In the Margins of Gerberesque Hypertime (or: the Swamplands of the Indomitable Will) by C Lue Lyron
I read the Defenders meme presenting Steve Gerber's super hero work as one on-going novel, and wondering how to comment on such a strange story as I
ron Man Annual #3. The hero who’s come the furthest into the mainstream this year goes on an adventure, as the Apollonian paragon, to meet with a force that can reorder logic itself---and all the while, a lumbering empathic beast, without thought, tangled in feeling as though a pawn of greater forces, watches from the swamps.
The hardest part is: no superhero story I’ve read crosses less with the Defenders of that day...in fact, this adventure is on the margin of those margins, a note on the back of a page, with remnants of Omegaville and the hard times of Richard Rory, and the lost schemes of some undying lord that once fought Dracula, in a swamp whose central drama also shares the birthplace of the Glob...tying it back to the Hulk’s adventure there, in this Nexus of All Realities. The little girl plays the part of one of her world’s most popular heroes---and who is centered moreso in the mainstream world of this Marvelverse than its epitomizing man of the world, Tony Stark?
What place do these creatures have in the margins? What is the fate of those who wander out there, to the seeping, fetid wetlands, where things of the subconscious creep moistly into the daily world? What happens to those most determined to play hero in the outer reaches of civilization...and what is the fate of those dark forces when they stalk the daylight of the mind?
First, a word about Daredevil and the swamp...and for that matter, the Man-Thing. Daredevil was a popular de facto Defender of the era, and the San Fransisco discussion cited in Plok’s links safely ends (
http://circumstantial.blogspot.com/2006 ... cisco.html )short of the Florida turn of the adventure concerning Foggie Nelson’s younger sister and her perilous connection to the revived Super Soldier Serum---a logical creation of science, however fueled by the passions and paranoias of a nation at war, in any decade. In WWII, the serum produces the soldier necessary in those times...and in the Viet Nam era, a very different savior figure, birthed from more deeply buried forces outside human causality, is created in the form of the Man-Thing. It’s America, see, and the defender of the free world must play with the will to win.
Daredevil’s investigation of kidnapped little sis Nelson draws Manny into drama and battle with his old foe the Gladiator, the aegis of new foe, Death Stalker, whose nature and abilities strike menacingly, untouchably from the unknown. The darkened relationship between man, the environmental world, and the soldier he places therein is the subject of the nightmare corridors of human thought: what if the Army would do anything to win? What if Man needed to live and fight in a chemically-exhausted world? At any rate, this part in Death Stalker’s plans is halted by a pair of protagonists, both altered by chemical wastes. (See Daredevil 113-115 for the story.)
Playing the hero out here at the edges of civilization can change you for life---or end life as you know it. Heroes can’t always save you, either---however brave they might be.
As for Matt Murdock: he drains the swamp of some of its poison. I want to avoid spoilers here, even though no one of whom I know has picked up the old ‘covert new serum’ thread from its disillusioned days of 1974, but Matt makes an ethical choice, preparing to wager a bit of his soul against the unknown lives he might save. The swamp is a place you may well lose part of yourself: your ethics, your utopianism, your body, your life-- your will, focused into a wand that could wreak anything.
So far, the benevolence of technology’s been in short evidence, in these swamps at the margins of Omegaville. But heroes would venture into the swamp...into the margins...where they’ve doubtlessly been warned “not to play.” They bring a reaction from a pair of consciousnesses, or sub-consciousnesses, that have come to lurk in the swamp, waiting for agency.
(A note herein connects Rory’s past---the Man Thing story that ends with his imprisonment---and “future issues of Omega the Unknown,” so there’s no question Gerber at least planned to then tie in the remnants of Omega the Unknown with the Defenders. A career change brings the organic closing threads of Gerber’s Defender-verse novel to an abrupt snip of epilogue, as Nighthawk and Doctor Strange tie off the entire question of adult identity and its eventual departure from the superhero universe in Defenders #41. The limits to what effect powers and costumes might have on the actual problems of the world are delineated nicely in organic ending to the Gerber novel in the King Sized First Annual of the Defenders.)
So, let’s in earnest begin!
What is it like to live in the margins, at the fringes of "normal" activity but still without having left the sphere of that activity completely? It isn't just a question for superheroes, obviously. But maybe it's a particularly apposite one for them: if the raison d'etre of the superhero is to be effective in protecting the greater mass of non-powered humanity, being stranded on the margins of society takes the ordinary superhero symbolism and invests it with some extra poignancy, because what it means to "help" or "protect" when you're out at the fringes is something different from what it means when you're closer to the centre. It's harder to know what to do, in other words: harder to act, and harder to succeed. Because the world of the margins enjoys its own logic, its own safeties and menaces, and for a superhero - that is to say, for any person, regardless of their empowerments - to be an effective force there, they must adapt themselves to its environment. They have to be willing to learn new things, that the people in the centre don't know. (Plok, from Seven Soldiers Meme #0)
If a character’s appearance is paramount in their identity, the faces of things, the surface of things, does indeed tell the most critical things about each character contained here.
Each of our main characters---Iron Man/ Tony Stark, Man-Thing, Molecule Man and our little girlfriend, Cynthia---venture somewhere they are advised they should not go.
Molecule Man looks like angry power. Man-Thing looks like the brackish murk inside the living system. Iron Man looks like a classic statue fused with a god---a man-made god, made by a man whose face epitomizes public respectabilty. Cynthia looks like a young girl---doing all she can, a girl-made god, disguised, rather, costumed, as her hero Iron Man, and later, as a hybrid vessel of “more or less: the Return of the Molecule Man!” Her body---the stand-in reader---is where the title of the story’s drama plays out.
She is the comic; she is the one-shot character; she comes from the farthest margins of the story, from a character whose body seems cold before the story is warm, to be the center of our story, in her struggle with the Molecule Man’s return.
If the girl’s the story, then the appearance of the story on page one---deliberately called out as “most misleading of 1976”---is masked by its frontispiece, drawn to appear to be all it needed to be, just like Gerber’s super hero work in general. Looks like the nigh-omnipotent might of the Molecule Man, versus the mighty Avenger and the macabre monster, looming in giant size, the marshy setting itself. But that’s all a disguise---for the not-so-dumb little girl who’s wandered into the swamp of super hero comics, the reader who could be you or your closest friends, on the verge of Gerber weirdness.
I want to point out Janice Cohen’s colors, even on this parched newsprint, took this comic a grade above average to begin with, merging a palette that must reach to the Iron Man world’s corner outside Citrusville, Florida. Computer coloring’s a decade away from its true hallmark status, but the story’s elements blend nicely into a psychaedelic stew without ever becoming lost solely in the service of art’s need for chaos. The mental plane is the center stage, but nearly all events happen in the world right beside you, outside, maybe just a bit beyond the licit boundaries of your back yard.
That’s how far you need to go to discover the remains of Omegaville---an alternative energy future, chillingly unfinished---or the dwelling of the Man-Thing---or the children at play, just a bit outside the margins of safety. They wander afield, to make the play truly death-defying; what child does not at some point naively crave danger? They are overjoyed to defy the parental prohibition...and now they’ve found a wand, just like the one belonging to the Molecule Man, who disappeared here fighting the Thing in the very first
Marvel Two-in-One.In super hero comics, stupid children didn’t die; that’s the province of a super-hero, to save the innocent.
Yet one foolish mistake, and we’re reminded that to disobey bears consequences; even our play violence that will hurt no one could have consequences that we would do well to recall!
Is that heavy, for a 1976 super hero comic book? For a celebratory annual? Oh, don’t worry, we’re still in a Code-Approved cocoon of experiences, however fantastic. We haven’t seen the last of Cynthia. In fact, we find we lost her in the very spot that once birthed the Glob, very nearly the first friend to the Incredible Hulk, among creatures assembled---and foremost, the Hulk was among Gerber’s Defenders characters. But as one friend to another, Gerber passes another cause-and-effect observation to his young readers: when you leave the margins of the known, you take a very real risk with your life, and like with the one panel devoted to Cynthia’s funeral---and her sad friends that fled her side in fear---you may find yourself part of a scene you imagine you may always regret. That touch of reality is genuine Steve.
Even then, the Man-Thing nearly saves her...in its own way,
Swampy won’t be the only hero to deal with a lost opportunity to reach out and save a person from the manipulations of the unknown. An accident with the emerging Molecular Person’s consciousness will cause a ruckus explored by Iron Man, who is snatched while one of the scared locals berates him angrily.
Behind the scenes, the buried recreation of Molecule Man and Cynthia brings on the maximum weirdness that adds an unwelcome surreal element to quiet Citrusville, which has long since learned to live nervously within the bounds of common sense, as though the abyss will not gaze back into them if they do not study it.
Is it part of the child or the Molecule Man’s dark consciousness that they decide to “help” Iron Man by destroying his critic---and from where does the will to power the characters in our reading spring? Has our ill will, at seeing our hero verbally abused and unappreciated, empowered the Molecule Person’s fatal mistake? However selfish his agenda in existing, Molecule Man has resurrected the child, a symbolic rise in the spirit, to experience boundless power and freedom for all our impulses.
How, as a confused person playing vicariously the hero, empowering the Iron Man with our fifty cents and as much undivided attention as we can muster, can we bring this strange threat to justice? How will Cynthia respond to her bizarre temporary life? And what is the Man-Thing doing in town, with Stark’s limousine smashed grill-first into his muckiness? He apparently can’t be harmed; must he be frozen in being as well as appearance? Is the best Iron Man can think to do with this creature standing outside his open car door a neutralization? Like the centrifugal force he is, Iron Man separates out the random factors, spinning away unpredictable forces until a way to attack is clear. More to the point, he will know at last what he faces---and still not understand it all, merely act on what principles he carries with him into the haphazard marshlands.
Richard Rory’s individualistic ways might as well be witchcraft, and whenever witchcrafts seem intent on bending the reality they know, people of his ilk and their lack of complete fear in the face of the strangeness become the ostracized other. Where better to find him here than in jail? It is all they have for a young man of his peace and open-mindedness. Only back near the center of the super hero universe will he get one twilight shot at freedom---released in his last story by the world of the super heroes without any room for notice, abandoned to the real world somewhere in the last background of the last story of Gerber’s last of his most personal work, Omega the Unknown.
What the Molecule Person, with its weird blended gender and age, like the place where writer becomes character, does with the bicycle and house and Mom bespeaks the childish rebellion---I will NOT die, I will NOT obey, I will NOT stop until I’ve had my way! These antics bring the hero from the center, the title star, rushing into the confusing tableau. It escapes, and “more weeks pass.”
Despite all these whispered curses, Omegaville gets its grand opening: the energy future alternative in the Marvel Universe, generously left by Steve Gerber in the last summer of social relevance. Yet the demon skeleton of Yagzan, the sorcerer, seems then to come to life, an ancient superstition-confirming threat on the cusp of the innovation of the rational world, inside and outside the comic in your hands. Before Tony Stark can even say Omegaville was born from the ashes of necessity, Iron Man is born of necessity, too, reborn to end this menace. The haunting death of the child is not complete, for the child is not completely dead; the inspiring rebirth of Omegaville is not complete, for it is not yet safe from the power of the Molecule Man, who wins dominance over poor Cynthia long enough battle Iron Man and the Man-Thing.
Finally, the animalistic forces of the swamp embody danger once more: danger to Cynthia in the alligator becomes danger to Iron Man in the snake humanoid version of the Molecule Creature. At last, the consciousness and its hatred attempts to retake power by controlling the heroes, who face it one by one. The control of the mind, let’s say, proves the most perilous swamp of all.
Out of necessity, the hero endures. The little girl admires the final battle in wonder, and finally her hero kneels before her, recovering, collecting, analyzing his brush with the actions of enigmas on every side, reducing him, in scale, to the mystified human among human residents of this humid, hazy, uninviting, quicksand-filled part of the world.
The advent and survival of what is most rational, what prepares us for the future, can never be taken for granted; what is reasonable even for our own survival is not what we, by nature, will choose every time. WE have agency for good or ill in every action; sometimes one must study the foundations of life itself to see the consequences, and even then will find much that is senseless, violent, hostile, and fearful in the associations of humanity.
Will we survive the hazards of our own science run amock, our own selfish humankind mysteriously imperiling our towns, so quickly given up without regulation to become a viable source of local wealth?
Can we make peace with the wildlife of the habitats, as well as the financial wildlife that makes prey of its most orderly sheep? Yet we must go to that uncomfortable, welcomeless frontier and begin to explore reasonable responses to our needs as beings who, after all, very much need one another and are bound to sink alone.
