2/9 The Multiversity annotations Pt 3

LIBRARY artefact #026

SOCIETY OF SUPER-HEROES #1

This began as my idea for a whole new take on the Earth-2 concept; traditionally Earth-2 was home to the Golden Age or wartime Justice Society characters, revived by Julius Schwartz and Gardner Fox for 1961’s historic The Flash #123, Flash of Two Worlds and established as having aged naturally in a parallel universe where their adventures had continued unseen and the heroes were now in their 40s.

I wondered if we could create a new Earth-2, capturing the flavour of the pulps and placing the Golden Age characters in a contemporary setting, on a world recovering from a WW2 style conflict only to be plunged into something worse.

It occurred to me that we could use some of DC’s Golden Age characters as a pulp-inflected team of super adventurers in the old style.

As I’d done for the other Multiversity books, I designed the cover as a classic pulp illustration with colourful adventurers defending a science tomb against an invading zombie army!

I love the opening page here, which was intended to evoke the illustrated first page of a dime novel.

The shot could have gone any number of ways, but the brilliant Chris Sprouse - the perfect artist for this story – has composed a perfect set up here which impresses me more and more every time I study it.

First there’s the deftly placed horizon line which drops us directly into this bustling world using a tilted Dutch angle to add movement and suspense while placing the reader POV in a position that’s almost impossible to imagine in the real world – floating bodiless above the traffic, we’re given a sense of remove and of safety where we’re above the action but can look down without danger, orient ourselves and look around. There is no threat, only the propulsive forward motion of a living world. Our eyes are drawn back towards the vanishing point of the perspective lines, giving us time to check out the odd cars and trucks.

At vanishing point, Doc Fate’s tower of power pulls our gaze back up again like a roller coaster ride so that taking time to read the text on the right hand side is like a gentle parachute descent, allowing us to appreciate the height of the tower from the top back down to the street - the drawings and text block are made to work as a perpetual motion machine sweeping our gaze up and around again and again.

I love how effectively Chris has Fate’s black tower completely dominate the scene while leading the eye down around into the hustle and bustle of the city, where there’s so much movement in the crowd on the crossing, it feels animated by a newsreel hustle. Every detail tells us something about this world with vehicles based on Norman Bel Geddes’ designs for the 1939 New York World’s Fair Futurama exhibit.

Even the little aircraft poised serenely adds to the feel that this is a living breathing world – and one where there are fewer people perhaps and clearer skies, while its twin fuselage recalls the bombers from the Alexander Korda/William Cameron Menzies 1936 film of H.G. Wells  Things To Come – another retro future vision.

When it came to the tone of the Immortal Man’s narration, I obviously had the pulps in mind but I was also trying to capture the pared-back folksy inflection of a man who’d lived thousands of years and developed a taste for plain direct speech – I was thinking of Mark Twain, but I haven’t read enough Twain to imitate him effectively so I settled for the kind of narration they used to do in old school Disney live action nature stuff – ‘…round about then a hungry ole mama bear came along, hoping to scout out a few tasty fish for herself and her playful cubs…’

‘V-Radio’ is ‘Videoradio’, the Earth-22 name for what we decided to call ‘television’.

Professor Rival, mentioned here, is a stand-in for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s proto-Quatermass Professor Challenger from The Lost World (1912) and various stories including When the World Screamed and The Disintegration Machine.

Rival was conjured into vivid life via the simple expedient of Microsoft Word’s futuristic thesaurus function. Challenger = Rival. He could have been Professor Contestant or Professor Contender just as easily.

I imagined the Immortal Man, now 500 centuries old -  sickened by humankind after a long life outliving all of us, he retreats to the untamed wilderness to run with the animals for a hundred years until, as usual, the damned white man shows up with his Bible, his science and his rampaging pox collection.

Professor Rival dubs the wildman ‘Anthro’  - the name of course of DC’s caveboy hero from 1968 - and here I imagined an Earth-22 take on the ‘Tarzan’ stories where instead of Africa, our Anthro’s been living wild with the animals and dinosaurs on The Lost World’s Maple White Land plateau in Mato Grosso.  

Keeping this in mind, the year Rival meets Anthro is given as 1912, which is when Edgar Rice Burroughs first Tarzan story was published!

I asked Chris to draw Immortal Man in the style of a Howard Chaykin hero and he nails the attitude perfectly here with obvious nods to Chaykin that don’t rely on aping his style.

To add to the old-time, timeless adventurer look, I suggested an outfit based on Pat Ryan from the Terry and the Pirates newspaper strip, with a dash of Jack Kerouac’s merchant sailor style to suggest ‘swashbuckler’ in the post-World War 2 period.  

Lady Blackhawk and her squadron brought the pulp aviator angle and a more interesting choice for this group than her more famous male counterpart and his team of flying aces. Significantly, Lady B and her gang of barnstorming gals brought some much-needed oestrogen to the otherwise super-sausage fest that was Earth-22.

The first Lady Blackhawk was Zinda Blake, introduced in Blackhawk #133 in 1959, although apparently an unnamed character very much like Zinda shows up to demand consideration as the first female Blackhawk in Military Comics #20

If I’d thought harder, I’d have used Zinda here but I created a new Polish Lady Blackhawk to be Polish like the male Blackhawk so I invented this Earth-22 counterpart, Lena Prohaska, named both for an ex and for Blackhawk’s Janos Prohaska identity in Howard Chaykin’s 1988 Blackhawk revision which also introduced a new Lady Blackhawk, Natalie Reed.  

Along with a different Allied nation, each of the Lady Blackhawk Squadron also represents a different Spice Girl, as given away by their names!

They are Killah – Scary. Monkey – Sporty. Red – Ginger. Princess – Posh. Pixie – Baby.

I love Al Pratt the Mighty Atom, who turns up in with no costume, just a face concealing hood, his college sweater and bags and a heaping helping of old-time can-do optimism. The full-face hood was part of the original 1942 Atom’s outfit but where he wore a traditional hero costume with a blue cape attached, Earth-22’s Al Pratt dresses more pragmatically as a roll-up your sleeves preppy bruiser.

The devilish Abin Sur’s costume is based on the Golden Age Green Lantern outfit worn by Alan Scott.

This scene with the characters meeting poured out unedited and was one of those blessed occasions when, as the writer, you feel like you’re listening in, simply watching a story unfold like a movie and trying to keep up on the keyboard while you transcribe the characters talking completely naturally among themselves as if you weren’t there!  

Doc Fate combines DC’s beautifully designed Doctor Fate character – the Lovecraftian helmeted occult hero created by Gardner Fox in 1940 for More Fun Comics #55 – with pulp titan, Doc Savage. The helmet, amulet and gloves belong to Fate, the jodhpurs and boots come courtesy of Doc, while the tunic is reminiscent of Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer. This was one of those inspired character collisions, created as a throwaway but filled with potential that suggests untold possible tales.

The villain base introduced on pages 10/11 was a bold attempt at peak pulp - two massive airships linked by a giant flying wing!

One pages 12/13 we see the buildings of a semi-materialised parallel universe city rotating down streets between the blocks of a different world’s city, occupying the same space -  

In my original idea – the villain world was Earth-3 and I imagined Earth-2 trapped in a binary configuration with its evil duplicate, to show the awful toll taken on good-hearted people trapped in a war with utterly savage opponents.

Previously Earth-3 was shown as the home of Justice League’s evil counterparts the Crime Syndicate of America. I suggested that it could, instead, host evil twins of the Earth-2 heroes, leaving the Anti-Matter earth for the Crime Syndicate.

When the pulp Earth-2 idea lost out to a different update on the Earth-2 concept, Earth-2 became Earth-22 and its evil twin became Earth-44 instead of Earth-3.

With the good guy team in place, it was easy to match each of them with an existing villainous equivalent from DC’s enormous library of characters.

Immortal Man’s nemesis seemed obvious; the immortal cultured brute Vandal Savage is a classic DC evildoer I’ve returned to a couple of times – he was the time-spanning antagonist in 1997’s DC 1 Million crossover and showed up again, for the ‘caveman’ and ‘cowboy’ episodes in 2010’s The Return of Bruce Wayne (I had no idea it was established canon that the DC version of Blackbeard the Pirate was an alias of Vandal Savage! Although if I’d known this, it would have compromised The Return of Bruce Wayne #3 where I depicted Edward Teach/Thatch, the historical Blackbeard, in a largely favourable light based on my research which suggested that, contrary to his popular image, Blackbeard was never a ruthless monster in the Vandal Savage mould.

To play Doc Fate’s otherworldly opposite number, I repurposed Justice League villain Felix Faust as Doc Faust, (I saw him as Belloc from Raiders of the Lost Arkwith added occult abilities), the deadly Lady Shiva became Lady Blackhawk’s obvious evil counterpart.

On page 16, we hint at the prejudice which still exists in the post-war world of Earth-22.

Doc Fate, this wealthy, acclaimed, brave and learned defender of souls, noted for saving lives and battling the forces of evil, still hides his face behind a helmet and his hands beneath gloves so as not to alienate a white majority –

Where Doc Savage was famous for his ‘bronze’ skin, we gave Fate a ‘golden’ cast to his features like the mask of black Tutankhamun.

The Atom had the super-strength and enhanced brain of Blockbuster, DC’s ‘smart Hulk’ to contend with, and Green Lantern faced Count Sinestro and the yellow Parallax entity.

Doc Fate’s ‘Electro-rehabilitation’ device is inspired by Doc Savage’s cavalier use of brainwashing and electronic mind control to transform his enemies into hard-working community-minded citizens!

The ‘Kamera’ – for some reason this creature manifested as a hole in my memory  and no matter how often I consulted my comics, I kept getting the name wrong, writing ‘Makara’ first, then ‘Kamera’ – it’s supposed to be the shapeshifting ‘Kamara’, a Kirbyization of ‘Chimera’ I presume, as seen in Jack Kirby’s The Demon#4, 1972 – by this expedient I hoped to draw a link between the King’s fear-thing and the fear-entity Parallax from the Green Lantern stories.

Doc Fate’s magical oaths – ‘By the Basements of Buddhakhamun! By the Radiance of Ra-Amida!’ hark back to Seven Soldiers Zatanna issue #1 where artist Rian Sook and I introduced a spookier version of the 1965 DC supernatural hero Prince Ra-Man, (formerly Mark Merlin), upgrading him to King Ra-Man.

I’d written Ra-Realm or the ‘inter-reality of Ra’ as an eerie electric landscape of neon and blacklight thankapatterns and mandalas, lit by the odd green hexagonal sun which features in the ‘60s stories.

The name Ra-Man suggested Egyptian mythology and his origin story is deeply rooted in Ancient Egyptian motifs but the geometric star felt like a Buddhist image, a jewel mandala, so I chose to create a weird fusion of Ancient Egyptian and Buddhist iconography and language to give the place its unique flavour, as if the two cultures were folded together in some higher concept realm, just as I’d fused Hindu and Muslim cosmology in Vimanarama to hint at a former world before traditions diverged, hence ‘Ra-Amida’ and ‘Buddhakhamun’ - although I changed Ra-Man’s ‘…cellars of Buddhakhamun…’ from Seven Soldiers to Doc Fate’s alliterative ‘Basements of Buddhakhamun’ which has more of Stan Lee Doctor Strange feel.

This was my attempt to write an iconic jungle pulp scene for Lady Blackhawk – she’s been shot down by Lady Shiva and her parachute’s tangled in the trees so she’s dangling above a swamp filled with snapping alligators – while Lady Shiva swings in on her own trapped parachute, sword in hand! A sword fight, dangling from parachute cord above the churning waters and snarling jaws!

The book ends on another pulp illustration with a block of text as the monstrous stone idol of the lost god Niczhuotan comes to life heralding the end of the world!

‘Tell your people, your super-people that it won’t stop here. It’s coming your way too. And if you have no super-people may the Lord have mercy…’

To be continued