Justice, Like Lightning . . .

In 1997, Marvel Comics was struggling. The market was in a slump, sales were down, and some of its marquee series were on the verge of cancellation. The company had spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring companies like Fleer, Panini, and Heroes World only to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Things looked bleak, to say the least.

In this midst of its financial meltdown, Marvel made the decision to cancel such long-running titles as Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Captain America, and Avengers due to lackluster sales. The characters themselves, along with a few others, were licensed out to Image Comics founders Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld, who relaunched those titles under the banner of Heroes Reborn. The X-Men-led event Onslaught led the way by seemingly killing off those characters to make room for four new series set in an entirely different world. For a full year, those characters were written in their own shared universe, separate from Marvel’s main line of comics, in the hope that Lee and Liefeld’s modern style of art and writing would boost sales.

Ironically, this led to one of the most memorable innovations in comics history.

Into this void stepped Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley with a new ongoing series titled Thunderbolts with a tag line, “justice, like lightning” borrowed from a 17^th century poet named Thomas Randolph. Six new heroes stepped forward to take up the burden of protecting New York and the world in the absence of the fallen heroes. Citizen V, Meteorite, Atlas, MACH-1, Songbird, and Techno were featured in existing titles for a few months before the premier of their own book, generating a level of excitement and attention from readers that Marvel hadn’t enjoyed in years. When the new series debuted, it was an instant sellout and had to be reprinted to meet the demand.

But there was a catch that only added to fans’ fascination with the new characters: they weren’t really heroes at all. They were villains in disguise.

At the end of the first issue, Citizen V reveals himself to readers as none other than Baron Helmut Zemo, one of Captain America’s most memorable villains and leader of the Masters of Evil. The other Thunderbolts are revealed as long-established (but mostly B-level or C-level) villains: Moonstone (Meteorite), Goliath (Atlas), Bettle (MACH-1), Screaming Mimi (Songbird), and Fixer (Techno), all of whom are loyal soldiers for Zemo.

As the series progressed, it became clear that this was more than a simple, one-dimensional story about a villainous plot. Zemo was so evil he was all but irredeemable, but gradually most of the other Thunderbolts began to question their own life choices. A few issues later, Busiek and Bagley introduced a new character: Hallie Takahama, a teenage girl who eagerly joined the team under the impression her teammates were legitimate heroes. Her enthusiasm and purity of heart rubbed off on many of her fellow Thunderbolts, and when the story climaxed with the revelation of Zemo’s ultimate plan for world domination they were left with a choice: follow the plan like the bad guys they had always been or betray Zemo and save the world.

What made the series to remarkable was the depth with which Busiek and Bagley portrayed so many characters who had previously been considered little more than jokes. All of a sudden, they all had pasts, motivations, hopes, fears, and internal conflict. Many of them looked at themselves and decided they liked the people they had become while posing as heroes than the criminals they had been for most of their lives. Being celebrated and respected was a heady experience for people who had always lived in the shadows of society, and they weren’t eager to give it all up.

Busiek’s focus on writing his characters as people instead of just the costumes they had always been had a lasting impact on the comic book industry. The human conflict of people who choose to risk death against overwhelming threats is echoed in modern comics, films, and animation. He and Bagley deserve a lot of credit for that, among other things they’ve achieved in their careers. I’ve loved so many other titles they’ve worked on, including Avengers, Ultimate Spider-Man, Marvels, and many more. But I’ll always remember them most fondly for what they did on Thunderbolts.

Writing Prompt #7: What is your favorite way to spend a lazy day?

Lazy days are nice, but like everything else money dictates the way people spend them. We live in a world that has been thoroughly monetized, so it’s hard to step out the front door without feeling like I’m suddenly hemorrhaging money. (But that’s a topic for another day.)

If money weren’t an object, I’d like to go someplace different, not necessarily someplace exotic, but someplace different from my day-to-day where I could maybe sit out next to a hotel pool and read a book. Or maybe I’d like to go somewhere I can go to plays or shows or concerts. Las Vegas sounds nice in that regard; I’m not much of a gambler, but I’ve always wanted to visit Las Vegas as an adult so I could see some of the shows. I just looked, and it seems that Penn & Teller still perform regular shows in Las Vegas.

I saw them once at the La Jolla Playhouse what feels like a lifetime ago, but before that I had seen them in an appearance on Babylon 5, where they portrayed a fictional comedy duo named Rebo and Zooty. They made such an impression on me that when I found out they’d be performing a live show near where we were living in San Diego, my (then) wife and I ran out and bought tickets. As it turned out, their comedy bits (which were very funny) took a backseat to their magic act (which was very good). I’ve seen my share of magicians in my time and never been terribly impressed until I saw Penn & Teller. Seeing them again is one of the items on my bucket list.

As far as lazy days go, I’ve actually spent a few just going through my comic book collection (when it wasn’t all digital), organizing them and changing plastic bags and backboards. There’s something very satisfying about just immersing myself in a big project like that, where I can satisfy my mind need for order. I don’t have any physical comics anymore, but that might be a good argument in favor of starting my collection again.

Pax et Justitia

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of comics. I’m a Marvel guy—outside of Batman, DC has never held much interest for me—so I started with some relatively modern runs on The Amazing Spider-Man and Avengers and Thunderbolts. Eventually, I remembered how much I enjoyed some older stuff, too. Years ago, guys like Jim Starlin and Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart were among some of my favorite writers. I won’t go through the entire progression that led me there, but ultimately I went back as far as the Kree/Skrull War (1971) and the First Thanos War (1972).

These are comics from an entirely different age and social order than modern comics. I’ve read some of it before, but I had forgotten how deeply ingrained the anti-war and civil rights movements were in many of those stories. I think a lot of purported “fans” of that age either remember those stories through the lens of their current political beliefs or never really read or understood them in the first place. These were hardly conservative stories and they assumed their audience was sophisticated enough to understand real-world conflicts.

Until 1972, Stan Lee was the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. Starting sometime in the 60s, he wrote a monthly column called Stan’s Soapbox that appeared in all their publications. Usually, he talked about behind-the-scenes anecdotes and goings-on around the office. He sometimes celebrated and brought recognition to specific creators or titles, and he generally tried to form a personal connection with readers that went beyond the stuffy persona of being the boss.

In December of 1968, Stan wrote a Soapbox that made Marvel’s position on civil rights and equality absolutely crystal clear. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had both been assassinated in the preceding year, and George Wallace was the vocal champion of racial segregation nation-wide. Race riots were everywhere on the news, and law enforcement was deploying tear gas against protestors with abandon. In the midst of this, Stan spoke about real-world issues to his mostly young audience. He didn’t hide behind fantasy or metaphors, and he didn’t pretend that his readers were too young to know about such things.

“Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today,” he wrote. “The only way to destroy them is to expose them — to reveal them for the insidious evils they really are.”

These were not words lightly written or published. Stan was risking a massive backlash in such a politically charged time. Like today, sides were polarized, anger was rampant, and there seemed no hope of compromise. Marvel could have easily faced financial catastrophe at the hands of angry parents and political figures who didn’t want their children indoctrinated into beliefs they didn’t share. But Stan felt it was too important an issue to stay on the sidelines. The stories he wrote in the 60s had spoken his mind loud and clear for anyone who paid attention, but now he spoke up in full print, not just handwritten word balloons.

“Although anyone has the right to dislike an individual, it’s totally irrational, patently insane to condemn an entire race — to despise an entire nation — to vilify an entire religion.”

That’s powerful stuff, not just for a kid to read in a comic book, but for anyone watching as American society seemed to be at war with itself in 1968. I think Stan needed to get his thoughts out there for his own mental health just as much as his readers needed to hear it. And lest anyone dismiss these as the ramblings of a naive fool, don’t forget that in 1968 Stan was a middle-aged man of 44 years. Stan was hardly a hippie, but he knew right from wrong and that was something that pervaded his comic book work his entire life.

So for anyone who thinks Marvel is too “woke” (a term I saw used to describe the Marvel Cinematic Universe just this morning), I’d like to say this: I don’t think you’ve been paying attention. I don’t think you truly understand the people who built that universe, from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin and on and on. I think you’re remembering those stories through the lens of the way you wish they had been, the way they fit comfortably into your modern, conservative opinions of today. I think you’re having trouble wrapping your brain around the idea that you’re the bad guys Stan was writing about back then.

“Pax et Justitia,” Stan signed off with. “Peace and justice.” I’m sorry to say that almost 60 years later, we’re still having those same arguments, and still fighting that same fight.

Writing Prompt #4: What is your favorite work of art? What do you love about it?

The interesting part of this question, to me, is how to define a “work of art”. Is it a painting? Is it a selection of music? Is it a statue, a piece of architecture, a poem, or a novel? Could it, perhaps, be a dance performance, a script, a play being performed, a film or television show? Maybe it’s a mission patch from one of NASA’s Apollo missions, or a logo designed for a company. Maybe it’s even a spraypainted mural on the side of a building.

There’s so much art to choose from that it’s nearly impossible to make a single decision. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but I see art everywhere in nearly everything. We express ourselves in so many myriad ways that it can be overwhelming.

One possibility for me is The Starry Night, a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. There’s something about the colors and the swirls and the darkness juxtaposed against the light that’s always appealed to me. Painted in 1889 while Van Gogh underwent self-commitment to a mental asylum, it is considered one of the most recognizable paintings in modern art.

Another personal favorite of mine (and here’s where my nerd shows through) is a concept-painting of the USS Enterprise-D created by Andrew Probert and Rick Sternbach during the development of Star Trek: The Next Generation prior to the show’s premier in 1987. Originally intended to demonstrate the proposed look of the new ship, it was so well-received that it was hung on the wall of the captain’s ready room set for the entire seven-year run of the show as well as the film Star Trek: Generations.

If anyone is ever wondering what to get me for Christmas, a framed print of either of those would make me very happy.

At the end of the day, though, I’m such a voracious reader that my “favorite” work of art has to be a story, either something written in prose or something filmed. Even narrowing it down that far leaves almost too many possibilities to think about. There are so many short stories, novels, comic books, television shows and films that have moved me over the years that I could teach several college courses on the subject and still only scratch the surface.

Of all the possibilities, I’m going to go with a simple one. It’s a comic book limited series called Midnight Nation, written by my favorite author, J. Michael Straczynski. It’s the story of a detective, shot dead by a suspect, who gets stuck in a place between life and death and who goes on a cross-country road trip to regain his soul from the Devil and in the process discovers who he really is as a person. Along the way, he discovers a multitude of lost souls who have been discarded, ignored, or forgotten by the daylight world we all inhabit. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, but in my twenties the ending struck me in a way that I don’t think anything else ever has. The thing I love about it is the self-discovery: our hero starts his journey wanting one thing, but at the end he realizes what he actually wants is something very different.

Even so, at the end of the day, I think trying to choose a favorite is an exercise in futility. There are far, far too many works of art out there that demand our attention, that demand our respect, to ever narrow the list down to just one or even two or three. If life is an exploration of possibilities, of ideas, then surely art is one of the tools we use in that endeavor. No matter how much we expose ourselves to, there’s always more out there, and I take comfort from that. The exploration will never be over.

Who Are You?

My family never attended church. My father is a devout atheist and my mother is, at best, a non-practicing Catholic. The only times I remember being in a church before my thirties were weddings and funerals. Religion was an alien world to me, one that I felt little need to dip my toe in.

That’s not to say that I didn’t find ideas and philosophies that influenced me and continue to influence me to this day. They weren’t what anyone would call “books of faith” or anything like that, but they were important to me and gave me a lot to think about. They helped me find my way and establish something firm to stand on in a world where the people I knew all seemed to have conflicting beliefs and convictions, and where I had a hard time deciding who was right and who was wrong.

In 1989, I was eleven years old when I bought my first comic book and really discovered Spider-Man. Actually, if I’m being honest, my first comic book was an issue of a licensed Real Ghostbusters comic that I found at Stater Bros. while my mom was grocery shopping. I begged and pleaded for her to buy it for me, as only an eleven-year-old can, and she finally relented. I loved it, but there were only a few issues available on the spinner rack at the time, and once I finished those two or three comics I was hungry for more. Not knowing much about the other titles on display, I picked a character I at least recognized from Saturday morning cartoons. Outside of a children’s read-along book I had when I was younger, The Spectacular Spider-Man #150 was what I consider my first “real” comic book.

That started a lifelong fascination with superheroes. From Spider-Man, I learned that with great power comes great responsibility. For those who don’t know, Peter Parker at first squandered his powers trying to make a profit and looking out for himself until, one day, he refused to stop a mugger he could have easily apprehended, a mugger who shortly went on to murder his Uncle Ben. As Spider-Man, Peter vowed to never look the other way again. He realized that if it was within his ability to help, he had a responsibility to do so, especially when people couldn’t help themselves. For an eleven-year-old, that’s heavy stuff. It goes deeper than just watching people in colorful pajamas beating each other up. It’s a way of life writ large. From Spider-Man, I moved on to other comics: Thor, The Infinity Gauntlet, The Avengers, Captain America and others. I found myself mostly drawn to Marvel characters, but I also collected a lot of comics from the Denny O’Neil editorial run on the Batman titles. One of the things I learned from all those writers, artists, and characters was that the differences between us all as human beings, whether they be ethnicity, nationality, language, religion, or any number of other differences were inconsequential. What mattered was that all people are important, all people deserve the chance to live in peace, to live according to what makes them happy and what they believe, and to be protected. Most of what divides us as people is trivial in the grand scheme of things.

Then came 1990. Over the summer between 6^th and 7^th grades, I was at a family event at my aunt’s house. I’ve never been a hugely social person, so I wandered into a side room and turned on the TV. This was well before the age of hundreds of cable channels, so the channel-surfing options were limited, but it just so happened that one of the local stations was airing a rerun of the most recent Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. I had never seen it and I was barely aware of the show in general, but that afternoon I was hooked. There was something about this group of people who were very clearly an extended family and their determination to do the right thing, save their father-figure, and protect the innocent people on Earth that captured me. I spent the whole summer watching every rerun I could and awaiting the Fall premier that would wrap up the cliffhanger that ended the previous season. It was the Summer between parts one and two of “The Best of Both Worlds” and the start of my attachment to Star Trek in general. Those themes of progressiveness, inclusion, scientific curiosity, and duty have been a part of my life ever since.

A few years later, Babylon 5 premiered, and provided me with a five-year run in which the stories and themes resonated on a similar level while giving me even more to think about: media bias, faith, fascism, good and evil, order and chaos, whether we are bound to follow one of two divergent paths or whether we have the freedom and responsibility to forge a third path, our own. It was J. Michael Straczynski whose writing first taught me the two most important questions in anyone’s life. “Who are you?” and “What do you want?” It was through his work that I realized it matters what order you answer those questions. Deciding what you want is much easier than figuring out who you are, but if you decide what you want before you understand who you are you can end up going wildly off-course and finding yourself in places you never thought you would and where you never wanted to be. That’s something that happens all too often in our goal-oriented, materialistic society. Wants are much easier to define than identity.

In the years since, I’ve been exposed to a lot of religion, mostly in the form of evangelical Christianity. That’s an entirely different ball of yarn to unravel, but one thing I’ve heard over and over again is that you have to read your Bible every day, every single day, to feed your faith and maintain your identity. And they’re right. They’re absolutely right. But it’s a broader truth than even they realize. I struggle every time I stray from the things that shaped me, that I truly believe in, even if I don’t believe in the literal, factual truth of the stories. I don’t believe superheroes are literally real or that Star Trek or Babylon 5 represent our actual future. But those stories don’t have to be factual truth to have power or for the themes and ideas they represent to resonate. If I don’t constantly reinforce those ideas in myself, I start to wander and forget what shaped me. But eventually, I always come back. I always come full circle. And I’m starting to realize how important it is to stay with those ideas in some form, to keep reminding myself who I am. Because that’s the first, most important question of our existence: “Who are you?” Without that, it’s all too easy to get lost.