16/7 The Multiversity annotations Pt 9

LIBRARY artefact #041

MASTERMEN #1 Continued

The geosynchronous satellite headquarters of the New Reichsmen is called the Eagle’s Nest after Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden.

In the trophy room where Brünnhilde and Overman exchange portentous dialogue, we see preserved plunder from previous New Reichsmen ‘adventures’. As Overman talks about outracing the past and the dead, he’s surrounded by mementoes of conquered foes. From the original script:

Overman stands in a room of glass cases and trophies – Kanjar Ro's GAMMA GONG is here and there's a STARRO one-eyed starfish facehugger floating dead in a tank. Also in trophy cases we can see THE SPEAR OF DESTINY, the ARK OF THE COVENANT and the HOLY GRAIL! Letting us know that EVEN Indiana Jones was beaten by those pesky Nazis! Other cases show the WAR CLUB of HERCULINA from EARTH-34, showing us that the Reichsmen have had parallel world adventures too.

Jim added Kanjar Ro’s helmet and a New Gods Mother Box. Overman is also seated in the broken dead husk of Metron’s wondrous Mobius Chair!

We see the Art Deco New Ferry Building on an abandoned Ellis Island where Uncle Sam has assembled his resistance band of Freedom Fighters.

He has various last souvenirs, mementoes, preserved items of Americana on the walls – representing Hollywood in the form of a Gone with the Wind poster. Jazz with Louis Armstrong. Baseball. Comic books. John Wayne. A Cadillac rim. Rosie the Riveter poster. Copies of the Saturday Evening Post.

This was my second attempt at reimagining the Quality characters oddly enough. I wrapped some versions of Quality stalwarts into the S.H.A.D.E. (SuperHuman Advanced Defence Executive) organisation for Seven Soldiers: Frankenstein #3 (Father Time was Jack Cole’s Spirit knock-off Midnight, and we saw the Red Bee as swarm-human Replika here and in Final Crisis) then worked out a coherent Quality Universe, where a modern, cynical, post-Authority/Ultimates superhero team book could scoop up all the Quality characters in a tale of political intrigue amidst a war for the soul of America. There were be updated versions of stars like Phantom Lady and the Ray, and lesser-known curios like Neon the Unknown, Red Torpedo, or Bozo the Mechanical Man, here reborn as Gonzo the Mechanical Bastard in a nod to Warren Ellis…). These story ideas were used as the basis from which Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray - with art by Daniel Acuna that was worthy of his Quality predecessors – grew and developed their own direction for Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters in 2006 and its sequel Freedom Fighters the next year.

This Earth-10 take on the Freedom Fighters is different again – this time re-imagined as representatives of different groups targeted for extermination by the Nazis and identified in the camps by variously coloured triangles. The Freedom Fighters of Earth-10 have reclaimed and recontextualised these dehumanizing labels into superhero insignia.

Our version of the first shrinking superhero, Doll Man (created by Will Eisner for Feature Comics #27 in 1939) and his fiancée Doll Girl (we’ve made her Doll Woman although for full tautological pointlessness she might as well be Dame Doll Girl).

As shrinking is one of the least aggressive superpowers, it seemed appropriate to give Doll Man and Doll Woman a support and surveillance role. This worked well with the casting of the couple as Jehovah’s Witnesses, another outsider group targeted by Nazi brutality.

As I understand it, Witnesses are generally pacifist on the grounds that God’s law takes priority over anything flawed humans ever came up with therefore they will not bear arms for any earthly cause. The introduction of these pioneering Witness superheroes is spoiled a little by the Amish beard Jim gives Doll Man! Jehovah’s Witnesses are clean cut and DO NOT HAVE BEARDS!

And it’s unlikely Witnesses would wear these flesh-revealing outfits, but they’re derived from the frank, ‘bathing costumes with capes’ design of the originals!

Leather coat and hatted Earth-10 Gestapo Sivana makes his appearance, borrowing his visual style directly from Major Arnold Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I had fun doing his Nazi eck-sent with the ridiculous, phonetically spelled ‘Tcherman’ from the old war comics and movies - ‘ve haf vays…’

The leering double agent gets to introduce the Freedom Fighters in a moment of grotesque irony. Left to Right, they are:

Phantom Lady (who wore a barely there semi-transparent yellow silk costume with green cape for her first appearance in Police Comics #1 1941. Another hit from Eisner/Iger, artist Arthur Peddy’s voluptuous exemplar of the ‘good girl art’ phenomenon – half-dressed superheroines in bondage or posing provocatively – went bombshell and reached a pinnacle of soft porn pulchritude when artist Matt Baker took over and stripped Phantom Lady of what little modesty she had left. Here, we’ve chucked the bomber fuselage pin-up look and recreated her as a Roma girl, wearing on her belt the BROWN TRIANGLE affixed by their captors to travelling people in the camps.   

BLACK CONDOR (this flying senator made his debut in Crack Comics #1 in 1940 - paving the way, I like to imagine, for Trank Comics, Skag Comics, Charlie Comics etc - created by Will Eisner and the brilliant Lou Fine whose spectacular and accomplished artwork elevated the feature) was originally a kind of avian Tarzan, rescued from bandits who’d killed his parents in Outer Mongolia, the baby Condor was then raised to adulthood by an actual condor. Not only did this remarkable creature take the infant under its literal wing but it went the extra mile by teaching the child how to FLY! That must have taken a lot of hard work and broken bones but luckily condors live to be 60 or more and have time to put in the effort!

Our version has black skin and a BLACK TRIANGLE on his belt. He was not taught to fly by a very patient condor.

THE RAY, (debuting in Smash Comics# 25 1941 and created by Lou Fine, who excelled in depictions of the nearly nude male form in balletically Michaelangelesque aerial postures) wears for this version the PINK TRIANGLE used to single out homosexuals and is a rebel gay man with the power to turn to light. Arguably implicit in Fine’s lyrical illustrations of the golden streamlined hero, the idea of the Ray as canonically queer caught on and the character’s current incarnation is out and proud.

Lena Lang is Overman’s wife, in a loveless stale marriage. She’s running out of the serum that has kept her young for decades and blames her husband for his inability to find or create a substitute. You get the feeling he could do it anytime. Her look was based on WW2 era German actress Olga Chekhova.

Behind Overman and Olsen in the TV studio we see the city skyline with its references to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. More of the story would have revealed that the distinctive ‘Tower of Babel’ building (the big drum shaped one with the crown on top) from Metropolis was Overman’s personal Fortress in this world!

Overman is asked what he regrets about the Hitler era which, we are assured, has led to worldwide security and prosperity – and we cut to a scene where the Aryan space hero arrives from the sky to find the chimneys of the death camps. He’s been gone for only three years, he says aghast. What have they done? He's brooding on a mountain of dead after the final cleansing of all undesirables from the face of the Earth. Oh, the guilt! If only he’d stayed to prevent it!

Except… had the story progressed, we would have witnessed the truth behind his recollections; Overman knew what was coming – he’d calculated how long it would take the Nazis to complete what they’d begun, worked out what it would cost to bring peace and stability to the world the Hitler way … and deliberately turned his back. He may have been assured nothing really terrible would happen, he may have been trustworthy enough to believe it but he lied to himself and fled into space for cosmic adventures while graves were dug the size of football fields…

Wagner’s Ring Cycle has been performed at the annual Bayreuther Festspiele since 1876.

Here’s it’s shifted to New Bayreuth, a city in Germanica, the former USA. We never specify which American city was remodelled as a magnificent cultural and political centre but it would be somewhere with a grand mountain backdrop – or, more likely, there would be an untold Silver Age story of Overman creating New Bayreuth by hand for Hitler’s birthday, carving the huge amphitheatre out of the Grand Canyon or Meteor Crater, so most likely it’s there and if I’d thought of that back then we’d have made more of the setting!

As we join Overman and Lena the 15-hour opera cycle is now, mercifully, entering its closing stages. We’re in Act III Scene 2 of Gotterdammerung, the final part of the Cycle where Hagan is using Wotan’s spear to slay the hero Siegfried in an act of misguided revenge.

I described our version of the performance – famous for the grandeur and opulence of its sets and costumes – as one designed by Jack Kirby! Thor via Parsifal.

‘Can you read the raven’s speech? Vengeance comes the call!’  is a rough translation of the original libretto ‘Erräth’st du auch dieser Raben Geraun? Rache riethen sie mir!’ and hints elliptically at the true origins of the strike against the Eagle’s Nest and the destruction of downtown Metropolis at the end.

Uncle Sam appears in giant, projected form here as a call back to his regular resort to towering size in the wartime Quality Comics stories. On the next page he recreates Sam’s famous pose from James M. Flagg’s 1917 recruitment poster urging Americans to join the war against who else but Germany – but here the stern head-masterly call to individual action becomes the pointing finger of a collective accusation aimed directly at Germanica – ‘We want you! To pay for your crimes!’

This was the first chapter in a projected Mastermen continuity, that would play like Game of Super-Nazi Thrones. Putting the baby Kal-L’s rocket at the Peenemunde facility in the opening was a nod to Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, the symbolic V2 arc and fall, the inevitable Aristotelian curve of dramatic tragedy where it’s all implied at the start. The anxious sinking feeling when the missile that went up so proudly must now come down…

Overman’s impotent fizzle out in a pulverised downtown…

next time: ULTRA COMICS!

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