creature (the "Spider").  Anticipating J. Michael Straczynski's controversial 2001 retcon, Kraven sees Spider-Man as a totem.

Notes

[1] After dying at the end of his very first appearance  ("The Coming of...the Wonder Man!" The Avengers 9, by Stan Lee, Don Heck, and Dick Ayres, October 1964), his brain patterns provided the basis for the personality of the Synthezoid vision. He would appear as either a ghost, a comatose body, or a zombie several times in the 1970s, before finally being revived in 1976. The experience leaves him haunted by a fear of death for  years.

[2] The black unitard looks like the original costume that became Venom, but it has the advantage of not actually being a homicidal alien symbiont.

Next: Death and the Spider

Transcending the Negative Zone

"Yesterday Never Dies!" confronts Eric Simon Payne (the Devil-Slayer) with the consequences of his own actions while doubling down on the familiar tropes of the superhero genre (monologuing villains, demons from hell, the damsel in distress). The final chapter of the triptych ("....Hunger..."), by contrast, starts as the equivalent of a theatrical production on a bare stage: Eric cradles Sunshine's dead body while sitting on a floating rock in the Negative Zone.

Don’t you hate it when this happens?

Since its introduction in Fantastic Four 51 ("The Man...This Monster!" by Stan Lee, Jack KIrby and Joe Sinnott), the Negative Zone has frequently served as a moral crucible for the individual characters who find themselves trapped in it.  A realm of anti-matter, it inevitably leaves its visitors plummeting towards an event-horizon that will destroy them.  In "This Man...This Monster!" a mad scientist who has disguised himself as The Thing has a change of heart, rescues his hated rival Reed Richards, and resigns himself to his impending destruction in the immediate aftermath of his moral redemption. Years later, an alternate version of Reed (from Counter-Earth, on the other side of the sun) initially consigns the "real" Reed to the Negative Zone, only to, like the false Ben Grimm, sacrifice himself and take his place in the anti-matter realm. The Zone is instrumental in the emotional growth of Rick Jones when he and Mar-Vell (the company's first Captain Marvel) alternate time there.  Rick Moody would later mine the Negative Zone for its symbolic resonance in his 1994 novel Ice Storm, but it is the film adaptation that captures the Zone's significance best:

To find yourself in the negative zone, as the Fantastic Four often do, means all every day assumptions are inverted. Even the Invisible Girl herself becomes visible and so she loses the last semblance of her power. It seems to me that everyone exists partially on a negative zone level, some people more than others. In your life, it's kind of like you dip in and out of it, a place where things don't quite work out the way they should. But for some people, the negative zone tempts them. And they end up going in, going in all the way.

Having finally accepted some measure of responsibility for the deaths he has caused, Eric suddenly realizes why his cloak as transported him to the Negative Zone: "I am here-- to die." For everyone else who has been trapped in the explosive belt of the Zone, death appears to be inevitable--there is no escape route available (aside from the one the writers open up to their heroes at the last second). But the Devil Slayer's experience of the Zone is different:  his Shadow Cloak can transport him out of the Zone at any moment. And, indeed, it does, several times, right before the asteroid he stand upon explodes. 

Once again, deMatteis uses the Marvel toolbox for allegorical purposes:  Eric's lifelong problem is his propensity for avoiding consequences (the Negative Zone) at the last second (using the Shadow Cloak). "Hunger" frames Eric's supernatural powers and human weakness in terms of an endless capacity for choice and evasion:  "There are so many worlds to walk, so many wonder to behold, and --in all the limitless cosmos--only I have access to these myriad realms." This freedom is its own kind of trap, because it saves him from every unbearable confrontation at the last second:  his morality (he leaves the Negative Zone right before an explosion four times), his dependency on alcohol (the ghost of Sunshine spurs him to leave a bar), his self-loathing (smashing a mirror in a filthy alley), his deflection of blame (retreating from the house of the mobster for whom he worked as a hitman, after being reminded that his sins are his own), his envy (the vain fury he feels when he visits a wounded veteran friend who managed to create a real life for himself), and his ex-wife Cory's terrifying call to prayer and faith).  It makes sense that this last installment is told by Eric in the first person, because his dilemma is that he can never escape himself.

Or rather, he cannot escape himself if he refuses to look outside himself.  This is where Cory comes in, both as a disappointing, familiar plot device (the "good woman" whose love is her only value in the narrative) and as a restatement of deMatteis's Dostoyevskian theme.  Yes, Cory was mistaken to put her faith in the false messiah David, but this turned out to be an important step on her path to true salvation: faith in Christ. Despite the fact that he strikes her, despite all the misery she has put up with during and after their marriage, she jumps into his Shadow Cloak as he once again teleports to the Negative Zone, ready to die along with him.  Unwilling to let her, he leaves the Zone for the final time, and beg Cory to help him believe.

"...Hunger..." has turned into a remix of Crime and Punishment," borrowing from the point in the book that so many readers find the least satisfying: Raskolnikov's acceptance of Christianity. Echoing the novel's epilogues, the last page even jumps ahead four months to an epilogue of its own, with Doctor Strange reading a letter from Cory describing their life now that he has turned himself in to the authorities and gone to prison.  As in Crime and Punishment, we do not see Eric's conversion first-hand, a distance that helps make it palatable.  And after being confronted by Eric's tortured consciousness for the entire issue, this distance is a bit of relief.  The issue ends with Stephen Strange shedding a single tear, emblematic of deMatteis's strengths and weaknesses as a chronicler of spiritual growth:  he hits all the right notes, but cannot resist the cliches of melodrama.

Next: Hunting the Spider

Let the Sunshine in

What follows is DeMatteis' Devil-Slayer Triptych:  the aforementioned "Renewal!", "Yesterday Never Dies!" (Defenders 104, by DeMatteis, Perlin, and Sinnot), and "...Hunger..." (Defenders 110, by DeMatteis, Perlin, and Esposito).  While his teammates are finding their bliss in Africa in the first story, Eric encounters a drug-addled ex-hippie who calls himself "Sunshine."[1]   Because Sunshine is able to pierce the veil of illusion that hides his costume from ordinary humans, Eric mistakes Sunshine for a demon, before realizing that Sunshine's perceptions have been permanently altered by years of drug abuse.

Eric's first encounter with Sunshine consists of repeated threats of violence on his part, followed by recognition of kinship and a resolution to help himself before he can help the addict whose squalid life so disgusts him.  Given his circumstances, Sunshine's name looks like a cruel joke, and yet he and Eric do manage to shed light on each other.  They are both doubles and opposites:  each of their lives was changed irrevocably by Vietnam (Eric's participation in the war and Sunshine's rejection of it as a blossoming flower child), and each has the capacity (limited and flawed though it may be) to see beneath the surface of the everyday. 

yeah, that sounds totally sane

Eric and Sunshine share another distinguishing feature:  each of them has outlived his context, resulting not just in their misunderstandings about each other, but in an ongoing generic awkwardness.  Sunshine (like the would-be-messiah David before him) is a hippy in a world that has moved on, and Eric is constantly on the lookout for supernatural demons, even when none are to be found.  To be fair, Eric does live in a Marvel superhero comic where demons are real, but his experiences have permanently damaged his capacity to recognize the mundane.  When he stumbles into Sunshine's life, he does not see the far from fantastic misery that characterizes a conventional addiction plot.  For his part, Sunshine has long since abandoned the ordinary perception of a default realist environment in favor of the hallucinatory charms of powerful narcotics.

In the middle installment, Eric follows through on his promise to help Sunshine, albeit with tragic results. "Yesterday Never Dies!" brings back Cory, this time as a hostage held by Ian Fate, a reporter-turned-sorceror whose wife and child Eric killed during his mob hitman days. Cory, Sunshine and Eric now form a triad linked by attempts at salvation, victimization, and self-sacrifice.  Eric plans to bring Sunshine in for treatment before being derailed by the threat to Cory; Cory is stabbed to death while protecting Eric from a demon; the Cory who dies turns out to be Sunshine masked by one of Fate's spells, and Eric himself is dissuaded from taking revenge on Fate by a teammate's reminder that this entire situation is Eric's own fault.

Self-sacrifice and the recovery from crippling guilt are classic Dostoevskian themes, but DeMatteis adds a context that departs from Dostoevsky's Christian traditions.  Christianity assumes an equal capacity for sacrifice among all believers, while also according all sincere sacrifice an equal value.  "Yesterday Never Dies!" points to the pagan antecedents of sacrifice that are the centerpiece of Giorgio Agamben's theories of biopolitics: not all lives are valuable enough to be worth of sacrifice. In his seminal study of the same name, Agamben analyzes the Roman concept of the "Homo sacer,"  a social outcast who can be killed by anyone without impunity, but cannot be the subject of a religious sacrifice.  Payne's own backstory is the drama of a man who has lost sight of the value of human life, first in Vietnam, then in his work as a hitman.  Sunshine can no longer see the value of his own life, and it is to Payne's credit that he has endeavored to see this filthy addict as human.  Here Payne must use the opposite of his "demon sight": he must look beyond superficial appearance to the humanity that lies beneath.

Corey is sacrificed twice over the course of "Yesterday Never Dies!" yet, on each occasion, her death is an illusion. The first time Fate has her suspended in mid-air over a pentagram, with six magical knives pointing at her body.  A cross between a stereotypical Satanic offering and a Tarot card, this scenario, aimed as it as at Payne, is not about Corey at all ("just a projection made convincing by the images of Ikonn"). Fate does not need her death; he only needs its effect on Payne. Corey's second "death" is different: now she has chosen to put herself in harm's way, shielding Eric with her body and dying from a knife wound. Now the subject of the sacrifice has agency and purpose. The only hitch is that "Corey" is actually Sunshine, disguised by yet another illusion.

Fate, in his quest for vengeance, proves himself to be an imperfect victim. Yes, his wife and child did not deserve to die at Payne's hands,  but Fate abducts and disguises Sunshine because he cannot accord the addict's life the same value as Cory's:

I couldn't take an innocent woman's life! I sent Cory back home..../ But I still had to hurt you--you see that, don't you? That's why I transported that pathetic junkie here...surrounded him in illusion and silence! / He wasn't innocent! He was worthless!/ But I could see that you cared about him!

When Wonder Man reminds Payne that everything that has happened with Fate is all his fault, he is not simply reinforcing the themes of guilt and redemption that are evident in each installment of DeMatteis' Devil Slayer triptych.  He is also highlighting the problems of agency and misprision that manifest themselves throughout these stories.  Payne's guilt is undeniable, and his quest to exterminate demons is an obvious externalization of his own failed attempts at exorcising the devils that have been haunting him since Vietnam.  But even as his mental powers give him the capacity to see demons in disguise, these powers consistently fail him, because he lacks the capacity for clear moral judgment.  Instead, he projects his guilt and shame onto others, reducing them to players in his own psychodrama.

Note

[1] In his few, brief appearances as a minor character in The Defenders, he is always referred to as "Sunshine" (in quotation marks).  I have left the quotation marks out, because I find them distracting, not to mention unnecessary ("Devil-Slayer" is fine without quotation mark, but "Sunshine" isn't?).

Next: Transcending the Negative Zone

Driving Out the Demons

The defeat of Satan and the Six-Fingered-Hand (in the 100th anniversary issue, no less) was thus a victory that the Defenders could not reasonably celebrate.  In a move that was uncharacteristic for Marvel at the time, DeMatteis chose to let his characters sit with their feelings of loss and despair for the better part of an entire issue ("Renewal," Defenders 101, by DeMatteis, Perlin, and Joe Sinnot).  Or perhaps "better" is not the word here; with the exception of one powerful plotline, DeMatteis displays his worst, most mawkish instincts. Not only is Patsy comforted by a bald-headed little girl in a cancer ward who is wise beyond her years, but Dr. Strange and Clea regain their appreciation of life when the Silver Surfer takes them to "Africa"("It's no longer the heart of darkness Jospeh Conrad wrote about some sixty-five years ago, but it still [sic] a continent that evokes a deep, primal awe"").  Among the "simple people" in the village that welcomes them, the two mystics are renewed.

The saving grace of an issue that tries so hard while falling so flat is yet another character whom DeMatteis had recently adopted as his own: Eric Simon Payne, the Devil-Slayer. Created by David Anthony Kraft and Rich Buckler  in 1975 as Demon Hunter for Atlas Comics, the chracter initially had better luck killing off comic books than denizens of hell.  He appeared only once before the company shut its doors.  With a few minor changes, they revived him as Devil-Slayer in Marvel Spotlight 33 (April 1977),  the last issue of a series that had run for six years.  Undaunted, Kraft brought him into The Defenders for a compelling three-issue sequence called "Xenogenesis: Day of the Demons."  From the beginning, Kraft set Payne up as a flawed, tragic figure: a traumatized Vietnam veteran and soldier of fortune who gained a mystically-empowered cloak and psychic abilities when he joined a demonic cult.

In other words, Devil-Slayer was the sort of character that DeMatteis found irresistible:  flawed, tortured, with a tragic backstory steeped in magic and horror.  Like Daimon Hellstrom, he was a sensible choice for a storyline involving demons and devils. His very name is as much a clever bit of irony as it is a mission statement, as the only devils Eric Simon Payne cannot slay are his own.

Thus what looks like just another supernaturally-themed guest appearance (after Dracula and Ghost Rider, but before Man-Thing) is actually Devil-Slayer's introduction as a semi-regular Defender. As with Nighthawk just a few months earlier, DeMatteis introduces Devil-Slayer in Defenders 98 ("Slouching toward Bethlehem," by DeMatteis, Perlin, and Sinnott) by focusing on a meaningful relationship from his troubled past:  his (estranged) wife, Cory, who writes to Eric that she has discovered true happiness on an Israeli kibbutz run by David Kessler, a self-proclaimed messiah.

Devil-Slayer's introduction to the team takes place in an issue that displays DeMatteis' growing mastery of his craft:  "Slouching toward Bethlehem" simultaneously advances the overall plot (confronting the fifth of the hand's six demons), develops the themes that would prove central to DeMatteis' run on the book, and deploys most of the comic's recent character transformations to move the plot along.  In order to investigate this mysterious messiah, Dr. Strange yet again cast an "unstable" teleportation spell, this time to bring the team to Israel (later we learn that forcing Strange to repeatedly use this spell is part of the Hand's plot to weaken the barriers between Earth and Hell).  No one thinks about the time difference, however, and Kyle Richmond, whose ability to move his body now only functions at nighttime, quickly relapses into paralysis once he suddenly finds himself in daylight.  Rather than complain (much), Kyle volunteers to be a guinea pig for David Kessler's alleged healing powers.

In one of the most tightly-controlled sequences in all DeMatteis' Defenders run, the next six pages show Kyle's successful healing by David (involving a full-body baptism-style immersion followed by thunder and lightning) while a reunited Eric and Cory continue their ongoing argument about faith as Cory tells her estranged husband about the angelic visitation that granted David his powers. At the sight of Kyle standing on his own two feet, all the Defenders feel the need to reassess their opinion of David's claims, all except the Son of Satan.  DeMatteis' is creating a brief tale of faith, disillusionment, and persistence that now unfolds in a series of visually striking revelations:  first David strips the illusions masking the true appearance of Daimon Hellstrom and Gargoyle, then David summons the "angels" who have empowered him, only to have Dr. Strange reveal them to be demons. David himself is completely taken over by "Hyppokri--demon of the hand!" before refusing to let himself be used any longer and ending his own life by throwing himself onto Eric's outstretched sword.

As Devil-Slayer, Eric's power is to see the demons who disguise themselves as humans, but his first appearance in the Six Fingered Hand Saga continually calls into question the extent to which appearances can be trusted. Those who appear to be angels are actually demons, while those who look demonic (such as Isaac and Daimon) are on the side of the (metaphorical) angels. Cory's faith allows her to persist in believing in the good that has been corrupted by evil ("Hyppokri"), while Eric is still, for the moment stuck in his black-and-white outlook.

Though DeMatteis did not create Devil-Slayer, he zeroed in on elements of the character's back story to use him as a vehicle for stories of disillusionment, enlightenment and redemption, both of which are featured in  "Slouching towards Bethlehem:"  post-Vietnam America (David was a hippy before finding "God') and his relationship with Cory.  Cory was a cipher in Kraft's and Buckler's hands (to be fair, they had little opportunity to do anything with her), while DeMatteis folds her into the redemption narrative so effortlessly that one might think that had always been her role.  Cory's function as the vehicle of Eric's eventual salvation is, of course, a familiar stereotype, but she does not accomplish this miracle on her own.  Rather, as someone who believes in God and Eric, she is poised to pick up the pieces when he is finally ready to rebuild his life.

Next: Let the Sunshine in

Dostoevsky's Defenders

Over the next three years, DeMatteis would follow the example of Gerber and Englehart in their team books: introducing character development by focusing on heroes who did not have books of their own. Though Dr. Strange and the Hulk would continue to play a role throughout most of his run on the book, DeMatteis took the opportunity to develop two Defenders stalwarts (Hellcat and Nighthawk), two characters from Marvel's fringes (the Son of Satan and Devil-Slayer), and one whom he created in his third issue:  Isaac Christians, the Gargoyle.  All of them wrestle with sin and guilt, and all of them manage to find redemption. 

"Sin" is a strong word for a superhero comic, but entirely appropriate for all of these characters, with the possible exception of Nighthawk.  Not that Kyle Richmond lived a life free of error or remorse; we have already seen what he did to Mindy.  But even when he is wallowing in self-pity, Nighthawk never avails himself of Christian theological language as a framework for his guilt. [1] The other characters, however, establish a pattern that DeMatteis will develop for decades, melding a Christian narrative of sin and salvation with a New Age framing of grace and revelation as a variation on satori, the sudden, fleeting experience of a truth that cannot be put into words.

Given DeMatteis's Sixties countercultural orientation, one might look to the novels of Hermann Hesse as a possible source of the writer's preoccupation with sin and salvation, were it not for two important factors: first, DeMatteis' characters do not need to maximalize their sinfulness before seeking redemption, and second, DeMatteis's own words point to Dostoevsky's novels as ur-texts. Most of the direct evidence for his love of Dostoevsky is found in DeMatteis' other comics from the 1980s, from the Russian author's inclusion in Moonshadow's formative reading, the revelation that Spider-Man's foe the Chameleon is actually named "Dmitiry Smerdyakov" (a last name that only exists in The Brothers Karamazov). A self-described "Dostoevsky fanatic," DeMatteis used the title "Crime and Punishment" for a Two-Face story at DC and cited the novel as part of the inspiration for "Fearful Symmetry." DeMatteis' makes no bones about Dostoevsky's centrality to his development as both a reader and writer: 

When I read Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov in high school, they seeped in through my brain, wormed their way down into my nervous system...and ripped me to shreds.  No other novelist has ever explored the staggering duality of existence, illuminated the mystical heights and the despicable depths of the human heart, with the brilliance of Dostoyevsky.

Both of the novels DeMatteis name-checks foreground themes that, with a change of context and genre, are legible to the superhero comics reader:  a young man's belief that he might be the superman (Crime and Punishment) and an exploration of the nature of crime, sin, and justice (The Brothers Karamazov).  For DeMatteis' first arc, however, the Dostoevsky title that comes closest to home is Demons. From Issues 94-100, followed by a thematic coda in 101, the Defenders face off against a hellish threat called the Six-Fingered Hand.  Each finger on the hand is a different demon, nearly all of them bearing a name suggestive of a particular sin or power ("Avarrish"; "Hyppokri").  They are a threat that seems tailor-made for the professional exorcists sometime-Defender Daimon Hellstrom, who, as his nom de guerre indicates, is literally the spawn of the devil. 

No, this is not the cover to The Brothers Karamazov

Over the course of each of six issues, the Defenders face off against a  series of demons that have either possessed or seduced a host, leading to conflicts that are as much about salvation as they are about superheroic violence.  Indeed, their very first opponent quickly becomes their ally:  Isaac Christians, an old man who made a pact with the Hand to save his dying town (and, along the way, trapping him in a monstrous, mystically empowered Gargoyle body).  Isaac's repentance is immediate, and his redemption complete by the time the Six Fingered Hand saga is over.  The old woman he injured in his assault on Patsy Walker's home has no memory of the attack, eventually even falling in love with him, and his fellow Defenders quickly learn to rely on his homespun wisdom and almost reflexive inclination towards grace and forgiveness.

By rights, a fight against demons from hell (who turn out to be working for Satan himself) should have been a recipe for simplistic heroism.  Where is there room for subtlety when your enemy is the embodiment of absolute evil? For The Defenders, a comic whose previous three years had suffered from an almost oppressive lightness, struggling with the forces of darkness imbued the heroes with a sorely-needed darker overtones.  The immediate beneficiary was Patsy Walker, a character whom Englehart had plucked out of Marvel's older teen soap opera comics, first to depict a failing marriage (in Amazing Adventures, starring the Beast), and then to transform her into a determined, self-actualized "I'm-not-a-feminist-but" survivor as the Hellcat (in The Avengers). After she joined the Defenders, she quickly became a one-note, perky adventurer who could not stop making terrible puns about cats.

The death of Patsy's mother opened the door to more emotionally serious storytelling in the last issues of Hannigan's run, but DeMatteis immediately upped the ante:  Patsy is possessed by a demon in the very first chapter of his first extended storyline, a trauma exacerbated by her discovery that her soul had been promised to the Six-Fingered Hand by her dying mother. Though rescued by her fellow Defenders, Patsy struggles with the aftermath of her experience and the revelation about her mother.  Over the next few issues, she displays a hitherto-unseen dark side at inopportune moments:  flirting with Daimon before scratching his face with her claws, or laughing maniacally at the dramatic irony that the manager of the demonically-empowered death metal rock star turned out not only to be the one who is taken off to hell after  making a deal with the devil, but is also the rock star's brother.

It's not all darkness, however; even as Patsy seems to be heading back down the road to hell, she and Daimon develop romantic feelings for each other that could point the way towards the light.  There is only one small problem: in the last chapter of the Six-Fingered Hand Saga, Satan (falsely) claims to be Patsy's father (which would make Daimon her half-brother).  This is not the only roadblock in their relationship:  in order to win the battle against Satan, the Defenders were forced to encourage the dominance of Daimon's Darksoul (his demonic heritage), leading him to decide that his place was in Hell rather than on Earth.  All of this would eventually be resolved:  Daimon would return to Earth and lose his Darksoul, Patsy would discover that she is not the Daughter of Satan, and the two would marry and live, if not happily ever after, happily for a time. [2]

Notes

[1] Curiously, after Nighthawk's death in Defenders 106, theology came after Kyle Richmond with a vengeance.  Resurrected by Mephisto, Nighthawk was cursed with a mystic sight that allowed him to see crimes before they happened. Kyle's visions are explored in the alternate reality series Universe X, only to be taken away during a subsequent volume of The Defenders.

[2] In the 1990s, Hellstrom gets back both his Darksoul and his own solo book, leading Patsy to lose her sanity and commit suicide.  Eventually, Patsy is resurrected and restarts her life and career as Hellcat, with Daimon only an intermittent obstacle.

Next: Driving Out the Demons

How to Play with Your Toys

The Defenders was DeMatteis' first significant run on a Marvel comic; he debuted with issue 92 ("Eternity..Humanity...Oblivion!", with art by Don Perlin and Pablo Marcos, February 1981), seven months before he began writing Captain America.  The series proved to be the ideal vehicle for DeMatteis' burgeoning skills as a comics writer. First appearing in 1971, The Defenders were initially a triumvirate composed of Dr. Strange, the Incredible Hulk, and Namor the Sub-Mariner.  None of them were team players (that was the point), but the stories were popular enough to land them their own title in 1972. After a few appearances by the Silver Surfer, they were joined by The Valkyrie (an amnesiac Norse goddess inhabiting the body of a human madwoman) and Nighthawk (former bored rich boy Kyle Richmond and villainous Batman-clone-turned hero). Well into its ninth year, The Defenders was a comic that had seen better days.

As a "non-team," with no fixed roster, leader, or regular meetings, the Defenders hit their mark early on under the pen of Steve Englehart. Englehart was also writing The Avengers at the same time, a circumstance he exploited to great effect in his multi-part Avengers/Defenders clash, an entertaining crossover that was among the first of its kind at Marvel.  After a brief interim by Len Wein, The Defenders fell into the hands of Steve Gerber, whose time on the book included some of his best work for the company.

Gerber saw the team as a collection of freaks and outcasts. At their best, The Defenders was not just metaphorically cerebral; it came close to being literally cerebral as well. Issue 21 (“Enter…the Headmen!”) was both a self-contained, if puzzling, story and the lead-in to the nearly yearlong storyline that capped Gerber’s tenure on the book. [1] The three Headmen of the title are obscure villains who each appeared in the publisher's pre-Marvel age science fiction horror comics: Arthur Nagan, whose experiments with interspecies organ transplants culminated in an ape rebellion and the grafting of his head on a gorilla body; Jerry Morgan, whose research into shrinking technology resulted in the miniaturization of his skull, but not the soft tissues that contained it; and Chondu the Mystic, a forgettable, minor-league guru.  The conflict that ensued was entertaining, but it also highlighted Gerber's approach to the book as a series of talking heads engaged in an ongoing talking cure.  For Gerber, the Defenders were less of a (non-) team than an encounter group.

With Gerber's departure after issue 41, the book floundered.  David Anthony Kraft retained some of the whimsy and introspection in his first year as writer, before giving the book over to random wackiness (a televised call to every hero to join the team) and continuity obsession (revisiting the Valkyrie's Asgardian backstory). When Kraft was succeeded  by Ed Hannigan, the writing for the book was on the wall:  for the two years preceding DeMatteis' arrival, The Defenders was the Platonic ideal of mediocrity.

One of the most remarkable things about DeMatteis' freshman outing on The Defenders was that it had a follow-up.  DeMatteis had done so many fill-in issues that his name on the cover after the end of the Hannigan era was a likely sign that the issue was more palate cleanser than appetizer. There were, however, a few hints, because the story contained something that had been absent from The Defenders for years: attention to interpersonal dynamics and character development.

"Eternity..Humanity...Oblivion!" sets the tone with a splash page that is refreshing for its unequivocal rejection of comic book action: Dr. Strange and his lover/disciple Clea watch as the most physically powerful Defender, the Incredible Hulk, sits on the floor and plays with Strange's statuettes of his archenemy Dormammu and his departed mentor the Ancient One as if they were action figures dragooned into a little girl's tea party:  "Then big wizard say to fire-head, 'Hello--want to come to my house and sing songs?'" Playtime is interrupted not by a sudden menace, but by the arrival of another Defender: Nighthawk.

Nighthawk is in the throes of a deep depression as a result of events in a DeMatteis' comic  from the previous month that really was a fill-in: "To Judge a Nighthawk!" (Marvel Team-Up 101, January 1981, with art by Jerry Bingham and Mike Esposito). In that story, DeMatteis used two of what would become his favorite tricks to bring instant depth to a shallow character:  linking back to an obscure Steve Gerber moment, and expanding on a previously undisclosed or underdeveloped tragic back story.   As one of the Defenders who did not star in his own book, Nighthawk (Kyle Richmond) got a great deal of Gerber's attention.  In the very complicated Headmen arc, Kyle briefly exists only as a disembodied brain, reliving his life's greatest failures. One of these was a drunk driving accident in college that killed his girlfriend, Mindy. In Marvel Team-Up, DeMatteis reveals that Mindy survived, but as a vengeful, psychically-gifted paraplegic who is obsessed with making Kyle pay for what he has done to her. Gerber designed Mindy to be nothing more than the collateral damage of Kyle's irresponsibility; she was not just "fridged" (sacrificed for the sake of the male hero's character development), but may as well have been born shrink-wrapped in the refrigerated goods section.  Her revival at DeMatteis's hands does not do Mindy any favors:  even when she eventually becomes a recurring character in The Defenders, her entire existence revolves around Kyle.

But when Kyle appears on Dr. Strange's doorstep, Mindy is simply the absent cause of Kyle's despair. Strange listens to Kyle's story, and his reaction may as well be that of a longtime reader of The Defenders who had had enough of Kyle's whining (showing that such is the case of DeMatteis himself): "Not only is your self-pity distasteful, Kyle--but it has distorted your perceptions beyond belief"

What follows is a clever pastiche of the Silver Age comics of DeMatteis' youth: Strange's involuntary astral journey to meet with Eternity (the humanoid embodiment of all existence) is an obvious Ditko homage, while the story itself is structured like a classic Gardner Fox Justice League of America comic. [2]   Since the Defenders must find the three errant pieces of Eternity living out human lives across the globe before their extended separation destroys all of existence, Strange divides the team into three pairs on separate missions:  the Hellcat and Son of Satan Daimon Hellstrom are dispatched to an Indian temple, the Valkyrie and the Sub-Mariner journey to a small Greek island, and Nighthawk and the Hulk find themselves in a remote Russian village. Fox divided up the JLA in the interest of plot dynamics, but here, the three different sets of Defenders allow for instant interpersonal drama.  Patsy Walker, the Hellcat, is still emotionally wounded by the death of her domineering mother. If nothing else, Daimon's response ("If it helps--know that I, too, have been torn by conflicting feelings towards a parent") shows that among the Son of Satan's many powers is understatement. The Hulk's limited intelligence means that Nighthawk will have to grapple alone with the ethical quandary of not informing a boy's adopted parents that they will never see him again (since the boy is one of the missing pieces of Eternity), while Namor the Sub-Mariner horrifies Valkyrie with his casual lie to a woman missing her husband (another wayward piece of Eternity) that she is now a widow.

The different approaches taken by all three pairs, as well as the disagreements each pair of Defenders has about the best course of action, constitute an implicit mission statement for DeMatteis's run on the book.  The emphasis on interpersonal conflict is, of course, one of the key features that distinguished Marvel from DC in the Silver Age; this is what made Steve Englehart's brief run on Justice League of America in the late 1970s such a shock after years of the team's bland bonhomie.  It also highlights one of the inherent appeals of a team book, which is watching the characters interact with each other.  In the case at hand, the attention to character work also has thematic resonance:  these very diverse heroes are tasked with convincing three newly-individuated parts of the monolith Eternity to relinquish their identity for the sake of those they have learned to love.  Their sacrifice is consistent with the altruistic morality of most Marvel superheroes at the same time that it represents the exact opposite of what DeMatteis has already started to do with the Defenders: explore the characters as individuals rather than as underdeveloped cogs in a failing team book.

In the decades that follow, DeMatteis will consistently double down on transcendence and the overcoming of the individual ego, but in "Eternity..Humanity...Oblivion!" this same process is one of great sacrifice.  Granted, by the end, the three Eternity shards feel the comfort of returning "home," but their decision to do so (after being persuaded by an emotionally vulnerable Nighthawk) requires the abandonment of their own desires for the sake of the greater good.  These three characters only existed because of a rejection of the transcendence to which they would eventually reluctantly acquiesce.

All of which shows the issue's opening pages to be particularly clever: watching the enormous Hulk use tiny figurines of Dr. Strange's supporting characters as dolls is an innocent counterpoint to the nearly apocalyptic experiment undertaken by Eternity: playing with actual human lives raises the stakes too high.

Notes

[1] This is despite the fact that, even here, DeMatteis managed to mine some earlier Gerber material.  Gerber's wrote only a handful of largely forgotten issues of the series, yet DeMatteis brings back Gerber's version of the Ameridroid, a character whose return was unlikely to have been a response to popular demand.

In Comics Interview 40, DeMatteis remarked that it was a relief to write Moonshadow and "funnel" his perspective "through my brain and translate it into this fantasy universe. ...Before it was like, 'Well how do I funnel my point of view or my life or whatever through Captain America?'...Which is hard to do through Captain America...Or the Defenders. Or whatever.'"

[2] "It was basically the Defenders as the Justice League. Comics Interview 39, 9

Next: Dostoevsky's Defenders

A Night at the Opera

DeMatteis' early years on Marvel's superhero properties yielded a result that is difficult to assess aesthetically: what, exactly, was he aiming for, and what would constitute success?  While the 80s were when his career as a professional comics writer took off, his first Marvel superhero stories read like an extended apprenticeship. Their very awkwardness is yet another feature that connects him with the best Marvel work of the previous decade.  In Marvel Comics in the 1970s, I argued that most of the best comics I discussed required a kind of curation:  as good as they were, they were not, like Watchmen or Maus, books that you could simply hand to a non-comics reader and expect them to appreciate.  This was not only because of the obstacles posed by continuing, non-stop monthly storytelling (i.e., the stories were not designed to stand on their own), but also a result of adherence to certain conventions of mainstream comic book storytelling that would be jarring to the uninitiated.  This includes a tendency towards histrionics and melodrama that can be effective with the right audience, but might seem like camp to less friendly or forgiving readers.

The earnestness I alluded to in the previous entry combines with an intense emotionality, a recurring focus on self-discovery and trauma, and an unabashed propensity for melodrama that reward the reader's empathy while requiring a high tolerance for a lack of subtlety.  Subtlety, though, was never a hallmark of Marvel's superhero output (Gerber was capable of it, but not consistently), nor would it be fair to expect it.  To appreciate the best of Marvel in general, and DeMatteis in particular, is to recognize that subtlety is not a Marvel value.  Instead, just as Stan Lee argued for the "illusion of change" rather than change itself, much of Marvel's most sophisticated superhero output cultivated an illusion of subtlety (through sophisticated references and storytelling techniques) that was nonetheless wielded like a blunt instrument.  And this is what DeMatteis excelled at, particularly in his runs on The Defenders and the Spider-Man line. 

In The Defenders and Spectacular Spider-Man (as well as a number of his later comics, such as DC's Doctor Fate), this translates into a tendency not just to telegraph moments or revelation or character breakthrough, but to set them off visually, verbally, and even typographically. DeMatteis favored the use of panel layouts that would, at key points, slow down time and close in on faces, while entire sentences would be broken up into words and phrases, spread out over the panels, often with oversized, bold fonts.  It is a verbal/visual approach to subjectivity and theme that might be characterized as operatic.  As in an opera soliloquy, time comes to a near stop, with all the emphasis on the body, sound, and character of the soloist.  Like the Stan Lee approach to interiority I discussed in Marvel Comics in the 1970s, it represents the interior by turning it into the exterior: verbalizing and demonstrating in a revelatory manner that, like a soliloquy or a song-and-dance number in a musical, requires the audience to suspend their adherence to naturalistic storytelling for the duration of the interruption.

Next: How to Play with Your toys

That Seventies Writer

Chapter Four:

Grace Notes:

The Early Comics of J.M. DeMatteis

That Seventies Writer

Of all the writers who were part of the next generation of Marvel creators,J.M. DeMatteis was the one with the deepest roots in the Marvel comics of the 1970s.  Granted, Claremont actually was a writer at Marvel in the 1970s, but his work helped set the company on the path that would define the 1980s. DeMatteis, who started his career doing fill-ins and obscure titles at DC before moving on to fill-ins and obscure titles at Marvel, combined Gerber's sense of the absurd, Englehart's preoccupation with transcendence, and the general Seventies Marvel emphasis on interiority to breathe life into neglected Marvel characters while never skimping on the melodrama that was the company's stock in trade. But where his predecessors had grown up on both Stan Lee and French Existentialism, DeMatteis's sensibilities were formed by Seventies Marvel, the Russian classics, and an attachment to the hippie ethos that yielded a deep commitment to New Age spirituality.  The resulting comics, even while often overwrought, displayed a sincerity that was a refreshing counterpoint to the "grim and gritty" spirit that would eventually dominate mainstream comics in the late 80s and early 90s.

Despite his relatively large output at Marvel between 1980 and 1987, DeMatteis is not necessarily thought of as a "Marvel writer." While two of his Marvel projects from that decades are widely considered classics, only one of them, a six-part Spider-Man story initially called "Fearful Symmetry" and better known as "Kraven's Last Hunt," is set in the Marvel Universe. The other, the twelve-issue limited series Moonshadow, was the pride of the company's creator-owned Epic imprint before being reprinted twice by other publishers, first by DC's Vertigo line (1994-1998), then by Dark Horse (2019). Subtitled "A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups," Moonshadow would establish DeMatteis as one of the then-rare comics writers who could work successfully in the liminal space between children's literature and adult entertainment.  Years later, his whimsical and moving fantasy series Abadazad (with art by Mike Ploog) was so compelling that, when its publisher, Crossgen, went bust after releasing only three issues, Disney bought the entire company in order to get the rights and allow DeMatties and Ploog to continue the story in another format. [1].

In the decades since his initial tenure at Marvel, DeMatteis has brought out a number of creator-owned projects with numerous publishers, but he is probably best known for his work at DC.  There, he formed an ongoing partnership with artist turned writer Keith Giffen. The team built a reputation on their revival of the Justice League (with outstanding art by Kevin Maguire) before eventually teaming up on several other projects.  Their collaboration brought out a side of DeMatteis that was much less prominent in this early Marvel work: Giffen and DeMatties were known for their hilarious dialogue and facility with farcical plots.  Starting in the 1990s, DeMatteis would deploy his strengths with both emotionally-laden and humorous material as one of the most successful writers to combine a career in comics and animation, penning numerous episodes for both DC's and Marvel's cartoon adaptations, as well as writing six direct-to-video DC superhero features (mostly, but not entirely, adaptations of well-known comics storylines).

Not a Marvel comic

There is no shortage of humor in DeMatteis's work at Marvel in the 1980s; Moonshadow found an appealing balance between laughter and pathos, while his two "Greenberg the Vampire" stories were at least intended to be funny. Still, DeMatteis' early superhero comics were, like much of his solo writing to follow, intensely earnest.  It is an earnestness that is, in itself, rather ironic, since so much of DeMatteis' output in these years involved playing in the sandbox of one of his idols, Steve Gerber.  Not that Gerber himself was unaware of the importance of being earnest; his best work was evidence of heartfelt conviction.  But Gerber's approach was always sharpened by world-weariness and an acerbic wit. Unlike Englehart's heroes, Gerber's characters were all but incapable of transcendence.  DeMatteis was always intrigued by the possibility of redemption, for both the heroes and their antagonists.

While at Marvel, DeMatteis was simultaneously joining his more adventurous colleagues in pushing the boundaries of genre and form (with uses of silent panels and complex voiceovers reminiscent of Alan Moore) and demonstrating an ethos that was out of step with what would prove to be a harsh and cynical decade.  DeMatteis was thoughtful, clever, creative, and funny, but he was also thoroughly and unapologetically uncool. To be cool requires at least an illusion of distance and indifference, qualities in which DeMatteis would occasionally show interest, but only for the purposes of doubling down on the important of sincerity and heartfelt spirituality.

DeMatteis's time at Marvel included a four-year run on Marvel's most earnest hero, Captain America.  It was not a match made in heaven; while DeMatteis added a number of enduring characters to the Captain's mythos (particularly by extending the backstory and family relationships of his archenemy, the Red Skull), a cursory Google search for the best Captain America storylines or collections rarely includes the DeMatteis era. The character needs some sort of edge or foil to rescue him from flag-waving self-seriousness, and DeMatteis never quite found it. [2]

This chapter will instead focus on the Marvel comics that were a better fit for DeMatteis's sensibilities. Within the Marvel universe, that means primarily his run on The Defenders, along with ancillary titles that shared some of the series characters (The Gargoyle, Marvel Team-Up), as well as the aforementioned Kraven's Lost Hunt. We will also examine his work for Marvel's Epic imprint, consisting of the miniseries Blood and, most important, Moonshadow. His superhero output during these years constitutes DeMatteis' first published attempts at broaching the themes and character arcs that he would develop throughout his comics career (or at least in the comics that were not primarily intended as humor):  guilt, redemption, and the search for enlightenment.  While these themes are also present in Moonshadow, they take second place to DeMatteis' version of the Bildungsroman.  These "Songs of Innocence and Experience" (DeMatteis specifically invokes Blake's poems at key points in the series) are also a key feature in DeMatteis' later comics, and are the perfect complement to his tales of guilt and redemption.  Put a bit crudely, they represent two halves of the human/heroic lifecycle that the writer never tires of exploring: the move from childhood to maturity (innocence/experience) and enduring the weight of sin and regret (guilt and redemption).  Ideally, the endpoint of each of these phases is the same: enlightenment, however ineffable, foolish, or temporary, whose value only increases as the hero recognizes how ephemeral true enlightenment actually is.

Next: A Night at the Opera

Inside Out

What, then, were the main contributions of the Claremont and his collaborators' work on the X-Men during the 1980s?  Certainly, the series is focused on pain, both physical and psychological.  The frequent costume changes involving leather teddies, spikes, and dog collars introduce an element of bondage and discipline erotica that is hard to deny, but the connections between "bad girl" accessories and the emotional torment of the women who wear them point in a different direction. There is a voyeuristic element that functions on multiple levels, with Claremont exploiting both the inherent features of the comics form and the undeniable predilection for kink that is evident throughout his work. There is an appealing unity between form and content, external presentation and subjective experience, costume and selfhood.  These women's inner states are literally inscribed on the increasingly over-the-top outfits that their artists clothe them in.  Yes, their spandex outfits and accessories evoke both S&M and B&D, but perhaps Claremont's X-Men is not so much bondage porn as it is trauma porn.

Great moments in kink: two minor white characters, who had already been magically transformed into Native Americans, now with fetish gear

I use the term "porn" advisedly, because it is as provocative as it is appropriate.  "Trauma porn" is a derogatory term for entertainments that invite a voyeuristic enjoyment of the characters' suffering and humiliation, and the use of the phrase argues that the storytelling is less about a profound exploration of human hardship than it is about an exploitation of the audience's choice or compulsion to not look away.  In the best traditions of melodrama, Claremont keeps his readers hooked through an unrelenting exploration of his characters' pain.  Superheroes (especially Marvel superheroes) had suffered before; look no further than Spider-Man, who spend most of the sixties and seventies as an anxious, neurotic mess.  On the whole, however, superheroes' emotional states tended to be reset to their default after a few issues.

This was not the case with Claremont's X-Men.  His virtually uninterrupted seventeen-year tenure on the book meant that new writers weren't pressing the reset button whenever they were brought on board.  Claremont's readers often focus on his tendency to let subplots simmer for years on end, sometimes with little or no resolution, but his real innovation was less about plot than it was about character.  Claremont's approach was all about continuity, both his own (the opportunity to play the long game) and the comic's, but for him, continuity was an opportunity to explore emotional and psychological consequences.  Trauma was not a substitute for character development, but a springboard for the extended examination of his heroes' emotional travails.  His rescue of Carol Danvers from her misogynist send-off in The Avengers was emblematic of the difference between Claremont and so many of his colleagues.  Where Shooter, et al, barely acknowledged the damage Carol suffered at Marcus' hands, Claremont demanded a reckoning.  Claremont's "strong women" were more than simply a fantasy of (literal) female empowerment; they faced science-fictional, superheroic analogs to the abuse women confront every day, and they persevered.  There is no doubt a voyeuristic element to the extended depictions of these women's suffering, but Claremont established his own "heroine's journey," extending through victimhood to an eventual triumph. Even accounting for the occasional death and resurrection, the women of X-Men always survived the experience.

Next:

Chapter Four: Grace Notes: The Early Comics of J.M. DeMatteis

The Power of the Powerless

When Storm loses her powers in Uncanny X-Men 185 ("Public Enemy"), everyone involved recognizes it as a tragedy. Forge, the newly-introduced mutant genius who invented the power neutralizer, puts it plainly: "You stripped her of her powers! You've destroyed her!!" But the next issue, "Lifedeath" (Claremont, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Terry Austin) forces both Storm and reader to reassess the damage. "Lifedeath" is widely recognized as an X-Men classic, with no small credit to the gorgeous art of Windsor-Smith (who, by that point, was a rare contributor to superhero comics).  "Lifedeath" is an example of one of Claremont's greatest strengths as a writer: his ability to use his collaborator's particular visual strengths to the story's advantage. Claremont is far less wordy in this issue, with fewer captions and word balloons. Instead, he trusts the artist to convey his characters' emotions, resulting in a comic that, while filled with clever conversation, is much quieter than the average issue of Uncanny X-Men.

The comic begins with a depressed Ororo unwilling to get out of bed, despite Forge's best efforts. The events of the previous issue are recapped through one of Forge's holograms, which recontruct the scene of Forge wading into the water to bring Storm's powerless, unconscious body to shore.  Awake, Storm walks through the hologram, as if walking on water, and engages in a brief dialogue with Forge that, against this backdrop, is beautiful in its simplicity:

Storm: That was not a kindness.

Forge: Ororo!?!

[The hologram fades; Ororo is standing on the plain tiled floor]

Storm: You should have let me drown.

Much of the rest of the issue consists of their conversation. As they look out onto the city, Storm casually demonstrates her proficiency as a pickpocket ("a human skill---something earned---the neutralizer did not affect it." She quietly laments that she can no longer feel the clouds, or fly.  Forge's response:  "And now you've got to walk, like everybody else. The goddess has become just plain folks."  The self-pity passes, and Storm does not spend the issue raging against her fate; instead, she indulges the feelings she starts to have for Forge, opening up to him.

Even before I lost my powers---

--I have been living on the raw edge of my emotions--feeling...reacting...to everything as intensely as can bee...

The first lesson I learned--and a very harsh one it was, too--

--was that my elemental abilities were bound up with my emotions. The greater my feelings, the more extreme the atmospheric response.

To protect myself and those around me, I cultivate an absolute serenity of mind and body, so much that I lost virtually all awareness of myself as a woman.

A few months ago, I cast away these restraints. I could no longer endure my self-enforced spiritual celibacy....

---so I rebelled.

I cut my hear, changed my cloths--like you, I denied as completely as I could my old world self and belifes.

Now--what irony--the problem not longer exists. I need not fear my feelings, for the only person affected--the only one at risk--

--will be me.

Ororo's monologue not only sums up the last two years of her character growth; it also implicitly explains the dilemma previously faced by her writer.  How can an unemotional goddess truly be interesting?  The depowering works in this case for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it was not entirely necessary: Storm was already well on the road to self-knowledge without her encounter with Forge's neutralizer.  Second, it turns the Dark Phoenix paradigm on its head:  Ororo will ultimately be defined neither by her power nor by its lack. For the next forty issues, she will both lead the X-Men and function as one of the book's lead characters despite the absence of her superhuman abilities.

As she moves from Goddess to punk to human, and eventually back to weather-controlling superhero (Forge helps her regain her powers in Uncanny X-Men 226, "Go Tell the Spartans," by Claremont, Marc Silvestri, and Green), Ororo does something that none of the other X-Women discussed in this chapter managed to do: she experience trauma and recovers from it in a relatively short period of time. It is also telling that, by the time this plotline develops, Ororo has gotten her claustrophobia under control--it is still present, but she is no longer helpless against the effects of a formative, childhood trauma. She demonstrates the same strength with the trauma she faces as an adult.   Where both Rogue, Carol Danvers, and all the various iterations of Jean Grey/Phoenix must constantly struggle to achieve and maintain a coherent sense of self, Storm confronts the emotional dilemma posed by her powers, works through it, and comes out the other side a fully functional, adult super hero who has access to both her powers and her emotions. Ororo, it seems, can survive any experience.

Next: Inside Out

Storm Loses Her Soul, But Gains a Mohawk

For a team book, cosmic powered heroes can spur intense storylines, but in the longterm, they can also be a dead end. In Claremont's X-Men, the cosmic characters were almost always female; ironically, giving these women unbeatable powers would also necessitate their removal (that is, the removal of either the women, the powers, or both), thereby undermining the original feminist intent. Claremont was famous for his "strong" women, a term that covered both strength and complexity.  Throughout his entire seventeen-year run, he managed to develop one particular X-Woman in a manner that evaded the traps awaiting the various Jeans.  But rather than avoid the tropes that hampered his cosmic powered women, in this case, he embraced one of them completely, in order to move beyond it:  in his portrayal of Storm, he developed a character whose strength proved independent of her mutant power set.

Storm was a charter member of Wein and Cockrum's X-Men, and certainly one of the most visually striking.   But for the first five years or so, Claremont did relatively little to develop her character.  True, he gave her a backstory filled with the requisite childhood trauma (being buried under rubble as a girl caused her claustrophobia), a less-than-saintly past for a so-called "goddess" (after her parents died, she was a pickpocket and thief on the streets of Cairo), but her emotional range was limited.  With the death of Phoenix, Claremont finally moved Ororo to center stage.  True, this began in the ill-advised "Rogue Storm" sequence, when Ororo appeared to be repeating the Dark Phoenix plotline less than a year after its tragic resolution, but behind this attention-grabbing stunt was a clever reevaluation of Ororo's character.  Her restrained affect was now not a flaw of her writers, but a byproduct of her powers:  she had to keep her emotions under control lest she inadvertently change the weather.  Storm was, in fact, full of emotions just beneath the surface, but they were never just an internal matter:  Ororo was a walking, talking Pathetic Fallacy.

Over the next two years of real time, Ororo slowly but surely begins to lose control.  Where being team leader drew Cyclops further into his shell,  when Storm takes over the role, she finds herself pushed in the opposite direction.  Her connection to the natural world has weakened; in "Chutes and Ladders" (Uncanny X-Men 160, by Claremont, Brent Anderson and Bob Wiaceck), she needs to focus just to summon a small rain shower.  Presumably, being bitten and seduced by Dracula in the previous issue ("Night Screams," Uncanny X-Men 159, by Claremont and Sienkiewicz) did not help matters. Her dilemma is further exacerbated by the X-Men's fight with the Brood (Uncanny X-Men 162-167), when, unbeknownst to them,  everyone on the team has been infected with Brood eggs that, when they hatch, will transform them into the alien creatures, body and soul.  Other than Wolverine, whose healing factor burns out the embryo, Ororo is among the first to notice something amiss within her own body ("I am lost---bereft of my self--and--at war with myself, without knowing why." ("Rescue Mission, Uncanny X-Men 163, by Claremont, Cockrum, and Wiaceck).  In the next issue ("Binary Star!", Uncanny X-Men 164, by Claremont, Cockrum, and Wiaceck) she loses control of her powers and accidentally kills several vessels full of the Brood.  Unaware of the Brood embryo, Ororo chalks up her failure to a combination of her general malaise and the alienation caused by being wrenched away from the Earth (something that never seemed to bother her in her previous outer space adventures):

But my soul is stricken. My spirit is wasting away, and the longer I am separated from my home, the more I will lose.

How will I ever regain those missing pieces of myself, Scott? And when there's nothing left of me?! Can a body live with its soul?

Only when she finally sense the Brood embryo does she truly understand her plight. Fleeing the ship, she nearly dies destroying the embryo, rescued by one of the space-faring Acanti (the enslaved race that the Brood use as their ships). For the brief period when she and the Acanti are bonded as one, she is at peace.

When she returns to Earth, the planet itself seems to reject her: she cannot control the weather and, for the first time in her adult life, actually feels cold ("Professor Xavier Is a Jerk!" Uncanny X-Men 168, by Claremont, Smith, and Wiacek).  From this point on, her transformation is rapid and dramatic, although, thanks to Claremont's narrative feint in setting up Madelyne Pryor as a possibly reborn Phoenix, Ororo's embrace of her violent side seems to be part of a larger overall storyline of manipulation and corruption (including Rogue's personal crisis and Karma's encounter with malevolent voices in New Mutants).  But the seeds had been planted months before.

Now, when the only way to save Kitty's life is a duel to the death with Callisto, the leader of the subterranean mutant outcasts who call themselves the Morlocks, Ororo does not hesitate to stab her opponent through the heart (Kurt" "I never expected that of you." Ororo: "Neither did Callisto. That was her mistake.") ("dancin' in the dark," Uncanny X-Men 170, by Claremont, Smith and Wiaceck). In the next issue ("Rogue"), Ororo dons Callisto's leather jacket, proclaims her leadership of the Morlocks, and taunts her wounded opponent ("We have crossed paths once, little mutant. / Don't push your luck.") Again, Kurt is the one to register the reader's likely shock at Ororo's behavior. When Storm declares that "nothing can change" the fact that she and Callisto are destined to be enemies, Nightcrawler thinks, "Perhaps. But the Ororo I remember would have at least tried."

Back at the mansion, after Xavier's announcement that he is giving sanctuary to Rogue, Storm contemplates her life as she waters the plants in her attic. Her gentle rain shower turns into a thunderstorm:

Weather around me always relelcts my emotional state.

My anxiety, my confusion--my--fear--manifested themselves as violence.

And my poor plants suffered for it.

When Xaver's psychic projection summons her, she throws a knife at it: "It is because of you that I became an X-Man, old man---/--and that decision is destroying me!"

The turning point in Storm's evolution takes place in Japan, where the X-Men have come for Wolverine's (abortive) wedding.  Storm falls in with Yukiko, a young woman who considers herself a ronin and has a history with Wolverine.  Yukiko's love of danger proves intoxicating to Ororo.  She finds herself looking forward to a street brawl, and when she wins, Ororo tells Yukiko: "Whatever it means--this madness of yours that has infected me---/I welcome it!" ("To Have and Have Not," Uncanny X-Men 173, by Claremonth, Smith and Wiacek). When next we see Ororo, she has ditched her costume for formfitting black leather (complete with a studded choker), and cut off her luxuriant hair in favor of a mohawk.  Her new, punk-inflected look is tougher and implies violence, yet careful readers will not that Storm has actually regained a measure of her serenity now that she has accepted her wilder nature.  She is now more comfortable summoning violent weather, and untroubled by the implications of this development ("Phoenix!" Uncanny X-Men 175, by Claremont, Smith,  Romita Jr. and Wiacek).

A few decades later, Kitty is going to be really embarrassed by her reaction

This does not mean she has completely made her peace with her new outlook.  Kitty Pryde's rejection hurts, and leaves her wondering if the girl's doubts about Ororo's mental health might be justified ("Sanction," Uncanny X-Men 177, by Claremont, Romita Jr and Romita Sr.") She confesses as much to Xavier in "Whose Life Is It, Anyway?" (Uncanny X-Men by Claremont, Romita Jr, Dan Green, and Wiacek): "Sometimes I think, I fear--I--hope/--I must be insane."  Xavier's psi-probe reveals "no mental illness," though is own reaction to her (that he never noticed what an attractive woman she was) feels a bit creepy, even if it's supposed to reinforce how different Storm has become. Only when she finally confronts Kitty does she manage to find a context for her transformation from "goddess" to human: "Perhaps I am infected with a kind of madness--but for the first time in my adult life, I can laugh. And cry.  / I can feel--to the fullest extent of my being--/without having to deny that emotion."

Storm's growth, while paralleling Jean's descent into Dark Phoenix, is actually the opposite of Claremont's familiar story of seduction by power and passion.  Ororo joined the X-Men as a powerful, but restrained "goddess" who was never given much emotional range, and now she is discovering her humanity.  The key element in Ororo's growth as a character looks like a variation on a dreary trope:  a superheroine loses her powers.  This was, after all, what Claremont and Byrne initially intended for Phoenix, and also what Claremont did to Carol Danvers as part of his project to reclaim her from the damage done in The Avengers.  Is the point really going to be that Ororo has to choose between having a full emotional life or having mutant powers?

Next: The Power of the Powerless

Limbo Needs Women

As a crossover spread across five different X-books (Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, Excalibur, New Mutants, and the X-Terminators miniseries) penned by two writers (Claremont and Louise Simonson), not to mention the many tangential tie-ins to other comics, Inferno has to resolve several barely-connected plotlines in order to wrap up the event. In New Mutants, Illyana is redeemed from her evil "Darkchylde" form and replaced by the child-version of herself who was kidnapped in Limbo in Uncanny X-Men 160, the X-Terminators rescue some kidnapped babies, and, in Uncanny X-Men and X-Factor , the two teams are finally reunited, all misunderstandings sorted out.  Naturally, the climax is a battle between the original Jean Grey and her angry clone, Madelyne.  Madelyne dies, but not before her psyche is absorbed by Jean.  Jean inherits all of Madelyne's memories and some of the Phoenix's, making her the one true Jean who can combine a continuity of consciousness from all her incarnations in a form that has neither the power nor the culpability of either the Phoenix or the Goblin Queen.   For a time, Jean's body is the host to all three personalities, before a Celestial deus ex machina takes care of the problem for her.

The Jean Grey who remains now has only one problem.  Without the Phoenix, without the trauma of her repeated duplications and iterations, she is on the verge of becoming what she was when Lee and Kirby introduced her: boring. As developed by Claremont, Cockrum, and Byrne, Jean was compelling because of a particular combination of power, appetite, and trauma. What was she in their absence?  After pushing aside so many extraneous variations, particularly Madelyne and the Phoenix (Force), the one true Jean is in danger of becoming superfluous.  Not only is she  no longer the only telepath or telekinetic, but, over the years, the two other female X-Men with her power set become rivals for Scott's affection: first Psylocke (briefly, and because of her own complicated doppleganger storyline), then, Emma Frost, who, years after Claremont leaves the book, engages in a psychic affair with Psylocke and becomes his romantic partner after Jean's next death.

All of which brings us back to the metaphor of the Phoenix and its connection to trauma and recovery.  As Claremont explored the nature of the Phoenix throughout his run, he added a third element to the death and rebirth that one expects from the legend of the Phoenix: a suspended, liminal stage between the two, located in what came to be called the White Hot Room.  The White Hot Room is where a dying Jean goes when she first meets the Phoenix Force (in the Classic X-Men 8 back-up feature that brings Jean's story in line with the Phoenix Force retcon), and where her spirit goes after the Phoenix's suicide in X-Men 137 (as detailed in the backup feature to Classic X-Men 43).  The White Hot Room is a kind of cosmic waiting room; in other words, it is a variation on the idea of Limbo.

The White Hot Room. Has there every been a better metaphor for Limbo than the inability to get a contractor’s attention?

Limbo and limbo-like states recur with an astonishing frequency in the stories of Claremont's traumatized women.  Carol Danvers and Rogue are the outliers: Rogue was never removed from the playing field for any significant period of time, while Carol's consignment to Limbo by a committee of obtuse male writers was what caused Claremont to bring her into the X-Men fold.  Illyanna Rasputin's entire life story is impossible to disentangle from a Limbo dimension that is distinct from the one in which Carol had been trapped.  This timeless, demonic realm robbed Illyanna of her innocence and her childhood, setting her on a path of corruption that would only be resolved by her eventual death and rebirth as her former child self. [22] Madelyne Pryor's hold on an independent existence was always tenuous before Mr. Sinister stripped it away from her, leading her to consort with demons from the same Limbo that had trapped Illyanna.  Years later, when a resurrected Illyana voluntarily cedes control over Limbo to a resurrected Madelyne, it is in tacit recognition of the clone's affinity for this timeless, liminal realm:  the only place where Madelyne belongs is a repository for entities who have no other place.  Rachel is briefly spirited away to Mojo's world by Spyral, removed from the ongoing story, stripped of her identity, and obliging her to claw her way back to the real world.  And then we have Jean Grey, occasional visitor to the White Hot Room, years-long occupant of a cocoon keeping her in stasis, and frequent corpse awaiting a resurrection.

Of course, Claremont's women are not the only comics characters subject to consignment to some form of Limbo or another; if they are exceptional for Marvel, their fate would be par for the course for DC.  After DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Earth-2 Superman and Lois Lane, the Earth-Prime Superboy, and the Earth-3 Alexander Luthor were stranded in an extradimensional realm for decades (leading, eventually, to the events of Infinte Crisis), while Grant Morrison has repeatedly visited unpopular characters trapped in "Comics Limbo" throughout their DC career (Animal Man, Final Crisis). But ever since Crisis on Infinite Earths, cosmic threats, reboots, and revisions have been DC's prime storytelling engine: DC comics exist to imprison and free their characters from backwater dimensions. Limbo for DC is primarily about DC, a symptom of the continuity revisions that recur like a bad weather phenomenon.  The propensity of Marvel's women to fall into Limbo can be a continuity fix (as it has been for Jean Grey, repeatedly), but it is also about the characters themselves.

Claremont's X-Women face a double dilemma: surviving the experience of being an X-Man and navigating the complexities of their role in a team book rather than a solo title. This goes back to the early disagreements between Claremont and Byrne about Phoenix's power levels:  how does a near-omnipotent character function on a team? Claremont successfully carried out his agenda of female empowerment for individual characters, but at the risk of rendering all their team mates (male and female) superfluous.  The various iterations of Jean Grey (including Rachel), as well as Binary, are almost literally stellar, their powers either related to stars (star gates, Binary's "white hole" powers, Phoenix's consumption of a sun) or compared to them (Jean/Phoenix is constantly likened to a star).  On a more prosaic level, many of them also become the "stars" of the X-Men books. Rather than flying too close to the sun, they are the suns around which the other X-Men orbit, and their storylines burnt hot and fast. Their lives, their powers, and their stories are overclocked, pushing the X-Men to cosmic-level stories that suit the comic well, but are only one type of plot that the X-Men do well.  So, again and again, they are taken out of play.

Next: Storm Loses Her Soul, But Gains a Mohawk

Burning Down the House

In Madelyne's case, getting revenge on everyone who has wronged her (Scott, for abandoning her, Mister Sinister, for cloning her and then trying to have her killed, and Jean Grey, just for getting there first) means thoroughly embracing her own derivative status to the point of weaponizing it. She seems determined to become the demonic inversion of all the various manifestations of Jean Grey.  In her dreams, she is depicted surrounded by flames, forming a shape that comes just slightly short of the Phoenix raptor, but Madelyne will channel the flames outward: again and again, she lampshades the crossover event by declaring she will start an "inferno."  Her "Goblin Queen" outfit is so revealing that it makes Jean's Black Queen fetish garb look like a nun's habit (only powerful telekinesis could possibly explain how she doesn't fall out of it). When she can't have Scott, she settles for his cast-off younger brother. If, cloned and fast-grown in a creche,  she was denied a real childhood, she kidnaps babies to use as a sacrifice. If she can't raise her own baby, she'll sacrifice him as well.  And, like Rachel right before assuming the mantle of the Phoenix, Madelyne is compelled to visit Jean's (empty) grave.  Surrounded by memories of Scott bidding Jean's grave a farewell, and of their wedding , she destroys the headstone: "Why did you have to ruin everything? /Why couldn't you have stayed dead?!?  ("Strike the Match," Uncanny X-Men 240, by Claremont, Silvestri, and Green).

Her tantrum is witnessed by Jean's parents, who paradoxically know their daughter so well that they can't be sure Madelyne isn't actually their eldest come back from the grave;

Elaine:  John--that woman--could it be Jean?

John: I don't know, Elaine. She had so many incarnations.

John has a point, even if he his phrasing sounds unlike anything that would actually be spoken aloud.  The X-Men universe abounds with telekinetic redheads, and throwing energy bolts while looking maniacal is definitely on-brand.  Madelyne transforms the Greys into a pair of demons who will serve her throughout the course of the crossover, a completely superfluous plot point that is nonetheless thematically resonant.  Madelyne is determined to both have and ruin everything that Jean had. At the end of her confrontation with Mister Sinister, the villain who cloned her, inadvertently caused her to be awakened by a shard of the Phoenix force, gave her false memories, and put her in Scott's path in the hopes that they would breed, she gives a speech that establishes her as the anti-Phoenix:

Phoenix:  Hear me, X-Men! No longer am I the woman you knew! I am Fire and Life incarnate! Now and forever - I am PHOENIX!”  (X-Men 101)

Goblin Queen (to Mister Sinister):  Your ambition is a world to rule. 

In one strike I make it ashes.

I abjure life, "Father"--

--and give myself over whole and unreservedly to the fire!

An inferno...

....that will consumer you all! ("Fan the Flames," Uncanny X-Men 241, by Claremont, Silvestri, and Green).

I think it’s safe to say that Maddie is in her “Villain Era”

Where Phoenix is fire, the Goblin Queen starts a fire. Where Phoenix is "life incarnate," the Goblin Queen "abjures life."  The Phoenix is a force of destruction and renewal, while Madelyne, in her new identity as the Goblin Queen, is interested only in destruction.  The Phoenix also embodies the endless iterability of plot (how many times she has died and come back), while the Goblin Queen's role is to finally put years of convoluted plotlines to rest.  Madelyne is the ashes out of which the Phoenix can rise again, or, to put it in a less flowery manner, she is collateral damage.  And she is angry.

Next: Limbo Needs Women

The Superfluous Woman

Claremont was obliged to spend over three years tearing down the admittedly minimal work he had put into building Madelyne as a character, and put her on a path towards villainy.  This could not have been easy, because the mandate to create X-Factor ironically made Madelyne  truly sympathetic rather than just a cypher. Her husband's absence for most of her pregnancy might have been a red flag, but as she herself readily admits when she confides in Ororo in Uncanny X-Men 201, this was out of his control (he was brought back into the X-Men involuntarily). But when the end of the team's Asgardian adventures landed them in France, "Kitty phoned, you phoned, almost everyone called to see how I was. Except my husband."  Soon after, Madelyne had to deliver her baby by herself, on the X-Men's kitchen floor.  Upon his return, Scott is so alienated from his family that he duels Ororo for leadership of the X-Men when Madelyne wants him to return home with her and their newborn son.  Madelyne still hopes he'll come back to them, but has few illusions about the scenario:  "Why can't it be because he wants to, instead of because he has no other choice?" The very next month, Jean is back, X-Factor debuts, and Scott abandons Madelyne and the baby without a word of explanation.  The next time the reader sees Madelyne, in Uncanny X-Men 206, she is lying on a stretcher in a San Francisco hospital, suffering from multiple gunshot wounds and unlikely to last the night.

Thus commences the next phase of Madelyne's haphazard life:  as fugitive from a group of mutants  called the Marauders, who inexplicably want her dead.  The Marauders were the perpetrators of the Mutant Massacre (which crippled several X-Men and decimated the subterranean Morlock population). Their mastermind is the newly-introduced Mister Sinister, who at the time was a generic villain with under-explained motives. [1] After Madelyne wakes up from her coma in Uncanny X-Men 215 (having healed at a rate that surprises her doctors), she is once again targeted for murderer. One of the Marauders, Scalphunter, explains his mission to Madelyne in a manner that is surely metafictional: "You're a loose end."

And, indeed, for the next several issues, even as the X-Men become embroiled in a potentially reality-destroying conflict, Madelyne struggles to be something other than superfluous to requirement.  Interestingly, she forms a bond with Havok, Scott's younger son Alex, who, now that his lover Polaris has been possessed by the evil spirit Malice, is also at a loss to find a place for himself.  Though his current emotional turmoil is a result of recent events, there is a stronger reason that he and Madelyne become kindred spirits: Alex had always been the superfluous Summer brother (before other writers threw in a third and even a fourth years later).  He and Madelyne have been secondary to Scott both in the X-Men franchise and in their own lives. For now, Madelyne's only solace is to turn her very superfluity into an asset, speaking to human reporters on the X-Men's behalf, and even volunteering to help Dazzler stay in the fight after the impalement of Destiny's mask onto head renders her blind ("I'll be her eyes!").

Once the X-Men are brought back to life and safely deposited in Australia by the goddess Roma, Madelyne makes herself useful to the team by managing all their technology, surveillance, and communications while the book bides its time for the next crossover event, Inferno.  Madelyne herself is the spark for this particular conflagration (although she has help from Illyana and a demon or two):  when she chances on television footage revealing that Jean Grey is alive, well, and very close to Cyclops, she undergoes a psychic and magical journey that finishes what the last three years of plots had started: as a character, she is completely dismantled, only to be built back up again.  Her entire life so far is briefly recapitulated in fantasy form: first, she is an angel flying free in the bucolic countryside, on her way home to her beloved husband and child.  Then her peace is shattered by the appearance of a naked, female figure utterly without features, who immediately steals her husband. Cyclops tears off Maddy's wings and gives them to this mannikin.  Then he hands her the baby, followed by Madelyne's hair, mouth, and eyes, turning this intruder into the "original;" Jean Grey.  Madelyne, Scott explains, is just a copy ("Dawn of Blood," Uncanny X-Men 233, by Claremont, Sylvestri and Green).  It is now Madelyne who is featureless: "A nothing being./ In a nowhere place. /Abandoned..../...and alone." 

This vision of Madelyne's dismantling handily sums up her experience within the X-Men Franchise itself:  she and Jean are in complementary distribution.  As the title of the  trade paperback collecting the stories in which Mastermind convinces the X-Men that Madelyne is actually Jean (From the Ashes), she is all that could be rescued from Phoenix's funeral pyre, until suddenly, she isn't.  What could be a better sign of her secondary status than the cannibalization of every one of her features as part of a project to rebuild Jean Grey?  She began as the embodied likeness of a character whose absence left a significant hole in the franchise, and now she has to give that likeness back.

In Madelyne's vision, the landscape resembles the comic's depiction of the Australian outback where the X-Men then resided, but as she moves through it, it first transforms her, and then is itself transformed. The heat bearing down on her "forges" her, "paring her down to her essence.../making her one with the land"  ("Glory Day," Uncanny X-Men 234, By Claremont, Silvestri, and Rubinstein). Her featureless surface melts away, leaving her once again looking like Madelyne. But why say that she is "one with the land"? And why is she greeted by S'ym, the demon who once served the monstrous Belasco, and until recently was bound to Illyana Rasputin? 

In her transformation into the "Goblin Queen" (effected by S'ym this issue), she is on her way to ruling the domain of Limbo and overrunning our world. It is an odd turn for Madelyne, who previously had no connection either to magic or to Illyana's realm, but it is more than just an unmotivated plot twist. Madelyne can rule Limbo because she has been stuck in limbo, both metaphorically (since the decision to return Jean Grey to life) and literally (when she wanders through an empty waste land).  No wonder she becomes "one with the land;" as a character who has become surplus to requirement, "limbo" defines her entire existence. This, in turn, justifies a crossover that hinges on both Madelyne and Illyana (whose entire backstory and recent plotlines are all based on her childhood exile to the Limbo that Claremont and Anderson introduced in Uncanny X-Men 160). Inferno is the story of two insanely powerful women whose fate is always about exile, suffering, loss, and superfluity.

Note

[1] Claremont's original plans for him was that he was a child's conception of a villain (hence the ridiculous name, and some of his dialogue).  Subsequent work by many other creators took Mister Sinister in a very different direction.

Next: Burning Down the House