15/7 The Multiversity annotations Pt 8

LIBRARY artefact #040

MASTERMEN #1

Welcome to Earth-10, the world where all your favourite DC superheroes are Nazis!

I had this notion of how to depict the cultural result of a win for Hitler and how the world might look many years after the worst of the war and the purges, and it surfaced first in Swamp Thing #153 in 1995, for a story called ‘’Twilight of the Gods’ which I co-plotted with writer Mark Millar for his multiversal ‘River Run’ arc. Here we floated the notion of a Nazi utopia, a stale and self-satisfied empire that won World War 2, forced decades later into a long-delayed confrontation with its past.

This was the ‘Earth-X’ story in ‘River Run’s Joycean ramble through the multiple Earths, though we never named the parallel worlds we were exploring then as DC had erased its multiverse at the time of Millar’s turn on Swamp Thing.

For Mastermen, ‘Earth-X’ became also Earth-10 (the ‘X’ revealed as a Roman numeral). A ghastly, stuffy world where the Nazis won the war then went to space and colonized Mars, creating a sci-fi Wagnerpunk utopia of general peace and prosperity  – by wiping out difference and diversity. Where, 70 years after the War little has changed, all culture feels stale and formal, like a boring night at the opera with elderly relatives.

Earth-X, a world where the Allies fell to the jackboot, thanks to a robot Hitler and an orbiting AI, was introduced to the DC multiverse by Len Wein and Dick Dillin for a 2-part story in Justice League of America #107-108, and in an outstanding run, it was a stand-out adventure, designed to showcase the Quality Comics stable of characters purchased by DC in 1956.

Quality Comics itself was an opportunistic venture hastily assembled to cash on the comic book boom of the late ‘30s and ‘40s. Reprinting existing strips to begin with, the decision was made to publish original material much of it supplied by the Eisner & Iger studio, set up by cartoonist entrepreneurs Will Eisner and Jerry Iger to produce comics on demand for start-up publishers. They assembled an unbeatable roster of talented, innovative cartoonists and illustrators that included Fletcher Hanks, Lou Fine, Reed Crandall, and the great pioneer Eisner himself. Quality superheroes were therefore distinguished, as their name implies, by a very high standard of artwork and drawing that often left competitors in the dust but was arguably way too good for the primitive printing techniques of a pulp paper mass market delivery platform! The features were strong, memorable and appealing, and names like Plastic Man and Blackhawks still resonate faintly through the yellowing dreams of pop culture.

Acquired by DC, Quality characters like the Ray, Black Condor, Phantom Lady and Human Bomb were recreated as the Freedom Fighters by Wein and Dillin, on a parallel world where a Hitler AI was still in charge 30 years after World War II (and yes, it seems very bizarre to me anyway that when I bought these comics on release in the 1970s, a mere 30 years had elapsed since Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust and Hiroshima…).

The ‘X’ was originally supposed to be a swastika – Crisis on Earth-Nazi - but the idea of putting a fascist logo on the cover of a DC hero book was nixed. Top marks then to Brian Bolland’s ‘Stars and Stripes swastika’ cover for Swamp Thing #153 twenty years later!

Which brings us back to the origins of this take on Earth-X and a definite desire to think of Mastermen as the ‘Mark Millar’ entry in  The Multiversity – where Millar and Dave Johnson’s celebrated Red Son showed a communist Superman arriving 24 hours late in his rocket to land in a Russian wheat field and grow up with Stalin, so does this story see a fascist Superman landing in Europe instead, discovered by Nazis and raised by Hitler.

The Nazi Superman has been done many times of course and, in each case, the portrayal tends to be of a rage-filled, cruel, uncivilized, and violent despot who is the snarling embodiment of subhuman fascist ideals, a generally one-dimensional caricature. The Nazi as Monster and Vandal.

Our Overman was intended to be a more complex, Shakespearean hero of tragedy, brought down by his own guilt and complicity in monstrosity. The Cultured Nazi, high on a self-flattering shared delusion that’s beginning to crack. Forced to represent a ‘master race’ concept of Superman that accords too easily with his Kryptonian heritage but troubles naturally compassionate Karl Kant, Overman. An ongoing Mastermen series would roll out the story of his and his world’s downfall, as Overman’s carefully constructed world of assured security and conformity collapses around him in betrayals, wars, emotional shocks.

Rian Hughes had the brilliant idea to put Jim Lee’s cover in this tacky frame he’d found, as one of the tawdry treasures of a moribund culture. The simplicity of the logo design with its echoes of propaganda pamphlets, Rian’s primitive colour job, and Jim’s iconic shot of Overman and Sam arm-wrestling across a cracking globe of the Earth adds up to a perfect Nazi world version of a classic Silver Age Superman cover (the dialogue was written to recall Weisinger/Schwartz style story balloons…).

The story title ‘Splendour Falls’ is taken from the poem within a longer verse known as The Princess by Alfred Lord Tennyson. The themes of the poem don’t bear too much relation to Mastermen but I liked the twist on ‘splendour falls’ that hints of imperial collapse and the end of grand systems.

Page 1 has Hitler on the toilet reading a version of Action Comics that recreates the famous ‘punching Hitler’ cover of Captain America Comics #1. This was one of the first scenes I wrote when I started The Multiversity project some time in 2008.

And Hitler’s digestive distress never cease to amuse me, I’m afraid.

This version of baby Kal-El owes more to Silver Age ‘superbaby’ portrayals than to later takes on Superman which show him developing his powers over time. Which is just as well, as all those bullets would have made a terrible mess of John Byrne’s infant Superman!

The Peenenmunde rocket scene features Hans Von Hammer, DC’s ‘Enemy Ace’ character. Created by Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert for 1965’s Our Army At War, Hammer, the ‘Hammer of Hell’ in his distinctive blood red Fokker emblazoned with the Black Cross, was a skilled Word War 1 aviator, presented as a noble troubled anti-hero in stories that showed the human cost of the conflict from the German side. Here, Von Hammer is older, with a stiff aristocratic Prussian manner he passes onto his descendant Leatherwing.

Also in attendance is real life Nazi aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, who worked on Hitler’s rocket programme before he was invited to collaborate with NASA on space technology for the USA after the war.

The narration - revealed to be from a book published after the fall of the Fourth Reich and written by Jurgen Olsen – was suggested by a punishment read of Piers Morgan’s autobiography Don’t You Know Who I Am? I can’t remember why I chose to put myself through this. Morgan’s constant desire to be infuriating is entirely infuriating.

The persona of the self-congratulatory, opinionated man at the centre of world events provided a perfect model for Earth-10’s cynical Jimmy Olsen surrogate, Overman’s Pet Journalist, Jurgen Olsen. Morgan’s self-justifying, unctuous power-of -hindsight voice can be heard in Olsen’s narration.

The atmosphere is heavy, stifling, depicting a utopia steeped in backward looking futurism that’s surely doomed to fall through its own rotten foundations. By the time of writing this story, the simple critique of fascism from the original notion, (that it could never provide a viable future, only a hideous facsimile constructed from bits of the past), had widened its focus to incorporate the retreat into backwards-rooted populism, nationalism, the politics of division - that was beginning to characterise the 21^st century. It was easy to see Western corporate/Mafia vulture culture churning in its own grinding nostalgic stasis, with similar forces and stresses at work, similar explosive and random responses to its hegemony (note how many rockets, bombs, and explosions there are in all through this story’s image system culminating in the finale/overture).

Even the architecture is recycled. Overman’s Metropolis includes distinctive buildings from Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis including the iconic ‘Tower of Babel’.

In background, we can see the lights of a city on the moon showing the reach of this science fiction culture.

We can imagine a self-deluding civilization built on discredited notions of exceptionalism and destiny. 

A focus on culture, heritage, pomp, and spectacle to obscure the dirty reality. All fascist vertical lines, aspiring to the heavens yet held down by the shared gravity of its past.

You can imagine chintzy little tea rooms on Washington’s Hitlerstrasse, with opera and chamber music playing out while underneath lies a seething miasma of horror and genocide with the ovens barely cooled after 80 years.

The scene where Overman lays waste to Washington, ending the War with a win for the Nazis, has a radio voiceover with a cod-Nietzschean propaganda broadcast.  

 ‘Tschandala’ is a Germanisation of the Indian word Anglicised variously – including here - as ‘Chandala’, ‘Chandela’, ‘Chandelah’, describing the lowest social class or caste. The word was repurposed by Nietzsche (in his own Götzen-Dämmerung) where he describes Christianity and Judaism as compromised religions of the downtrodden - they speak of love and redemption but remain fundamentally flawed by their origins in the hatred of the oppressed for the oppressor. Like much in Nietzsche, the word was seized on eagerly by the Nazis and redeployed to describe everyone they considered inferior to themselves, but especially Jews.

The obligatory Nazi book-burning scene shows the Ratzi bastards torching our favourite comic books! Talk about the banality of evil! Uncle Sam, spirit of the USA, with his power shattered, reduced to a vagrant in his own country - now renamed Germanica - sneaks away a few precious scraps of pop culture!

Overman’s dream shows the Gentry villain, Lord Broken. Its role in the story, the meaning of its intrusion into Earth-10 for the nefarious purposes of its anti-kind, is made clear by Overman himself as he recovers after waking.

Overgirl’s death occurred in Final Crisis #3.

We meet the New Reichsmen, Earth-10’s answer to the Justice League:

The Manhunter is an alternate world counterpart of charter JLA member J’onn J’onnz, the Martian Manhunter. But where J’onn belongs to the more benevolent and pacifist Green Martian race, his counterpart on the Reichsmen is an aggressive, imperialist White Martian.

Leatherwing, our Batman analogue is not Bruce Wayne but the descendant of Hans Von Hammer, whom we met earlier in the rocket scene. The sneering aristocratic Leatherwing has all of Batman’s skill, wealth and pragmatism, without his compassion, empathy and commitment to real Justice. Some thought they resembled ballooning overmuscled thighs but those are actually jodhpurs he’s wearing!

The Wonder Woman stand-in is Brünnhilde. Where Wonder Woman is an Amazon from an all-female warrior society, Brünnhilde is a Valkyrie from an all-female warrior society.

Lightning/’Blitz’ in the German is our Flash expy – her costume combines elements from the 1940s Flash, Jay Garrick with design from Carmine Infantino’s Kid Flash costume. Jay Garrick’s trademark winged Mercury helmet adapted easily to a Nazi helmet shape. She’s a legacy hero, latest in a line of Blitzen. Seems young and harmless but she nearly kills Leatherwing with that parallel universe ray gun.

Underwaterman/’Unterwassermann’ has my favourite name of the whole team in both English and German translation. We’re told how his people fought against the Nazis during the Second World War and were only spared because the superstitious Nazis believed Atlantis to be the ancient root of the Aryan race!

(Later we see two other team members – a Red Tornado android inspired by the robot Maria from Metropolis and programmed with this world’s morals, and a Green Lantern. Hard to believe a GL would join a team like this one but maybe he’s been sent by the Guardians to keep an eye on these people. By this time, they’re no longer active Nazis, having completed their purges and invasions long ago, so maybe the GLs can work with that. Or maybe… there are active factions working against he Reich round every corner and the Lantern is here to ultimately judge and to punish…)

Uncle Sam, the top-hatted, sleeve-rolling can-do Spirit of America, the man who said ‘I WANT YOU FOR U.S ARMY’ was turned into a Quality Comics superhero in National Comics #1 from 1940 (given almost incalculable powers by legendary writer/artist Will Eisner) Here, we play up the gritty, sloganeering, rabble-rousing idea of a US spirit reduced to its final ragtag defiant posture, inspiring the the last stand of the once-welcomed huddled masses. This more threadbare version of Uncle Sam, personification of something that no longer exists, speaking English, a dead language, has lost a lot of his Paul Bunyan-esque mythic stature. We would discover that he recreates his feats using, why of course, Hollywood wizardry! Industrial Light and Magic maintains the myth of a towering undefeatable Uncle Sam! The plan was also to see the wizened, weakened Sam of a fallen America grow younger and increasingly vital and powerful as more and more people came to believe in him…

The Human Bomb is a Quality Comics character (created by Paul Gustavson for Police Comics #1 in 1941, he’s a guy in a ‘Fibro-wax’ hazard suit who’s basically a living bio-chemical explosion!) reintroduced and repurposed by Len Wein to fight the Nazis on Earth-10. The triangle on the Bomb’s suit doesn’t quite come across but here is the original description from the script identifying him specifically as a Jewish political radical:

The Bomb’s costume is just a dirty old rad suit - which has a STAR OF DAVID on it made with a RED TRIANGLE, point up, overlaid on a YELLOW TRIANGLE - point down (in the concentration camps, the Freedom Fighters all display different colored triangles to show their affiliation to persecuted groups). 

A man who fights tyranny and injustice by blowing himself up became an all-too easy fit for this story of terrorists, where we find ourselves queasily cheering on the bombers as a sham civilization falls!

To be concluded tomorrow!..