Heroes Never Rust #84: Watchmen, and Flashbacks

11 Wednesday Mar 2015

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Heroes Never Rust #84 by Sean Ironman

Watchmen: Flashbacks

Flashbacks are tricky. A story needs to move forward, not backward. But. Sometimes to move forward we have to move backward. Readers need information for certain scenes and characters to have resonance. At times, events that occurred before the story’s present are necessary. They may be necessary for a reader to understand current relationships, the world, or character motivation, among other reasons. The second issue of Watchmen makes very little forward progress in terms of the story’s present day storyline. Rorschach is not any closer to solving The Comedian’s murder. The issue is necessary, however. In the first issue, we were introduced to the world, but so much of the world’s history was not revealed. Giving the reader so much right off the bat would have risked overloading the reader. It was best to focus on Rorschach beginning his investigation. We got an overview of the characters and the world, but so much of where Watchmen goes is dependent on the history of the world, not just the murder investigation. Now that the story has a focus, the history needs to be unveiled.

There are five flashbacks in the second issue, not counting the end montage of The Comedian in all of the flashbacks and his death scene from the first issue. During The Comedian’s funeral, the Silk Spectre (not in attendance), Ozymandias, Doctor Manhattan, and Nite Owl II have flashbacks to a time when they interacted with The Comedian. Later, after the funeral, when Rorschach visits Moloch, one of his suspects because Moloch used to be a supervillain, Moloch shares a flashback of The Comedian visiting shortly before his death. With so many flashback scenes, as well as the present-day story, the reader could become lost, not understanding when the events happened in relation to each other. But Alan Moore structures the issue so that even though readers are given past scenes, those scenes are told in chronological order. The first flashback (Silk Spectre’s) is the earliest, and as we get more past scenes, the history moves forward, getting closer to the present-day story, with Moloch’s flashback being only a short time before the first issue begins. The flashbacks take place over many decades. If they were not given the reader in chronological order, the reader may become confused. One thing to keep in mind with Watchmen is that The Comedian is dead at the beginning of the comic. Every scene he appears in is a flashback. His character, though, needs to be developed and strongly characterized just like the other characters. Not only are the scenes furthering the main storyline, they also provide character development for The Comedian. Readers do not as much follow the present day narrative as they follow the life and times of The Comedian.

Beyond the characters of Watchmen, the comic is primarily about the idea of the superhero. Characters such as Doctor Manhattan and Rorschach are interesting. (Actually, every character is well-defined and interesting.) But the comic has more to do with complicating the superhero construct. Watchmen is one of the greatest comics because the world is so vivid. Superheroes do not just live in the world, they have affected the world greatly, even bringing the United States closer to war with the Soviet Union. The flashbacks are a fundamental part to building the world and explaining the situation in the present-day storyline.

The first flashback is a meeting of the Minutemen, a group of masked vigilantes in the 1940s. Team members come together for a group meeting. It quickly turns dark when The Comedian attempts to rape Silk Spectre I. Hooded Justice beats the crap out of The Comedian. The second flashback is The Comedian at the meeting of the Crimebusters in the 1960s. This time, The Comedian doesn’t join the team. He burns up a map of the group’s plans and tells them nothing they do will matter. In the next two flashbacks, The Comedian is in Vietnam and in New York during the police riots as vigilantism becomes illegal. He’s continued his descent into darkness, far away from the superhero ideal, and injures and kills innocent people who are in his way. But, in the final flashback, the one shortly before his death, The Comedian is drunk and rambling about how nothing matters. He’s seen real evil. “I mean, I done some bad things. I did bad thinks to women. I shot kids! In ‘Nam I shot kids…But I never did anything like, like…oh, mother. Oh, forgive me. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.” Readers get the whole arc for the character. The flashbacks are specific enough and detailed enough that readers can plug in the years not presented. In a few pages, The Comedian’s life unfolds. We see him go from cocky, young superhero to lose himself in the darkness of the world to realizing his wrongs.

But, and this is important, the flashbacks are not just about The Comedian. I don’t have the room here to discuss each one (the column would just be too long), but it is important to note the point of view in which the flashbacks occur. All of the flashbacks occur from the point of view of different characters. For example, Doctor Manhattan flashes back to The Comedian in Vietnam. The Comedian, tired of the war and ready to go home, kills a woman who he got pregnant. Doctor Manhattan stands there and watches the woman be gunned down, even though he has the power to stop The Comedian. And The Comedian points that fact out to the superhero god before walking away. The moment is not just important because it builds the world or that it characterizes The Comedian, the moment is important because it is a turning point for Doctor Manhattan. He has the ability to do anything he wants, yet he no longer cares about humanity. With a thought, he could have teleported the woman away or turned the bullet into steam, yet he just watched. That is crucial to the present-day story of Doctor Manhattan.

And I think that’s ultimately why the flashbacks in issue two work so well. Not because they characterize the point of view characters like Doctor Manhattan. Not because they characterize the deceased Comedian. Not because they help build the history of the world. The flashbacks work because they do all three, and they make that information seem interesting. When I am discussing writing with undergraduate students, many of them will make comments that a scene, or even a paragraph, is in there because they help characterize the protagonist, or the love interest, or the antagonist, or anyone else in the story. But, really, scenes and paragraphs and sentences and dialogue and really just about everything in a story needs to be doing multiple things at once. That’s why writing is so damn hard. Writers aren’t trying to add one piece at a time to go down a checklist. Writers are balancing language, characterization, pacing, structure, theme, plot, and everything else at once.

_______

Photo by John King

Sean Ironman (Episode 102) earned his MFA at the University of Central Florida. Currently, he teaches creative nonfiction and digital media at the University of Central Arkansas as a visiting professor. His work can be read in The Writer’s Chronicle, Redivider, and Breakers: A Comics Anthology, among others.

Heroes Never Rust #48: War at Home

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Heroes Never Rust, Violence

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Alan Moore, Saving Private Ryan, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Violence

Heroes Never Rust #48 by Sean Ironman

War at Home

This morning, I watched the opening battle scene of Saving Private Ryan. My internet was down and I decided to check out what DVDs I had while I ate breakfast. I don’t know why I chose Saving Private Ryan. It’s been years since I’ve seen the film. I only watched the first twenty minutes or so. I left off a couple of minutes after Tom Hanks and his crew make it off the beach and start obliterating Nazis in retreat. I was fourteen when the movie was released and I thought the battle scenes were the best part. Explosions. Limbs blown off. A Nazi throwing his hands up and surrendering just to be gunned down. It was good action and that’s what I was looking for. But I’m old now and tired. Today when I watched the film, it was horrific. Not just because people were dying. Not because I understand that real people had to go through this. Before I turned it off and went to start my work for the day, a few Nazis began to run away. About three of them were in their trenches, not firing, just running. Running to safety. Running home. Running from death. And then, about two dozen U.S. soldiers, who are above the retreaters on solid ground, gun them down. As a kid, I probably cheered when that happened. Take that Nazis! But watching it now, there was something so animalistic about it. I understand these same Nazis were killing American soldiers just a few minutes earlier. But I felt the scene showed what war does to a person, how it changes a person, how it destroys everything.

In the conclusion to volume one of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, war has come. Professor Moriarty’s airship bombs Limehouse, which is engulfed in flames by page two. In the opening, Moriarty says in regards to the cavorite, “This wonderful, celestial material…It’s given me the sky, this element that I was surely born for. Ah, Sergeant, does your soul thrill as mine does to these seas of cloud, to this God-like perspective? To this God-like power?” Moriarty is an evil son-of-a-bitch. He even comments on the “countless tiny lives” below before commencing the bombing. He must kill thousands this issue. And for what? So he can defeat a rival crime lord? As the neighborhood is burning to the ground, I no longer see Kevin O’Neill’s beautiful artwork. Even though it’s fiction, I think about all those people who were sitting down to dinner, who were getting ready for bed after a long day working construction. They have no stake in what’s happening. And now, they’re dead.

When the Chinese crime lord, The Doctor, sees the destruction, he orders his troops to attack. They fly at Moriarty’s airship with their own personal flying devices. I feel bad for them. What do they get out of this? They fly to their death, and from what we see later, it is a gruesome death. Nemo and Mr. Hyde lay out what looks to be hundreds of men. In the end, when the league wins, and of course they win, men fall to their deaths. And, again, for what? Because two crime lords can’t get along? What’s a crime lord any way, other than an asshole? What’s he a lord of? We’re smart people. How does someone lord over us? Why would anyone follow these mad men? They can’t pay well. The hours must suck. Who’s dream in life is it to work for a crime lord? To kill for someone else? I say if The Doctor and Moriarty can’t get along, then let them fight, but leave everyone else out of it. They can kill each other all they want, but London would be safe. The battle is made worse because people follow the villains. The villains themselves can do barely any damage. It’s the numbers of men, the numbers of bombs. Moriarty didn’t make those bombs, or his airship. He didn’t load those guns, sharpen those swords. He told someone else to do it, and someone else did as they were told. Why?

In the television show Game of Thrones, Varys poses a riddle to Tyrion. I couldn’t find the quote for the show, but riddle in the books is: “In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me – who lives and who dies?” The sellsword has the power over the three men. He can kill them all or just walk away. Yet, people go on and pretend the other men have the power, and most people do what others tell them.

At the end of volume one, the league triumphs. Moriarty is beaten. London is saved. But it all seems so anticlimactic. It was all for nothing. And I don’t mean that as a criticism of Moore’s script. That’s just he way things are. A couple of crazy, power-hungry men cause destruction, and then we’re left to clean things up.

Maybe I’m thinking too hard about things. Maybe I should just look at the pretty pictures and be in awe of how the league fights their way through the masses of soldiers to win the battle. I can say that it’s pretty cool, and I enjoy the comic greatly. But maybe I’m just tired. Tired of seeing new mass shootings on the news. Tired of soldiers killing people. Even tired of people who do work they don’t love just because they’re following what other people tell them to do. No one can tell us what to do. I think from time to time about superheroes in our own world. If they would be helpful or not. But we wouldn’t really need them if we just did what we know is right. The league of extraordinary gentlemen would have no purpose. Maybe if the league didn’t have to fight these mindless battles, Mina could fight for equal rights of women. Nemo can fight against England’s treatment of India. But I guess the important things will have to wait. A little orb that makes things float seems to be much more important.

___________

Sean Ironman (Episode 102) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.

Heroes Never Rust #47: And So, Then, to the Death?

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Heroes Never Rust

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Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Heroes Never Rust #47 by Sean Ironman

So, Then, To the Death?

The penultimate issue of volume on of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen gets everyone caught up on the villain’s plan and moves everyone into position for the climax. Not much actually happens in this issue in terms of moving the plot forward. We find out Professor Moriarty’s plan and the league heads out to stop him. But the issue is held together because each scene shines in the dialogue. Also, it’s great to finally see the league begin to come together as a team.

A flashback to Reichenbach, Switzerland in 1891 starts off the issue. The final showdown between Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes. The scene is interesting, even though it’s somewhat unnecessary. It explains how Moriarty is still alive, but that’s about it, since Sherlock Holmes doesn’t really play a part in the rest of the volume. But it works because their fight is so proper. Moriarty, while a villain, allows Holmes to write a letter to Watson before they fight. As Holmes writes, Moriarty stares off the cliff. “Ah, what is to be a man below so blue a sky.” But when Holmes asks him if the fight is to the death, Moriarty replies, “Oh, yes. Yes. Absolutely.” He relishes in that moment. There’s an animal underneath the proper, intelligent man, something more primal.

They fight. Holmes wins, and throws Moriarty off the cliff into the water below. But Moriarty doesn’t die. Campion Bond finds him. Then we get why the league is necessary, why superheroes are necessary. “He thought me…an enemy…of the state…never reasoning…that it might suit the state…to create…its own enemy. Shadowboxing, Bond. We’re all just shadowboxing.” The league must exist to fight against any enemy, even if the enemy is the government. It’s common in Moore’s work to have a corrupt ruling system. Here, we have Moriarty as both a government man and a criminal ruler. Even he doesn’t know which one he really is. “Am I, for example, a director of military intelligence posing as a criminal or a criminal posing as a director of military intelligence or both?” I think, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. Not to the league, at least. In turns out, Moriarty had the league steal the cavorite from The Doctor, a criminal ruler, in order to use against The Doctor and fuel Moriarty’s own warship to bomb Limehouse, destroying The Doctor’s criminal empire.

One thing I really like about the comic, and one of the things the movie got wrong, is how focused on England the whole thing is. Moriarty’s not out to rule the world. Maybe eventually, but he makes no mention of that here. He’s fighting over London. The threat against the country had come from the inside, and to continue the treatment of minorities from earlier issues, Moriarty, in the words of the Invisible Man, plans for the cavorite to be “a weapon in his war against he Chinaman.” Moriarty’s going to destroy part of what he’s fighting for to destroy the foreigner.

Most of the league just stands around this issue and learns about Moriarty’s plan. Although, the Invisible Man, the member to sneak out and discover Moriarty, proves just how horrible he is by killing a police officer. The officer didn’t discover him. The Invisible Man killed him because “I was cold. It’s getting rather chilly out there, you know.” He smashes in the man’s face and stole his clothes.

Mina is mad at the group in most scenes because she feels they don’t take her seriously because she’s a woman. To be fair, they don’t. But I don’t think it has much to do with her gender. Maybe a little. But there’s more to it. Nemo says to Quartermain, “Why the authorities chose her to assemble our group, I have no idea.” And I have none as well. Jekyll/Hyde is a monster. The Invisible Man can spy. Nemo has his contraptions. Quartermain is a national hero. And Mina is…? One thing I will give her is she gets shit done. Maybe that’s it. She’s capable of getting the job done and making sure there’s a plan. She’s a good leader, even if, in the field, she doesn’t help much. She complains to Quartermain for not catching on to Moriarty earlier. “Now half of London’s to have horror rained upon it. All because of my ridiculous female naiveté.” With the mistreatment of women in the background for most of the series, it was interesting to hear Mina go along with it. But in a move that speaks to the team coming together, as well as Quartermain’s own romantic interests in Mina, he says, “You were no more naïve than I. We’re just lucky that Nemo was ingenious enough to work things out.” The person who’s a representative of England’s past speaks well of two minority groups in one line. Things seem to be changing and the team is finally a team who respects each other.

Well, maybe not the Invisible Man. He’s just a bastard.

___________

Heroes Never Rust #46: The Turning Point

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Alan Moore, Heroes Never Rust, sean ironman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Heroes Never Rust #46 by Sean Ironman

The Turning Point

The fourth issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the most action-packed one yet. The league attempts to retrieve the cavorite from “The Doctor” and stop the devious foreigner from building his airships. We finally see Mr. Hyde cut loose and rampage his way from room to room creating a distraction so Quartermain and Mina can get their hands on the cavorite. Of course, the team succeeds, escapes unscathed, and hands over the cavorite to Campion Bond. Job well done. Britain has been saved.

But wait, this is the fourth issue of a six issue miniseries. It’s not over. It’s just beginning. With all the violence and death and dismemberment in this issue, many readers might think the gruesome deaths of the countless evil henchmen take center stage. But there’s a lot of suspicious behavior to be found. There are a lot of secrets.

The issue opens with Captain Nemo talking with two of his own men (Ishmael and Broad Arrow Jack). Nemo doesn’t trust Campion Bond. “Bond believes we are his pawns. He thinks no-one observes his game. But I am no-one. I observe everything and to play with Nemo is to play games with destruction.” He refers to himself in the third-person so you know he’s serious. Captain Nemo sits out most of the action, putting together his plan.

Another trick of a character is Mr. Hyde pretending not to see the Invisible Man. We get a couple of panels from Mr. Hyde’s point of view, and we see that he can make out the heat signature of the Invisible Man. Mr. Hyde is like Predator from Predator. But he pretends that he can’t see him. When the Invisible Man points in the right direction to go, Mr. Hyde says, “You keep forgetting, Griffin. I can’t see you.” The reason behind this lie doesn’t come out in this issue. But it does change the way the reader views Mr. Hyde. He isn’t a mindless hulk. He might not look like a person, but he’s not quite an animal either. Dr. Jekyll’s more dangerous than a beast. When the Invisible Man tells him they have to rescue Mina and Quartermain, Mr. Hyde still holds a grudge from when they captured him. “Murray and Quartermain. Huhughh. Yes, I remember them from Paris. They shot me, poisoned me and abducted me. I don’t think there’s any great hurry, is there?” I don’t know why Mr. Hyde lies to the Invisible Man, but I can make an educated guess that it’s not for something good. The Invisible Man better watch out.

The last segment of the issue reveals the largest and most dangerous of the hidden truths. Last time, I wrote about how based on Alan Moore’s previous work, we were going to get to a point when the league turns against the government. This issue features the beginning of that turn. Campion Bond leaves with the cavorite, but then we find out the Invisible Man is nowhere to be found. He’s following Campion, seemingly under the orders of Captain Nemo. I really enjoyed that the only reason we now see where Campion goes off to is because one of the members of the league follows him. Many writers might have just chosen to reveal to the reader the identity of Campion’s boss. But that always comes off as bullshit. If the reader is following a character or set of characters, then we should know what they know. There may be exceptions to that rule, but I think it’s a good one to have. If a point-of-view character knows something, the reader should know it to. We find out the identity of Campion’s boss because one of the characters finds out. We don’t just get the writer revealing it to the reader. It’s a part of the story.

Mina Murray thought Campion’s boss, Mr. M, meant Mycroft Holmes, is the elder brother of Sherlock Holmes. She was close. While Mr. M is not Sherlock’s brother, he is a Sherlock Holmes’s character. Mr. M is Professor James Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’s arch-nemesis. Apparently, he used the league to fight a rival crime lord and to steal the cavorite for his own insidious schemes. We’ll have to wait until the next issue to see what the league does with this knowledge.

___________

Heroes Never Rust #45: Undercover

11 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Alan Moore, Heroes Never Rust, sean ironman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Heroes Never Rust #45 by Sean Ironman

Undercover

Now that the team has come together, the mission can begin. As Captain Nemo puts it, “An enemy of Britain has stolen its one sample of cavorite, the key to the mastery of the air.” The more I re-read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the more I think about Alan Moore’s other works. Moore wrote Watchmen, a comic that asks the question, if we put our trust and power into superheroes to save us, who’s there to keep them in check? In V for Vendetta, Moore’s story follows an anarchist who fights against a repressive Britain. In his best work (at least in my opinion), Miracleman, Moore follows a superhero who slowly separates himself from society, from humanity, and comes to be thought of as a god. There seems to always be an anti-establishment thing going on in Moore’s work. In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the heroes work for the British government. But I still think Moore is fighting against the establishment.

The so-called villain, “The Doctor,” has stolen the cavorite (a metal introduced in The War of the Worlds), which will help create airships that can drop bombs on England. But we never see this. Not once, at least as of yet, has the heroes seen the Doctor, or has the reader been given a scene with The Doctor, or even a henchmen running off with the cavorite. Campion Bond, a government stooge tells the league and they go off. There have been no threats, no attacks. The league is trusting the British government, and I fear they will regret it.

The idea of the foreigner, of the outsider, being less than a white male British citizen is staying with the comic series. To blend in, the Invisible Man puts on the whitest makeup. Take a look on page two, at Mina’s waist, it’s pencil thin , being held tight by a corset. Captain Nemo, the foreigner, must stay on the ship, even though he seems to be the most capable member of the team. In talking to Dr. Jekyll about Mina, Quartermain lets on that he believes something “ghastly happened to her last year.” Then says she divorced her husband. How ghastly.

They are a team pretending to fit in with the British government, but they can’t. Nemo. Mina. The Invisible Man. All outcasts. Quartermain is a product of a past time, no longer fitting in with the current society. Dr. Jekyll is the closest to a regular British citizen, except for underneath his gentleman-exterior, he becomes a hulking beast.

Where do these heroes search for the bad guy? In the Chinese district. Of course, the “real” British citizens couldn’t have anything to do with it. Go to the foreigners.

I shouldn’t be too hard on them, though. In the end, they do find an airship, with a cartoonish offensive Chinese drawing on it. Mina and Quartermain (along with the Invisible Man) sneak in. Well, not so much sneak in. They lie and tell a Chinese man that they have no place to sleep so the man lets the couple in. `

At the end, we’re given a splash page of men working on a giant airship with guns much larger than a man. It seems to spell doom for the league, and for Britain. Ending each issue, Moore gives up a little paragraph that speaks directly to the reader and sets up the next issue. This issue ends with a box with a green dragon wrapped around it. “Tremble, dearest Reader, at the horrid spectacle of Johnny Chinaman, armed with the mighty weapons of our new Electric Age and bent on turning them against our island home!” Johnny Chinaman. Of course, we aren’t meant to take this seriously. I don’t need Moore’s past work to tell me that. He’s setting us up for when he pulls the rug out from under us, for when the league must turn against Campion Bond, the status quo.

___________

Sean Ironman is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.

Heroes Never Rust #44: Outsiders

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, Heroes Never Rust

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Alan Moore, Heroes Never Rust, Kevin O’Neill, sean ironman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Heroes Never Rust #44 by Sean Ironman

Outsiders

While the second issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen begins with the gang taking down Mr. Hyde and features the team stopping the Invisible Man from molesting women, the comic still seems very concerned with the treatment of minorities and outsiders in England. When the team returns from capturing Mr. Hyde, Mina Murray tells Campion Bond that she has been nearly killed twice in six weeks. Caption Bond responds, “A waspish tongue, Miss Murray, is to my mind but one of the many unattractive features of the modern suffragette.” He shuts her down right away. Also, nearly all of the panels for the two-page scene between the characters is framed from far away. They meet at the docks, which are under heavy construction, building a new London. The conversation can take place anywhere. It’s really only two talking heads. It’s exposition to set up the team going after the Invisible Man, as well as laying the groundwork for later plot developments. But Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill put the construction workers and the poor city folk up front. They are making sure the reader sees what’s going on in the city. Workers rush around machinery. The poor sit in alleys starving. They look miserable. In one panel, a woman argues with a man in the background, and the man seems to be punishing a small child. Campion and Mina ignore them. The focus is most definitely on the poor and the immigrants who are building London’s future.

The team later travels to Edmonton to Miss Rosa Coote’s Correctional Academy for Wayward Gentlewomen where the women believe the Holy Spirit is impregnating them—it’s really the Invisible Man. The team is undercover, so they play into stereotypes. Mina plays the wife to Quartermain, and Captain Nemo plays the couple’s manservant. They easily get into the academy.

As the team is shown around, they pass a room where a teacher is punishing a student. The teacher slaps the woman’s bare ass with a rod, while another student holds the woman’s hands down. It doesn’t affect the plot at all. It’s a single panel and the scene is quickly forgotten. As they pass the punishment being dealt, the woman in charge, Rosa Belinda Coote, says, “Strictness and discipline, Miss Murray. That’s the key to everything!” Then, we are shown the beating. But, the key to this panel is in the dialogue and in the eyes of one of the characters. The student holding down the woman being punished has crazy eyes. She seems hypnotized. O’Neill is a fantastic artist and works with incredibly detailed images. I don’t believe she has the eyes of a hypnotized person just because. She’s losing her individuality, or has already lost it.

As she swings the rod, the teacher says, “Take that, Olive Chancellor, you willful girl! And that! We’ll soon thrash your independent American ways out of you!” To which the student being beaten says, “Ahhh! Mercy, Miss Carr! I am dying! Aah!”

First, the dialogue is comical. It makes the whole scene ridiculous. Also, there’s a reason the teacher mentions the student by name. Olive Chancellor is a character from The Bostonians by Henry James. In that novel, Olive is a feminist and falls in love with a woman. In the comic’s panel, the only member of the team visible is Mina Murray, who earlier was chided by Campion Bond for being a suffragist. The teacher, Miss Carr, is Katy Carr from a series of children’s books by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey under the pen name Susan Coolidge. In the first novel, What Katy Did, Katy Carr is a tomboy who wishes to be beloved and to grow up and do something huge with her life, like paint a famous painting or save the life of someone drowning. At one point, Katy falls and bruises her spine, leaving her bedridden. In the end, the children gravitate toward her and she takes over running the household.

So here we get Mrs. Carr, who represents what the feminist movement is fighting against, beating a feminist into submission with some ridiculous dialogue in a throwaway panel. To me, Moore and O’Neill are showing readers throughout The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen the absurdity in bigots, in standing in the way of the future. The final scene introduces the next villain the team must face—The Doctor. We don’t know much about The Doctor, only that he’s worse than Captain Mors, who is described “as Satan Himself.” Captain Mors is another literary character, a German air-pirate from a popular German dime novel, Der Luftpirat und sein lenkbares Luftschiff. Captain Mors is basically Robin Hood in the air—he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. He was incredibly smart and traveled the solar system in a ship he designed. In many ways, he’s similar to Captain Nemo. A Nemo and Robin Hood mix. His crew was a combination of Indian and European, and he fought against evil. Doesn’t seem like a bad guy to me, but he protects the poor and whoever those in high society deem less than human, so I guess he must be stopped. The bastard. What’s he doing protecting the poor and the immigrants? I guess if the League thinks The Doctor is worse, they have a real lunatic on their hands.

___________

Heroes Never Rust #43: Literary Superheroes

28 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Heroes Never Rust

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Alan Moore, Allan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Hawley Griffin, Heroes Never Rust, Jekyll and Hyde, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Mina Murray, sean ironman

Heroes Never Rust #43 by Sean Ironman

Literary Superheroes

Let’s get this out of the way up front. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be studying The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol 1. For those of you who haven’t read it, please (sigh) do not confuse it with the Sean Connery film. While the movie is based off the comic, other than the names of characters, they’re nothing alike. For one, the comic is good. Very good. The same basic idea exists—characters from literature exist in the same world. A team of literary characters is formed—basically a literary Avengers—to protect England. This team consists of Allan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Hawley Griffin, Jekyll and Hyde, and Mina Murray.

There’s a quote in the opening of the first volume from Campion Bond, an ancestor of James Bond and the man who sends Mina Murray to form the League—“The British Empire has always encountered difficulty in distinguishing its heroes and its monsters.” It’s a perfect quote to start a story about a team consisting of characters more damaged than heroic. We’re not introduced to the whole team in the first issue. Campion Bond sends Mina Murray and Captain Nemo to collect the team.

They make two stops in the first issue. The first is to Africa to collect Allan Quartermain. Quartermain basically acts as a screwed up version of Captain America. He’s the nation’s hero from a previous era. Mina grew up listening to stories about him. Except here, instead of being given a super solider serum, like Captain America, he’s an opium addict. He’s thin and can barely walk or open his eyes. On their second stop on the Rue Morgue, Quartermain messes things up by going to the pharmacy and lets Mina get captured by their next member, Mr. Hyde, who here is the team’s version of the Hulk—a monstrous ape-man who towers over everyone else. That ends the first issue, so we’ll have to wait to see what happens when the team goes up against Mr. Hyde.

The interesting aspect of the first issue, and I didn’t notice this the first time through when I read it years ago, but the white males (Quartermain, Jekyll/Hyde) are corrupted. Quartermain is a drug addict, and Jekyll has turned into Mr. Hyde again. Both men are capable of great things, but they basically let drugs get in the way.

The other two members of the team (Mina Murray and Captain Nemo) are outcast from society. No one thinks much of either, but they are far more capable. Captain Nemo is the son of the Hindu Raja of Bundelkund. He’s a foreigner. When some lowlifes are chasing Quartermain and Mina, Nemo saves the day with a huge harpoon gun. Because of him and his Nautilus, the fledgling team can travel in secret. He’s proven much more useful already than Quartermain or Hyde. Yet, later in the issue, Quartermain says, “That’s Captain Nemo. Nemo the Madman. Nemo the Science-Pirate…” Characters don’t seem to think much of Nemo, and there doesn’t seem to be much basis for it other than they don’t understand him.

Here, Quartermain is not the leader of the team. He’s in no state where he can manage a team. Mina Murray, the team’s lone woman, leads. She’s the one who tracks everyone down. She goes out after Mr. Hyde. She goes in search for Quartermain, while Nemo stays with his ship. She’s the proactive one. The minorities bring the team together. In the opening, Campion Bond tells Mina, “Your history has placed you far beyond the social pale. Divorce is one thing, but that other business…ravished by a foreigner and all that. Quite against your will, of course, but then people do talk so, don’t they?” The worst thing you can say about Mina is that she’s a divorced woman who may or may not have been raped. And this makes her worse than the opium addict and the monster, apparently.

I don’t know what any of this says about the treatment of minorities, other than the obvious. I’ll be interested what it adds up to over the course of volume one. I don’t even know if it will. But I think it’s there. I think there’s a reason why Nemo is the one to say, “The winning side writes the history books, Miss Murray” in response to Mina pointing out that Nemo was the villain of the British Empire and Quartermain was its hero. Hopefully, the rest of the volume will continue this discussion, wherever it leads.

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Sean Ironman is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.

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