The introduction to the hardcover Whatever Happened (which is named after the two-issue story at the front of the volume; the other two issues are standalone Moore/Superman stories that just pad out the book to justify its deluxeness) alleges that Moore actually insisted that he be allowed to write that namesake story, complete with death threats, but whether editorial approached him or vice versa, the fact remains that it is a story written by a visionary but using old characters. In fact, it is a coda of sorts to the Superman mythos. Or one big chunk of the Superman mythos.
Right, let me wax expository for a bit. Superman is about as recognizable a privately-owned American icon as Ronald McDonald or Mickey Mouse, and he’s been around since 1938. But whereas Ronald McDonald is just a corporate mascot, and Mickey Mouse is an ageless character who resides in a 50’s-ish cartoon world but can easily be dropped into fairy tales, Dickensian holiday classics, or a disco album, Superman has been steadily accumulating a narrative history for seven decades. The basics of the character have always stayed the same, but the trappings evolved over time, to the point where one could build a fairly canonical biography of the character based on the monthly issues that advanced the story of Superman’s life – and of course comic book fans did just that because being a comic book fan tends to go hand in hand with being obsessive and over-invested.
The upside of comic books as a medium is that you can keep drawing a character the same way forever – you don’t have to recast the actor playing the hero, you don’t have to worry about the signature special effects that were once cutting edge looking dated and cheesy. If you find something that works you can ride it indefinitely. The downside is that if you also incorporate an accretion of meaningful history – the dreaded Continuity – then you eventually run into problems with that otherwise desirable open-ended timeline. On the one hand it’s a storytelling limitation, because a writer in 1979 can’t hang an issue on the idea that Superman would be surprised to encounter magic in the modern era if Superman had previously fought a warlock in 1969 and a coven of witches in 1959. And on the other hand it strains the suspension of disbelief; it’s well and good that pencil artists can re-draw Lois Lane and Clark Kent in the fashions of today year after year, or even have the writers move them from the old-fashioned newspaper business to the exciting glamour of television news, but how is it that the same Lois Lane who exposed Nazi saboteurs in World War II is now covering computerized satellite launches and still doesn’t look a day over 30?
Various efforts to explain away or ignore these inconsistencies were employed for about the first fifty years of Superman’s publication history (and these kind of inconsistencies didn’t just affect him, obviously) and then DC Comics decided to scrap everything and start over. One month comics would be published in which Superman had been Earth’s greatest hero for a long, long time, winner of countless battles against his menagerie of villains through the years; the next month that collective memory of Superman’s career was editorially nullified and the audience was given a new take on Superman’s premier appearance, with first meetings of allies and enemies still ahead of him. The origin – rocketed from doomed Krypton, raised in Kansas by the Kents – was kept intact, but moved forward in time to jibe with Superman’s apparent age. Other elements of the Superman mythos were totally revamped. Lex Luthor, for instance: he had always been a mad scientist intent on committing loot-motivated crimes of genius and/or destroying Superman, and at one point it was revealed that young Lex and Superboy were actually friends, to the point where Lex tried to create a cure for kryptonite for his buddy, but one day Lex’s lab caught fire, Superboy showed up to blow out the blaze, and in the process caused some fumes to sweep across Lex and make his hair fall out, which explains both Luthor’s baldness and his hatred of Superman. I SWEAR TO RAO THIS WAS CANONICAL – until 1986 or so, when Luthor was retooled as a respectable but corrupt businessman first, dabbler in science second, a self-made man more interested in power than wealth (though of course the latter helps achieve the former), who hated Superman for being an alien, for having innate powers which were less worthy than Luthor’s own bootstrap-hoisting origin, and for thwarting Luthor’s scummier schemes. In hindsight it seems like a no-brainer to truly update and streamline the Man of Tomorrow so that he no longer seemed like the Man of 1950, but it was a big gamble at the time.
But back up to that moment in time just as all of Superman’s previous exploits are about to be deemed inapplicable to the history of the character going forward. (Yeah, talking about the history of comics and what-was-considered-real-and-when hurts my head, too.) DC Comics decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to give that classic version of Superman a classic send-off, a grand finale of literally monumental finality. OK, technically it was a cheat, because all of the earth-shaking changes chronicled in that final story would be undone and rendered meaningless as the new Superman era began, but it still seemed fitting. And Alan Moore got the gig, and the world got Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?
Moore, always a riot-of-ideas kinda guy, pulls out all the stops. He tells the story of Superman’s Last Stand, and the tale of the battle documents the fates of most of Superman’s villains (they die), all of his supporting cast of friends and loved ones (most of them die, too, no messing around here), and finally the big guy himself (I’m hesitant to be too spoiler-y, but the story is told as a flashback based on the recollections of Lois Lane Elliott, who is clearly living in the future in a world without Superman). Yet somehow, in keeping with the classic Man of 1950 feel of the character, the story has a happy ending.
As is my wont, though, I’ve just provided all of those reams of background info to provide context for something really specific I want to focus in on. Alan Moore, given the chance to put a big red, blue and yellow bow on the Superman saga, and working within the expansive DC Universe and without constraints, incorporates a sweeping cast of characters like he’s Cecil B. DeMille. Lois Lane and Lana Lang and Perry White and Jimmy Olsen are all present and accounted for. (Ma and Pa Kent were deceased in this version of the canon, another thing the post-Crisis revamp rectified.) Bizarro and Luthor and Brainiac play big bad guy parts, and lesser foes like the Toyman, the Prankster, the Kryptonite Man, and Metallo get their moments, too. Plus there are all the other super-heroes to contend with, including Krypto the super-dog, the future-based Legion of Super-Heroes who can’t interfere in the past, and Superman’s contemporaries, who are kept away from the siege on the Fortress of Solitude by a plot device (an impenetrable forcefield that is not what it seems to be). It’s a balancing act for Moore as a writer, who wants to tell a story about Superman facing down his greatest enemy all alone, despite living in a world full of super-heroes who all practically worship him and would unquestioningly fight at his side. So the other heroes are kept out of the fight, and only allowed in when it’s time to clean up the wreckage left in the battle’s wake.
Who are these heroes? Pretty much exactly who you’d expect: Wonder Woman, Batman, Hawkman, Captain Marvel, Vartox …
Wait what.
To those of you with even the most casual familiarity with Superman, one of these things is not like the other. You know Wondy and Bats thanks to Lynda Carter and Adam West if nothing else. Hawkman was in the Super-Friends cartoon and has a pretty recognizable look to him. Captain Marvel you might know better by the slightly-less-accurate-but-also-less-copyright-problematic Shazam(!) another character who had both live-action and cartoon TV incarnations. So that leaves ...
Vartox is an alien from the planet Valeron who has hyper-powers that rival and possibly exceed Superman’s, and his look is based entirely on Sean Connery in the role of Zed the Exterminator from the 1974 sci-fi movie Zardoz.
WAIT WHAT.
It’s true, I’m not embellishing in the slightest, so let’s just accept it and move on. Needless to say, Vartox is a relatively late addition to the Superman mythos and arguably one who never really had the time or space to catch on. Wonder Woman and Batman and Captain Marvel and even Hawkman were all headliners in the 40’s and more or less mainstays ever since. Vartox debuted in the pages of Superman in the mid-70’s, mainly to serve as an older, more-experienced, hairier-chested buddy to Supes, and about ten years later all of that would be chucked out the window anyway.
But just before that defenestration, Alan Moore thought that it made perfect sense that when Superman was in the fight of his life Vartox would rush to his aid. In that mid-80’s context, with Vartox as well-established as he was ever gonna get, I suppose it did make sense, as Vartox was undeniably a heavy-hitter and every bit as loyal to Superman as Wonder Woman or Batman. I also like to think that Moore recognized how ludicrous it was that the Superman cast had a supporting member who was based on a Sean Connery modeled future-man already painfully dated a mere ten years later (hell, arguably painfully dated the day Zardoz hit theaters), and given no reason not to use Vartox did so for the sheer hilarity factor as well. Whatever the true reasons, Moore worked him into his epic Superman farewell. And the best part is that he calls no undue attention to it. Vartox doesn’t get a single line of dialogue, nor is he ever identified by name. If you know who he is, it’s impossible not to recognize the mustachioed gent showing a lot of skin. (As opposed to the bird-headed gent showing a lot of skin – that’s Hawkman.) But if you don’t, it doesn’t impact your ability to understand or enjoy the story an iota – weirdly-dressed dude shows up with Batman to help back up Superman, he must be one of the good guys (who are destined to play a very sidelined role in this drama).
Personally, I don’t really have a good reason to know who the hell Vartox is, either. He showed up only a handful of times in Superman comics between the time I was born and when I was nine. By age nine I enjoyed comics but only read them here and there when a grown-up bought them for me, and I never asked for Superman comics because other titles appealed to me more. To this day I still don’t read Superman comics very often, for various reasons which could take up another few thousand words, but I like the idea of Superman and the rich history of his myriad incarnations, especially the crazy anything-goes days of the 60’s and 70’s. I have killed many an hour on teh interwebs surfing around various Superman reference sites and learning about storylines and characters that are entirely too obscure to have made it into the coffee-table retrospectives or be recycled as plots on Smallville. I love that stuff. (I love Smallville, too, don’t get me wrong. Smallville also put its own spin on the Luthor-Superman relationship and brought back a twist on the how-Luthor-got-bald story but, again, that is a post for another day. Right now we’re focusing on Uber-Nerd Comic Book Trivia.)
And I love the fact that, annoying and limiting and self-contradictory as Continuity can be, it sometimes has its own rewards. Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow is a Superman story with a deservedly classic status, and great fun to read both in and of itself and as a time capsule of DC Comics in a period of upheaval in the 80’s. To be able to identify what basically amounts to a decades-old inside joke in the inclusion of a forgotten, misbegotten and marginal character makes me feel for just a moment - a sweet, utterly enjoyable moment - like my embarrassingly vast stores of useless geek-knowledge aren’t quite so useless after all.
There's one other "Who Dat?" character in Whatever Happened. She was another bit of Bronze Age weirdness lost in the Crisis-shift: "Superwoman." Superwoman was a history professor from the distant future who used highly advanced tech from the Far Future to be a superhero today. She was essentially the Flash villain Abra Kadabra as a good guy.
ReplyDeleteIn typical Bronze Age fashion, Professor Future Woman Whose Name I Forget travelled to Today to find out the identity of the only superhero whose secret identity was never uncovered, Superwoman. Prof brought techno-gadgets to help her survive our dangerous era that she turned to in a time of danger and yep -- "Oh my, *I* am Superwoman!"
She was a semi-regular in the Superman books right before Crisis, I think. Like Vartox, she has no lines in Whatever, but you can see her punching at the dome too, alongside Wonder Woman and Batman.
That level of continuity is fun -- "hey, I know who that is!" Current levels are a goddamn drag.
I did recognize Kristen "Superwoman" Wells in the hero-cavalry, as well, and she does fit right in with Vartox as an exemplar of how the Superman mythos/family might have been getting a wee bit bloated just before Crisis. But as your post so ably demonstrates, her backstory is hella-convoluted, so to even mention her is to commit to hundreds more words of exposition, and I was trying to be merciful. :-) Furthermore, to even mention that Superwoman is on the scene might beg the question in a casual fan's mind (i.e. in the minds of my imaginary Superman-acquainted but non-geek audience) "Hey, what about Supergirl?" And the answer to that of course is that at this point Supergirl was dead, which actually is pointedly addressed in the story itself and kind of a big deal, but for my purposes ultimately beside the point. The point being: hyper-alien thigh-boots-wearing Sean F-ing Connery.
ReplyDeleteIt's also true that there are a lot of current comic book writers who are so enamored with and beholden to Continuity that instead of including little shout-outs for eagle-eyed fans they produce entire storylines that are impenetrable unless you've been reading and taking notes for the past twenty years ... but I'm eternally optimistic that this is a cyclical thing and the industry will pull out of it once the pendulum swings the other way.