Claremont's X-Men

This week I am in the Eaton Collection reading a bunch of classic X-Men books from the Claremont/Cockrum era, and I know it has been often commented on before but man is it a bit startling to read comics with actual dialogue again. Comics these days are so art-dependent, the writers seem to pride themselves on using as few words as possible. I'm all for the occasional silent panel, one of my favorite panels in Camelot 3000 is completely wordless, but Claremont is so brazenly unafraid to talk your ear off.

And it's not Stan Lee-era narration of the action, either. Where Thing says, "Darn, I missed!" when he, you know, misses. It's commentary, exposition, and characters just, you know, taalking and thinking in character. It appeals to the roleplayer in me, who can spend an entire scene just talking in character without any actual plot happening. Though there's plenty of plot in Claremont's X-Men too.

The real object of my quest has been to find out the moment in which Kitty Pryde actually used the "Ariel" codename, which Xavier proposes to her but she rejects way back in #139. All the sources say she switched to Ariel in #171, but I have read every page in that comic three times this week and nowhere does Ariel appear. In #169 she says she doesn't like "Sprite" any longer, because it is "a kid's name," but she doesn't use Ariel anywhere in Uncanny until she leaves the team post-Secret Wars and has her miniseries with Wolverine, which is of course when she switched to Shadowcat.

I still maintain that Claremont lost me as a regular X-Man reader when Storm went punk. The whole conversion and change Storm went through was a big non-starter for me, I was totally on Kitty's side during that whole series, and I'm actually kind of surprised that I could read the book when Cyclops -- whom I have always liked -- was getting pooped on and treated like garbage, but when they turned the weather goddess into an ad for Love & Rockets, I quit. Reading the books again today, I still felt exactly the same way.

Peter David's "Tempest Fugit", Incredible Hulk 77-81

I finally got my hands on the trade collection of Peter David's return to the character of the Hulk, his "Tempest Fugit" storyline which was published as Incredible Hulk #77-81. I come to this story with a particular interest in David's use of Shakespeare's play The Tempest, which is where the title comes from, but you can't just talk about one part of a story like this, you have to wade on in.

There's perilously little plot in this story, which is something it has in common with The Tempest. The Hulk walks up onto a mysterious island before devolving into Banner, whereupon he is rescued from a monster by Gwen and Ripley, two other castaways who seem to be entertainers hired to sing on a pleasure cruise before the yacht exploded and the two washed ashore. Somewhere Ripley acquired a flame thrower and, more worthy of comment, he has apparently gone blind. There's no real reason as to why Gwen, who can see and seems to be in perfectly good shape, and who has something of a snarky attitude to boot, lets the blind guy carry the flame thrower.

The three are attacked by more monsters, including Fin Fang Foom and a three-headed dog which may or may not be Cerberus, before General Ross appears to give the first explanation for what is going on: this island is a place where scientists have developed a weapon which makes your imagination into reality (ala Forbidden Planet, a famous Tempest riff), said project has gone out of control and the imagined monsters are now killing everyone. The trio are separated; Hull fights Foom, Wolverine, Kang the Conqueror and Mephisto, Ripley gets drugged to sleep by a "Professor Yarish", and Ripley is seemingly drowned by Ross, but then wakes up. This leads to the denoument, a few pages at the end of a 5-book story which finally tells us what was going on. "Ross", Kang, and Mephisto were really Nightmare. Gwen is really Nightmare's daughter, "Daydream," stripped of her self-knowledge and thrown to live among mortals. Ripley appears to really be Gwen's boyfriend, and Nightmare has been messing with Hulk's reality and memory for years now, as revenge for various insults and slights which the Hulk has inflicted upon him over the years. We never get a pin in "Professor Yarish," who might be a creation of Nightmare or a Silent One playing the role.

This sounds really complicated, but it's not really, because as I say it is all suddenly revealed at the end of the story in the manner of a man pulling back the curtain on things you never could have really known or figured out for yourself, so to a very great degree the entire plot is a pretense for various cameos by antagonists the Hulk gets to beat up on which, we are forced to admit, describes the vast majority of Hulk stories anyway.

Parallel to this main plot is a subplot, a flashback sequence in which Bruce Banner, the skinny new guy in high school, tries to get involved in a lunchroom spat only to get beat up and unappreciated by the pretty young thing he was trying to rescue. During this sequence, the Hulk is portrayed as Bruce's "imaginary friend," a kind of split personality which Bruce has nurtured since the departure of his father for a psychiatric ward. Hulk is constantly pushing Bruce to "smash" everyone at school who puts the diss on him, culminating in a "Dark Side" moment in which Bruce wakes up to discover that, while he was asleep, Hulk used his body to plant a bomb -- which Bruce had built in his basement -- in the school. Bruce reaches the school in time to defuse the bomb, but he is still caught and found culpable for putting the bomb there in the first place, leading to more violence wrought upon him by students, his expulsion, and a move out of the city by he and his caretaker aunt. After all this, a young Thunderbolt Ross shows up to offer Bruce a job as a weapons designer since, after all, he is a teenager who built his own bomb.

There's more plot in this subplot than in the Hulk's actual wanderings in the island. David is pulling on a number of threads here, and only one of them is Shakespeare. To get that part out of the way first: Nightmare is Prospero, the magical mastermind who has lured his enemy to a magic island for revenge. Daydream is his daughter, Miranda, but also his magic-wielding servant, Ariel. Ripley is Ferdinand, the guy Miranda falls in love with and leaves to marry at the end of the play. Hulk is Anotnio -- Prospero's brother and hated enemy. I'm not sure if any of the monsters on the island count as Caliban; we could give the nod to Foom or to Wolverine, or even to Hulk himself, since Caliban is consistently described as fish-like and Hulk spends the first several pages of this book walking on the bottom of the ocean, killing sharks and giant squids, before revealing that he apparently has a gland in his body that creates oxygen-filled liquid, just like that pink stuff in the Abyss, which is where David clearly got the idea.

And this reveals one of the most important things about this book: Peter David's number one priority does not seem to be telling a good story so much as it is redefining, yet again, the Hulk and how he works. David has to put his stamp on the Hulk one more time, and the number of retcons in this story is pretty crazy. First off, there is the big one about Nightmare being responsible for most of the Hulk's woes over the past few years, a reveal almost as cheezy as the Crossing, in which Kang took responsibility for Tony Stark's alcoholism. In fact, now that I think about it, I think that might be why Kang shows up in this book, of all the crazy individuals David might have thrown in. Kang smells a heavy-handed retcon and he's snuck over to reminisce.

But there's plenty more, starting with that opening sequence in which we learn that the Hulk did not, after all, have to hold his breath while underwater because, apparently for years, maybe since his creation, he's had a gland in his body that creates oxygenated fluid in his lungs, thus balancing out the pressure in his body and making him immune to the bends. This, apparently, was really bugging David. So much that he had to clue us in. Then there's the sudden reappearance of Betty at the end of the story, an un-telling of David's famous decision to kill the gal off in the first place, all those years ago. To these retcons, add Bruce's decision to bomb his own high school, and Ross's subsequent involvement in Bruce's life, presumably establishing that this is when Bruce got put on the road to eventually building the Gamma Bomb.

So on one hand, David is writing a Tempest riff. On the other hand, his priority is the retcon. His third story is to say something about 9/11, terrorism, and school violence along the lines of Columbine. Nightmare reveals that he now has power in the mortal world because of the fear and terror which 9/11 caused; everyone looked at the smoking towers and said, "Let this be a bad dream." Invoked by an entire nation, Nightmare created his new island and began experimenting upon human beings with his powers, with the Hulk as a primary test case. But Bruce's high school plot also ties into this thread, making him an instigator of school violence. It's hard to get too sympathetic over Bruce either, since while getting beaten up regularly is certainly bad, and being humiliated by a girl is also pretty terrible, the Karate Kid certainly did not need a bomb under the school to get even. David seems to be saying that Bruce's youthful history of violence and psychological problems also contributed to that atmosphere of fear which 9/11 is a part of, so that Bruce, too, becomes somewhat culpable for Nightmare's newfound power and freedom. After all, plenty of people are afraid of the Hulk. All of this compounds to make Bruce Banner even more guilty for all the awful things he has done, which I am not sure was really necessary, considering how much guilt he's already got.

The cleverest bit of this entire story -- and really it is quite well done -- is the bit about Nightmare being invoked on 9/11. I mean, sure, I can totally see that day as America's Nightmare moment. And it makes perfect sense for that to be the high water mark for Nightmare himself, who surfed that wave all the way from the Dream Dimension to the real world. The trouble with "Tempest Fugit" is that there just aren't enough other clever moments in this story to give this one jewel any decent competition. Hulk's one liners are just cynical and jaded (see what I did there), the island itself has no real story, and the flashback story paints Bruce as so psychologically disturbed that I would lose all empathy with him were I to acknowledge David's version of the character instead of my own.

You have to work pretty hard to make a nerdy kid who got kicked around in school no longer identify with Bruce Banner.

One Down, Three to Go

I've been working on the last chapter in "Superhero Comics and the Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance" this week. This chapter, which will become Chapter 3 of 5, and thus be the "central" chapter if the designation means anything, is on Shakespeare and comics. I don't want to do another survey; there's a few of those already and they do great work. But I already did something of a survey for Chapter 4 (on Arthurian comics) and honestly, in these days when anyone can log on to Wikipedia, I don't really see why academics bother with surveys anyway. There are plenty of idle amateur scholars with time on their hands who can assemble long lists of "Shakespeare in Comics" and put that list on the internet for all the world to see. What we need is analysis.

The first thing I had to do, of course, was read everything I could find on Shakespeare and Comics, and my bibliography for that is still visible several entries down. Basically it broke down into three categories:

1. Surveys of adaptations of Shakespeare's plays in comics, ie Classics Illustrated.
2. Analyses of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman and the three issues in which Shakespeare appears there.
3. Everything else.

Of these three categories, #2 was by far the largest, being about twice the size of #1, which was in turn twice the size of #3. There were seven or eight worthwhile essays on Sandman, and the best stuff dealt with Gaiman's use of him as a "me character," some discussion on the source of Shakespeare's talent (personal tragedy and sacrifice vs. hard work and humanism), and some very evocative though harder to use observations on the magical power of poetry and Gaiman's broader discussion of imagination and its dangers.

The surveys told me what adaptations might be worth finding and reading and which I could live without, but I'm not that interested in adaptations, really. At least, not obvious ones. What I really want to see are subtle adaptations, probably better called "re-enactments" as Michael Torregrossa does, but which I also call "silent collaborations" in my Arthurian discussions.

By the way, for those looking for other appearances of Shakespeare in comics, the only ones which have really been written about are:

• Flaming Carrot's adventure into the past, when we learn that Buddy Hacket wrote Shakespeare's plays.
• The Cowboy Wally Show, where a version of Hamlet is performed in prison as a star vehicle for Wally.
• The Badger #46, in which "Larry," a telephone repairman with fond memories of his high school acting days, saves the world from demonic invasion by quoting Shakespeare.
• Three issues of Justice League Europe in which "Deconstructo" does exactly that to the JLE, with both sides misquoting Shakespeare and just about everyone else.

I got to read that Badger comic and it's great, by the way. Most of Badger kind of left me cold, but I've grown into this story.

Today I finished my discussion of Shakespeare and Comics criticism, which is the first part of four which make up Chapter #3. The remaining three parts will be much more fun. They will focus on:

• Tempest in the X-Men: Caliban, Ariel, and the mysterious island which is home to the powerful mastermind.
• Peter David's 5-part "Tempest Fugit" story: more mysterious islands, magical masterminds, and monsters.
• Alan Moore's Black Dossier: The "lost Shakespeare play" Faerie's Fortune's Founded and Prospero's appearance in the final pages of the book.

In other words, I have all the fun stuff remaining, and all the boring stuff behind. Which is good.

Jonah Hex

I know this film came out a while ago, but Nicole and I waited for it to come to the dollar theater and we just saw it this afternoon. I didn't read Jonah Hex either before or after Crisis, but I could see that his post-apocalypse Road Warrior phase was a bad scene.

That Jonah Hex is a lousy film is pretty much beyond argument, but there are some easy ways to tell it is a bad film, and the checklist goes something like this:

• Exposition at the beginning of the film is made completely redundant by flashbacks during the movie which repeat the entirety of the exposition. This might be poor editing, so that the creators thought the flashbacks were not clear enough, so they added the exposition at the beginning, when they should have just trusted the audience.
• Numerous scenes, especially in the first half, of the hero walking or riding away from a burning/exploding building.
• Voice over by the main character.
• Only one female character in the whole film.

Now these are flaws which no film has any excuse to suffer from. But in addition to these standards, there are additional weird flaws in this particular film. Jonah has a kind of dream sequence in which he fights his nemesis, and this dream sequence seems to recur during the scene in which Jonah actually fights his nemesis, so that he is more or less fighting in two places at once at the same time. Now, in a comic, this would work fine. I understand what they were trying to do; Hex is sort of on the "astral plane" if you will, fighting his enemy, at the same time as he's fighting in the real world. Xavier and Magneto have done this more than once. But on the comic page you can just split the page in half along the center, or you can use panel borders to show what is in the astral realm and what is in the real, and you can read and re-read in any order you want. But on the screen it's just a messy series of cuts, and it doesn't make the conflict more interesting, it confusing.

Because I did not read the comic, I can totally accept that Jonah Hex can talk to dead people, but the film then cops out by not giving a similar supernatural quality to Hex's adversary. Malkovich's character is believed to be dead, but it turns out he is not, and this should have been because he had somehow escaped death through a curse or bargain with an Indian witch, or something occult like that, and in this bargain he had become some sort of walking dead or something. And then Hex could use his power to animate or torture the dead as a weapon against his enemy, who is dead and thus vulnerable to him in a way a living enemy would not be. But instead Malkovich had simply staged his own death, and he was a normal mortal, and so obviously inferior to the supernatural Hex, and therefore not much of a challenge. The bad guy has to seem stronger than the hero, if you want the conflict to have any kind of tension.

There was one very neat bit in the film. Jonah is nearly killed, and is rescued by convenient Indians, who perform magic over his body to keep him from dying. And the climax of this scene is when death, which has been personified as a black crow, crawls out of Josh Brolin's mouth and flies off. This exorcism of death, out of Hex's body, was very nicely gutsy. Not many movies would try something like that.

And since I only paid $2 for the film, I don't consider myself to have been ripped off.

Shakespeare Summer: the Ongoing Saga

I finally got a chance to read Annalisa Castaldo's "'No more yielding than a dream': The Construction of Shakespeare in The Sandman," and boy am I glad I did. This is the best bit of criticism on Gaiman's use of Shakespeare that is out there, and I say that as a person who has read all the scholarship, though not, I am quick to say, all the fan press.

What makes Castaldo's essay so good is that she doesn't spend time gushing over how wonderful Sandman is, and instead gets right to brass tacks about what Gaiman is doing with Shakespeare. Other writers are content to just sort of handwave, for example, Gaiman's extremely liberal use of facts and his willingness to use long-refuted anecdotes about Shakespeare's life as fact. The most obvious of these, for example, is the "Prospero is Shakespeare's 'me character'" conceit, which we all know is complete bullshit but which we all like to pretend is true because, dammit, it makes a great story. Other writers pretend it is true, or they admit its not true but pretend it is. Castaldo allows it is not true, admits Gaiman knows its not true, and then goes on to the better question: When Gaiman uses the story as if it is true, what it is saying about Gaiman?

So this article is a wonderful examination of Gaiman's choice to use Shakespeare as his personal surrogate in the book, and it helps shed light on what Gaiman might be trying to say about himself and about Sandman the comic series. Castaldo understands that Gaiman isn't as original as everyone claims. That he kind of dislikes his own books after they've come out. That Gaiman seems generally uncertain about his own life's work, and about his success, and even a little guilty, because he knows he's using all these old characters and concepts which have been around for years but which everyone seems to act like he made up. That is, there is a wonderful ambiguity about Gaiman's self-presentation in Sandman; she has helped me to understand that Gaiman isn't using Shakespeare to puff himself up as a (indeed, THE) master storyteller, but is rather using a construction of Shakespeare, which he throws doubt and guilt upon, as a way of illustrating the doubt and guilt which Gaiman himself feels.

This is a wonderful contrast to Moore. I'm not entirely certain what to make of it yet, but I think it has to be significant that while Gaiman uses Shakespeare as his autobiographical representation, Moore chooses instead one of Shakespeare's characters. Shakespeare, himself, doesn't exist in League except as an offstage guy who wrote factual plays about things that really happened. The conceit of the Blazing World is that Shakespeare made these fictional characters, but the fictional characters in turn affect the real world, creating a sort of endlessly reinforcing loop of influence so that it is impossible to really say either of them are "real" or "fictional." So Shakespeare creates Prospero, who influences Alan Moore. Maybe Moore isn't so much using Prospero as a stand-in for himself, as he's revealing that he, Alan Moore, is something of a stand in for Prospero!

Anyhow, Gaiman's Shakespeare is a guy eager to lay his burden down. A guy who has sacrificed his real life in order to tell stories, and rues the bargain. But Moore's Prospero is just the opposite: he is a vigorous protagonist who refuses to give up his books, who stages his own death so that he can go on a secret mission to save two worlds. He's lived a life, a good long rewarding life as a Duke, a husband, a father, but I think he kind of rejects that life in favor of the Blazing World, a world of imagination made real. I suppose it's something of a psychedelic argument, and it would be easy to just say, well, Moore wants to give up reality for the Blazing World because he's doing a lot of Amsterdam hash, but I don't think I'll use that for my conclusion.

MacBeth with Mummies

The way I figure it, it would go down something like this: Shakespeare, established playwright, needs a new patron after Elizabeth's death, and naturally is looking to please the new King James of Scotland. So in his research, preparatory to writing a play for said Scottish King, he discovers the AWFUL TRUTH. When the Templars fled the Inquisition in the 1300s, they came -- as everyone knows -- to Scotland. But they brought with them a secret treasure, looted from the hidden tombs of the Pharoahs of Egypt. And these were ancient mummies, who rose to new life in northern Britain and spread their dark power through fell and unbreakable curses. And James is their pawn, their slave, as he would give anything to earn the gift of immortality, which will be bestowed upon him by his master, the Mummy named MacBeth.

"MacBeth with Mummies" then turns into a "runner" plot, with Will trying to stay ahead of every Mummy from fiction or legend I can find, all of whom are closing in on him as he writes his expose of the entire magical plot, a play named "MacBeth." But, in the end, the best he is able to do is barter for his own life. He will be allowed to live, and James will indeed become his patron, securing both Will and his family's future for a generation to come, but his play is to be destroyed. The truth cannot be allowed to be revealed. But, since Will has already told Henslowe and others that a "MacBeth" play is coming, one will be written for him and put on its place, one which is more flattering to James, and which does not reveal the hidden truth, and which is safe and harmless. And this play, the fake MacBeth, has already been written, by James's Master, the Mummy named MacBeth.

It's sort of like a 17th century Anno Dracula.

Tempest in a Teapot

Today is the first day I really felt I was working exclusively on the new chapter, plugging the hole in the ms. Rather than outline it -- which was my first inclination -- I decided to hit UCR's Eaton collection looking for some of the comics I knew I would have to read.

Much to my disappointment, it looks like the Eaton does not have Peter David's 2005 run on Incredible Hulk, which began with a 5-part story called "Tempest Fugit." The index of Shakespearean comics cites only two issues of this run -- the two issues in which Shakespeare is actually quoted -- but in fact the whole story seems to be a pretty solid Tempest riff. This is one of the weaknesses of academia on not just this subject but in related ones, such as Arthurian comics. We tend to stop our search at obvious adaptations of the original, instead of more loose stories which play with them; the exception to this is, I think, Michael Torregrossa's great article on the X-Men and Excalibur as Arthurian re-enactment. But endless lists of plays in which someone happens to quote a line from Shakespeare is not, to my eye, particularly useful.

Anyhow, in Tempest Fugit, Hulk, General Ross, and a couple of other people get stranded on an island where they are beset by strange monsters, and it looks like Nightmare is behind it all. So in this setup, Nightmare is Prospero. Can't wait to read them, and it looks like it was collected as a trade, so I am almost certainly going to have to order it.

So instead, I looked up some old Uncanny X-Men. I mean, you've got a book with a character named Caliban in it, and Kitty Pryde went by the name Ariel for at least a little while, so Claremont is obviously running at least a little Tempest riff here, but I needed to look back at the books to see what was going on. And my first estimate is that there's definitely something going on here of the "toybox" variety. I mean, the issue in which Caliban appears, the main story is his attempt to find more of his own kind, and he reveals that his father called him a Monster (which I believe Prospero does, but I have to check), and he sort of accidentally assaults Kitty, who becomes the Miranda-surrogate of Caliban's life (rather than Ariel, but "Miranda" is even less superheroic sounding than "Ariel"). But the B-Plot in this story, starting with page 1, is Cyclops and his girlfriend-of-the-moment getting washed up on a mysterious island after a storm! And who should turn out to be master of that island, but Magneto! Didn't I just say that Prospero was sort of a template for every sympathetic supervillain mastermind in comics? Didn't I? (I did. Scroll down.)

I don't know what came first; did Claremont remember Tempest when he decided to crash Cyclops into the island, then steal Caliban's name for his one-shot monster of the month story, or did he create Caliban first, and when researching potential names come up with the idea for the island plot? Don't know and impossible to tell, I think. But there's certainly Tempest stuff going on here and the gist of it is a sympathetic re-casting of Caliban as tragically misunderstood misanthrope. Caliban's not a bad guy, he just lost all his self-esteem under his father's cruel ministrations, and now he just wants company in the form of a young, naive, virginal female heroine. There's a follow up story in which Caliban rescues Kitty from a fight with the Morlocks and she agrees to stay with him as a ploy to escape, and later agrees to live up to that promise and marry Caliban only for him to release her, but I don't think that's got nearly as much to do with Tempest as it does with classic "I married a monster!" stories.

Flipping back to Kitty's earliest appearances, I found out the Ariel name was originally suggested by Xavier but she chose "Sprite" instead. Unfortunately for my theory, though Sprite does appear in a few of Shakespeare's plays, including Midsummer, Tempest isn't one of them. But this suggestion of "Ariel" as Kitty's name is a lot earlier than I had first thought. Unfortunately (again!) I can't find the issue where she finally did change from "Sprite" to "Ariel." The interwebs tells me it is #171, but I checked out that story and there's nothing of the sort in it. I may have to re-read most of Paul Smith's run to find it, which is kind of personal torture for me since it was during Paul Smith's run that Storm turned punk, which was the final straw that made me stop reading X-Men in the first place.

Anyway, long story short: Hulk looks promising but can't read it yet. X-Men panned out on the Caliban front, but I need to read more of that Magneto-as-Prospero story and more of Paul Smith's books to find out when Kitty actually started calling herself Ariel. Just for the record.